The passing of H. Bruce Franklin this past week reminded me of his piece in Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line, The Lumpenproletariat and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, made more real in the continuing campus resistance to the Israel/Gaza events. it seems appropriate to reconsider how much retroactive continuity or ret-conning happens in the historiography of Marxist discourse that applies to ecosocialist discourse.
With respect to Saito’s retconning of the Marxist tradition, we must interrogate the evidence he presents for Marx’s abandonment of traditional historical materialism and its description of the necessity of the development of the productive forces. The answer is: very little.
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From the neoliberal “wise use” criticism of environmental regulation to the quasi-austere urgency of degrowth, much of Marxist meta-criticism must always wade through a theoretical swamp that must inevitably transcend the 175 years of reading, misreading, and reading again. It’s neither Biblical inerrancy or counter-reformation censorship, but knowing heuristically that “production” exists at multiple levels and modalities of critical practice. Knowledge production is also an industry, after all.
The original ideology is Destutt de Tracy's, which Marx then uses as a model for understanding what Bauer and Stirner are up to. Then he expands that further to name all the various projects of changing society via education or persuasion or force (i.e., not by changing production).
In a re-reading of the article on Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism by Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips it should be noted that moving away from market allocation and shifting toward democratic economic planning doesn’t mean that our new wine breaks its old bottles. Darn that cognitive dissonance about the Green New Deal and its relation to democratic socialism..
‘popularizing’ trade books don’t exclude trade unionism, in fact it is a type of valorizing intellectual property, not necessarily ‘lost in translation’
Close reading of those texts includes the difference between an author’s trade book and the academic tome on which it’s based, demonstrate the trouble of accusing people of ignoring the working class and the class struggle because it was always a matter of emphasis, not exclusion.
In the end, it should be clear that whether Karl Marx was a secret “degrowth communist” does not matter much in informing our political strategy today. The key question — for either classical socialists like us or Saito’s vision of degrowth communism — is: What agent of change could actually deliver the transformations we agree are necessary to address climate change and other ecological problems?
It remains hard to imagine what are “classical socialists” in the current capitalist mode of production since the last “actually-existing-socialism” was so problematic under Stalin. The reconciliation of Red/Green ideologies does not (always) devolve to a Brownfield or even a color revolution.
Yet, strikingly absent from this chapter, and indeed Saito’s recent two volumes, is any mention or role for what is the core agent of Marxist politics: the working class (in Slow Down the phrase only appears four times in passing).
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This bit of parsing is far too much like academic searching in book indices to assure oneself that there was at least a fleeting acknowledgment of Karl Marx.
It seems this is a desperate attempt to contort Marx and Marxism into a post-1970s environmental and degrowth ideology. To do so, we must accept that everything Marx and Engels wrote together in the 1840s (and indeed Engels’s more popular articulations in the 1870s and 1880s), like the German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto, is a product of a flawed Promethean Marxism. All that’s left in its ashes are idiosyncratic readings of Capital, some sparse notebooks copying disconnected passages from agricultural texts, and the letter to Zasulich.
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Huber’s could be accused of an indexical critique based on Horses and Zebras (When you hear hoofbeats, think horses (or a ret-conned donkey?), not zebras.)
Justus Freiherr von Liebig[2] (12 May 1803 – 20 April 1873)[3] was a German scientist who made major contributions to agricultural and biological chemistry, and is considered one of the principal founders of organic chemistry.[4]
Now, scientists have developed a new method that uses spent brewer's yeast - the same brewing industry byproduct that is used to make Marmite. Liebig studied other foods, as well. He promoted the use of baking powder to make lighter bread, studied the chemistry of coffee-making and oatmeal.[9][35]: 238–248 He is considered to have made possible the invention of Marmite, because of his discovery that yeast could be concentrated to form yeast extract.[36]
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Rebranding our 21st Century reading of Marx into a “degrowth communist” when we know more idiomatically that Marx didn’t like thinking of himself as a “marxist”
We should consider that our research problem resembles the breakfast spread called Marmite versus its cousin Vegemite also represents the brewery waste that fostered valorized yeast from Leibig’s original research.
