K.Saito Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge University Press (2023)
Saito’s book offers a re-reading of Marx’s political economy and attempts to reconstruct a Marxism for the twentieth century. At the same time, the author suggests that such a project is indispensable if the Left is going to be able to provide a coherent response to the climate crisis. In particular he offers a defence of de-growth from a Marxist perspective. It is an important work on many levels, and in the words that publishers like to put on the back cover of their books ‘a necessary read’ – especially for those like me that consider that the meeting of leftists and greens is the only hope for confronting the climate crisis and social injustices of all kinds.
At the centre of the book is a question: why did Marx never get round to finishing volumes two and three of Capital? He rejects the explanation that has been offered that, due to old age or ill-health, Marx was running out of steam. Rather, Saito argues, after 1860 Marx was engaged in a serious rethink about his whole project. And this rethink required reading a great deal of new material. We have a greater access to Marx’s readings, including his notes on that reading, because of the work carried out by the MEGA project – a herculean task of bringing together Marx and Engel’s collected works – in which Saito has been an active participant.
A large share of this material was in the rapid developments within the natural sciences. In particular Marx read a great deal in the areas of geology, chemistry and agronomy. This constituted focused reading, for what Marx was interested in was the effects of capitalism on the natural environment. This was not exactly a new concern, as the understanding that beyond labour, natural resources were also a source of wealth, and the key concept of a metabolic rift, were already in Capital. But Marx increasingly felt he had underestimated the effects of capitalism on the natural environment and thus the seriousness of the metabolic rift.
This was no small rethink. For on the one hand, Marx was approaching the idea that there were natural limits to how far the planet’s natural resources could be exploited – not only because of the existence of exhaustible resources but because of the degradation of the land from intensive, and increasingly capitalist, farming. On the other hand, his analysis of capital’s inexorable thirst for profits and drive for accumulation was an analysis that still held. As Saito explains this entails that certain limits are man-made and take a specific form in the capitalist mode of production. Most notably, the drive to capitalist accumulation also entails the creation of wants, a consumerist culture where people seek self-realization through the acquisition of ever more goods. In this sense, scarcity is an artifact of capitalism. But this does not imply that there are no natural limits.
Put these two together and you have a contradiction in capitalism. As G A Cohen argued, increases in productivity in capitalism can be turned into an increase in the production of goods for consumption, or, alternatively, can form the basis for increased leisure time. From the perspective of capitalists, the former is always desirable, because profits, on the whole, come from increased production and consumption. From the perspective of the planet, more leisure seems to be an indispensable prerequisite for reversing climate change by limiting the demand on available resources. Hence there exists a contradiction. For Saito, Marx was moving towards a critique of productivism, the idea that a never-ending increase in the productive forces was indispensable for progress.
In the twentieth century productivism was a dominant mode of thought within the Left, either as a basis for the transition to socialism (orthodox Marxism) or as a way to ensure a redistribution of income within capitalism (traditional social democracy). Saito is critical of both orthodox Marxism and what he calls, somewhat idiosyncratically in my opinion, Western Marxism. For the latter, the rejection of the teleological or determinist aspects of orthodox Marxism, and the return to the younger Marx, with the stress on humanism and agency, often seemed to be accompanied by the abandonment of the field of political economy. This stance weakened both the critique of modern capitalism and our ability to think seriously about feasible futures.
Saito excludes from this critique Gyorgy Lukacs who struggled to come to terms with the natural and man-made limits to perpetual increases in the forces of production. Lukacs, somewhat in the manner of Gramsci, had to write rather guardedly given the risk of criticism from more orthodox Marxist theorists. He was accused of not being a monist, that is to say not being materialist enough and adopting forms of dualism. Saito, on the other hand, argues he was an ontological monist – humans are part of nature, not distinct from it, – but a methodological dualist. While humans are clearly a part of nature, they develop societies that have certain – emerging – properties that cannot be reduced to the physical properties of human beings. And for Saito, this methodological dualism is indispensable if we are to understand the metabolic rift, that is both the natural and man-made limits to ever-increasing productive forces.
If one set of Marx’s readings post-1860 was leading to a critique of productivism, the other was in order to reject eurocentrism. Marx started a serious study of pre-capitalist societies. This included the case of Russian agricultural communes, in part as a response to Russian leftists’ inquiries on the question of whether Russia needed to go through a capitalist phase before embarking on to the transition to socialism. The correspondence in the early 1880s between Vera Zasulich and Marx is well known, but now we have access to Marx’s earlier drafts of his letter, due to the MEGA project, which provide stronger evidence that Marx was considering “the new in the old”.
The possibility of finding the new in the old was also at the centre of Marx’s interest in the ancient Teutonic tribes. His reading of such authors as Maurer and Fraas (the “socialist tendency” according to Marx) showed his interest in cooperative production and communal ownership. Such arrangements provided for a far more balanced relationship between man and nature and displayed a concern that the natural environment was something to be nurtured and handed on intact to the next generation. Instead of being maximizers these producers could be seen as satisfiers, that is producing no less but no more than was needed by the community. Here we have a different conception of what constitutes both abundance and social/communal wealth. More important still, the aspects of equality and sustainability went together – a win-win for supporters of socialism!
Saito rejects the idea that Marx was indulging in his old age in a form of romanticism. Rather Marx was, in coming to terms with both productivism and eurocentrism, working towards a reconstruction of historical materialism. In this new approach the increase in the productive forces was neither possible nor desirable. It is this that for Saito opens the path to a Marxism that can engage with the climate crisis. Saito’s view on degrowth that stems from his new interpretation of Marx will be the subject of the second part of this review.