‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’ by Kohei Saito reviewed by Tim Christiaens


Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023. 276 pp., $22.99 pb
ISBN 9781009366182

Reviewed by Tim Christiaens

About the reviewer

Tim Christiaens is an assistant professor of economic ethics and philosophy of culture at the …

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In 2017, Japanese Marx scholar Kohei Saito published Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize the following year. It is a study of Marx’s notebooks after the publication of Capital: Volume I, detailing his inquiries into the natural sciences. Saito demonstrated that they constituted not mere distractions to the project of Capital, but a fundamental rethinking of Marx’s critique of capitalism. In those notebooks, Marx abandoned his growth-oriented and techno-optimistic views about communism while investigating the environmental unsustainability of industrial capitalism. If the capitalist mode of production leads to resource depletion, soil exhaustion and the destruction of livable environments, then communist revolution cannot be a mere working-class takeover of the means of production. The production system itself has to be redesigned from scratch.

Marx in the Anthropocene continues this line of inquiry, but moves from scholarly Marx exegesis to a theoretical confrontation with other strands of contemporary Marxist scholarship. Saito links his approach to John Bellamy Foster’s metabolic rift theory from the 2000s and defends it against, among others, post-humanist theories of the Anthropocene (Latour, Moore), Marxist social constructivism (Smith, Castree) and prophecies about fully automated communism (Bastani, Srnicek). Though these polemics excel in their creative use of Marx’s complex and esoteric conceptual experimentations (Saito is less successful in painting an honest picture of the aforementioned opponents), let us focus on Saito’s own position.

Saito’s starting point is volumes I and III of Capital, where Marx worries that industrial, urbanized capitalism and large-scale agriculture disrupt ‘the metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) between man and the Earth’ (25). Saito convincingly argues that these sparse references are symptoms of a larger shift in Marx’s thought, evinced in other, previously unpublished work. Marx’s notebooks show that the references to metabolism are part of a larger ecological critique of capitalism.

Nature is, for Marx, not a passive material substratum for human action but a dynamic ecosystem, in which multiple species and substances generate rich living environments. Humankind, however, is unique in this metabolic network of nature insofar as it deliberately reflects on its interactions with its environment and reflexively gives social form to these exchanges with nature. Human society consciously coordinates the labor process, the moment when human activity and natural reality meet, rather than simply left to instinct. This coordination process requires constant adjustments between the social metabolism of human communities and the natural metabolism of their living environments. The dynamics of social and natural processes must align in order to foster stable forms of life.

Capitalism, however, generates misalignments, or ‘metabolic rifts’. The capitalist valorization cycle subsumes both human and non-human beings in pursuit of profit, but ignores the underlying metabolic equilibria of nature. Both workers and nature have to serve the particular purpose of profit-maximization, independently of their own flourishing or subsistence. Whatever fails to enhance economic value production is ejected as waste. The social metabolism of capitalism hence clashes with the metabolism of nature, resulting in pollution, soil exhaustion, biodiversity losses, etc. Capital subsumes nature under a social form that stretches the elasticity of nature beyond its limits, until the elastic band inevitably snaps. Capitalist expansion thereby undermines its own conditions of possibility. Saito’s version of metabolic rift theory thereby masterfully shows how nature can be a dynamic and open-ended agent, and yet still confront humankind with insuperable biophysical limits.

According to Saito, this ecological critique of capitalism and the limits to growth leads Marx to change his perspective on communism after 1868. In these final years, ‘Marx ultimately became a degrowth communist’ (173). However, Saito acknowledges the opposition between the green and red branches of the left, and is aware of the controversy that a term like ‘degrowth communism’ will spark. Yet he convincingly detects some strategic points of convergence: environmental movements are turning away from ‘green capitalism’ and seem increasingly open to revolutionary activism, while socialists have largely abandoned the Stakhanovite promise of proletarian redemption through work and have become more critical of Promethean techno-solutionism. Anti-capitalist environmentalism and post-work socialism converge into degrowth communism.

