Among leftists of the most diverse currents, there is still no doubt about the finiteness of capitalism. This finiteness results from the inherent contradictions of this system. This certainty or hope is expressed in the catastrophism of the climate movement, which, according to Luxemburg, postulates „socialism or barbarism. Doom is near and barbarism more realistic than socialism. The more optimistic view saw in Corona Keynsianism the potential for socialism and the most revolutionary view sees in the arrived uprisings their new revolutionary subject that has already initiated a revolutionary phase. Historically, revolutions rarely occurred and even more rarely than revolutionaries proclaimed them. We would like to propose a different view against this desperate optimism.

The concept of the accumulation regime attempts to explain phases of stability in the midst of capitalism’s immanently crisis-ridden mode of production and helps to bring into view capitalism’s power of integration and renewal, but also its crisis-ridden phases of upheaval. We know that a regime of accumulation can only be precisely defined ex post, that is only in its final phase, in which the respective principle of production is anchored in all areas of society. In this respect, our attempt to outline the Green accumulation regime is inadequate. And yet we think it is necessary in order to catch up, at least theoretically and in the future also practically, with the height of the times of capitalist development. We believe that the separations and divorces we are talking about today have something to do with a transition into something new, comparable to the transition from a Fordist, to a neoliberal regime of accumulation. If neoliberal restructuring was a response to the profound crises of Fordism, today we see an attempt to respond to the crises that are the price of interim neoliberal profitability. Just as neoliberalism was much more than an economic program, so today we believe we see the outlines of a reorganization of all our lives. When we speak of a new green regime of accumulation, it is to introduce a term that allows us to examine the multiple connections between these reorderings that we are discovering in the fields of the green economy, new forms of states of exception and security policies, subjectivizations, bio- and necropolitics, digitalization or algorithmization, and extractivist access to the few areas of life that are not yet capitalized. Above all, the deep excavation of this colonization of the soul and the body develop a new quality. While Fordist capitalism still had a certain exteriority, neoliberalism has increasingly abolished this exteriority and finds a further level of internalization in the aforementioned new quality. Through biotechnologies or technical prostheses or body extensions (e.g. smartphone) this colonization is automated, shifted into body/soul and becomes an immanent part of the self.

The neoliberal model responded to the profitability limits of Fordist production by attempting to expand the boundaries of capitalism, through deregulation of the financial sector, monetary policy and the labor market, through the deterritorialization of production by means of a new global division of labor based on a world-spanning logistics. Today, for its part, the limits of this neoliberal model are appearing everywhere. The speculative bubbles of the real estate and financial sectors have been inflated to the point of being too big to grow and too big to burst. Neoliberal labor market policies are producing both a shortage of skilled workers and a surplus proletariat. Last but not least, the ecological limits of capitalism are making themselves felt so violently that they are collapsing global supply chains and just-in-time production. This experience produces the desire, this time, not only to extend the limits of capitalism, but to abolish them. To make oneself independent of everything material, of energy sources, raw materials, bodies, one’s own, but above all of the bodies of the exploited and oppressed. This desire is most radically articulated in the projects of transhumanism, but it can also be found in green ideology and the closely related digitalization.

Thus we witness the staging of a schism between fossil and green capitalism. On the one hand, the dirty coal mines and filthy oil fields symbolize a world whose resources have been exhausted and whose ecological limits have been reached. On the other side is a green world of the coming future, where everything appears to be sustainable, renewable, clean, digital and virtual. But at the latest from inside a lithium mine, this staging of an absolute separation exposes itself as an absurd farce. The demand for green electricity, rare metals, biomass and water, for ever larger areas for wind turbines and solar cells is growing ever more exorbitantly.

The green access to it is the access to territories where the coveted metals and raw materials are located, through which pipelines and infrastructure projects run, where solar plantations and wind farms are to be built. The communities that inhabit these territories experience the same forms of colonialist extractivism that are evident in both the fossil and green accumulation regimes. This is based primarily on two types of separation.

First, a form of community division that uses patriarchal and hierarchical power structures and thrives on the questionable promise of being able to participate in the exploitation that destroys one’s own territory. As can be observed, for example, in the center-left governments in Latin America. Secondly, a form of separation of communities from water, wood or the cultivable land they could use for their reproduction, in other words, a separation of territories and bodies. This separation is based on the modern emergence of the male, possessive, bourgeois subject. The separation of the human body from the world made it possible to formulate the individual claims of ownership over nature that were at the beginning of the early capitalist enclosures of forests, rivers, and common property. It is in this context that the so-called conservation of nature can be seen to be rampant. Nature conservation is the socialized form of the male claim to ownership of nature, which is feminized in the concern for the environment and thus appears to be progressive. But in the end, the bourgeois separation of nature and man is conceived in terms of ownership and profit categories.

