K.Saito Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge University Press (2023)
In 1980 the left-wing publisher Verso published Bill Warren’s Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism. As the title suggests, the book offered a positive revaluation of imperialism in both colonial and post-colonial times as a progressive force, in promoting development and reducing inequalities between North and South. Twenty-two years later, the same publisher published Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Η εκδίκηση του Marx: Η αναζωογόνηση του καπιταλισμού και το τέλος του κρατικού σοσιαλισμού). At the height of neoliberalism’s hegemony, Desai was calling for a reassessment of capitalism that still had the potential to move economies forward and would only reach its limits when it was not capable of such progress.
Although Saito does not mention either of these two works, his reassessment of the late Marx’s critique of both productivism and eurocentrism, presented in the first part of this review, can be taken as a serious critique of such approaches. In particular an inexorable increase in the productive forces, not least in light of the climate crisis, cannot be considered either feasible or desirable, and in any case does not constitute a pre-requisite for the transition to socialism, or as Saito would have it to degrowth communism. Before going to delve deeper into how the author sees degrowth communism, it is perhaps useful to examine one or two other targets of his book.
One such target is those that think that the growth of technology can be hijacked by the Left to promote a world of less work and greater equality. Automation technology, in this line of thinking, is as much a potential as it is a threat. Saito describes Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future (Penguin books, 2015) and Srnicek and William’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2016) as part of a “new utopian” tendency. His main objection is that technological developments are never neutral in their impact and therefore it is not the case that existing technology can just be put to better use by progressive forces.
His main argument relies on an extensive discussion of how technology in capitalism is integrated into the labour process. A key distinction here is the one Marx made between the formal and real subjugation of labour. In the origins of capitalism, workers still have some autonomy with respect to their work. But this formal subjugation is soon replaced by a real subjugation in which the division between conceptualization and execution of work, or between non-manual and manual, become hard distinctions. It is in this sense that current technological developments which promote automation – the de-skilling and replacement of workers – or the surveillance of workers cannot just be taken over for progressive use. As I have argued at length in my Manifesto for a Sustainable Society (Polis, 2025), we need technologies that enhance the skills, or local and tacit knowledge, of current workers, while at the same time creating jobs in new sectors such as the care sector which is in desperate need of development.
This is a theme developed by Acemoglu and Johnson in their book Power and Progress (Basic Books, 2023). They argue that there is always a choice over which technologies to develop and many of our current problems – economic, social and political – can be traced to the fact that these choices have been delegated to the leaders of Big Tech. However, they have a less linear account than Saito over the direction of the growth in technology. They describe how at certain times in history countervailing forces, mostly from the trade union movement, have managed to impose technologies on industrialists that worked with the skills of current workers and created jobs in other sectors. Two such periods, they consider, were the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades after the Second World War. In both these cases productivity increases led to an increase in wages and living standards, something which we do not observe with the current crop of technological developments. This seems to me an important corrective to Saito’s more linear conception and provides more optimism that the direction of technology is not a given, working outside the forces of class and political struggle.
Finally let us consider whether those arguing for a Green New Deal are also guilty of productivism as understood by Saito. Within the Left there is widespread agreement that so-called green capitalism will not work. The reasons were laid out in the first part of the review. Even if capitalists recognize that the climate crisis presents a serious threat to their interests, it is in the very logic of capitalism to accumulate, to spur ever more consumption to meet an ever-greater production of goods. Like the old story of the scorpion that hitched a ride on the back of the frog to cross the river, with the promise not to sting, but nevertheless halfway across could not resist the temptation to sting the frog, it’s a matter of instinct! Regulation at times may work to limit the worst practices of private firms, but this is soon negated once the pressure is off. Thus while at the beginning of 2020 firms like BP, Shell and Total seemed committed to moving to clean energy and reducing fossil fuel extraction and exploration, they are now planning to expand production, even open new coal mines, in part as a result of them seeing little action on the part of governments following the 2015 Paris Conference (see Brett Christopher ‘So Much for Paris’, London Review of Books, vol. 47, no. 2, Feb 2025).
To be sure, those arguing for a Green New Deal, for instance around Biden’s presidency, are more radical in purpose, explicitly recognizing, for instance, the need for a far more pluralistic gamma of ownership forms. But on the whole, they are explicitly critical of degrowth. For instance, Robert Pollin (De-growth vs a Green New Deal’, New Left Review, 112, Jul-Aug, 2018) argues that it is just not possible to get a majority to support a strategy to respond to the climate crisis if it entails a serious reduction in their standard of living. It is not at all clear to me that supporters of degrowth are arguing in favour of an actual decrease in living standards. Rather as E P Thompson wrote long ago, at the very beginning of concerns about the ecological crisis, what we may need is ‘the rediscovery, in new forms, of a kind of ‘customary consciousness’, in which once again successive generations stand in apprentice relations to each other, in which material satisfactions remain stable (if more equitably distributed) and only cultural satisfactions enlarge’. This does not amount to degrowth, but it gives a place to the importance of changing the consumption model.
In other words, it is possible to exaggerate the difference between the two sides. Both support investments in green technologies. Both see the need to address the problems that workers will face if the fossil fuel industry is to be seriously constricted, and more generally, both accept that it is unlikely that climate change will be confronted if levels of inequality are not considerably reduced. But there is a major difference. Green New Dealers seem to underestimate the importance of challenging not only the production models of capitalism but those of consumption. It seems unlikely that the planet will be saved without such a challenge, without, as we saw in the first part of the review, promoting a different concept of social abundance and community wealth. As Saito has said, this may need electric vehicles but also less cars.
But to properly address these issues, we need to turn to an assessment of the coherence of Saito’s conception of degrowth communism, which is the subject of the third, and last, part of this review.