Matt Huber’s new book is worth your attention (30-50% off at Verso this month $4.99 as an e-book). Socialism can be built on a warming planet and we should work more on the consequences of metabolic rift particularly with respect to working class agency. More analytic approaches will be necessary at macro- and micro- levels of the Capitalocene.
Climate Change as Class War begins from the premise that the climate movement is losing, and seeks how we might not. This is a question of power. As Jane McAlevey points out, to build power social movements must first engage in a “power-structure analysis” of “precisely who needs to be defeated, overcome, or persuaded to achieve success.”11 On that front, we need to build power to take on some of the wealthiest corporations in world history. My central argument is that this particular power struggle is a class struggle over relations that underpin our social and ecological relationship with nature and the climate itself: ownership and control of production.
Resistance to the consequences of neoliberalism can yet reflect on the issues of historical materialism and class consciousness. It remains worth noting that Marx himself never explicitly described his theory of history.
The theory of historical materialism has also been charged with being overly simplistic and reductionist; it is often referred to as “technological determinism” by those who say so. Opponents argue that it is simply not true that the mode of production by itself determines the institutional structure of every society. Marxists can reply that Engels himself agreed that the mode of production is not the only determining element, but this concession raises other problems. To wit: if other elements can influence production, then history is not solely the result of economic activity.
www.britannica.com/…
The end of history is a concept most often associated with Marx, but appearing earlier in his predecessor Hegel. Hegel was (according to Fukuyama) the first philosopher who saw man as a product of his historical and social environment. But unlike later historicists, Hegel did not turn to complete relativism.
www.studocu.com/…
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence helped establish analytical Marxism as a school of thought,[5] and came to be seen as a classic.[10] The book was praised by the historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix,[11] and was also commended by the political scientist David McLellan.[12] According to the philosopher Peter Singer, Cohen, in contrast to some more Hegelian interpretations of Marx's thought, "argues brilliantly for a more old-fashioned interpretation of Marxism as a scientific theory of history, an interpretation often known – disparagingly – as 'technological determinism'."[3]
The critic Terry Eagleton, who understands G.A. Cohen to be espousing a determinist theory in which productive forces automatically produce certain social relations, finds Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence to be a skillful defense of a "wrongheaded" idea.[7]
en.wikipedia.org/...
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Is there a technologically deterministic cart put before the biophysical limits of the horse. Perhaps the desire of identity groups for recognition is a key threat to liberalism only in that they subordinate working class agency, but remain in Department II (sic). It still will be about working out the financialized commodity relation to property.
Nearly five decades into the neoliberal assault on the working classes, amid the horrifying prospect of climate and ecological breakdown, the challenges before us cannot be underestimated. We would, however, also be underestimating the potential for a way out of the crisis if we failed to recognise and build on the possibilities of the present, the first signs of a deepening structural crisis in the here and now – the exhaustion of neoliberalism, and economic and social stresses all over the world that can create opportunities to defy ruling class power, in the unions and in the streets. We necessarily have to contend with the challenges: organised workers in the trade unions are often constrained by union bureaucracies that seek compromise; consciousness is uneven within the working class; and pessimism and defeat can overwhelm the best organisers. Despite these, there have been fundamental breakthroughs in the past, not just following the Russian Revolution but the post-Second World War period, 1968, 2011 and even 2019, where society was reimagined and the task of reordering it begun. By resurrecting accounts of revolutionary upheaval and moments of rupture that have been written out of history, and relating to existing struggles that working-class people are already fighting, we learn from those struggles and can advance them.
Climate Change as Class War is an immense contribution towards putting the case for a stronger working class as a climate objective. Concluding the book, Huber argues that it did not take long for the balance of power to shift towards the working class in mid-1930s America when a combination of crisis and militant upsurge created the conditions for a momentous restructuring of capitalist relations in the form of the New Deal. It is absolutely true that the conditions for considerable political change can come quickly, and we need to be prepared. The work of political organising can be seen as putting things off, but we need to think in terms of the scale of the crisis. If we have to build mass movements that are powerful, democratic, internationalist and capable of reorganising society, then there are no shortcuts. The series of crises we face now are even deeper than those that wracked the 1930s, and the potential for movements to demand fundamental change is real. It is to this eventuality that we must bend our will.