In his post-1868 notebooks and correspondence, Marx turns to the study of natural scientists and ethnologists who focus on how non-Western, rural communities organized their economies around collective and commons-based use-value production. These communities sustained economic systems that might not grow exponentially, but also did not create metabolic rifts with their natural environments. They were de facto stationary economies run through the collective ownership over the means of production. In earlier years, Marx would have dismissed these examples as isolated relics from a primitive past doomed to be soon integrated into global capitalism. This Marx would have argued that pre-capitalist communities must first assimilate to capitalism and thoroughly industrialize before they can make the jump to communism.

The later Marx, however, upholds a multilinear understanding of historical materialism. The general laws of capitalism always interact with very specific local conditions. They consequently generate variegated trajectories of historical development. The road to socialism can hence vary for different societies. Especially in the case of Russia, Marx regarded the Narodniks’ rural communes as active sites of resistance against capitalism. He praised the communes’ alignment of social and natural metabolisms: these communities had successfully fostered sustainable interaction between economic and ecological processes. They had created a social system that interacted with nature not to maximize capital accumulation, but in order to optimally satisfy the collective needs of their members. They had thereby achieved economic abundance not by technologically enhancing the productive apparatus, but by harmonizing people’s needs and nature’s fecundity through a commons-based agricultural regime.

Marx is not a romantic advocate for returning to subsistence farming, but he speculates about what those in the West can learn from these agrarian communities. He argues that they should mimic elements from the social form of these communes’ production process in order to overcome capitalist metabolic rifts. Capitalism subsumes everything under a strict valorization process that incessantly ousts exhausted nature and surplus populations. The alternative focuses on the production of use-values governed in common without putting excessive strains on the environment. These examples point to a future where the sustainable, free and full development of human potential reigns.

Marx in the Anthropocene provides an original and engaging reformulation of Marx’s thought that not only demonstrates the relevance of even Marx’s most obscure writings, but also uses these texts to formulate a poignant critique of capitalism that unites environmentalist and socialist concerns. The book’s ability to articulate a common critical framework for both movements is its main achievement. That is no easy project given the decades-long heated debates between socialists and degrowth activists. But to keep both camps satisfied, Saito’s ultimate depiction of degrowth communist politics remains underdetermined. The book ends with a programmatic list of demands, like an investment shift toward sectors that promote of use-values instead of economic value (e.g. education, healthcare, or the arts), reducing the workday, enhancing workplace democracy and restraining technologies that dispossess workers from the power to coordinate their own labor. These general policy-suggestions are open-ended enough to simultaneously accommodate red and green demands, but also not terribly specific. In this programmatic vagueness lies this reviewer’s main criticism to Saito’s book.

Marx in the Anthropocene excels at diagnosing the objective contradictions of the logic of capital vis-à-vis the metabolism of nature. The depiction of how the general tendential structures of capitalism clash with the needs of nature’s metabolic processes is impressive in its insight and presentation. However, this theory of the objective contradictions of capitalism in the abstract does not link up to a concrete conjunctural analysis of today’s ecological struggles. We get a general exploration of the logic of capital and its limits, but not of the political power dynamics and divergent subject-positions of the current moment, nor of how these power-relations can be leveraged for a better future. As Saito himself claims, the general laws of capitalism interact with particular local environments with variegated effects. Degrowth communism must consider these localized variations in order to efficaciously articulate its politics. While, for example, the overworked cognitariat of the Global North might cheer for a reduction of the workday, informal workers in the Global South have had only limited access to governmentally regulated labor-time in the first place. While indigenous populations might rejoice at a movement that respects ancestral claims to their land and opposition to industrialization, the working class of the Global North – a net beneficiary of the ecological exploitation of the Global South – would mainly perceive degrowth communism as an enforced limitation on its ability to drive polluting cars, go on holiday abroad or eat meat. To make degrowth communism work as a political strategy, these variable subject-positions and their divergent social demands must be ideologically aligned.

