The Surplus Value on the Thermometer — Not a Climate Catastrophe, but Capital's Massacre!

Ah, that glorious, that visionary, that cradle of human rights and civilization — dear Europe! How warm it is these days, isn't it? But do not worry: our suit-clad bureaucrats, philosophizing in air-conditioned rooms in Brussels about "Carbon Neutral 2050" targets, are once again very concerned for humanity. They appear on television and decree, "Please drink plenty of water and do not go outside during the hours when the sun is at its highest." As if the person in the street were laying asphalt for pleasure, tiling roofs, or sweating beside the melting pot in unairconditioned factories!

Come, let us look at this "great, mysterious, classless natural event" — the climate crisis that claims thousands of lives every year — through our lens, the lens of reality. Because the Lancet Countdown Reports and academic studies place before us a picture that makes it impossible not to see the barbaric, selfish face beneath that polite European culture.

The Thermometer Shows Everyone the Same Degree, but the Bill Does Not Come to Everyone the Same!

When marketing natural disasters and ecological crises, the liberal ideologues of capitalism adore that famous refrain: "We are all equal before nature; neither virus nor heat distinguishes rich from poor." This is the greatest, most refined lie of bourgeois rationality! The mercury in the thermometer is honest; it obeys the laws of physics and shows however many degrees Celsius of heat are in the air at that moment. But the social reality of the bodies that mercury strikes, of the classes that bear that heat, is diametrically opposed. The laws of physics may not be class-based, but what determines the destructive consequences of those laws upon human life is entirely the relations of production and the order of capital itself.

Come, let us look at those famous scientific data gathered across Europe — data that strip away capitalism's makeup — through a Marxist lens. Recent epidemiological and socioeconomic research clearly documents how merciless, how flawless a class correlation exists between economic inequality and heat-related deaths: because of structural inequalities and social deprivation in Europe, more than 100,000 people lose their lives each year from excessive heat and cold.

What confronts us here is the everyday bill of "metabolic rift" — a concept at the very heart of Marxist ecology. Capitalism, reducing the relationship between humanity and nature to profit-driven exploitation alone, also sends the bill for ecological destruction to the very bottom of the social pyramid. The data from the Lancet Countdown 2024 Europe Report clarify the coordinates of this tragedy: a 9% increase in heat-related deaths — mostly in Southern Europe — and a staggering 41% increase in the number of days experiencing heat waves.

So who are the lives inside these statistics? Let us ask the question in reverse: when the thermometer passes 40 degrees, are the bourgeois managing AI investments in the smart climate-controlled mansions of Paris's luxury suburbs the ones dying? Or are the parasitic elites sipping champagne on their yachts on the Côte d'Azur the ones having heart attacks? Of course not. Those who die are agricultural workers, precarious construction laborers, retired workers trapped in the concrete blocks of poor neighborhoods, the chronically ill, and women who pay the heaviest price for this crisis both at home and at work. The cry rising from the heart of Europe — "We feel like serfs, like peasants from the Middle Ages" — is proof of how the European working class has been placed under a literal "biological siege" by the climate crisis.

In order to keep profit rates high and the wheels of production turning without interruption, capital savagely exploits not only the planet's ecological limits but also the physical endurance limits of the working class. That the European Commission and governments turn a deaf ear to calls from organizations such as the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) — "Workers are on the front lines of the climate crisis; pass a maximum working temperature law" — is no accident. For the capitalist state, the priority is not public health but the continuity of capital accumulation. No matter how many degrees the air temperature reaches, surplus-value production cannot stop! For the bourgeoisie, the worker's body temperature rising to 42 degrees and their organs failing is far more acceptable than the "markets overheating."

That is why that damned thermometer may write the same number when measuring the luxury residence in the rich neighborhood and the poor public housing in the suburb. Yet while the rich observe that number from behind the comfort of luxury with the aristocratic complaint that "this summer is very hot indeed"; for the worker and the poor, that number means unpaid electricity bills, suffocating in unairconditioned homes amid humidity, melting alive from heatstroke in the field or the factory. In short, comrade: the thermometer may be an objective physical instrument, but the bill it cuts is entirely class-based, political, and capitalism's hypocritical choice to sacrifice humanity.

Large-scale research conducted across Europe is putting that linear, that flawless link between socioeconomic injustice and heat-related deaths on display more clearly than ever before: in Europe, 100,000 people die each year from excessive heat and cold because of inequality! According to the Lancet 2024 Europe report, there is a 9% increase in heat-related deaths — especially in Southern Europe — and a 41% increase in the number of days experiencing heat waves.

