On the concept of the ecological council

What will communism make of the human species? To communist theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, revolution possessed a distinctly anthropological and anthropocentric character. With the transition to communism, the fetters of all hitherto class society dissolve and the human species for the first time takes control over its own development as members of a species community. This understanding has become so axiomatic that today its basic premises remain unchallenged. Despite revolutionary pretensions, “the cult of man in the abstract” continues to find expression in communist liturgy. No longer. The human being is nothing other than a ritual of capital. Communism begins on unconsecrated grounds. What follows is an abbreviated version of a much longer and more detailed speculation on the process of communist reconstruction, ecological limits and planning, and the concept of the council as an interspecies self-reflexive process. What appear here are selections from that text to advance the general hypothesis that communist partisanship must overcome the limits of the human species.

Marx and Engels left all variety of scattered precedents for the conceptualization of communism as the providence of fully developed humanity. If all previous forms of social reproduction were riven with class antagonisms of some kind, then only in a truly planetary classless society does the human species as such step onto the historical stage as the subject-object of its own self-development. This is why Marx cryptically referenced communism as the end of “the prehistory of human society.”¹ The constraints of necessity are diminished and human history proper begins. In Anti-Dühring, Engels characterizes the transition as a drama in which the human species wrestles itself free from external nature through the scientific mastery of “natural” forces, now put to exclusively human ends, leaping from the “kingdom of necessity” to the “kingdom of freedom.”²

The formulation of communism as freedom opposed to necessity can be found in Marx: “the realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper.”³ In keeping with 19th century revolutionary thought, and with the level of development of contemporary natural sciences, Marx conceptualized communist freedom as an exclusively human possibility. While criticizing Feuerbach for his conception of human essence as naturalistic and ontological, Marx’s own early treatment of the question of “species-being” relied on essentialist notions of human labor. In this treatment, the problem with capitalism is that it alienates this essence of the species from itself. Thus, in his youth, Marx fixated on communism as the “true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development.”⁴ But whereas, for Engels, this conscious, social appropriation of human capacity was to be expressed through the hard separation and domination of nonhuman nature, through man’s repression of animality, Marx was more ambiguous. He described communism as a “fully developed naturalism,” which “equals humanism,” and “as fully developed humanism [that] equals naturalism.” Communism is “the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature,” or, “… the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature… between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.”⁵

His characterization of communism as the “negation of the negation” suggests that both humanism and naturalism are ideological fetters that result from bourgeois society. Yet these sketches from his notebooks were very abstract and provide little insight into the regulatory functions of a truly communist social metabolism.⁶ When he did provide more practical insight into the basic prerequisites of communism, he tended to drop the philosophical pretenses of his early notes, instead focusing on pragmatic concerns of socially-planned production in more anthropocentric terms:

Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.⁷

The formulation we inherit then is something like: communism = realm of freedom = the development of human powers as an end in itself—a sort of communist categorical imperative.⁸ In contrast, the nonhuman world, including our own animality, figures into the realm of necessity. Its relation to communism is as a condition of possibility from which the human species emerges and greets itself for the first time.

The terms “human species,” “humanity,” or “human community,” while popular invocations and mobilizing images among communist theorists, are abstractions without clear material content. The fraught concept of species that communism will inherit is itself a conceptual artifact of capitalism, which materially conflates the historical taxon Homo sapiens with the concept of humanity-in-general, and further confuses biological species with community. This confusion is historically unique because only the capitalist mode of production brings about an identity between species belonging, social reproduction, and individual subsistence. “Humanity” is a perverted, ideological form of the capitalist social metabolism that appears to us as natural and essential, dissolving any distinction between social practice, biology, and subjectivity. While not abstractly equivalent, the “human species,” “humanity,” or “human community” are made practically interchangeable by capitalism. This is not because they describe the same phenomena, but because capital inscribes within each the irreducible quality of labor-power.⁹ This social meaning of humanness essentially colors and eclipses all others, whether biological or philosophical, normative or descriptive. In the hands of communists, these concepts deserve more scrutiny.