As a political strategy, degrowth communism cannot solely rely on the objective logic of capital and its metabolic rifts to lead people to a better future. It must also work on the libidinal economies of the oppressed in order to render a non-growth, commons-based economy a desirable and shared vision of a post-capitalist future. If people are expected to experience degrowth as a form of radical abundance rather than painful asceticism, the libidinal metabolism of their desires must also change, which is a blind spot in Saito’s current framework. Saito has thereby expertly shown what is at stake in the struggle for an ecologically sustainable future, but the ideological work of writing a degrowth communist manifesto is yet to be completed.

27 February 2023

12 comments

  1. This email doesn’t seem to work:
    t.christiaens@kuleuven.be

    I very much appreciated your review of Kohei Saito’s book. I was struck by the similarity between the issues today and back in the 70s when I worked on the debate between Commoner and Ehrlich. It seems not much has changed, at least as far as the left strategic dilemma is concerned. I wrote a chapter in my book Questioning Technology which relates directly to your concerns.

  2. I very much appreciated your review of Kohei Saito’s book. I was struck by the similarity between the issues today and back in the 70s when I worked on the debate between Commoner and Ehrlich. It seems not much has changed. I’ll attach a chapter from my book Questioning Technology which relates directly to your concerns.

  3. I don’t think the issue is “either de-growth or growth”. That would be a Rylean category mistake.

    The reason is that, as any sensible economist knows, the real discussion is about *what kind of growth* is desirable, and *what sort of growth* is not desirable.

    This implies among other things, that some parts of economic activity ought to grow, while other parts should not, or should shrink.

    So I don’t think leftwing de-growth ideology will be popular – to the contrary, it contributes to the political impotence, dumbification and fascization of the Left. It’s a bit like “techno-feudalism” ideology, where the academic Knights of Labour go galloping at windmills, until they get a whack from one of the blades.

    Important questions that de-growthers ought to answer are: (1) “who pays the cost for de-growth policies”, (2) “why should I pay, and pay while others do not pay, or do not pay the same”, and (3) “what ecological difference do I really make with what I do or don’t do, compared to other actions, and the actions of others”.

    I suspect that the leftist de-growth ideologists will not be paying their share for de-growth, if de-growth happens. They will argue instead, that promoting de-growth is far too important to allow their own budgets to be cut; somebody else should pay; and that the de-growthers should get more pay, to fulfill their quest for generalized degrowth. That will then enable “the growth of the de-growthers”.

    Thus, the de-growthers would get more and more money for doing less and less work, which is precisely the neoliberal utopia. The rest of us would be rigidly regimented in what we do or do not do, by a large green “duh-growth” police.

    We have certainly come a long way since the Dutch ”Capitalism in the Seventies” conference was held at Tilburg Polytechnic in September 1970. Due to academic de-growth, few people know anymore what it was about, and what happened after.

  4. Keito Saito argues that after Marx “completely abandoned productivism and Eurocentrism” he was “able to fully integrate the principle of a steady-state economy as the foundation of the future society” (p. 209).

    It sounds kinda sexy and romantic, it seems to have appealed to many Japanese people, but is that really so, or is Saito just trying to make Marx say things that fit with his ecopolitics agenda? I will share some reflections.

    Firstly, Marx did not use the term “productivism” (production for production’s sake), at least I have never found any instance of it in his writings.

    What Marx does say, in a passage about contradictions in the accumulation process, is that “the capitalist mode of production tends towards an absolute development of the productive forces irrespective of value and the surplus value this contains, and even irrespective of the social relations within which capitalist production takes place.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 3, p. 357).

    That is, the quest for the accumulation of capital from production is often pursued as if there is no limit, particularly in the phase of a boom in the market, when everybody can make gains, even if the gains are unequal. When a slump subsequently occurs, it becomes very clear that there really are limits. Point is, the competing private enterprises and the state have no way to reduce production at the highest point of the boom, meaning that when the limit is reached, it turns out that a lot of commodities and services can no longer be sold. Alas, there does not exist an endogenous or system-immanent mechanism in the capitalist economy for the self-regulation of output volumes at that point, so that production can transit smoothly to a saturated market with lower sales.