So who are the dead? Those sipping champagne on yachts in Monaco? Those living in mansions in Paris's luxury suburbs with smart climate-control systems? Of course not! The dead are precisely the slaves that glorious European civilization renders invisible. Families from lower income groups, migrants, cleaning workers, and women. A woman's cry — "We feel like serfs, like peasants from the Middle Ages" — summarizes the feudal-capitalist barbarism behind that glittering shop window at the heart of Europe.

"Summer Energy Poverty": The Climate Button Is Class-Based

Come, let us now tear away the curtain from one of capitalism's most sterile, most polite lies: "Summer Energy Poverty." Ah, what a philosophical, what a sociological term, is it not? This sterile concept, adored by the academy and EU bureaucracy, is in fact an effort to conceal open class war. As a conscious ecologist, I strip away this packaging: this is not energy poverty or anything of the sort — it is the order of capital roasting poor masses alive in their homes!

Behind the EU's glittering shop window, more than 100 million people — nearly a fifth of the continent's entire population — do not have the thermal comfort or the budget to keep their homes at a humane temperature during the summer months. Just as freezing to death in winter or wrapping oneself in blankets because one cannot pay the bill is a class fate, suffocating from humidity and heat in the middle of one's home in summer is entirely a class fate. That "on/off" button on the climate control determines who will breathe cool air and survive, and who will silently suffer a heart attack in the middle of their room — it is a class boundary.

Capitalism's spatial production and urban policies make this murder even more layered. While the neighborhoods where the rich live are designed as oases stripped of asphalt, planted with trees, furnished with parks, and able to escape the urban heat island effect; the slums where the working class, migrants, and lower income groups are squeezed are entirely zones of concrete, asphalt, and greenless deprivation. The literature calls this thermal injustice. That is, the bourgeois with money is not merely buying the electricity for climate control; they are also buying the geographical coolness of the neighborhood they live in.

So what happens in poor neighborhoods? The bourgeois hypocrisy that tells people subjected to double exploitation by nature and capital — "Do not turn on the air conditioning, you are enlarging your carbon footprint" or "Shorten your shower time" — knows perfectly well that those people cannot touch the climate button for fear of the bill. Masses with no money to insulate their homes, left to the mercy of energy monopolies, are baking to death inside those concrete blocks as if in concentration camp cells. As the Lancet Countdown report clearly shows, low-income households are far more likely to experience food insecurity and energy scarcity during these climatic crises.

Instead of solving this structural crisis, the bourgeois world has found a new profit gate: Climate Gentrification. They are closing off the cool places in cities, their green spaces and park surroundings, at extortionate prices and driving the poor out. If your wallet is empty, what falls to your share is waiting for your heart to stop at 40 degrees of humidity without even being able to turn on a fan to cool off. This is precisely the truth Marxist ecology teaches us: in capitalism, even air is not free; cool air is a privilege capital offers only to its own class!

While Workers Roast in the Heat, the "Market" Must Stay Cool

The greatest hallmark of the order of capital is to see human labor and nature unceasingly as "inputs" to be converted into money. Today, as thermometers break records across Europe and streets, factories, and fields turn into open-air ovens, the capitalist states and bosses have but one concern: surplus-value production must not be interrupted, supply chains must not break — in other words, the "market" must remain cool and ticking smoothly no matter the cost! This market coolness secured at the price of the worker's blood, sweat, and life is the most naked form of capitalism's biological exploitation.

According to ETUC data, 23% of active workers on the continent are exposed to extreme heat for at least a quarter of the summer months. Yet this rate shows a terrifying polarization according to class composition: 36% of laborers working in agriculture and industry, and 38% of construction workers, are fighting to survive in the very center of this deadly oven, under the sun. These workers stand on the front lines of the climate crisis and capital's savagery. When air temperature rises above 30°C, the risk of workplace accidents increases by 5% to 7%; when temperature exceeds 38°C, the probability of accident and death soars to staggering rates of 10% to 15%. Nevertheless, in factories, on assembly lines, and in fields, the wheels do not stop for a single second. That in France alone in 2020, 12 workplace deaths officially recorded as directly caused by high temperature is the certification of the biological war this order has opened against the working class.

What confronts us here is, in the full sense, an "air-conditioned office tyranny." As ETUC Deputy General Secretary Claes Mikael Stahl rightly revolted, politicians and technocrats sit in the comfort of their ultra-luxury, centrally air-conditioned, sterile offices while ignoring this deadly danger falling upon the most vulnerable laborers. Through their unions, workers are demanding a binding Europe-wide "maximum working temperature law," reminding us that ideal conditions suited to human biology lie between 16°C and 24°C. But bourgeois governments turn a deaf ear to these demands. Because a law that would protect the worker means slowed production, falling profit rates, capital "overheating."