In any case, some version of the human-without-qualification makes its way through the motions of capitalism, the sole protagonist of history and the solitary engineer of communism. Communists still sing the praises of some human essence, as if it were always there in its totality, regarded as a transhistorical fact in the process of becoming that was repressed by class society and to be unleashed by its destruction. Human emancipation, being an essential condition of communism, is presented not only as the whole of the content of the communist program, but as a test of its actualization. Jasper Bernes, for example, describes the present task of the communist movement as building structures of self-organization that can realize the “real human community—classless, stateless, and moneyless.”¹⁰ In their “Theses on the Council Concept,” The New Institute for Social Research argue that, precisely because it functions self-reflexively as a form of human social reproduction, “the concept of the council remains oriented toward the possibility of humanity qua classless society as self-determining subject.”¹¹

The ambiguity of terms like “community” and “humanity” is matched by their ubiquity. Presuppositions such as “humanity qua classless society” or “communism qua humanity” seem to animate essentially all communist perspectives and programs today. While precedent clearly exists in the work of Marx and Engels, the now taken-for-granted formulation of communism as “the material human community” comes to us from the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga, by way of his pupil Jacques Camatte.¹² Adding to our confused inheritance, Camatte read “humanity” and the “human community” (the two terms are never quite clearly defined or disarticulated) onto Bordiga’s conception of the human species. For Bordiga, the human species, which “supersedes all bourgeois ideology,” was the real subject of the communist movement.¹³ To him, unlike the bourgeois conceptions of human individuality and dignity, the species as such was a biological and historical fact, brought into totalizing relationship with itself by the movement of capital. Communist revolution, “for the first time in history,” will allow society to “voluntarily and scientifically subordinate itself to the species; which is to say, will organise itself in forms that best respond to the ends of future humanity.”¹⁴ Put simply, Bordiga thought of communism as “a life plan for the species.”¹⁵

Camatte interpreted this with more abstract grandeur, finding in Marx the blueprints for communism as the “material human community” (Gemeinwesen). According to Camatte, capital had either entirely eradicated or subordinated all prior forms of historical community, which were only ever partial, regional, and particular. It replaced these social ties with the bondage of the market and production. This material community of capital could now be appropriated by the species and transformed into the human community as a universality.¹⁶ Marx generally used Gemeinwesen to refer to something like “community” but, to make his point, Camatte mostly drew from Marx’s earlier writings, specifically an 1844 article in which he claimed that

social revolution possesses a total point of view because—even if it is confined to only one factory district—it represents a protest by man against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the point of view of the particular, real individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting, is the true community of man, human nature.¹⁷ 

From this perspective, the function of communism is to bring about the “true community” as an essential, natural quality of human existence. Since Camatte, unlike Bordiga, does not mobilize “species” in the biological sense, any safeguarding against reified conceptions of humanity is lost. We return to capitalism’s peculiar species abstraction, now dressed in revolutionary costume.

It is true that “communist revolution is, fundamentally, an anthropological revolution.”¹⁸ Communism’s break with the human species is a forward thrust, an anthropological revolution that finds its dialectical partner in the revolt of nature, such that neither humanity nor nonhuman nature would be preserved unchanged. Communist revolution will shatter the world inherited from capital—its social relationships and categories, its material structures of production and distribution, its ecological devastations—and initiate a process of communist reconstruction through which these inheritances are reshaped into a transparent metabolism. In the process of communist reconstruction, the fate of the species should not be confused with the fate of species as a social category. If communism breaks with the human species, it is because it breaks with speciation as a reification of biological and social processes and breaks with the material process that gives practical truth to the abstract conception of humanity.¹⁹ In the absence of market relations, such a practical abstraction would be unmoored in communism. The significance of species as a category will dissolve. Taxonomic rankings may be reconstituted, but it is not possible to know what this will look like in advance. Social reproduction and individual subsistence will not be mediated by class, race, gender, or even species belonging.

While this may appear bizarrely idealist or utopian, directly contradicting the lineage of communist theory and a communist movement that sought to measure communism by the unit of species, these contradictions are more apparent than real. The contradictions between scientific mastery and atavistic enchantment, freedom and necessity, humanism and naturalism, human and nonhuman, find their terminus in the destruction of capitalism and the construction of communism on its ruins. Indeed, articulations of the communist program as anthropological revolution are helpful in coordinating the tasks of communism as an interspecies process of metabolic reconstruction.

The communist program must reckon with the problems posed by species and anthropocentrism for two basic reasons. The first is the simple fact of the world as it actually exists. The planetary metabolism involves a complex array of biogeochemical flows and cycles that involve biotic communities and abiotic factors alike. As a minimal condition, communism makes possible and requires the transparent and planned reproduction of these cycles to maintain biospheric integrity. It does so by reducing necessary labor and material and energy throughputs to a minimum but cannot do so merely via the planning and regulation of human activity alone. Any process of communist reconstruction will need to develop ways to account for the metabolic flux of planetary reproduction. Here, an expanded concept of the council is needed.

