Through discussions in previous chapters, various productivist approaches characteristic of Marxism turned out to be inadequate to formulate a response to the economic and ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Technocratic visions, despite their bold claims of emancipation, reproduce the non-democratic and consumerist relations of domination and subjugation that exist under capitalism. Furthermore, capitalist development does not guarantee the transcendence of the contradictory character of the capitalist mode of production because ‘productive forces of capital’ as an art of robbery severely deform the human metabolic relationship with nature, without providing a material foundation for the future society. This is not a new problem. In the 1860s Marx became increasingly aware of this problem while writing Capital, but due to the persistent understanding of the philosophical foundations of Marx’s historical materialism as the unilateral progress of universal human history driven by the development of productive forces, his vision of revolution tended to be reduced to a Promethean one, as if the maximal acceleration of the existing tendencies of capitalism could ultimately realize a final leap to communism.

Marx’s own remarks reinforce this impression. Even in the well-known passage from the preface to A Contribution in 1859, Marx famously wrote, for example: ‘No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society’ (MECW 29: 263). This kind of assumption can easily be read as productivist, but such an interpretation is untenable today because the acceleration of productive forces will sooner or later make most of the planet inhabitable before the collapse of capitalism.

It is understandable that environmentalists often show disdain for Marxism. In fact, historical materialism is unpopular today. This is a pity considering their shared interest in criticizing capital’s insatiable desire for accumulation, though from different perspectives. Admitting the inadequacy and flaws of Promethean Marxism, this chapter attempts to finally resolve the tension between Red and Green. By revisiting Marx’s own texts, I re-examine whether a path exists to reconcile the long antagonism between Green and Red and to build a new Front Populaire in defence of the planet in the Anthropocene.