Historical (Holocene) context

It would be a pretence to claim that the essence of the argument I intend to make in this article is wholly new. Red Biocentrism has long lurked in potentiâ behind the claims of Marxist heretics and misfits. If one were to delve into the annals of the early days of the socialist movement, after a little searching one might discover the lost world of the poet visionaries and dreamers of early Bolshevism, giants in their own ways, but sadly so little regarded among serious green socialists in the present day — Bogdanov, Gorky, Lunacharsky — figures whose names could be on the lips of those seeking to find educational solutions now, in the ‘collapsing times’: Bogdanov for his vision to create a science of all things, a meta-theoretical approach intended to enable precisely the recoupling of the natural and human sciences that so many of us struggling with the meaning of the Anthropocene seek; Gorky for his imagining of the transformative capacity of a surrender to the collective; Lunacharsky, both for his marriage of Marxism and religious sentiment, but also for his application of those ideas of proletarian cultural evolution to the field of education, as the first Soviet Commissar of Education, no less. And behind them all lies the even mistier figure of Joseph Dietzgen (Reference Dietzgen1906a, Reference Dietzgen1906b).

To set the theoretical context for the call for Red Biocentrism, allow me first to illustrate the potentialities immanent at the moment of post-revolutionary confusion in the decade following the 1905 revolution in Russia. Why might this be of any interest whatsoever? During this period, the intellectual and moral leadership of the Russian Marxists was contested, and with it the direction social democrats should take in advancing the revolution. Perhaps the ideas born of and grown in this ferment could not outlast it; certainly, they could not have emerged except in response to the set of material conditions and a balance of forces that it offered. Or perhaps the unique context offers a lens through which we might recognise something of the meaning of the Anthropocene, of our own restlessness, distrust of leaders, sense of impending transition, rootlessness. For we bear witness here not only to a moment of political transition after 1905, but also to a new scientific context — a recognition of the importance of energetics and natural limits, an emerging awareness of the new physics; and, of course, a keening sense of the disorientating disequilibrium occasioned by the ongoing brutal and uneven advance of capital across the landscape. Add to this a deeply superstitious and fatalist peasantry and a rapidly growing proletariat receptive to and productive of novel and revolutionary ideas and we have a cauldron of contradictions. From this context, it is argued, we might learn something of the organic synthesis of the religious and scientific, the political and the cosmological, the ἄνθρωπος and the βῐος. The historical overview offered here attempts to relocate the precursors of the Red Biocentric synthesis within a set of material practices and ideas that are both particular to the moment and offer a glimpse of the project of epistemological and pedagogical reconstruction possible, and necessary among the contradictions of the current period of environmental crisis.

What is fascinating and important for those of us on the left, from the perspective of the early Anthropocene, is that the grand project of rethinking the conceptual basis of our epistemic disciplines is not new to our traditions at all and lurks in the darker corners of wild experimentation before the coming of Marxism-Leninism. For Ted Benton, Bogdanov’s proposal for a universal organisational theory represented a ‘new proletarian science’ of the sort anticipated by Dietzgen, which ‘was a precursor to, and possibly even a superior version of, the systems theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’ (Benton, Reference Benton1996, p. 116). Bogdanov’s all-encompassing attempt to offer a set of general methods of explanation of the interrelations between every element of the universe allows the retrospective reader to attempt a more or less direct line from Bogdanov through systems thinking into the Anthropocene expansion. In addition, for Benton, ‘[b]y conceiving humans as part of and within nature, as existing only through their capacity to obtain and process usable energy, Bogdanov [for the first time] brought the limitations of the natural environment into sharp focus’ (Benton, Reference Benton1996, p. 116).