Historically, “councils” refer to workplace executive bodies composed of revocable worker-delegates linked together in a system of political and economic organization. In the early 20^th century, councils grew out of strike and action committees to become a key form of revolutionary organization and combat under direct proletarian control.²⁰ The council was treated as both a means and end—both a weapon intended to eviscerate class society and an organ through which to germinate communist relations and imperatives. As I am appropriating it here, council is more concept than form, one not necessarily limited to the factory floor.²¹ The council names a relational process, a social matrix to define and execute tasks to solve the problem of common social reproduction, providing a formal opening for creative experimentation in the social-ecological reflexivity that is communism in becoming.²² As a shorthand, we can think of this structure of interspecies accountability as the ecological council.

Second, if we take seriously the basic prerequisites of communism as not merely the end of value, money, markets, and wage labor, but of class society tout court, then this means the historical negation of the Neolithic agrarian revolution.²³ Such a revolution would be a reckoning, the practical expression of the normative impulse of the communist project—that is, non-domination, “the minimal guiding principle of a communist society.”²⁴ Non-domination is not identical with communism, but remains a necessary condition for it, one of its basic negative measures. This is the meaning of “association of free producers.” An expanded concept of the council as interspecies and ecological poses uncomfortable problems with respect to non-domination. As the positive content of communism, the imperatives of “voluntary association” and “free development” are intended to proscribe against the possibility of domination reemerging. Yet what, exactly, constitutes domination among species? How do “voluntary association” and “free development” apply to nonhuman life or abiotic processes? This is not entirely clear. Some activities more obviously involve interspecies domination than others. Systematic violence is dispensed against all variety of existence.²⁵ Yet, in the communist imagination, the messy work of relating freedom to necessity conventionally takes the form of measuring human freedom against nonhuman necessity. Thus, the minimal condition of non-domination is conventionally limited to the human species, excluding nonhumans from consideration in the communist program before it can be tested against reality.

Reality tells a different story. It is my proposition that the destruction of capitalism will upend this conventional understanding of non-domination by eroding the social basis of anthropocentrism. The communist program annihilates the social burden that is undifferentiated humanness, reified in the ideology of human dignity. Through voluntary association and coordination, labors and efforts are rendered directly social, bypassing the mediation by abstract human belonging. In other words, social (re)productive activity would no longer be exclusively human. In fact, it cannot be, and never was, but could only be valorized as such under capitalism through the mediation of wage-dependence. What communism makes “transparent and tractable” are the already-existing realities of the planetary metabolic flux, the biogeochemical cycles, biotic life processes, and abiotic components implicated in every social practice and ecological-developmental process.²⁶ Planning of social reproduction from the perspective of ecological limits, accounting for the metabolic requirements and throughput across and among species, this is precisely the task of ecological councils.

The council function must innovate new forms of representation that permit deliberation as an interspecies process. While the concept of an interspecies communism is relatively novel, it has in fact been articulated elsewhere.²⁷ These articulations for the most part have been either rhetorical or ossified as a discursive exercise of the academy. This is unfortunate, because any real communism will be a communism of the biological-metabolic continuum, what Marco Maurizi in a more limited sense calls the post-Neolithic, “enlarged animal society.”²⁸ The difficulty lies in moving from mere thought experiment or empty gesture to the practical path before us (though social struggles have already begun to test this hypothesis). Added to this is the mysticism and pure ideology that cloaks the metabolic separation, which in turn renders any present speculation on the prospect of interspecies reflexivity and reciprocity either heavily intellectualized or encumbered by atavistic folk-science or vulgar animism (think The Secret Life of Plants), often manifest in attempts to “inhabit” the land in nouveau-autochthonous fashion. What the concept of the ecological council demands is not opacity or esotericism, but transparent and exoteric participation in processes of metabolic repair, amelioration, and convalescence, all tending toward the reconstruction and reproduction of dynamic systems with endlessly diverse internal differentiations and biotic and abiotic compositions.