Even more savage, as we see in current debates, the priority of our mode of production is never to struggle against environmental chaos or its lethal effects. While Europe struggles to breathe today, while hospitals reach breaking point because of heat waves — do you know what governments' priority is? Developing artificial intelligence (AI) data centers — ecological monsters that consume enormous energy and water! Technology lobbies are even bold enough to demand that the EU further loosen climate targets already reduced to bird feed, so that AI investments do not be interrupted. While Western governments suspend environmental and worker protection rules to increase profits, capitalism's structural crisis renders these catastrophes entirely invisible.

Market rationalism imposes upon the worker: "No matter how many degrees the air reaches, that surplus value will be produced." While precarious migrant workers die in the fields, couriers on the asphalt, industrial workers at the mouths of melting furnaces; the capitalist class continues sipping whisky in the coolness of the green graphs on stock exchange screens. We Marxist ecologists cry out: this barbaric order in which workers roast while markets are kept cool cannot be fixed by reforms. This is humanity's and nature's struggle for survival; either capital's profit mechanism will be completely stopped, or this system will destroy the working class by burning it alive!

The Anatomy of Bourgeois Hypocrisy: Sterile Words, Bloody Realities

The bourgeoisie's approach to the climate crisis and the mass deaths it produces is a hypocrisy theater befitting its own class character. As thermometers break records on European streets, bourgeois media and politicians love to package this situation as a sterilized "public health problem" or an inevitable "natural event" stripped of class content. In the media they aestheticize the crisis by placing cheerful beach photos and images of children eating ice cream beside extreme heat news. They behave as if what is happening were a pleasant Mediterranean summer, not capitalism roasting the planet and humanity. Conservative elites calling for common sense every time the thermometer passes 30 degrees reduce structural murder to individual measures with condescending and absurd advice such as "carry water with you" to the thirsty worker on the metro. Here is the first anatomical section of bourgeois hypocrisy: reducing systemic massacre to individual lifestyle choice.

Yet this hypocrisy is not confined to continental Europe's borders alone; it is a direct extension of the unavoidable moral collapse the imperialist center displays on a global scale. While European rulers deliver ornate speeches about climate change threatening "human rights" within their own borders, they directly sponsor the most savage massacres waged for the survival of capital in the rest of the world. The stance European democracies have taken toward Israel's genocide in Gaza today is the bloodiest document of this hypocrisy.

While tens of thousands of people in Gaza are destroyed by bombs, thirst under blockade, and ecocidal weapons — bourgeois states that have stopped chewing the gum of "human rights" and "international law"; when it comes to the profit margins of their own monopolies, they suddenly turn "green and humane." Europe, dumping its consumption-based emissions on the Global South and importing its environmental pollution and social pressures to Third World countries, writes the enormous carbon emissions and human devastation caused by bombs in Gaza to the profit ledger of the military-industrial complex. The imperialist barbarism that destroys the most basic right to life, clean water, and coolness with missiles in Gaza, and the logic that creates the worker suffocating from heat at home in Europe's slums because they cannot pay the bill, are entirely the same: the interests of capital are more sacred than humanity's and nature's right to survive!

The Dead End of Social Democracy and the Limits of Bourgeois Democracy

The most faithful directors of this hypocrisy theater are structures that market themselves as "left-liberal" or "social democratic." The greatest illusion of social democracy and bourgeois democracy is the lie that ecological and social justice can be secured within the limits and laws of capitalism. Instead of solving the climate crisis through radical systemic change, these structures try to save the system by putting makeup on it.

• Technological Illusions and the Emissions Lie: Social democratic and liberal governments boast that air pollution (PM2.5) has decreased in Europe over the last 15 years. Yet as Lancet reports clearly show, this decrease does not come from abandoning fossil fuels but from advanced control technologies that do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions and merely mask pollution. That is, while attaching filters to smokestacks to cleanse the bourgeois conscience, they continue heating the planet just the same.
• The False Opposition of "Either Air-Conditioned Office or Natural Living": Bourgeois politics polarizes society with false dilemmas. While the radical right wants to concrete the entire country and equip it with air conditioning, the social democratic and liberal left produces only romantic, palliative solutions such as "let us plant trees, let us build with straw" that do not resolve structural exploitation. Yet the real problem is that even the green spaces and coolness of cities are sold only to the rich through "climate gentrification," while the working class is entirely excluded from this ecological planning.
• Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Energy Monopolies: That European states setting supposedly net-zero carbon targets (29 of 53 countries in the WHO European region) still continue providing billions of euros in net subsidies to energy giants and fossil fuels draws the limits of bourgeois democracy. The fact that on the current path Europe will reach net-zero targets only by 2100 proves that the capitalist state apparatus is a toy in the hands of energy monopolies.