Bogdanov’s theory has been characterised as representing a supersession of Marx and Mach (Jensen, Reference Jensen1978), but commentators have tended to neglect the influence of Dietzgen. Under the influence of Dietzgen (and Mach), the pedagogical aspect of social transformation came to the fore within the thought and writing of Bogdanov and the other vperedists. In proposing workers’ self-organisation into a ‘General Workers’ Soviet’, Alexandr Bogdanov recognised the need for proletarian self-education: for this to operate, he, like Sorel (Reference Sorel1999), saw the need for a working-class mythology to inspire a reorientation within the world.Footnote ¹ Such a project is of special interest today in collapsing times. For along with autodidacticism goes a cosmology or worldview that identifies collective action of the extended proletariat (see below) as a manifestation of contradictions in the material conditions of production within which they find themselves, but which does not require the necessary intervention of a party from the outside; such a dualism being seen as representative of a mind-body split, or of a theoretical-practical divide. Here, Joseph Dietzgen’s legacy goes far deeper than some recognise. For it is only on the understanding of the universe as single and unbroken that it is possible to conceive of a dialectics without mind-body or party-people dualisms (Boxley, Reference Boxley2019). This theme is one common within recent debates among feminist and ecological thinkers wrestling with the implications of environmental crises for cosmology and ontology, coming from perspectives that draw together the concerns of feminism and ecosophy (Mathews, Reference Mathews2003, Reference Mathews2005; Naess, Reference Naess and Sessions1995b, Reference Naess and Naess2008; Skott-Myhre, Reference Skott-Myhre2018).

It has often (Goodison, Reference Goodison1992; Peat, Reference Peat1987; Žižek, Reference Žižek2010) been said that the Left has failed to reach those affective yearnings and affiliations that would really equip us to tackle the challenges of the Anthropocene. If the Left reaches only the right brain, then its neglect is not of sentiment, but rather it fails Dietzgen’s earlier challenges and divides the rational from the emotional, the political from the ‘religious’, in such a way that it lacks the vocabulary to approach desire, the sensual and spiritual. Bogdanov and Lunacharsky saw thisFootnote ² , and we would do well to learn from them some important lessons: hold on to the long view; evolve the symbols, the mythology that supports a collectivist, monistic worldview; find new ways to feed desire without the need for endless growth.

Why Red Biocentrism?

The first, most prosaic answer to the question ‘why Red Biocentrism?’ is because there is no going back, and such a positioning is a necessary response to the new epoch. If Dryzek and Pickering (Reference Dryzek and Pickering2019) are correct, planetary boundary conditions cannot any longer be regarded as those that pertained under now unobtainable Holocene conditions (Dryzek & Pickering, Reference Dryzek and Pickering2019, p. 9). At issue here whether an ontological Rubicon has been crossed, or whether we might indeed go on thinking about a return to the status quo ante. There can be little doubt that, even were we to find impossibly neat technological solutions to our energetic throughput, which included currently unimaginable levels of carbon sequestration, it would still take many thousands of years to return to the Holocene conditions that we left behind so recently. On a day like today, as I write this article, on what our news broadcasters in the United Kingdom are proclaiming the warmest winter day ever recorded (Shukman, Reference Shukman2019), one can almost smell the smoke from burning bridges. Yet, it behooves us well to retain the long view. Thinking again of Alexandr Bogdanov in 1919 when he published his Course in Political Economy, Bogdanov imagined a utopian social order organised on the principles of his universal science, TektologyFootnote ³ (Bogdanov, Reference Bogdanov1996). Most interesting from the point of view of ‘popular Anthropocene’ theory is the role Bogdanov assigns to capitalism in this text. The domination of capital represented a period of profound instability between far more stable and organised epochs. From the perspective of Russia, with capitalism a relatively recent, shallow and incomplete mode of production, Bogdanov saw this phenomenon as brief and transitory, covering ‘a period which is very important from the point of view of the individual but insignificant when examined from the perspective of mankind’ (Bogdanov, as cited in Susiluoto, Reference Susiluoto1982, p. 58) It was preceded by primitive collectivism with its relatively resilient and sustainable character, and will be succeeded by advanced collectivism in a state of equilibrium.Footnote ⁴ The Anthropocene ‘moment’ has begun, one of great significance for those who live through it, but one which may prove ephemeral — like Bogdanov’s view of capitalism, a period of great temporary instability between relatively steady states. We might even say that the phase of capitalist production and the early Anthropocene are not separable phenomena, but represent different names for the same material reality. In this respect, Dryzek and Pickering are quite wrong to glibly dismiss the important work of Jason Moore (Reference Moore2015, Reference Moore2016). To claim that for Moore the epochal shift is tied too closely to the gadfly phenomenon of the capital system entirely misses the pointFootnote ⁵ — that while it may be ephemeral in geological terms, it is precisely the set of material conditions that have coalesced within the capital system that have taken us to this place. These are just the psychological, institutional, systemic, political, economic and cosmological conditions that Dryzek and Pickering require rethinking: to claim that the mode of production is secondary to these is to run scared of the beast that cannot be confronted, the domination of capital itself. Red Biocentrism points towards the (re-)turn to future stability, at some as yet to be determined point later in the Anthropocene, a stability that will hopefully point towards a ‘Gaian’ epoch to succeed it.