For me, the essence of historical materialism is understanding the “progressive character of capitalism.”
In Capital, Marx shows how capital itself *socializes* the production process — integrates cooperation, science, & ‘the collective worker.’ 2/x
Unroll available on Thread Reader
Saito claims this abandonment begins in Capital (diverging from articulations of HM in 1859 preface/Grundrisse). Supposedly Marx’s concepts of cooperation/real subsumption show he no longer believed the dev of productive forces create the material conditions for socialism. 2/x
It can’t be understated how bold these claims are (& I haven’t seen reviews bring it up):
159 — “[the pf of capital]..compelled Marx to abandon his earlier formulation of HM”
159 — “In Capital he was no longer able to endorse the progressive character of capitalism.”
3/x
173 — “In finally discarding both ethnocentrism and productivism [in the 1870s], Marx abandoned his earlier scheme of historical materialism. It was not an easy task for him. His worldview was in crisis.” 4/x
182- “Marx must have completely parted ways w/ HM as it has been traditionally understood” and Marx “consciously discarded historical materialism…” 5/x
177 — “He realized that the productive forces do not automatically prepare the material foundation for a new post-capitalist society, but rather exacerbate the robbery of nature.” 6/x
This allows Saito to argue against HM and for a kind of ahistorical idealism. Under socialism there will be no use of capitalism’s productive forces. They “disappear together with the capitalist mode of production” (156). 7/x
When it comes to technology, socialism will have to “start from scratch in many cases” (158). Start from scratch socialism! All the technological breakthroughs of the last few centuries must be smashed & disappear! 8/x
So what *evidence* does Saito marshal for this claim about Marx abandoning HM (he literally calls it an *epistemological break* on p. 209, ala Althusser). It’s incredibly *thin*. 8/x
He uses this passage from the preface to Capital in order to note the absence of his mention of ‘the productive forces’ in contrast to the famous 1859 preface. 9/x
But, this ignores that Marx actually footnotes the 1859 preface in Capital itself! (p. 175 Penguin edition) To be fair he *does* exclude the productive forces from the quote, but he doesn’t seem like someone who had abandoned the 1859 formulation which he calls ‘my view’ 9/x
Plus, in Capital itself, Marx says things like this *a lot*. Note here how central the “development of the productive forces” are argued to create the material conditions which “alone” (ALONE!) form the basis for socialism. Sounds pretty historical materialist to me! 10/x
Also this passage from “Results…” (supposedly written btw 1863–66) which is the famous elaboration of the ‘real subsumption’ theory Saito claims is so central to abandoning HM. Again the productive forces *ALONE* provide the basis for a free society! 11/x
OK, but to be fair, Saito claims Marx really abandons HM and becomes a full blown “degrowth communist” after 1868 in the last 15 years of his life. What’s his evidence there? Again not much! 12/x
Basically some notebooks where Marx transcribed some things about livestock and soil (180–1). The key evidence is the well-trodden examination of Marx’s study of Russian agricultural communes in the 1870s 13/x
Saito makes a huge inference (and analytical leap) where he claims because these communes were stationary (developmentally) and Marx thought they could provide a basis for communism, he was a ‘degrowth communist’ (207). Wild! 14/x
But even Saito’s quotes from Marx and Engels’s 1882 preface to the communist manifesto showing both believed the communes could become a “point of departure” only alongside “proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other…” (195). 15/x
Also, again, if Marx fully abandons HM and becomes a ‘degrowth communist’ in the 1870s, he continues to write passages like this from The 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program that look rigidly HM! (Saito admits some read the Gotha program this way, 234). 16/x
OK fair question: does it matter? Is this pointless Marxology? I think it matters. Marx’s theory of HM is one of his most powerful ideas that inspired literally *millions* to believe capitalism was laying the conditions for the abolition of class & human emancipation.17/x
Here’s how Lenin sums up the Critique of the Gotha Program (written in Marx’s peak degrowth phase apparently): 18/x