    Okay, it might be argued that although Marx did not use the notion of “productivism”, nevertheless he was committed to “productivism” in the sense of “productive force determinism”.

    But if Marx’s classic statement about the materialist conception of history in the 1859 Preface to “A Contribution to the critique of political economy” is read carefully, he does not commit himself to the idea of “productive force determinism” as the driving force of all social change.

    What Marx says is, that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life”. Changes in productive forces as result of technological innovations will, once they spread to the whole economic community, cause change in social relations. For example, the worldwide growth of the internet has changed social relations greatly. But this is a contradictory process, in which the growth of productive forces clashes with the existing social relations. The outcome of this conflict is by no means predetermined in favour of the productive forces. We might get “de-growth”, even without the progandists of de-growth. In a letter he wrote, Marx provides an example of this:

    “In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.” (Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, November 1877). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

    But didn’t Marx also say rhetorically, in The poverty of Philosophy (1847), that:

    “Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces people change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” ? https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/pov-phil/ch02.htm

    Critics have objected that Marx’s analogy here (that stuff about the hand-mill) is historically inaccurate. That may be true, but nevertheless Marx does not at all claim that when “in acquiring new productive forces people change their mode of production”, this is a smooth, linear and unproblematic process. He was talking about the broad sweep of history, the fact that when people acquire new technologies, they change their social relations. That is generally true, although it might take quite some time.

    If the truth be told, it is that historically the concept of “productive force determinism” was mainly a creation of Leninism and Stalinism, that was taken over by the some of the New Left Marxists and Gerald Cohen. Even so, Lenin’s concept actually relativized productive force determinism. One of Lenin’s slogans was “socialism = electrification + soviet power”. The existence of workers’ councils was at least just as important as building electric power generation stations (which Mr Putin likely wants to destroy in Ukraine now, God help us, I hope not). Interestingly, New Zealand engineers or technicians actually helped to build hydro-electric power stations in the Soviet Union, which they could do via thje NZ-SU friendship society, aided with their experience of building a national grid in New Zealand.

    Stalin’s idea was, that the Soviet Union very rapidly had to create modern industry to hold its own in modern society, and that if it didn’t, it would be at the mercy of the imperialist powers. For that reason, the Soviets (worker’s councils) had to cooperate with the CPSU and the state, “do or die”, literally. Stalin was in a sense not wrong about that (as Mr Putin acknowledges) since without the aid of modern industries, the Soviet Union would not have been capable of defeating the Nazi’s in world war 2 (let me note here, since we are at war, that I do not at all believe that Ukrainians are Nazis, or that they have a Nazi government, there is no proof of that, and I never supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine).

    What about euro-centrism? Was Marx, at least initially, euro-centrist as Saito claims, even although Marx never used that term? I suppose Marx was euro-centrist in a sense, because he lived and worked in Europe. His knowledge of other regions in the world was limited. But was he truly Euro-centrist, believing that Europe was the measure of all things human? I think not.

    After all, Marx was one of the leaders of the International Working Men’s Association (Keito Saito doesn’t talk about the IWMA). It is true that Marx’s internationalism was not perfect, but his political commitment was very clearly to the cause of the working class across the whole planet, not just Europe. The Communist Manifesto states that the working class has no country, it has the world to win.

    Okay, I agree the working class cannot win the world, if it cannot even defend its own interests against foreign speculators, obviously. The workers need to defend the sovereignty of their own territory, against encroaches of foreign capitalist speculators which only cause harm, sure.

    Critics have talked about Marx referring to “dirty Mexicans” in private correspondence etc. (Marx did use some foul language in correspondence with his intimates and in manuscripts he did not publish, not realizing that, later, all that stuff would be published; Kautsky tried to remove this language when he published his version of Theories of Surplus Value). A New Zealand member of the International wrote to the bureau of the International in London, complaining about Chinese immigration, with Chinese entering the country willing to work below ordinary wages (this was documented in a study by Herbert O. (Bert) Roth & Jenny Hammond, Toil and Trouble, Methuen 1981). I do not know what the response of the International was.

