Degrowth Communism
* Book: Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. By Kohei Saito. Cambridge University Press, 2023
URL = htt ps://www.cambridge.org/core/books/marx-in-the-anthropocene/D58765916F0CB624FCCBB61F50879376
Contextual Quote
""As degrowth has become a more influential concept in scientific thought, it has begun breaking through in left political circles. In one of the most highly anticipated books of 2023, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito argues for a reconceptualization of Marxism to become more ecological, using Marx himself as an early proponent of “degrowth communism” to do so. Saito’s newest book comes after another recent publication of his that provided him with international fame. Having sold over 500,000 copies in Japan, Saito’s 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene—a more accessible read than the academic Marx in the Anthropocene—burgeoned at an unexpected time: during an economic recession caused by a zoonotic disease that resulted in a worldwide pandemic. Unlike other degrowth arguments, Saito’s contribution puts forth the argument that Marx was an early “degrowther” who began to articulate a form of degrowth communism. But beyond the academic argument for recharacterizing Marx, Saito’s intentions are fundamentally about bringing “Greens” and “Reds” together for intellectual cross-pollination and political movement building."
- Andrew Ahern [1]
Description
""Facing global climate crisis, Karl Marx's ecological critique of capitalism more clearly demonstrates its importance than ever. This book explains why Marx's ecology had to be marginalized and even suppressed by Marxists after his death throughout the twentieth century. Marx's ecological critique of capitalism, however, revives in the Anthropocene against dominant productivism and monism. Investigating new materials published in the complete works of Marx and Engels (Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe), Saito offers a wholly novel idea of Marx's alternative to capitalism that should be adequately characterized as degrowth communism. This provocative interpretation of the late Marx sheds new lights on the recent debates on the relationship between society and nature and invites readers to envision a post capitalist society without repeating the failure of the actually existing socialism of the twentieth century."
Review
Via Dave McLeod:
"I became an environmentalist at the time of the original Earth Day in 1970 when I was in high school. I read an excerpt from Herman Daly's "Steady-State Economics" in 1977, several years before I started to be influenced by Marx, and I have never altered my conviction that there are material limits to growth. Of course more recently Daly's theory has been extended under the heading of "degrowth."
Since the Seventies there has been a greening of many things, including Marxism. John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have established that there is an ecological component in "Capital" which was obscure and overlooked until recently (see Foster's "Marx's Ecology" -- 2000).
With his intensive work with Marx's notebooks for the MEGA (see below), Kohei Saito has unearthed more extensive evidence of the late Marx's ecological views after 1868. This is not, then, "what Marx really thought," revealing that he was actually a deeply ecological thinker all along. Rather, the argument is that in his last few years Marx came to see the need for "degrowth communism," but that this analysis was never published.
Here are two key passages:
"...with his growing interest in ecology, Marx came to see the plunder of the natural environment as a manifestation of the central contradiction of capitalism. He consciously reflected on the irrationality of the development of the productive forces of capital, which strengthens the robbery praxis and deepens the metabolic rift on a global scale. Marx also studied radically different ways of social organization of metabolic interaction between humans and nature in precapitalist and non-Western societies from an ecological perspective" (200).
"The idea of degrowth communism is opposite to the young Marx's Prometheanism and nor is it quite identical with the standpoint of 'ecosocialism' that he put forward in "Capital" through his reception of Liebig's critique of robbery agriculture. Ecosocialism does not exclude the possibility of pursuing further sustainable economic growth once *capitalist* production is overcome, but degrowth communism maintains that growth is not sustainable nor desirable even in socialism" (209).
Saito delves deep into marxology here, with extensive analysis of the differences between Marx and Engels and the unpublished work of György Lukács, which Saito sees as being in line with Marx. He also takes on the philosophical monism of Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. (For a more thorough demolition of Latour, see Andreas Malm's excellent "The Progress of This Storm" -- 2018.)
Marx was slow to realize the need for a steady-state economy. We don't need Marx to realize it, but Marxism is important for the fight against capitalism that will be required in order to attain a steady-state economy via degrowth, and it is excellent that environmentalism and Marxism are no longer antithetical as they were for so long.
Kohei Saito (b. 1987) has rapidly become known as a leading Marx scholar. He co-edited Volume 18 of Division Four of the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe -- Complete Edition), which was published in 2019. Work on the book also informed his Ph.D. dissertation, which he completed at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where Marx studied for his Ph.D. from 1836-1841. The dissertation was the basis for his first book, "Karl Marx's Ecosocialism," published in English in 2017 by Monthy Review Press."
More information
- Video presentation by the author at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kVLqoKYdn8