For Maurizi, “contrary to animism, reciprocal respect between humans and nature would not be caused by a fundamental indistinctness between us and the other species: it would flourish from our ability to perceive and appreciate difference.”²⁹ This is necessary, but insufficient. Difference, yes, but which difference? My wager is this: it will not be the abstract difference between the human and nonhuman tout court. In the absence of production-for-value, this Manichean divide would no longer be necessary. Its salience is neither essential nor transhistorical, but given by capital’s abstraction of humanness.³⁰ More granular forms of difference, particular ecosystem limits and dynamic equilibrium requirements, determined by ever-shifting species compositions, would factor into production and reproduction considerations directly. In practice, the ability to appreciate difference and make it tractable to production would then render the distinction between the “human” and “nonhuman” increasingly untenable and unstable. The functions of “transparency and tractability” necessitate ecological and biological knowledge and research to maintain ecosystem services and interspecies functional biodiversity for the more-than-human community. However, because the deep structure of social functionality is so profoundly shattered and reconstituted by the revolutionary process, the forms and concepts subjected to transparent self-activity and reflexivity are themselves destabilized and transformed. The very category of species will be made void—at least as we know it presently. Nothing is sacred in the communist destruction of the old world.

The advantage of this reconceptualization is that is allows us to shift the vantage from merely the point of rupture, which carries with it an endless obsession of organizational forms, to the perspective of social reproduction, the problem of a communist function crystallized from historical and physical—that is, ecological—reality. The New Institute writes that the council is “essentially self-reflexive responsivity to natural and social conditions in the process of their collective transformation by individuals,” but fail to draw out what I think are dramatic implications for the character of communist reconstruction as an interspecies process.³¹ Indeed, the authors maintain a sort of knee-jerk reaction to any whiff of “anti-civ” or “anti-humanist” tendencies among contemporary communists, especially those “ecologically” inclined (not without cause). But, in doing so, they elide a very real problem posed by the very council concept that they champion. The process of communist metabolic reconstruction is the desecration of anthropocentrism through the practical destruction of the process that gives form and function to the human abstraction, leaving transparent and tractable the flux of ecosystemic metabolism. It is in this theoretical space that the concept of the council can generate possibilities for political activity and clarification of the tasks of communist reconstruction.

Communist reconstruction makes legible and practical the reality that the object of social reproduction has never been the human species per se, but has only appeared as such in the capitalist mode of production. Any concept of communism that makes alpha and omega of the human species is an idealism made obsolete by the real anthropological revolution of communist reconstruction. At best, we can imagine that voluntary associations would tend to retain an anthropocentric character as a purely practical matter, given individual self-interest and most immediate filial relations, such that only a small percentage of the human population would assent to planetary injunctions against the domination of nonhuman forms of life, prohibitions against certain kinds of use that reflect the particularity and reflexivity of species life history strategies, interests, and measures of planetary biodiversity. Yet even in this more pragmatic scenario, it is unclear why species self-interest—implying ethical prescriptions, forms of kinship, and modes of social reproduction—should be given in advance of the revolutionary process itself. After all, the human species (including even the scientific and social content of the concept of species) will be utterly dissolved and transformed by the anthropological revolution that constitutes communist reconstruction. Communism opens the possibility for new forms of interspecies relationships, giving unprecedented historical content to biological symbioses and altruisms, regulated by conscious, scientific planning and understanding of biogeochemical processes that underwrite the complexity of the planetary ecological metabolism.

Communism presents the flux of the biological world as transparent and participatory, rather than blindly automatic or atavistic. Communist reconstruction is a process-activity, an aspect of the universal ecological-developmental dialectic. This is always happening. What distinguishes communism is the historical capacity to actively plan within the ecological-development process as it unfolds. Communism renders this relational mediation transparent. It does not invent it. It does not overcome it. The ecological councils function as units of this absolute metabolism, what Marx called the universal metabolism of nature. We come then, finally, to the negation the negation. Communism overcomes the first negation—the dispossession from “late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps”³² that constituted the unity of the human species in capitalism—through a second: reconciliation with multi-species infrastructures by overcoming class domination qua market dependence. It is only in this limited sense then that the concept of “speciesism” has any practical force, when the potential for its real overcoming is finally realized. Non-domination of nonhuman life then becomes more like a measure of the extent and success of communist reconstruction, if only because its implementation has as its necessary conditions not only the full negation of capitalist relations, but the negation of the Neolithic scars of class society and the abuse of the land and its inhabitants. It is only in this particular and limited sense that communism is the end of human prehistory.