    Marx believed, rightly or wrongly, that imperialism brought not only racist oppression, but simultaneously also civilizing influences and progress. But he was rather modest in what his own analysis of capitalism could prove. This is made very clear in the same letter to the Russian Left I mentioned previously, where he writes:

    “If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.)” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm

    This letter is possibly the only one in which Marx uses the term “capitalism” instead of referring to “Capital” (Das Kapital). One of Stalin’s achievements was to transform a large part of the Russian peasantry into proletarians who did not own land, but very violently and brutally so. This is well documented by historians. Lots of kulaks were executed by security services for no other reasons than that they were kulaks, who were experienced enough in farming to grow wealthy from it. By comparison, Trotsky’s political proposals for progress in the Soviet Union were rather mild.

    Anyway, was Marx a “euro-centrist”? Marcel van der Linden, a supervisor of Western Marxism, never actually says this, probably because being an ex-member of the Fourth International, he knew very well about Marx’s political comment to the International. Marx had his biases and prejudices, yes, but his commitment to proletarian internationalism was clear. So I think accusing Marx for euro-centrism (a term that did not exist when he lived) does not really make much sense. All you can say is that he did not know much about large parts of the world, other than that he read about that (he did read a lot about the Russian empire at a senior age).

    Did Marx envisage a “steady state equilibrium communism”? To my knowledge there is no explicit evidence that Marx held this view, he did not even claim to know exactly what a communist society would look like, though he presumed that this type of society would know consciously how to regulate its own economic life.

    Saito’s suggestion is that, at one time Marx speculated that Russia might be able to transit from village communes (the Mir) straightaway to communism, and in doing so, he therefore abandoned productivism and euro-centrism. Marx however never subscribed to euro-centrism or productivism, although he was aware of “capitalist euro-centrism” and “capitalist productivism” in different words. So I think Keito Saito’s case, although well-intended and ecological, must fall down.

    Who knows, in the future, after all the wars are done, humankind may want to reach out much more to other planets and galaxies, and is that really compatible with “steady-state communism”? Only the future can tell that story, not the past.

    Marx suggested in the preface to the first edition of Capital Vol. 1 (p. 91, Penguin edition 1976) that the most developed industrial country shows to the less developed country an image of its own future. Modern sociologists suggest that this narrative (which is not unlike the liberal theory of modernization and globalization) may be be mistaken nowadays.

    These commentators talk about the “Brazilianization of Europe” (Ulrich Beck), the “Racket society” (Horkheimer), the Thirdworldization of Europe”, “Deindustrialization” (Jefferson Cowie), the “poverty of globalization” (Chossudovsky), “degenerate Europe” (Putin) etc.

    Marx’s idea would then be inverted: in the era of late capitalism, the developing countries would be showing the developed countries an image of their own future. This theorizing reflects a loss of confidence of the neoliberal bourgeoisie in their ability to create a better world for all, via spontaneous market activity, in the face of growing socio-economic inequality and reduced incomes and wealth for the European and North American middle class, as shown by OECD data.

    What the real outcome will be, I do not know. What I do know is, that we do not get an answer to that, without research and action in the present. We do not get there, with “general historico-philosophical theory” (Marx) or the kind of “world schematism” which Friedrich Engels ridiculed in his polemics against Eugen Dühring (the latter whom went blind in the end).

  5. Of course when I wrote “Keito Saito”, that should be “Kohei Saito”. Keito Saito is wellknown as boogie woogie pianist in Japan. My apologies for some spelling errors.

  6. Kohei Saito’s book has definite merits, it struck a chord in Japan and sold half a million copies there https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/09/a-new-way-of-life-the-marxist-post-capitalist-green-manifesto-captivating-japan . Pretty good going for a Marxian philosophical book! One thing may lead to another in a constructive sense.

    In classical philosophy, an important question was “how should I live, how ought people to live”, and now that we have to make so many choices about our lives with so many options, large and small, that question again becomes an actual question, not merely a luxury preoccupation to philosophize about.