Some readers may detect a familiarity in the term ‘Red Biocentrism’, born of reading the writings of David Orton (Reference Orton1998, Reference Orton2000) and his Left Biocentrism. I admire this work and wish to build on it. However, Left Biocentrism exists as a species of Deep Ecology, drawing on its eight-point platform while also identifying with anti-authoritarian Lefts, both anarchist and socialist traditions. But it is not communist. Red Biocentrism seeks a truly communist mode of expression suitable to the Anthropocene. Unlike Left Biocentrism, it is a species of Marxism, as much as Dietzgen’s formative cosmic socialism, Bogdanov’s empiriomonism or indeed Merrifield’s (Reference Merrifield2011) magical Marxism. It is communist, but the common in its communism is interspecific. That said, Red Biocentrism shares a great deal with Left Biocentrism. Drawing from Curry’s (Reference Curry and Curry2011) analysis of Left Biocentrism, one might make the following brief observations. First, for Left Biocentrism, ‘concerns with class, gender and race, while urgent … are viewed in the context of ecological justice’ (Curry, Reference Curry and Curry2011, p. 117). This is nearly right: for Red Biocentrism, class, gender and racial injustices are also necessarily ecological injustices. Second, Left Biocentrism’s goal is ‘solidarity with all life, not just human life’ (Orton, as cited in Curry, Reference Curry and Curry2011, p. 115). This is entirely in accord with Red Biocentrism. Third, for Left Biocentrism, nature is ‘a true commons — even, as such, sacred — and therefore “not to be privatized”’ (Curry, Reference Curry and Curry2011, p. 115). Yes, of course! Dietzgen (Reference Dietzgen1906b) said as much in the 1880s (Boxley, Reference Boxley2019). We go further and recall, after Michael Hardt (Reference Hardt, Douzinas and Žižek2010, p. 136), that the distinction between a ‘natural’ and an ‘artificial’ commons quickly breaks down especially under Anthropocene conditions. The common products of human creativity — language, ideas, and education — constitute but a part of the material commons of nature. Red Biocentrism rejects the myth of private property in its ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ emanations.

On the other hand, while the Marxism of the Holocene was anthropocentric, simply asserting biocentrism, left or otherwise, will not do if it allows an accommodation with capitalism. A Biocentrism of the New Age too easily falls prey to temptations of consumerism, competition, hierarchy.Footnote ⁶ While in its origins in the 1960s and 70s biocentric New Agers may have celebrated sufficiency with axe in hand, the festival of healing methods, spiritual paths, self-help and reawakening packages that followed became nothing less than a carnival of profiteering (Goodison, Reference Goodison1992, p. 240; Greer, Reference Greer2012, p. 105).

Why, then, Red Biocentrism?

1. (1) Because the distinction — Anthropos and Bios — can no longer be sustained. Much has been written about this (Bonneuil & Fressoz, Reference Bonneuil and Fressoz2016; Hamilton et al., Reference Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne2015; Moore, Reference Moore2016) — I do not intend to revisit here a theme that must surely feature in most discussions of popular Anthropocene ontology.

