Plastic in utero is not a metaphor but a fact of contamination within our very biology.

As the sun sets on the Holocene, we find ourselves staggering under an unbearable weight; an extinction event, the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first to be caused by a mode of production. Industrial capitalism is bringing a permanent end to the relative climate stability of the last 12,000 years, the geological epoch that made agriculture and civilization possible, and terminating the 2.6-million-year-old Quaternary glaciation period for which our biological adaptations have specifically evolved to survive. This is not a hypothetical future, but a present reality, in which any viable theory of political action must operate. Humanity’s relation to nature has been so thoroughly alienated that the species-being itself has become a dumping ground. Wet-bulb heatwaves are killing laborers on the job, extended fire seasons are choking our lungs, industry is dumping forever chemicals into the sea, climate instability threatens global food chains, thousand-year storms decimate our communities, and microplastics are stunting the photosynthetic process of every plant.

Yet, the dominant discourse that claims to address this unfolding catastrophe remains trapped, circling a drain of its own making. Should we have hope, or is nihilism the only honest response? This false binary is a cage. It presents a choice between two forms of paralysis that function, in practice, as sophisticated instruments of governance. Programmatic hope disciplines us by promising a future that will redeem the present if only we are patient and obedient. Nihilism disciplines us by dignifying surrender, making inaction look like a form of profound lucidity. This essay proposes a way to step off this debilitating axis entirely. The alternative is not a new mood but a different methodology, a revolutionary praxis for our specific historical moment: Negative Materialism, a left-anarchist orientation that rejects both teleological comfort and performative despair to fight within the current mode of production.

Hope, in its institutionalized form, persists not because it is analytically sound, but because it is politically useful to the institutions that must manage our dissent. It is a powerful social technology for postponing urgency, for converting the raw, disruptive energy of conflict into the manageable rhythms of a calendar. The parties’ five-year plans, quarterly stakeholder consultations, biennial electoral cycles, and net-zero targets that recede ever further into the horizon all train our minds and desires to wait. This discipline appears in many costumes, from the liberal faith in policy innovation and technological deliverance, to the vanguardist faith in the historical destiny of the proletariat. Even its vibrant, counter-cultural cousin, the Solarpunk movement, can fall into this trap, functioning as a kind of technologically-mediated utopian pastoralism. It offers a more seductive vision, replacing technocracy with lush vertical gardens and elegant solar arrays, yet sidestepping the material question of how such a world could be built amidst biospheric collapse and resource contraction. In both forms, hope functions as a promise of future resolution that legitimizes present sacrifice, a demand for obedience to a program that refuses to ask if the logic of centralization, extraction, and administration is the core of the problem.

Nihilism appears as hope’s sharp-edged opposite but often functions as its perfect mirror. Where hope suspends action in anticipation of a managed future, nihilism suspends it in resignation to a catastrophic one, protecting the self from the messy disappointment of partial victories and inevitable setbacks. Its most visible form is a kind of online doomerism, a curated aesthetic of catastrophe that mistakes the ability to catalogue disaster for political critique. This nihilistic retreat into abstraction has its high-tech twin in transhumanism, posing as the ultimate form of liberation what it openly promises is an escape from the frailties of the body and the finitude of the planet, rendering the urgent work of ecological and social repair irrelevant and something to be forgotten. A more visceral variant festers within our own anti-authoritarian milieu, the eroticization of civilizational collapse, where ruins are staged as a kind of purity, danger as proof of authenticity, and catastrophe as a baptism of fire that will burn away the decadence of civilization. Whether retreating into the aesthetics of defeat, the fantasy of technological transcendence, or the spectacle of destruction, each of these nihilisms dodges the difficult, constructive work of composition, leaving the actual infrastructures of domination to continue their work uninterrupted.

Negative Materialism begins by refusing the terms of this fraudulent binary, starting not with a feeling about the future but a disciplined method for acting in the present, built on three foundational refusals: inevitability, universality, and permanence. There is no pre-written historical arc, no teleological march to either salvation or ruin. History is a contested field of forces, and the future is radically open. No single tactic, ideology, or formal system works everywhere, at all times; strategy must be domain-specific, tied to the unique material and cultural context of a given struggle. Alliances, organizations, and encampments are temporary tools, not ends in themselves, designed to be assembled for a purpose and dissolved when it is met. From these refusals flows a core logical principle: anti-closure. The clash of a thesis and an antithesis does not produce a higher, perfected unity, but a new, more complex, and still-plural field of contradictions. This open-ended process of learning replaces scripture with recipes: detailed, shareable notes on what worked where, under what conditions, with what materials, and with what failure modes. Knowledge becomes operational not when decreed by a central committee, but when strangers can reproduce it without borrowing anyone’s charisma.

This abstract logic finds its footing in a concrete subject,not a historical class abstracted from its members, but the materially situated ego-in-relation. The body feeling the heat, breathing the smoke, and carrying the burden of its labor is the grounding of our condition, a materialist recognition that the experience of domination, exploitation, precarity, toxicity, is felt at the scale of the organism. Agency begins here, with the visceral hunger to persist and reclaim power over one’s own life. This entire project must now confront the material basis of our historical moment, where scarcity is ceasing to be merely a social condition. The sixth mass extinction, topsoil degradation, aquifer depletion, and mineral scarcity are material processes actively dismantling the productive capacity of the planet, forcing us to ask not “How do we distribute the fruits of immense productivity?” but “How do we navigate a future of managed contraction and shared decline without resorting to the brutal logic of eco-fascism or market-based triage?”