Equally unsurprising is the fact that not only are the methods of both the fossil and green extractivist assault on the body-territories similar, but so are the actors of capital behind them. It is enough to put two lists side by side of which corporations, funds, and banks invest the most money each in fossil or green ventures to see from the numerous similarities that there is no real schism between green and fossil capital.

If we said above that the staging of an absolute separation is an absurd farce, we would like to insert here that this staging is an ideological trick of the rulers to cover the real separation. Of course, the schism is not between fossil and green capitalism in the sense that on one side only natural coal deposits are exploited, on the other side renewable resources, but in the fact that the old neoliberal model of accumulation is exhausted and capitalism needs a fundamental regeneration. This is the schism that is also present in the consciousness of many capital factions, be it Silicon Valley, Exxon Mobile or the German car industry. The staging of the schism between fossil and green, only serves to produce consent for the restructuring and intensification of domination.

At the same time, the global hunt for raw materials, semiconductors and cheap energy sources is producing a divorce at another, interstate level. In the neoliberal phase, relocations of production capacities and capital flows were deliberate strategies for profit maximization in the USA and the EU. The global value chains and international linkages that emerged were not seen as a disadvantage because of the belief in market regulation and financial hegemony of the West. With the increasing fragility of global supply chains and the financial system on the one hand, and the rise of China, among others, on the other, this has changed. Whereas a few years ago many saw only transnational corporations or a global governmentality of empire, today every self-respecting imperialist bloc and country has a national commodity strategy and plan for its own „strategic autonomy.“ Especially with the focus on rare earths and renewable energies, which are distributed differently and more diversely around the globe, this search will be global, potentially making every place on the planet a possible site of a commodity war (in the social, environmental as well as military sense).

International interdependence and multipolar orientations are currently seen as a detrimental dependency that must be flanked by strategic autonomy. Economically, the crisis of empire is rooted in the crisis of (post) Fordist fossil capitalism, which, in the face of massively declining profit rates, an inflated financial system, climate catastrophe, pandemic, etc., must develop a new regime of accumulation; must reinvent itself. The policy of sanctions, punitive tariffs, and economic wars creates an escalation, which in turn creates a new moral pressure of disentanglement, as we can observe as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It is not difficult to see from these divorces the future of an imperialist schism between the United States and China. But let us remember the history of the Church: the division into Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches also brought about a new ecumenism. In this respect, especially on the geopolitical level, we are in a phase of reconfiguration of the international web, the outcome of which is still uncertain.

We have focused here mainly on the economic processes and tried to show by examples our way of thinking how one can think together different phenomena with the concept of the Green Accumulation Regime in order to develop a conceptualization of the whole. In doing so, the whole field of biopolitics, biotechnology, the state of exception, digital communication, algorithms, catastrophism as a ruling ideology, technicism, solutionism and instrumental reason would have to be included in the analysis of the political form of regulation of the Green Accumulation Regime.

If we therefore imagine the current and future dynamics somewhat schematically and fade out the asynchronies (Ernst Bloch), we could perhaps speak of a first phase that is characterized by the conflict between fossil capitalism and green capitalism (this is not necessarily a conflict between individual capitalists or capital factions, but runs transversely to them and rather marks two logics) and in the course of which one logic will prevail as the guiding program. We could perhaps say that the „green faction“ is trying to use force to push or accelerate the transformation. The second phase, if we assume that the Green Faction will prevail, could be called „green war economy.“ War economy inward in the sense of a normalizing state of emergency in which technocracy, arguments of necessity and morality are used to get the necessary measures and investments underway. This Green Capitalism could unleash a field of new accumulation in the face of climate catastrophe under the pretext of sustainable climate policy. Externally, it could be characterized by protectionism and aggressive foreign policy in the struggle for technologies and resource access. In this context, it will depend above all on whether national interests manage to establish a new international (dis)order as a guarantor of security and order for the new accumulation regime and thus to secure its global implementation.

This could stabilize the crisis of capitalism into the next century. Not only because it „simply“ opens up new economic sectors, but because this new accumulation regime will mean a new social project, which will not only include new economic forms, but also new legal, political, cultural and subject forms. An industrial assembly line society requires a different way of living and being than post-Fordist/neoliberal financial market capitalism.

In economic terms, this restructuring is based on three main systems. The leading sectors, the leading technologies and the energy systems, which are embedded in political forms of regulation with their effects on the organization and control of labor relations.

It is not so difficult to imagine how new domestic economies, from which new forms of life, consumption patterns and modes of subjectivation emerge from the green accumulation regime: On the one hand, smart-green cities for home-office brigades; on the other, desert cities around solar farms for workers and their families. New global infrastructures for transmitting energy to the North could massively upend global settlement. On the other hand, the internal refugee movements of today already speak volumes about demographic shifts.