2. (2) Because recognising ourselves as a species means becoming a species among species. The Anthropocene meaning of Marx’s species being has been recognised (Žižek, Reference Žižek2010) to require a material reimagining of humanity, not only in itself but now also for itself. As Marx saw in 1849, the conditions of capitalism carve out new abstractions, as materially real as the nexus of impacts they affect upon the world about them; ‘[t]he domination of capital has created for this mass of people a common situation with common interests’ (Marx, Reference Marx1995, p. 189), from which it is but a short yet existentially revolutionary step to not only our class but our very species uniting as it is constituted ‘for itself’, recognising in the political struggle to rewrite the Anthropocene the new species-consciousness of our telluric identity. In this sense Red Biocentrism represents a ‘species-being movement’ in the manner Dyer-Witheford (Reference Dyer-Witheford2006) proposes. But this is not enough …

3. (3) Because the communism of Anthropomarxism could not accommodate the wider community. An Earth-centred Marxism adequate for the Anthropocene requires further extension of proletarianisation (Žižek, Reference Žižek2010) through identification (Naess, Reference Naess and Tobias1988) to solidarity with the wider collective (Gorky, Reference Gorky1910)Footnote ⁷ — pan-speciesist proletarianization.Footnote ⁸ What could this possibly mean? Joanna Macy and John Seed famously coined the phrase ‘the Council of All Beings’ (Fleming & Macy, Reference Fleming, Macy, Seed, Macy, Fleming and Naess1988) for ritual ‘Deep Ecology Work … to heal our separation from the world, or to know our interexistence with all beings’ (Macy & Brown, Reference Macy and Brown1998, p. 150). The expansion of an extended ecological self beyond class identification to such interspecific solidarity is a necessary and essential feature of Red Biocentrism:Footnote ⁹ in the insurrectionary spirit of radical self-realisation, let us rename its nexus ‘the Soviet of All Beings’.

4. (4) Because all species must be included in a new compact with the earth. Holomarxism cannot rely any longer on the acquiescence of non-human life to the revolutionary project. Insofar as untold ecological damage has been wrought in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the opportunity for an anthropo-exclusive soviet (along with anthropo-exclusive councilismFootnote ¹⁰ ), though invaluable a century ago, is over: the Soviet of All Beings must be consulted and means constructed by which non-human species’ ‘voice’ can be heard in the determination of policy.

5. (5) Because capitalism, liberal and neoliberal, is driving the great acceleration and cannot persist into the new age. Liberal and social democracies only did better at responding to environmental pressures when, as Nicholas Stern (HM Treasury, 2006) so comprehensively pointed out, they started to do irredeemable damage to economic growth and its long-term prospects, not because they had conceded to pressure from environmental campaigners as they claim (Dryzek & Pickering, Reference Dryzek and Pickering2019, p. 25). This was a case of interest convergence, but one which cannot hold in the face of the global juggernaut of capital.

What is Red Biocentrism?

Full definitions fall beyond the scope of this article. However, before moving to consider a Red Biocentric educational project fit for the Anthropocene, let us identify a couple of points that provide a ‘primer’ in the spirit of earlier examples of such formulations for Deep Ecology (Naess, Reference Naess1973) and Left Biocentrism (Orton, Reference Orton1998). What is Red Biocentrism?

(1) Red Biocentrism is dark Marxism; dark green Marxism. Red Biocentrism posits itself from within the traditions of Marxism, while seeking to radically extend the scope of revolutionary agency beyond wage-workers, beyond even Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s (Reference Dalla Costa2019) universal female reproductive labourFootnote ¹¹ into the reproductive capacities of all those species that provide the human life support and whose exploitation feed the accumulation of surplus value for capital. For Rikowski (Reference Rikowski2018), as for Merrifield (Reference Merrifield2011), to invoke a ‘dark’ magical Marxism is to call upon a primitive spirit of spontaneous energy that resides in the darkness, in the communism that already exists here and now. Derek Ford is right that the dark Marxist revolution ‘is not projected into a future but injected into the present, making it so the present feels foreign and the future feels possible’ (Rikowski & Ford, Reference Rikowski and Ford2019). ‘Primitive’ thinking that enables the theurgy of dark Holomarxism is not exclusive to tribal peoples but is a structure of thought common to all that can access it.

