The psychological and political dimensions of late capitalism are coming into sharp relief now, as well as the tasks for revolutionaries.

Marxist attempts to periodise capitalism have often gone horribly wrong, nevertheless, we persist.

What is specific about Late capitalism is the deepening poly crisis, massive wealth inequality, declining living standards, the contours of WW3 emerging, declining profitability, erosion of bourgeois democratic norms – essentially the unity of determinants themselves overdetermined by the destruction of the biosphere. We can call this Late Capitalism because – put simply – can we imagine another 100 years of this?

We like to trot out Jameson’s quote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, now we do not need to imagine, we are part of the machine that is actively creating this ending as we hurtle towards 4C warming, a world in which adaption might not be possible with 4 billion people facing lethal heat waves, collapse of the food chain and rising sea levels impacting just under 1 billion people. 

A time where billionaires preach indifference or outright fascist logic, and where cruelty and division are celebrated, and sadism in politics and economics is practiced across the bourgeois political spectrum. It is no surprise some of the most reactionary capitalists are not only the richest ones but also those from the tech world who require massive data centres gobbling up terawatts of power to generate AI art slop.

It is no wonder that in this crisis, there are powerful figures and idealogues on the far right who push a vision of a world where empathy is seen as weakness. Elon Musk called empathy “the greatest weakness of western civilisation”.

And we know why. They are steeling our hearts for the brutal violence and horrors their politics inflict. This is a time when race science and eugenics are returning to public discourse and openly saying you are a White supremacist or a Nazi increasingly carries less stigma. 

It is in the tech supremacy – which has created the world’s first Trillionaire – where anti human ideas have come to dominate. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, was recently asked whether the human species should continue… he struggled to answer. Eventually he said yes, but as trans humans – meaning cyborgs. 

As climate breakdown accelerates, we face the most urgent question of all – how do we build a society fit for humans on a finite planet? And how do we articulate that vision in a convincing way?

This is an argument for a revolutionary humanist ecosocialism fit for the life and death struggles of the modern age, where we face the challenges posed by the rise on the one hand of eugenics, genocide, race science and violent nationalism or the ‘green fascist’ view of humanity as some kind of virus to be eradicated.

At the same time, it frees up revolutionary energies from the dead hand of reformism, ‘activism without an end goal’, and the interminable debate between liberal forms of identity politics or outright class reductionism.  It is a call for a universalist outlook rooted in the creation of the working class as a political category in struggle. 

Why Humanism Matters

Humanism is the idea that every person has agency and the capacity for creativity and that the human – and the best conditions within which to be human – exists  as the meaningful category within philosophy and politics.

These concepts emerged during the Renaissance and were part of the ideological underpinnings of the revolutions in America and France. But from the start, it was riddled with contradictions—slave owners declaring “all men are created equal,” and colonial powers preaching liberty while committing genocide. Liberal and therefore hypocritical humanism.

Marx saw through this hypocrisy. He argued that true humanism cannot exist under capitalism because capitalism alienates us – from our work, from each other, and from nature. For Marx, communism was not just an economic system. It was humanism fulfilled: a society where we consciously shape our world, free from exploitation in a social collective .

Yes, there is a lot of ink spilled on how Marx ‘grew out of this phase’ but I don’t think you can read Capital and not see it as a profoundly humanist text. The key is to identify what is holding us back from the self actualising of ourselves as humans leading a ‘good life’ and to work consistently and energetically to dismantle these barriers. 

The Crisis of Anti-Humanism

After World War II, some radical thinkers challenged or outright abandoned humanism, seeing it as tainted by colonialism. Sartre is often cited here with his introduction to The Wretched of the Earth by Fanon.

Through the entrenchment of post war Stalinism the decline of Marxism as a liberatory cause led to the rise in forms of critical theory that specifically attacked the universalism and class agency of Marxism and socialism.

As Alain Badiou warned: “When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.” Post colonialism, post structuralism and postmodernism fragmented potentially liberatory politics into competing silos, undermining the very ideas of solidarity and revolutionary agency.

Liberal forms of Identity politics which focused on representation within capitalism often replaced universal revolutionary liberation struggle with competitive particularisms under the aegis of neoliberalist thinking (often resulting in perceived competition between different oppressions) and essentialism. This weakens solidarity and plays into the hands of the far right, who offer their toxic “identity” based on nationalism and racism. A dangerous particularism dressed up as a false universality.

We must reject essentialist thinking about people and conceive of our struggles as fundamentally political, based on the oppressive social relations of our current society and how we organise and resist them collectively. 

For us, universalism is revolutionary humanism as an integral part of an ecosocialist struggle. 

Class and Solidarity

If we maintain that class is the foundation of all social relations we can practice a clear analysis and guide to action. Capitalism divides us—by wealth, by race, by gender—so that a tiny minority can profit. Without challenging class power, struggles against racism, sexism, or homophobia remain partial. The particulars of our experiences cannot unite into a universal struggle without an anticapitalist perspective.

The dangers of a vulgar class reductionism are present – stop going on about woke politics and focus on class – but this often obfuscates the complex realities of how people live their lives. As Stuart Hall said, “race is the modality” through which we understand class. The same can be said of gender. Marx said, “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”

Our liberation is universal – or it is nothing. The question is the articulation of the universal with the particular and then – politics as art – the question of forms of agency that is generated by this dynamic unity and how struggles emerge and what to do about them..

