The environmental crisis and the crisis of work are one and the same.

Humans of late capitalism are impotent in the thermodynamic sense: they are unable to turn heat into work. As natural beings, humans are subjected to the objective powers of nature: hunger, cold, finitude. They therefore suffer (Marx: To be sensuous is to suffer). As human-natural beings, however, Marx notes in the Manuscripts, humans can feel their suffering, and convert suffering into passion (πάθος into πάθος, in greek they are one and the same).

As Scott notes, this metabolic ability is disrupted and mutated under capital, which reserves all passion for itself (Scott 2020). From the perspective of social thermodynamics, humans suffer, but cannot feel their suffering. They therefore cannot convert suffering into passion, nor passion into labour. Labour is not the mediation and objectification of individual and collective passions and needs, but coerced and alienating activity, performed under and resulting in the dissemination of mass apatheia.

Therefore: the disequilibrium and gradual collapse of natural systems owes itself to a total increase in entropy, but only because humans are failing to absorb, metabolise, and direct energy into sustainable patterns of motion. The energetic excess is returned back to nature and perceived as extreme phenomena; it is only nature screaming and shouting to us.

Lord Kelvin’s prophecy of the heat death of the universe is coming true, but only half. Instead of the dissipation of energy, the natural half has energy that does not know what to do with it, and the social half does not know what to do without its energy. The wildfire and the zombie are two sides of the same coin, and they will keep confronting each other until they become one and transcend both states.

Scott, R. (2020) ‘Suffering and the feeling of suffering in Marx’s Capital’, Textual Practice, 36(1), pp. 76–93. doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1786720.