This task begins with a precise diagnosis of our enemy. The system we are fighting is no longer the infinitely expansive industrial capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries. We face a new mode of production of Capitalism in Contraction. Its prime directive is not infinite growth but the managed, hierarchical distribution of decline. The core mechanisms of capitalism remain, but their operation is warped by the biophysical limits of a dying planet. Surplus extraction is no longer simply about appropriating the value of labor, but about appropriating the material basis of survival itself by enclosing the last viable resources such as sourcesof clean water, privatizing seed stocks, and financializing atmospheric carbon. Class power is now expressed as the power to hoard resilience with gated communities, private bunkers, and exclusive supply chains while externalizing precarity and toxicity onto the poor and marginalized. Crisis is not a cyclical aberration to be overcome, but the baseline operating principle of a system managing its own contradictions, where each disaster becomes a new opportunity for primitive forms of limited accumulation. The exploitation of labor and the exploitation of nature have fused into a single metabolic crisis; the destruction of the biosphere now directly constrains labor’s ability to reproduce itself. This sharpens our refusal of inevitability. Because this mode of production is novel and reactive, its “laws of motion” are not fixed. It is scrambling to secure itself on unstable ground, and its trajectory is therefore unstable and contestable. Our politics must be as adaptive and experimental as the system we fight, probing its weaknesses as they emerge.

This re-tooled, hardened praxis becomes indispensable as the direct counter-logic to Contraction-Capitalism, demanding principles that prevent our own projects from reproducing the very brutality we oppose. These principles are not blueprints for utopia but weapons for survival, found in a sober re-reading of Murray Bookchin’s ecological ethics, stripped of their post-scarcity assumptions and remade as militant tools for an age of limits. Usufruct, Complementarity, and the Irreducible Minimum form not an ideal future schema but a practical framework for navigating scarcity without surrendering to barbarism. Their purpose is not to be moralized but operationalized, providing the social cohesion and material base from which communities can resist fragmentation, absorb shocks, and endure with dignity in the midst of contraction.

The Irreducible Minimum becomes a non-negotiable political commitment, not simply a moral claim but a direct refusal of capitalist triage, a material declaration that there are no surplus people. If the total pie is shrinking, the floor below which no one is allowed to fall must be defended at all costs, even if that means lowering the ceiling imposed by wealth and privilege. Usufruct, the demand to use and enjoy any resource without damaging or depleting it, shifts from a laudable principle to a core survival tactic against enclosure and commodification, forcing the question from “Who owns this?” to “How can this be used, maintained, and passed on in the best possible condition for collective survival?” Complementarity, the principle of mutualism and recognizing strength in diversity, becomes the material basis of resilience, recognizing that the many forms of skill, knowledge, and practice fractured by capitalism are neither in competition nor commodities to be bought and sold, but complementary weapons against precarity. Re-tooled for a world of limits, these three principles provide the internal operating system for the nodes of resilience we must build, ensuring they emerge not as moral sanctuaries but as pockets of defiant, egalitarian life in the midst of decay.

This raises the crucial question of scale, answered by moving from a logic organization to a logic of protocol. We scale not by building a centralized federation, but by developing and propagating a set of shared, interoperable protocols, technical, ethical, and tactical, that allow autonomous groups to coordinate and support each other without a central command. The re-tooled Bookchin triad serves as the core tactic for communal cohesion, technical protocols allow for material interoperability, and tactical protocols form a distributed library of struggle. This is how the refusal of permanence is maintained while building power, the capacity residing not in a headquarters, but in the shared intelligence of the network itself, a network that is resilient, decentralized, and capable of learning, adapting, and expanding on its own terms. However to displace too much weight onto protocols risks reproducing an anarchist fetish for form while leaving the question of seizing and dismantling capitalist power underdeveloped. The danger with this lies in the continuation of the fragmented and atomized struggles seen over the last half-century. Without directly confronting class rule, our nodes of resilience could be tolerated, even incorporated, as safety valves within a decaying capitalism. Unless tethered to the class struggle against capital’s command over a field of contracting resources and production, autonomy will merely become survivalism.

In the end, Negative Materialism offers a way out of the debilitating dialectic of hope and nihilism by refusing its premise, inviting us into the messy, difficult, and profoundly meaningful work of the present. It calls us to find our agency not in a distant horizon, but in the tangible acts of negation and provision that we can undertake today. It is a call to become more capable, more connected, and less governable, fostering a practical, material freedom within a world of constraints. It does not promise to reverse the planetary crisis or to deliver a final, post-revolutionary peace, but to build durable, caring, and defiant communities capable of navigating what is to come with dignity. It is to shorten our dependencies on brittle, extractive systems, to thicken the networks of mutual aid and solidarity, and to carve out and defend pockets of autonomy where other ways of living can be practiced.This is a politics stripped of its messianic pretensions, returned to the humble, necessary work of keeping each other alive, a materialism that has passed through the crucible of the negative and emerged not with a new hope, but with a new hunger: a hunger that organizes, a hunger that shares, a hunger that refuses to be managed, and a hunger that fights to live.

This document is not a finished doctrine or a final word, but an initial proposition, a first draft in a necessary and ongoing conversation. The principles of Negative Materialism demand that this framework be a product of collective intelligence and distributed struggle. We therefore invite all who find resonance in this approach to join in the work of its construction. to allow our theoretical development to be as distributed, transparent, and adaptable as the praxis we seek to build.