For the first time, we’ve lived through 12 straight months with global warming of 1.5°C, and no amount of Trumpian rhetorical nonsense will erase much like the current “good” US economy in contrast to the recessionary economies of the UK and Japan.
Karl Marx did see environmental crisis situated in capitalism. “It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy,” Kohei Saito writes, “if one ignores its ecological dimension.” his Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017) helps us understand the inevitable impossibility of capitalism to adequately solve the continuing ecological crisis. Supporting degrowth, however important to save the planet nonetheless allows capitalism to linger and even provide greater strength to those whose antihuman self-annihilation may succeed. The latter could be “self-proclaimed ecomodernists, like those connected to the Breakthrough Institute.
“(A)... revolution against capital would require a thorough demolition and reconstruction of the technical and organizational foundations of society” that may turning into either a skid or drift requiring more than braking under acceleration. At the end, safety barriers could be energy absorbing or fixed, not unlike a capital constructed of what Marx called common or cooperative wealth (genossenschaftlicher Reichtum). “Guard rails” within governance or governmentality will not suffice. Deconstructing capital(ism) under ecosocialism will require new approaches to the geospatial information and commons political economy. We are more than NPCs in a gameable ecosocialist future.
The “capitalist system does not offer an alternative to the juggernaut of overproduction and overconsumption” (p. 1), as Kohei Saito puts it in his important new book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2023). “Capitalism’s systemic compulsion continues to employ fossil fuel consumption despite consistent warnings, knowledge and opposition” (p. 1)
"Achieving degrowth communism, [Saito] believes, is less about personal choices and more about changing overarching political and economic structures. Marxism, he argues, offers a viable model for reorienting society around the maximization of public goods as opposed to the endless pursuit and concentration of wealth." —Ben Dooley & Hisako Ueno, The New York Times
In his last years, Marx searched for anthropological evidence of collective social relations in pre-capitalist societies. He read widely about non-Western and Indigenous peoples around the world; the annotations from these texts would later be compiled by the anthropologist Lawrence Krader into The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. His final intellectual challenge came from Russian revolutionaries who wanted to know if he thought that the rural communes of the tsarist period could provide a foundation for socialism, allowing Russia to bypass capitalism entirely. Marx would reply: he thought this possible indeed.
[no different than Mao]
In Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kohei Saito attributes a newer theoretical framework to this late Marx: that of degrowth communism. Saito analogizes Marx’s thinking of that period to the current degrowth movement, which envisions a post-capitalist economy that can deliver a reconceived standard of social well-being while remaining within the natural limits of the biosphere. A number of books have already been written about Marx’s ecological consciousness and his critique of the “metabolic rift” between nature and society under capitalism.
Having overcome ethnocentrism and productivism, Saito argues, Marx died having reached a position congruent with that of modern degrowth communists.
(Saito insists)… that Lukács’s approach to the nature-society relationship was dialectical rather than dualistic (in Hegelese, natural and social conditions coevolve as “unity-in-separation” or the “identity of identity and non-identity”).
portside.org/…
Engels may have failed to fully appreciate the intellectual difference in the concept of metabolism that characterized Marx’s thought in his late studies of the natural sciences. OTOH, we know Leibig also as contributing to the developing of the yeast spread Marmite, perhaps a classic example of valorization. We also, in Saito’s revision of understanding Lukacs’ writing that we revisit his Tailism and the Dialectic. This is where “ Lukács says that it is “self-evident” that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society.”2
Record temperatures over the past year have thrust the world into “unknown territory.
Some of the world’s biggest banks are now back-tracking on prior climate commitments – climate action isn’t just not moving forwards, it’s going backwards — Bill McKibben
For example, stranded assets and greenwashing are more than write-downs and marketing but rather dimensional, valorizing forms of surplus, “it can take a money form, like money-rent in the final phases of feudalism, and capitalist profits. Surplus-value is essentially just that: the money form of the social surplus product or, what amounts to the same, the money product of surplus labour. It has therefore a common root with all other forms of surplus product: unpaid labour.” Maybe.
Losses mediated though the financial sector are problematic when imbricated with the state much like the social credit granted to the fictitious capital mediated in information spaces or as ‘green securitization, recalling that there must be social debt for whatever social credit is constructed.
LONDON, Feb 2 (Reuters Breakingviews) — Most investors are familiar with the concept of stranded assets. By 2050, the thinking goes, oil giants like Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab and Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), opens new tab could wind up with billions of dollars in oil reserves for which there’s no demand — the fight against climate change will have rendered them redundant. The issue for consumer goods giants like $123 billion Unilever (ULVR.L), opens new tab is they may have an edible version of the same problem.
Newish Unilever boss Hein Schumacher presides over an empire with two distinct parts. There’s the well-established foods business selling staples like Marmite, and there’s the beauty, home and health care equivalent in the form of household washing and cleaning products such as Dove soap and Domestos. In 2022, food contributed nearly 14 billion euros of revenue, while the separate ice cream division — containing mainstays like Magnum, Wall’s, Cornetto and Ben & Jerry’s — added nearly 8 billion euros more. All in all, edible sales amounted to well over a third of Unilever’s 60 billion euros of 2022 group revenue.
Then there’s rethinking commodities and the commodity value-form.
- Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, Monthly Review Press, 2017.
- Capital in the Anthropocene (人新世の「資本論」, Hitoshinsei no Shihonron), Shueisha, 2020.
- Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Penguin Random House, 2024.
Ecosocialism is democratic and calls for sustainable production based on human needs rather than profit. Of critical importance, ecosocialism proposes a steady state economy that does not require growth.
www.routledge.com/…
Ecosocialism will be built from what precedes it. So the repurposing of existing structures would play an important role in its development.
The advanced stage of the climate crisis imposes serious environmental constraints on any future post-capitalist society. A democratically chosen ecosocialist government would therefore need sufficient political power to shut down or repurpose destructive industries on national and international scales, including not only fossil fuel industries, but also the industries that depend on fossil fuels. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to socialize virtually all large-scale industry. In addition, large scale carbon capture and sequestration might be necessary to restore parts of the biosphere, and that also would require government coordination.
[...]
To defeat capitalism, it helps to understand it. At its core is surplus value, the difference between what a worker is paid and the value of her labor. Surplus value is the fount from which all other profits flow (upward) in capitalism. It may be thought of as capitalism’s “on-off switch.”
Turn off surplus value, and capitalism cannot continue. The working class is therefore uniquely situated to lead the struggle to abolish capitalism, because it is the working class that generates surplus value.
[...]
Perhaps a strategy for minimizing capitalism’s destruction of Nature while building an ecosocialist future is first to push the capitalist system to the (insufficient) limits of what it can accept, and then make the reasonable and necessary demands for survival that it cannot accommodate. At that point the system is vulnerable to collapse. The Green New Deal (GND), together with building unity and power of the working class, is such an approach.
www.resilience.org/...