The project of magical Marxism (Ford, Reference Ford2017; Merrifield, Reference Merrifield2011) is the leap from a dead world of zombie economics into a rich world of magical desires, a world where we can live out the primitive. Red Biocentrism is a dark green Marxism because it recognises that in the Anthropocene there is no leap into the ‘primitive’ future of an earth in common if our communism cannot act upon and organise for the liaison that Merrifield identifies. Conjuring dark spirits of Marxism to scare the bourgeoisie is also essential to Red Biocentrism!

(2) Red Biocentrism is feminist, pro-witch, and (eco-)sex-positive. Insofar as Red Biocentrism requires further extension of proletarianisation through identification, to solidarity with the wider collective (see Endnote no. 7), sex and collective consciousness are inseparably intertwined aspects of the movement towards unity, from the erotic, the ‘magic’ of unity with sexual partners, to group identification, species-being and the panspecies widening of the Self (Fox, Reference Fox1995, Reference Fox2016; Naess, Reference Naess and Naess2008). The basis of ecosexuality — a rapidly expanding field of study — is an acceptance of an erotic energyFootnote ¹² existing in all of nature, moving through and around us. In an echo of Merrifield, for Hagamen ‘Sexuality is a potent and precious expression of this life energy, and it represents our primal desire to merge with Life itself’ (Hagamen, Reference Hagamen2016, p. 28):

There is a serious attempt here to locate an important, indeed an incommunicably deep locus of reconnection, an undeniably powerful drive to draw together community and place in an embrace seemingly forgotten, the ‘rapture’ of contact. Marxists should not treat lightly the possibility that the erotic, like the ‘magical’ primitive, acts as an unparalleled force for reconnection and collectivism. That expanded sense of ‘we-Self’ that starts in sexual union and offers the possibility for loving others in solidarity and support pushes the boundaries of class consciousness towards what the Dietzgenites called World Consciousness (Untermann, Reference Untermann and Labriola1918, p. 243). For Anderlini-D’Onofrio (Reference Anderlini-D’Onofrio2016), as for McIntyre, sex is ‘the balm that heals the split between humans and Gaia’ (McIntyre, Reference McIntyre2012, p. 11). It has even been argued that in humans, ‘unique connections between the forebrain and cerebellum may account for the fact that some women experience orgasm so intensely that they enter altered stares of consciousness similar to religious experiences’ (Long, Reference Long1981, p. 41), offering ecstatic glimpses of an expansive, rapturous ecological-Self, and that the primary adaptive function of female receptivity in humans has become not reproduction, but ‘the development and maintenance of affectional bonding’ (Long, Reference Long1981, p. 41). So, of course, it is not without reason that non-reproductive sex — sex for pleasure — became an obsession within early capitalism for its dangerous power to disrupt the necessary cycle of the reproduction of labour (Collard & Dempsey, Reference Collard and Dempsey2018, p. 1354), as so vividly conjured by Silvia Federici (Federici, Reference Federici2014, pp. 194–195) in the figure of the witch. As we know, reproductive labour was rendered cheap, and then women’s activities defined as non-work, consigning women’s bodies to the realm of non-human nature to be used up and exploited without any of the old recognition of the sacredness of non-reproductive sex.Footnote ¹³ Duty and chasteness replaced the old order, reproductive labour a free resource for husbands and capital to exploit. As Reich noted in the 1930s, ‘[f]rom the attitudes of bourgeois ideology towards natural sexuality, one could easily infer that it served the purpose of safeguarding economic interests’ (Reich, Reference Reich1976, p. 123). The ‘relegation’ of women as (dangerously) ‘close to nature’ (Collard & Dempsey Reference Collard and Dempsey2018, p. 1356) is regarded by Red Biocentrism as a ground for collective strength, struggle and an education in erotic reconnection.