Bourgeois democracy is nothing but a crisis-management apparatus so long as it does not touch the property relations of the capitalist mode of production. When thermometers rise, social democrats pull the "emergency brake" by closing schools and postponing exams. Yet this is not a solution but a tactic of deferring the structural crisis by voluntarily putting the country into shutdown mode. It is impossible for a modern society to halt for weeks every summer, and no "adaptation law" that does not liquidate property relations can save the worker from dying inside those scorching concrete blocks.

The tyranny before us is a contemporary barbarism in which the separation of powers has ended, freedom of expression has been seized, and hegemony is built solely on profit. Social democracy is nothing but powder smeared on the face of this barbarism. In the face of ecological and social devastation, the only way out is to take to the streets, shattering the sterile limits and parliamentary illusions drawn by bourgeois democracy, and organizing an anti-capitalist resistance that targets the property order directly.

So, against the effort of bourgeois democracy and social democracy to dissolve the climate crisis within the system through the lie of "sustainable development" — which ideological apparatuses do you think most prevent the masses from recognizing this green-capitalist deception and reaching a radical ecological consciousness?

Conclusion: Not a Climate Crisis, but Class War!

It is time to give the global tragedy unfolding before our eyes its correct name: what confronts us is not an abstract, philosophical "climate crisis" independent of human beings; it is the savage, boundless class war capital has opened against the working class, the poor, and all of nature!

In order to preserve its own profit rates and the false coolness of the market, the bourgeoisie has accepted roasting millions of people alive in their homes, factories, and fields. This is not nature's revenge upon humanity; it is the relentless hunt for surplus value that the capitalist mode of production continues at the price of turning the earth into a gigantic graveyard.

When compared with regions such as Slovenia where income inequality is relatively low, is it a law of nature that socioeconomic inequalities in Europe alone lead to more than 100,000 excess deaths each year? Or is it a coincidence that the suffering of nearly 60 million people experiencing food insecurity intersects with the profit hunger of monopolistic companies that do not pay the drought bill? Of course not! While bourgeois living in Switzerland's sheltered, rich, isolated oases buy cool air, death falling to the share of deprived masses in southeastern Romania or precarious migrant agricultural workers laboring under Mediterranean heat is open proof of capitalism's spatial and biological exploitation. For us Marxist ecologists, this picture is not a crisis of nature but the structural barbarism of capital. The "green transition" lies hurled from politicians' air-conditioned rooms, and those fake clean technologies that reduce air pollution while continuing greenhouse gas emissions just the same, will not suffice to conceal this bloody war.

We Will Share the Sky: The Dawn of an Organized Future

Yet from this burning ground will come neither despair, helplessness, nor fatalism! If the bourgeoisie expects us to die silently inside those scorching concrete blocks where it has imprisoned us, it is mistaken. Against the blatant foolishness of climate deniers and social democracy's efforts to save the system, the working class on the front lines of the climate crisis is arming its organized power. The voice ETUC has raised with its demand for a law on maximum working temperatures is not merely a search for legislation; it is the first herald of the great blow labor is preparing to strike against capital's sacred profit mechanism to defend its own biological existence and right to life.

This wave of anger stretching from factories to fields, from migrant workers to urban slums, is the sole force that will overcome capitalism's structural crisis. We are sowing the seeds of an ecological general strike and an organized future that will eliminate this parasitic order simultaneously exploiting nature and labor, to demand accountability for every comrade slaughtered by being made to work unprotected under the sun. Against capital's sheltered fortresses, the organized will of the working class will rise; for just as the laws of physics are unaffected by the bourgeoisie's false debates, the dialectical laws of history cannot stand before the organized anger of the masses!

Another World Is Possible: The Common Spring of Humanity and Nature

Upon the ruins of capitalism, we will build a brand-new world in which not profit but the common interests of humanity and nature are placed at the center! A world is possible in which the priority of our mode of production is not to feed AI data centers or the military-industrial complex, but to defend the thermal comfort, food security, and right to life of all living beings.

Those cool neighborhoods, planted parks, and clean air that capital sells only to those with money through "climate gentrification" will cease to be luxury consumption objects and will become the common property of all humanity. By cleansing our cities of asphalt and concrete, we will collectively build a collective, planned life in harmony with nature's dying ecosystems. In that free world where the button that turns on the air conditioner ceases to be a class-based fear of the budget, where rivers and lakes flow freely not as commercial commodities but as springs of life, humanity will be freed from alienation from nature.

This planet being roasted because of capital's blind profit hunger will be saved by the calloused hands and organized mind of the working class! We will free the sky, the cool air, and the sun from their chains, and in that common world humanity will be reborn not as nature's master but as its loving, protective, inseparable part. Liberation is in our own hands; either capital's profit order will burn us alive, or we will bury that order in history's garbage dump and begin the common spring of humanity and nature!