J. Caurine is a communist from the Timber Belt.

Footnotes

1. Karl Marx., A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm ↩

2. Friedrich Engels., Anti-Dühring (1877), Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm ↩

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (Penguin, 1991), 958-9 ↩

4. Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In Early Writings (Penguin, 1992), 348. ↩

5. Ibid., 350, 348 ↩

6. Ibid., 358 ↩

7. Marx, Capital: Volume III, 959 ↩

8. Indeed, this is precisely what Marxist humanists argue themselves. Karen Ng recently described Marx’s project as a “new categorical imperative,” informed by “’the doctrine that man is the highest being for man.’” Ng, “Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits,” Qui Parle 34, no. 1 (2025): 178. ↩

9. Capital’s peculiar form of social wealth, objectified human labor in the abstract, weds the reproduction of the human species per se to the reproduction of capital. The operative abstraction is human labor in general, a logical category that has a real, material dimension in capitalism. In the process of capitalist reproduction, the valorization process abstracts the quality of human belonging from the flux of nonhuman nature. Human workers, by realizing their capacity for labor and their aliquot part of the undifferentiated human metabolism, are ipso facto valorized as possessing the quality of humanness, belonging to the species. Every other aspect of the production process, from the tools and machinery to the raw materials and energy inputs, are devalorized, or, in other words, rendered nonhuman in the abstract, the undifferentiated mass of species nonbelonging. In effect, all that matters is that these various substrates and inputs do not possess the capacity to valorize value, to produce surplus value, which in turn delimits the form of their utilization and externalizes the conditions of their reproduction. ↩

10. Jasper Bernes, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso, 2025), 159 ↩

11. A New Institute for Social Research. “Theses on the Council Concept” https://isr.press/Theses_on_the_Council_Concept/index.html ↩

12. Loren Goldner, “Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today” (1995*) Libcom.* https://libcom.org/article/communism-material-human-community-amadeo-bordiga-today-loren-goldner; Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community: the results of the immediate process of production and the economic work of Marx (Pattern Books, 2020) ↩

13. Amadeo Bordiga, The Science and Passion of Communism: Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga (1912-1965) (Haymarket, 2020), 450. ↩

14. Ibid., 455 ↩

15. Ibid., 88 ↩

16. Camatte, Capital and Community ↩

17. Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform.’ By a Prussian.”* Vorwarts!* 63 (1844). Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/08/07.htm; For Camatte’s invocation without reference, see Jacques Camatte., “Origin and Function of the Party Form.” Il programma comunista (1961). Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/origin.htm ↩

18. Phil A. Neel and Nick Chavez, “Forest and Factory: the Science and Fiction of Communism” (2023) Endnotes. https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory ↩

19. “The human and the nonhuman, being achieved as a practical truth through the valorization process, generated as a speciated discontinuity in the continuum of life and metabolic processes, are themselves perverted forms of dynamic social-ecological material relationships. The reproduction of this speciation is the humanization process.” Decompositions, “Tragic Theses” (2023): https://decompositions.noblogs.org/post/2023/03/09/tragic-theses/ ↩

20. For a good historical and theoretical introduction see Anton Pannekoek, “Workers’ Councils” (1947): https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/workers-councils.htm ↩

21. Councils of course never were limited to the factory floor, ↩

22. A New Institute for Social Research, “Theses on the Council Concept” ↩

23. This point has been made elsewhere. For example, Bernes (2025) argues that communism is “the negation of those elements not only of capitalism but of class society since the Neolithic revolution: division of labor, state, and class” (125). Or, for, John Clegg and Rob Lucas, “if communism is to amount to the abolition not only of capitalism but of class society per se, then a communist revolution must be seen as the negation of this first agricultural revolution.” John Clegg and Rob Lucas, “Three Agricultural Revolutions.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 1, (2020): 101. ↩

24. Neel and Chavez, “Forest and Factory” ↩

25. Widespread animal domestication comes to mind, for a variety of reasons, but nearly all modern agricultural and extractive activities have deleterious to disastrous consequences for the nonhuman life and systems involved. The challenge is to distinguish harm from domination. ↩

26. The formulation of “transparent and tractable” comes from Bernes, The Future of Revolution, 171. ↩

27. See e.g., Leigh Claire La Berge, Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke University Press, 2023) ↩

28. Marco Maurizi. Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory (Haymarket, 2021): 172. ↩

29. Ibid., 174 ↩

30. For this reason, Marx called Christianity, “with its religious cult of man in the abstract… the most fitting form of religion” for bourgeois society. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin 1992), 172. ↩

31. New Institute, “Theses,” emphasis mine. ↩

32. James Scott, Against the Grain: The Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), 18 ↩