As we proceed to transition from capitalism to some ecosocialist present, we perform not so much a direct robbery like Willy Sutton telling why he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, but rather approach capital like Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried doing Ponzi schemes. Occam’s Razor and Sutton’s Law do make bad analogies.
There is forever unevenness in development natural or social and the punctuated equilibrium can be incorporated into a 21st version of a steady state economy.
Periods of rapid technological advancement could be seen as analogous to periods of punctuated change, leading to new economic structures and industries. Change is not always “technical”.
Similarly, punctuated equilibrium as originated in evolutionary biology describes how species evolve in periods of rapid change followed by long stretches of stability. Sounds a lot like uneven development plus unfinished critique.
Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy By Kohei Saito
The Anthropocene describes short/long periods of technological rapid change or long/short periods of radical environmental upheaval, which we need to critique beyond critiquing a more fanciful characterization of Marx as the “original degrowth communist”. The relation between universals and particulars emerges again, perhaps even as a version of Critical Realism.
Saito however extends and inverts John Bellamy Foster’s position. Where for Foster, Marx’s critique of capitalism entails a theory of metabolic rift, for Saito, Marx’s “concept of metabolism” is “the foundation of his political economy.” It’s metabolism all the way down.
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While Liebig is a giant of natural science and chemistry, Foster and Saito make a different kind of claim about the “robbery system”: it is historically specific to capitalism. This is the fulcrum of their entire approach to ecosocialism: if we can discover in Marx a theory of how capitalism, by necessity, destroys nature, we have a properly Marxist theory of why capitalism must be replaced with (eco)socialism.
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The incommensurability of capitalism with nature seems obvious even without declaring any “Anthropocene”. Ultimately like most of academe it’s more than staking out a theoretical position and more like affirming the need for more empirical research. That robbery is not merely the social banditry inherent in capitalism but the idea that the lumpen exists under all modes of production and one hopes will be easier to combat under actual “fully automated luxury communism”. This is same totalizing discourse of differentiating between “homeless” and “unhoused”.
It seems at first glance incoherent to want American (or French or Australian or Japanese) workers to organize, potentially strike, and win higher wages while also telling them their lifestyles are not only extravagant, but downright imperial. This enthusiasm for degrowth ideology appears on the face of it neither compatible with socialist goals, nor trade unionism, nor the classical Marxist critique of capitalism.
Yet the ideas of Saito — who argues not merely for a marriage of degrowth and Marxism but that Marx was the original theorist of degrowth, bien avant la lettre — have found great favor amongst the non-Marxist green left and even self-described eco-Marxists as well.
So were the traditional socialist disagreements with Malthusianism (a belief in limits to growth) and classical Marxist calls for an “unfettering of production” from the irrational constraints of the market made in error? Given Saito’s popularity, it is worth interrogating such ideas. As we do so, we find that the incompatibility of degrowth and classical Marxism runs much deeper than this slander that workers in the developed world are imperialists whose everyday lives are a primary driver of “ecological breakdown.”
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It is problematic to base a position on the “leap forward” of class development and production beyond the few drafts of Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich, but considering the lacunae represented by the rediscovery of unpublished texts no different than reinterpreting the Zapruder film or the George Holliday video tape. This century’s Great Leap Forward not impossible. It’s not an absolute necessity to posit that “Marx abandoned historical materialism” to know that there is a considerable variation in its importance to later Marxist thought and to appreciate that our materialism needs more not less metacritique.
Needless to say there’s more ‘to be continued’ in this kind of critical discourse analysis.
This chapter identifies four key commitments of green ideology—ecological restructuring, radical democratization, ecological law, and non-violence as a principle of action. It then examines whether these core principles effectively constrain the potential decontestations of other, adjacent principles. Is green ideology a ‘thin’ ideology that is open to co-optation by more developed rivals, or does it stand on more distinctive conceptual territory, placing firm limits on such ideological appropriations? The chapter then assesses some of the challenges that have emerged in recent years from ‘sceptical environmentalism’ and ‘post-ecologism’, whose proponents claim sympathy with the broad objectives of the environmental movement. The chapter concludes by suggesting that such internal diversity represents a maturing of green ideology, but it may also indicate that the version of green ideology that (in the eyes of its proponents) constituted a radical challenge to existing forms of political and economic organization now stands increasingly marginalized.
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