I am currently rereading some of the Capital by Marx however just now for the first time drew a connection from Marx’s theory of the average workday to climate protection and environmentalism. I will outline my thoughts which boil down to what is essentially an argument for solidarity, support and protection for our planet from a Marxist school of thought. This would require us to reduce our use of resources and emissions to a degree were our world can naturally recover itself to a normal state (what is currently known as earths overshoot day). The goal is not a to provide justification to anything nor should it be understood as a call to action. What follows is simply an interesting game of thought.

Marx argues the following. The capitalist who owns a factory wants to have it running all day since any time it is not running the capitalist is paying for it (rent, energy, tax) without producing anything. During the industrialization Marx sees this proven by a steady increase in both the average workday as well as the number of workers (involving women and children in production). However, Marx argues that eventually the savvy worker notices that the if he (or she for that matter but Marx was quite sexist unfortunately and at the time it was mostly he) works above a certain number of hours each day the employees body wears down and cannot recover thus stealing time and money from the employer. Essentially if a worker works 16 hours each day for let’s say 100$ he will only be able to work until he is on average 40 years old. Assuming that the worker is working 300 days a year and he is currently 18 that will add up to a total of 660,000$. If the worker were to work only for 12 hours, he would only earn 75$ per day however would have sufficient time to recover enabling the worker to work until he is 60. This would leave him with a total income of 945,000$. The capitalist does not care about the individual worker if they are replaceable and the wage per hour is the same and will therefore push to consume the workers time that he is able to work as quick as possible. As already mentioned however the savvy worker does these calculations and discovers that if he were to work less, he would earn more and therefore the capitalist is stealing from him. This is illustrated by the fact that if the worker does work more, he is not compensated for the loss of what is in this example 285,00$. Consequently, workers will demand an average workday enforced by the government limiting the time they can work each day to an amount that leaves the worker enough time to eat, sleep, socialize or simply put recover to a normal state of mind and body. Marx points out that this development too can be seen especially in the development of labour rights in England, and it continues until today.

Marx argues we achieved this average workday through the antagonistic relation between those who own the capital or the capitalist and those whose only capital is their body and therefore the workers.  Also, the development of this thought has continued until today with countries like Iceland experimenting with a 4-day workweek. We have come to terms with the fact that having people work for too long hours is not just morally questionable but also in violation of their contract since the capitalist or today the employer is stealing time and therefore money from the worker or employee. So, what does this have to do with climate change and environmentalism?

Just like for the capitalist any hour the factory is not running because the workers have off leads to expenses without producing anything, the same goes for the environment. If there are fish to catch or forests to cut down and someone is willing to buy it, any square inch of unused land is to the capitalist unused profit. We see expressions of this in the decimation of the Amazonian rainforest or the literal stealing of coast and rivers sand for construction. Like the worker this exploitation of our planet has led to a situation where the planet cannot recover to a normal state. We ran through our yearly budget of resources on July 26^th in 2021 meaning that everything we consumed after this day was stolen from earth. This leads firstly to the issue of contract and second the one of voice.

The issue of contract is necessary to show that we are actually stealing from earth. The capitalist can only steal because he entered a contract with the worker and is violating it by stealing the workers lifetime and consequently total income by cutting down on recovery time. There is however no explicit contract with earth. Instead, there is an implicit one all animals except the human seem to be able to follow by pure nature. In nature you are entitled to all resources available but that in most cases leads to self-balancing effects that eventually always ensure that the local or global environment will recover. Humans do not follow this law instinctively anymore and today we often ignore it. We violate the contract by consuming more than the planet can recover from. With that we break the contract and therefore steal from earth. We need a government enforced average workday for our planet.

The issue of voice is the one that will define how we will deal with climate protection in the future. There is one problem that earth has, which is unlike the worker it cannot voice its opinions to us directly. Instead, there are natural barriers in place to prevent this extreme exploitation of the planet, it is rebelling against us which manifests in droughts and floods and hurricanes.

Solidarity and support are at the core of any labour movement. This usually only goes as far as to include other minorities to their struggle for justice who also have nothing but their body as capital. In this spirit I think Marxist theory might require labour movements in specific but also humanity in general to stand up and give a voice to the most oppressed, exploited, and underrepresented entity of this planet which is earth itself. In that sense: “Workers of the world unite” – Greta Thunberg.

*Some concluding thoughts. I might elaborate further on this later especially the idea of a natural contract with earth can be expanded. Still thinking this way about climate change and the action necessary against it could offer justification for many regulations intended to limit our theft from the planet. There is a lot to of further discussion possible but for now I’ll leave the work to you.