    Personally I am a bit wary though about scholars who read into what Marx wrote much more than he actually said, intended or meant. Certainly Marx was quite aware of environmental damage, already in the 1840s, but he was not a moralist with ready-made “recipes for behaviour modification” at the micro-level. There are plenty books now which depict Marx as a sort of “brave pioneer of ecological thought”, but rather few books which credibly and systematically explain in a scientific sense precisely what environmental effects are entailed by his own analysis of the capitalist mode of production.

    Which environmental effects are due exclusively to specifically the growth of capitalist private enterprise, and which are due simply to population growth (in the 1970s there were about 4 billion people, now nearly 8 billion, who all want food and drink, housing, energy, sanitation, clothes, motor vehicles, TV’s, computers, holidays etc. – consuming scarce resources)? Which effects are due to the technologies and designs of industrialism, which were also used in non-capitalist economic systems? Which effects are primarily due to state policies, laws and ideological beliefs about modernization and development? Which effects are foreseeable, and which effects are unintended consequences which nobody wanted to happen, but which did happen anyway? Behind the political proposals are the interests of nations, social classes and groups, and their power to force certain behaviour patterns on other people.

    It is easy – too easy – to blame pollution and despoliation of the environment exclusively on capitalism, and on closer inspection it often turns out, that the causes involve much more than just the quest of private commerce for commercial gain. General disquisitions about capitalism may not actually be very helpful.

    Obviously, how we frame the problems and their causes will have a big effect on how we think about what the solutions are. The main contribution that Saito appears to make to the debate, is that, yes, there are many things we can do as individuals and groups that can make a positive difference, and that it is important that we do this – and it’s also quite consistent with what Marx stood for. But it does not yet solve the issue of what we can legitimately expect other people to do, and how we use the social power that we have to good effect.

    Blaming everything on capitalism can actually mystify (1) what has to be done to solve environmental problems, (2) who has to do what, to overcome them, and (3) what can be done that is really effective, without overly restricting civil freedoms. It is usually best to gain a good understanding of the real proportions of the problems, qualitatively and quantitatively, so that we do not get fixated on issues which, in the bigger picture, are only minor or relatively trivial. Without it, we are likely to miss what our main aims ought to be, if we are serious about resolving the largest environmental problems that have the most impact.

    1. Indeed. Instead on something like the rise of the Green movement made us all more aware of these issues and looking again at our sacred texts we find that Marx had some important early insights into how we might think about these questions – it tends to come across as a bit like – well if you read Marx you’d find that we already knew all that…

  7. @Shane: Hi Shane, glad to see you’re still there! Yes, it can often seem like that song Déjà vu by David Crosby from 1970 (Crosby sadly died on January 18th 2023).

    I never expected that when I was a member of the first national Green party in the world 45 years ago (the Values Party in New Zealand, when I was 19), this kind of concern would later assume the vast and pervasive significance that it did. I also did not realize that half a century later, the old literature would be recycled once again, for a new generation who often believe that “astonishingly new findings” are now being published. Nor did I realize, that far less effective environmental action would be taken than the science and the thinktanks called for across half a century.

    Actually, when I joined the Greens back then, they already had the concept of “zero population growth” and “zero GDP growth” on their party programme (they did not call it “de-growth” though).

    The political irony was, that in the 1978 NZ election, when the country reached both real zero population growth (0.03 % in 1978 and -0.39 % in 1979) as well as zero real GDP growth, the NZ Values Party lost disastrously and disintegrated. In stagflationary times, NZ voters became far more concerned about unemployment and wages. The NZ Green Party was refounded only a decade later, in 1990. In the 1980s, we became socialists and studied Mandel, Shaikh, Castells, Gunder Frank, Gorz, Altvater etc.

    The real point is, that structural, planned “degrowth” is impossible to reach within capitalism, and, empirically, capitalist “degrowth” occurs only in the form of deindustrialization, legal sanctions, social decay, financial crises, natural disasters, and wars.