History shows revolutions are never “pure.” They are alliances – workers, peasants, oppressed groups – united against common enemies.  Every strike, every protest, every act of solidarity brings further our side in this struggle.

An example of a true universal class approach – the 2023 strike wave against inflation. The left focussed almost exclusively on the unions taking strike action.  Vanguard forces, of course. But the task is to move beyond what Engels and Lenin called the narrow particulars of trade unionism into a genuine class fight back, one bringing in the unemployed, pensioners, students, those not in unions. The failure of Enough is Enough particularly left a gaping hole in the left’s strategy to mobilise wider forces.

Take the trans liberation question – how can we build a mass working class movement around the fight for trans liberation? Trans people make up 0.3% of the population and yet are considered an existential threat to all gender relations.

Uniting the struggles around gender, for women, trans people and of course to also liberate men from the shackles of misogyny and sexism, is to argue for a broader fight around bodily autonomy and social reproduction – particularly in the face of the attacks by the far right. 

The key task is to broaden and deepen the struggles along anticapitalist lines that connect the particular ways we are oppressed under capitalist class society with a universal movement of emancipation. 

The working class as tribunes of the people, not for everyone to collapse their particular struggles into an abstract class struggle but for a dynamic unity. The Your Party founding document strategy for instance argues to build the workers movement over here and then ‘social movements’ over here. No articulation or coordination, not attempt to integrate class politics into the social movements or bring the demands and energies of the social movements into the workers movement. 

Universalism means defending this concept when it comes to the provision of social security and the ‘social wage’.  For instance free child care for all – this includes millionaires! Why? Because it is about shifting the wealth and resources towards everyone and showing how universal provision is more socially just. It isn’t just for poor people.

The same with Council Housing when the Daily Mail finds out that a lawyer or a doctor on higher than average wages lives in a council flat and they campaign for some kind of wage cap to access council housing. No! Council housing is supposed to be  a universal provision, not ghettos for poor people.

To means test benefits or social provision of services is to accept capitalist and neoliberal logic and we reject it. Richer people should pay more in tax but be able to access the same excellent quality public services as anyone else.  

It also goes without saying that a clear commitment to universal revolutionary humanism is also a way to distance ourselves most clearly from the Stalinist police states of the 20th century, as well as the managed authoritarian capitalism of modern China.  The legacy of Stalinism is still a damning one for the left and it is clear that the kind of regimes that they ran veered far away from the vision of a socially just world based on humanist principles that Marxism originally envisioned. 

Ecosocialism – A Universal Vision Of course the climate dimension is crucial.  This is why we cannot talk about a good life for humans or even the continued existence of humanity without ecosocialism – a society that meets our needs within planetary limits. 

Capitalism and class society is based on artificial scarcity and the political divisions this causes. Overcoming this with rational planning means we can focus on what is naturally scarce (and might be increasingly so under ecological collapse). 

We stand for a society of radical abundance—shorter working weeks, universal services, democratic planning, and a sustainable relationship with nature.

It’s the logical answer to a system that is destroying life on Earth for profit.

Ecosocialism means:

Ending production for profit and replacing it with production for need. Eliminating exchange value to restore the primacy of use value.

Democratising the economy – because freedom in politics means nothing if the workplace is a dictatorship, and economic planning will require active participation of workers as part of the productive forces of ecosocialism. Economic democracy is a key part of the self actualisation of people away from our distorted and alienated life.

It is a focus on universal provision of services, from food to housing, healthcare to art galleries. It means not just focussing on ‘economic’ demands like higher wages but also on broader social goods, showing how a society of radical abundance is better for everyone. 

Currently, the far right argue that environmentalism is only a ‘loss’ for workers, even some on the left believe that environmentalism is based on self sacrifice which lends itself to middle class consumerist choices. 

It means an emphasis on ecosocialism as human freedom, of self-actualised individuals free from scarcity, exploitation and oppression. It challenges the anti-communist arguments that the left just wants to perpetuate dictatorships, or socialism is just ‘whatever the state does’. It re-centres a revolutionary, anti-repressive state perspective within the ecosocialist struggle.

Socialism is about an expansion of positive freedoms, freedom from domination and from compulsions that are not socially necessary.

It means supporting people fighting for democratic or political rights wherever they are, including against dictators and supposed communist regimes which are in effect dictatorial; Palestinians, Ukrainians and Uyghurs, alongside Tamils, Kurds and many others are all deserving of democratic national rights and freedom from oppression based on their nationality or religion.

It means theory is at the service of human liberation, not arcane and convoluted excuses to support regimes or actions that are clearly oppressive and debasing because of some twisted realpolitik. 

In conclusion – why not start from picturing a world where poverty, war, and ecological collapse are relics of the past. Where humans live freely, creatively, in harmony with nature. That world is possible – but only if we fight for it.

Ecosocialist humanism is not a plea for kindness, it is not an argument to just get along with each other and ask the capitalists nicely to stop destroying the basis of life on Earth. It is a call to arms—a war drum beating to build a society truly fit for humans.

It is humanity coming back to itself.

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