There’s no question that First World consumption must decrease as part of any viable climate crisis mitigation strategy. But a politics that emphasizes consumption at the expense of production is getting things backwards. 1/6

As Marxist economists have shown time and again, it’s production that drives consumption, not vice versa. To reduce consumption, we need to reduce production. 2/6

To reduce production, we need to wrest the means of production away from those who use them in the pursuit of private and ecologically destructive profit. They should instead be used to meet collective, ecologically regenerative, wants and needs. 3/6

Beginning with consumption also implies that the "consumer" is the political subject of change. With this often comes an overemphasis on the First World and a disavowal of the agency of the Third. 4/6

Beginning with production, meanwhile, means that the worker becomes the political subject. Suddenly, we can imagine and start to fight for international working class solidarity. 5/6

As Marx put it, our methodology — in struggle and in analysis — should "rise from the abstract to the concrete". We move from the abstraction of consumption to the concrete of labour, exchange, value, imperialism, uneven and combined development and metabolic rifts. 6/6