Why Red Biocentrism in education?

As Collard and Dempsey (Reference Collard and Dempsey2018) explain, the ‘reproductive realm’ represents that ‘iceberg of patriarchal capitalist accumulation’ (p. 8) that, dwarfing the formal economy, made possible the catastrophic, exponentially accelerating throughput of late Holocene hyperconsumption. This vast reproductive hinterland includes all those ‘cheaps’ whose inexhaustibility Moore (Reference Moore2017) reminds us never blindly to accept. Among these, giving birth, parenting, subsistence production, but also the reproductive capacities of nature itself, the energetics of ecological systems, the very work of photosynthesis. Also, of course, education in its broadest sense.

What is the product of a Red Biocentric education? Like capitalist education, like all education, it is subjectivity. Let us be clear, education plays a central part in the reproduction of the conditions for the possibility of capitalism. The wage labourer’s subjective existence is dependent upon a relation to capital established by and through educational process (Rikowski, Reference Rikowski, Dinerstien and Neary2002); likewise, the capitalist’s. That section of the Grundrisse wherein Marx offers his analysis of precapitalist economic formations explains that ‘[t]he production of capitalists and wage-labourers is a major product of the process by which capital turns itself into values’ (Marx, Reference Marx1965, p. 118). This is a process of subjectification.Footnote ¹⁴

The Holocene saw a revolutionary transformation in the forms of human subjectivity and subjectification that accompanied the ‘separation’ of labourers from the nexus of relations that comprised their precapitalist ecology (Mezzandra, Reference Mezzandra2018). What Marx calls, rather provocatively ‘natural conditions of existence’ (Marx, Reference Marx1965, p. 87) have a dual character — an objective and a subjective aspect, an outside and an inside. For those producing within such conditions, the ‘producer occurs as part of [an ecology,] a family, a tribe, a grouping of his [sic] people… It is as such a communal part that he has relation to a determined (piece of) nature (let us still call it earth, land, soil), as his own inorganic being, the condition of his production and reproduction’ (Marx, Reference Marx1965, p. 87). During the course of the late Holocene, human consciousness underwent a process of subjective estrangement from these ‘natural conditions’ that accompanied the emergence of the capital relation. In respect of this weirdly abstracted subjectivity, while the biological requirements of ongoing, lived entanglement with nature is retained,

Capital, as we know, deployed enclosure as the means of producing wage labourers, of stripping women of their power within a gendered division of labour by devaluing the non-monetary ‘cheap’ labour of birthing and childrearing, and of effecting this separation.

The form of education in the early geological Anthropocene will be necessitated by a revolutionary transformation equal to that of the late Holocene. Its aim is the production of revolutionary biocentric subjectivity, capable of extending the ecological Self across class and species to turn identification and solidarity into realisation and flourishing. Specifically, unlike capitalist or bureaucratic-centralist socialist education, it is not merely the production of the subjective aspect of labour capacity.

If, as Red Biocentrism asserts, consciousness or subjectivity does not stand above and against materiality, if in the Anthropocene there is no separation between actor and backdrop, then while it is necessary in order to produce biocentric consciousness that the structures of society be transformed, it must also be true that a revolution in the social, political and economic structures of society cannot be deep or sustained without a revolution of the mind.Footnote ¹⁵ A century ago, Bogdanov and Pannekoek (Reference Pannekoek and Dietzgen1906) were as one in applying Dietzgen’s philosophy to reach this conclusion. In his exposition of Pannekoek, Gerber (Reference Gerber and Bricianer1978) takes the dialectic of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ revolutions to a spontaneist conclusion in declaring that ‘[a]lthough the outcome of… revolution will be decided by the physical power of the working class, it is not this power alone that is decisive, but the ‘spiritual power’ that precedes it and determines its use. Revolution is thus a victory of the mind, of historical understanding and revolutionary will’ (Gerber, Reference Gerber and Bricianer1978, p. 17). Bogdanov formulated his proletarian systems thinking in response to just this dialectical challengeFootnote ¹⁶ , drawing out of the slipstream of 19th century materialism a prefiguration of the challenges of the unimaginable Anthropocene; and it was Dietzgen’s autodidactic ideal and the manner in which it found political form in support for spontaneism that hung over the proto-systems theoretical perspective, and that still haunts the holistic project of an Anthropocene education for Red Biocentrism.