    It appears strange to many of us oldies that, after fighting against capitalist austerity and impoverishment for many years, the Left is now rooting for “degrowth”. They forget that you only live once. They forget, that when poor countries have experienced real degrowth, a lot of poor people have died. They don’t have the financial buffers, margins, supports and reserves that we do in rich countries. If you are in favour of degrowth, be prepared to open your wallet.

    The only system of degrowth that I can conceive of right now as a theoretically feasible reformist policy is a very comprehensive “international resource redistribution system”. I don’t think though that business people (and many ordinary working people) would ever accept it voluntarily. Instead of shrinking politically, social democracy would have to experience an international resurgence, with a new global gush of cosmopolitan sympathy. I don’t see that happening yet, although perhaps “something like it” could happen in the future, when poverty, climate and housing problems keep increasing more and more. The paradox is, that you can’t solve those problems without economic growth.

    Retrospectives about history are often tricky. We tend to select out evidence that supports our case, and we forget about erroneous analyses and forecasts in the past (which are just as important to know, for scientific purposes). I remember for example how, about 5 years ago, I expected a stock-market crash to be imminent, but I was wrong, and then I had to think through the reasons why I had been mistaken.

    There exists no historiography without distortions, and, when the distortions are corrected after the fact by other historians, they often introduce new distortions. We like to think that we were “always right”, that we were always “on the right side of history”, and therefore we tend to hide, obscure, downplay or overlook mistakes, after the fact.

    If you would admit to the errors, you can obviously also make yourself vulnerable to criticism, there are reputation issues to consider, and so forth. Moreover, we often tend to “embellish” our experience after the fact, remembering the positives and forgetting the negatives.

    I have seen this phenomenon at work also among professional historians and other academics (of whom you might have expected far more rigorous and conscientious objectivity about their own past). By keeping silent about mistakes however, we inhibit the possibilities for learning from the mistakes.

    In 1972, Ernest Mandel quoted Harry Rothman’s book Murderous Providence (Hart-Davis, 1972) as follows:

    “If fossil fuel consumption continues to rise at the current rate, there will be 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the year 2000 than there is now and the average temperature on earth will rise by 0.6 to 4 degrees Celsius. As a result, the cloud cover in the atmosphere could become 10 per cent thicker, which in turn could lead to a temperature drop of 7.5 degrees Celsius. The last ice age was caused by a drop in the average temperature of the globe by 7.9 degrees Celsius” (Rothman, Murderous Providence, p. 207). https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1972/11/growth.html

    The first part of the forecast is not too far off the mark, but I haven’t seen a “new ice age” yet, have you? Today, they’re not talking about global freezing. The ice caps are melting. They’re talking about more flooding problems as a result of global warming.

    In 1846 – as Mandel mentions in the piece I quoted – Marx and Engels already stated that “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief [Unheil], and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money)”. [The German Ideology, Moscow 1976 edition, p. 60]. This being the case, it is simply not credible to argue, as Kohei Saito does now, that Marx moved from a position of “productivism” to “degrowth” sometime in his senior age. Kohei Saito, just like many New Leftists, all the time mixes up Marx’s thought with Stalinist modernization ideology. In the 1980s, we learnt that this conflation was an error. Scholars like Mandel, Gorz and Altvater explained why. Marx and Engels were very aware of environmental despoliation all along.

    In his polemic “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), Friedrich Engels already devoted a whole chapter (“The great towns”) to discussing the terrible living and working conditions of the urban proletariat, and he dealt with environmental pollution and despoliation in considerable detail. There was, however, nothing especially new about Engels’s information, it was more that Engels described how the bourgeois classes (who lived at a distance, elsewhere) mostly did not care about the squalor, how they accepted it almost as a natural inevitability, and how they regarded the working classes as inferior (or implicitly as subhuman) – a bit like the caste system in India. One of the main new developments in the 19th century, occurring parallel with accelerating industrialization, was the rapid expansion of the physical sciences, farm sciences etc. which in due course not only raised productivity, but also enabled much better environmental impact and health assessments.