It is also already a reality how new leading technologies are developed and change the work regime, spread to other industries and provide for the development of further innovations: For example, the military or ChatGPT: IT industries in which no programmers work anymore, but promters: These only ask the right questions to the bot, which then programs. This has been a reality for a year and it is not vanity or marketing when some of the most powerful and influential people call for a global petition to stop the development of AI programs. Phenomena can also be quickly found at the subjectification level: in 2019, people said, Should we zoom? Make a digital meeting? In 2023, people say: Should we meet physically?

With the current crisis of the accumulation regime, the reproduction conditions of traditional hegemonic masculinity are also in crisis, which leads to new forms of masculinity (Habeck), to the rejection of gender as a social relation (Queer Diversification), but also to violent right-wing parodies of masculinity (Trump). The controversies surrounding feminicides in Latin America explicitly make the point that the mass murders of women can be seen as an unleashed crisis phenomenon of Fordist and neoliberal patriarchy.

Fossil capitalism continues to exist and its faction, as second-class capitalists who have so far ensured the necessary restructuring, will now earn its money with lower profit margins in the Global South. Overall, however, this regime will also cement and exacerbate the unequal dynamics between the Global North and South. The green, digitalized accumulation regime in the North needs green extractivism in the South.

Admittedly, we have argued that a new accumulation regime can only be defined ex-post and that many of the developments outlined here are still open. Nevertheless, we believe it sometimes helps to jump from the analytical level to the fantasy level to get an idea of the dimension of planetary change dynamics.

Let us remain in the image, useful for us, of considering capitalism as a religion, in order to devote ourselves to the ideological implications of this Green Project. Inevitably, the terms schism and heresy come to mind again, and the question of their meaning. Schism, whether staged or real is not a question of faith, but a question about the authority of the Church hierarchy. Schism is divorce for the sake of power. Heresy is divorce for the sake of faith, either as an autonomous divorce from ecclesiastical authority or as an alienated exclusion by that authority. Marking others as heretics not only serves as a deterrent, it also helps to define one’s own faith, thus creating a basis of legitimacy that lies outside the power-political content of the schism. But precisely because the schism instrumentalizes faith only for its power politics, a heretical transcendence can emerge from the contradictions of the staging that eludes the schism. Only in this indirect form, then, would Bordiga’s sentence be true that „the revolution grows out of the schism.“ And yet, historically, revolutions have arisen only from the fewest heresies.

The transition to the green accumulation regime involves an attack on the conditions of reproduction of populations in both the metropolis and the periphery. The legitimation of this policy is based on the production of schisms that conjure up a division between good and evil against the apocalyptic image of a doomed world. It is not the content of the faith that is decisive here, but the legitimation of one’s own authority through the marking of heresies. Thus, the army camps of believers in the green accumulation regime resemble each other, whether they go to war over green world salvation, Ukraine, or the vaccination campaign. Submission to authority, willingness to sacrifice, is fueled by hatred of heresy. It creates green-liberal subjects who do their part by hunting the heretics personally. This mechanism can also be found in the earlier persecution of heretics and witches, whose greatest threat was often not the inquisitor but the denunciator. Who waters his lawn in the hot summer? Who flies on vacation? Who is not vaccinated and tested? Who has backyard parties in lockdown? Who reads Dostoevsky or still drinks Russian vodka?

The persecution of heretics may increase our disgust for the Inquisition and its helpers, arouse our sympathy for the persecuted, and perhaps even drive us into strange constellations of resistance. Another question is that of the political potential of heresy. By not recognizing the schism as a conflict of power politics, but moving on the level of its struggles of faith, the heretics are not able to escape it. The obscenity of power, the contradictions within their schisms, produce heresies that never become dangerous to the Church because they only want to be their own Church. Thus, the heresies create a historical image of a transfigured past to which they cannot return, if only because it never existed. Seeing the moral depravity of the existing priests, they proclaim their own counter-priests. The heresies in the green accumulation regime are populated with these counter-priests, from pro-Russian military experts to esoteric farmers to doctors who explain to their disciples how exactly the vaccine injection brings death. In this way, these heresies remain within the geopolitical and biopolitical paradigms from which they grew. „You don’t bring power back down to earth to lift yourself up to heaven.“

And yet, in heresy there is a potential for transcendence that the schism lacks. Amidst failure and regression, are there not also the heretical stories, of those who deserted without only building an oasis? Who wandered to stir up trouble instead of finding disciples? Who spoke about faith to attack the prevailing dogmas without proclaiming their own? Who did not fight on the terrain of power, but led new conflicts, tried out new ways of life and relationships without declaring them the general standard?

Fidelity to this memory is the search for a heresy of destitution.