A Red Biocentric educational project for the Anthropocene cannot set its sights on mere knowledge, nor even understanding of the environmental crises that beset us, but rather an aspiration that children and young people feel it, live it. If, as Steven Jay Gould so powerfully claims, ‘[w]e cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well — for we will not fight to save what we do not love’ (Gould, as cited in Orr, Reference Orr2004, p. 43), then Red Biocentric education aims to take up and extend the exhortations of David Orr further, to care for the earth as a lover and partner, perhaps even ‘proposing a major shift in the leading metaphor that informs cultural interpretations of the planet we humans inhabit and share’ (Anderlini-D’Onofrio & Hagamen, Reference Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Hagamen2015, p. 4), from mother to lover Footnote ¹⁷ ; building a relationship of respect, mutuality, agape, and perhaps also eros. Red Biocentric education intends to produce young people capable of receiving the responsibilities of biotic citizenship in these collapsing times, without despairingly retreating into eco-anxiety (Pihkala, Reference Pihkala2018), ecophobic passivity and incapacity; citizens who are as intentional about the kind of sex they practise as the food they eat and the products they consume. Such a project does indeed draw on the insights of deep ecology, for it is Fox (Reference Fox1995), Naess (Reference Naess and Sessions1995a) and others of their ilk who so beautifully and compellingly make the case for a project of self-expansion, to enable a real and meaningful identification with non-human nature within our greater, collective we-selves. Red Biocentrism sees this as complementary to, not at odds with the pedagogical projects of Marxist collectivists such as Dietzgen and Gorky.

What this means in educational terms for our children is a matter that we will all need to continue to explore. However, what I have witnessed in my own practice, and which has often given me hope, is the closeness that can develop between a child and particular places, animals and trees, for example, which in its intensity recalls the relation to Winnicott’s (Reference Winnicott1953) transitional objects. This is to say, the importance of a tree or community of pond-side plants to the child in and as part of their sense of self is as intense as the feeling of identification that some feel with their ‘tribe, or grouping of people’Footnote ¹⁸ , and which many recognise, for example, from the inclusion within their family of pets, this engendering such real identification that the loss of some element of that family, human or non-human, produces a gap, an absence in one’s very self. Red Biocentrism finds hope in collective identity at the scale of family, yes, but also ecosystem and bioregion, and also crucially, class and species. Unlike Naess, though such self-expansion is not seen principally as a matter of maturity (in the particular sense in which Naess [Reference Naess and Sessions1995a] intends it), but also of pedagogical intervention towards providing the opportunity to love, to be absorbed, for the ego-self to be lost in collective experience of land-community and class-consciousness. The truth is that such opportunities exist almost nowhere in any current formal education, including even environmental education.

Unity is to be found in action, in sex and solidarity. Marxism has rarely been sexy — a rediscovery of the place of sex ‘magic’ in Holomarxism is essential to its biophilia. This puts sex and relationships learning in a central role in the Red Biocentric educational project for the Anthropocene, along with a rich and varied experience of learning in place, outside learning and a burgeoning understanding of the network of relations that enmesh us in ecological and erotic nexūs. Sex and relationships education, at least in the United Kingdom, is anthropocentrically concerned with human coupling (straight and gay), but neglects the erotic energy of attraction towards the non-human, places and landscapes, and the capacity of such energy to enhance lovemaking between humans. Red Biocentric sex and relationships education encourages the growth of the kind of feelings described by Williams (Reference Williams1995), which accord also with those active opportunities for identification and absorption with/in place.