  8. Saito has written a political manifest, just like the communist manifest was a political manifest. Marx very reluctantly participated in writing it, pressed by Engels, because it was an oversimplification of his general political and economic theories. Saito is guilty of the same ‘ error ‘, his ‘ activism ‘ forces him to very subjectively interpret Marx’s writings, formulating conclusions that Marx would never have made. Very obviously he ‘ confuses ‘ the possible model of the communist society ( that Marx saw among others in the German markgenossenschaft ) with the transformation period / fase from capitalist to communist society. The capitalist society has to be negated by a centralized oppressive and transforming force, which has to be negated by an associated community of individuals ( a common or an association of commons ). For Marx there never was a historic deterministic materialism, only a dialectical historic proces of evolution with no fixed outcomes. If Capital is able to ( allways ) temporarely solves its internal contradictions it can prolong its existence. For instance, what if Capital is able the shift / solve / negate the ecological crisis by transhumanism, artificial intelligence and cyborgs ? Didn’t Marx say that changes in production forces / relations causes parallel changes in social relations, and nowadays maybe even in social
    / human forms ? As Lenin said : “ concrete analysis of concrete situations “. I don’t think Saito is doing Marxism a favour !

  9. I can empathize with Marco’s comment to a considerable extent, but I would suggest two relativizations.

    Firstly, the stern truth is that there is no way that modern capitalist private enterprise can avoid large ecological disasters occurring, unless huge changes are made in due time to the systems of production, distribution, circulation and consumption.

    In this respect, the track record of business just isn’t very spectacular yet in an overall sense, even although a lot of new ideas and methods are being invented for sustainable and environmentally friendly production, distribution and consumption – this is acknowledged even by defenders of liberal capitalism, who point out that environmental targets that were set in the past have not been achieved. It could well be the case, that very serious ecological disasters will have to occur, before a broad consensus is achieved to implement the very radical changes that are necessary.

    Secondly, although Saito arguably erred in reading into or imputing too much to Marx’s texts (as I have mooted), he does have the merit of showing Marx’s real concern with the environmental effects of capitalist development, and reaching half a million readers with his message. Even if he is judged as not completely correct in a scholarly sense, at least he does contribute to the ongoing discussion, and makes the case for the relevance of Marx’s analysis. That’s important, because conventional economic theory basically shuts out the insights of Marx and many other radical thinkers who had foreseen the incompatibility of capitalism as we know it, with the good stewardship of the environment which we all need to survive and prosper.

    As regards the first point, an obvious question to ask is why the official environmental targets have seldomly been met. Well there are many reasons, including the brute fact of the commercial competition of private enterprises. One important factor I think is the “deindustrialization” of the West. That means among other things a lot of the major polluting industries are nowadays located in relatively poor countries and regions where there is much less regulation. If the majority of jobs in the wealthy West are service jobs with computers, then that generates less physical pollution, and then it seems the issue is not so serious. A lot of reforms in the West can effectively curb pollution and promote recycling and sustainability. But these policies do not have enough effect as yet on what happens elsewhere in the world. Most people in the West are not very conscious of the global productchains that sustain their lifestyle, and what those productchains in reality require.

    As regards the second point, the ecological challenges of planet earth in the 21st century are too great and too serious to leave them to the Greens. We should welcome new analyses from many different fields of endeavour, insofar as they help to make more precise what is at stake, and what can be done. In the science of ecology, “everything is connected with everything else”. This is often a disorienting non-starter in politics. Politicians are concerned with policies for which they can show a real gain at election time. But it also means that we are as yet still unaware of much of the interconnectedness of the processes that cause severe ecological damage. It takes thousands or even millions of people to bring into focus what is happening. Saito is one of those. Maybe it is only one pebble thrown into the pond. But it does create ripples. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with degrowth theory, we will in the future have to “do more with less”, and use resources more wisely than we have done in the past – if only because of changing global cost structures and price structures. Supposedly, capitalism is “efficient”, but in reality it is becoming increasingly visible that it is efficient only in some areas and activities, and squanders resources in others. As Gyorgy Lukacs put it once, capitalism combines “partial economic rationality” at the microlevel of individual competing business units with overall economic irrationality at the macrolevel of all business units combined.

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