In the Anthropocene, environmental education is erotically charged, as it calls us all, children and adults, into nature’s embrace. First spring warmth on freshly exposed and wildly sensitive skin, the softest of breezes bringing up goosebumps; the giddying heave of the water fast moving against waders; the fungal musk of humus on a damp, silent forest morning — this is the erotic pull of learning in and among our ‘natural conditions’. But, our environmental education should also help us to appreciate that at the cusp of the Anthropocene, we live, for the most part, in a pornographic relationship not only with one another but also with nature,Footnote ¹⁹ one where mutuality and organic holism are fractured by the complicatedness of commoditised estrangement, rendering Gaia’s body, like that of a ‘pornified’ sexual partner, one ‘that is used, rather than a body that is shared’ (Williams, as cited in McFarland-Taylor, Reference McFarland-Taylor2004, p. 42). Desensitised to the lightest of brushes with our environment, we so often seem to require the backlit hyperreality of super-high-definition widescreen exposing the impossibly unseeable (the snow leopard, the angler fish) in obscene detail. The musty closeness of the forest floor does not sufficiently excite. Identification (Naess, Reference Naess and Tobias1988) remains the basis of overcoming this alienation, and to that end, we must overcome pornographic environmental education in favour of erotic environmental education.

The author worked for many years in early education, a phase where children are all too willing to raise up the earth to smell and taste its cool musk, embrace the craggy bark or hunker down in the darkness of the bower to feel its quiet harbour. Some adults too (you know who you are) will sometimes consciously embrace such opportunity, but our anthropocentric, and especially our ‘tired, indoor pedagogy’ (Orr, Reference Orr2004, p. 52) all too rarely provides chances for young people of all ages to feel the erotic draw of the soil, the forest, the lake. While readers will be aware of examples of just such experiences offered as part of outdoor and ‘adventure’ learning, Red Biocentrism necessarily takes a further step to request a conscious gathering of forces in defence of increasingly loved places. Such an effort requires children and young people to ask of those living things within their grasp whether and how they wish to live and flourish, and to become attuned to the necessary preservation of habitats for the wealth and wellbeing of non-human species. This gathering of forces is the beginning of the convening of the Soviet of All Beings.

In the United Kingdom, as across the world, our children are rising in defence of the planet (BBC, 2019). As we lurch into the Anthropocene, tens of thousands of young people have been taking part in a school strikes in what must surely be understood as an act of solidarity and identification with those ecosystems and their many and varied species which provide the forms of what deep ecologists term our ‘wider Self’. As in the time of Marx’s writing, capital has ransacked the commons of childhood, appropriating children’s time for the benefit of the employers, always pushing back the limits of children’s working days in schooling. The international credit system (the financial markets and the banks) ‘often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people … A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children’ (Marx, Reference Marx1990, p. 920). Marx was right, the blood of our children mingles with the blood of the earth as both are shed to yield succour to bloated capital’s ceaseless accumulative expansion. The laws that protect the enclosure of our common inheritance Marx calls ‘bloody’ (Marx, Reference Marx1990, p. 896) for their disinheriting of our children from their shared commons of culture, of history, of homeplace. Red Biocentrism follows Chris Knight (Reference Knight1991), Silvia Federici (Reference Federici2014), Peter Grey (Reference Grey2013), and the uprising of Extinction Rebellion (Hallam, Reference Hallam, Farrell, Green, Knights and Skeaping2019; Mohdin & Carrell, Reference Mohdin and Carrell2019; Real Media, 2019) in ritual celebration of our shared and spilt blood. In the absence of real, erotically charged, self-realising environmental education in our schools, and in the name of blood-red biocentrism, deep green holomarxists exhort our children, walk out of school: strike! Find common cause with the beasts of the field and wildflowers of the meadow, in the Soviet of All Beings. All power to the Soviet!