Here’s Engels at Marx’s funeral explaining the power of his materialist theory of history (btw on p. 209 Saito claims that Engels didn’t really *know* Marx was a degrowth communist lol…it was Engels who spread HM theory best perhaps) 19/x
So what is going on here? It seems to me this is a *desperate* attempt to contort Marx and Marxism into a post-1970s environmental and degrowth ideology. 20/x
On p. 155 Saito claims Grundrisse-era Marx (Promethean) is “incompatible w/ environmentalism.” This crystallized Saito’s project for me: to make Marx and Marxism “compatible with environmentalism.” 21/x
But what does environmentalism have to show for it? It has risen during precisely the same period of a massive shift in political power toward the capitalist class. It has shown itself incapable of forming a movement able to challenge this capitalist power. 22/x
Meanwhile Marxism, & the associated theory of historical materialism, induced world-historical revolutionary upheavals & provided a serious challenge to capital. We might apply its basic principles to the ecological crisis (rather than revise it to current movement fads) FIN
Oh, and @Leigh_Phillips and I plan to collaborate on the review (at some point!). His natural science knowledge will be really helpful in examining some of Saito’s claims on the metabolic rift and the centrality of ideas of biophysical limits to ‘degrowth communist’ ideology.
*overstated 🤦♂️.
Is not the discourse of A.I. “starting socialism from scratch” putting us on the road to Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Huber on Kohei Saito's book Capital in the Anthropocene enters some new interesting terrain for discussion. The question that will be raised is whether Degrowth can have a role in reversing or mitigating Climate Crisis.
We are in a bad way with the mythologies of fossil fuel and even our breath
www.nature.com/…
“The book starts from a position of complete factualness, then imagines what might unfold. We’re not expecting all this to happen. We’re saying this is what a worst-case scenario could look like,” Oreskes tells me. It’s not a pretty picture. By the end of the book, co-written with fellow historian Eric Conway, the Netherlands and Bangladesh are submerged, Australia and Africa are depopulated, and billions have perished in fires, floods, wars and pandemics. “A second dark age had fallen on Western civilisation,” Oreskes writes, “in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.”
The new book follows Oreskes’ and Conway’s (non-fiction) best-seller Merchants of Doubt, in which they painstakingly detailed how a small group of scientists and lobbyists successfully sowed confusion about the dangers of cigarette smoking and climate change. “Merchants of Doubt tried to explain why so many people think that scientists are still arguing when the reality is quite different,” says Oreskes. “This time, we took thousands of pages of IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports and distilled them into a parable about what climate change really means and what it would mean to ignore it, which is more or less what the world has been doing.”
In Merchants of Doubt, mainstream scientists were often the victims, outmanoeuvred by a cabal of pseudo-scientific renegades working alongside industry. In Collapse, Oreskes’ future historian slams the very same experts for pursuing certainty at all costs. “It’s absolutely insane that we don’t have different evidentiary standards for potentially existential threats,” says Oreskes. “There’s no law of nature that tells us that a 95% confidence level is ‘proof’. By demanding an excessively high standard when faced with an existential risk, you could be sentencing the world to experiencing that crisis.”
“Scientists also constantly discuss climate change in the future tense, and have been doing so for 30 years. But some of the things they talked about in the 1970s are happening now. There has to be a point at which you say, yes, heat waves have become more frequent, it’s a statistically significant signal. Maybe not at the 95% confidence level, maybe only 90%, but maybe that’s good enough.”
While scientists take a beating, Oreskes and Conway reserve their greatest ire for politicians and the business community. “ I find it amazing that grown men in suits and ties talk about the magic of the market,” says Oreskes. “If my three-year old did that, I’d call it magical thinking. The reality is that markets are created by people and that markets need governments to sustain them. Without the right structures and institutions, markets degrade into monopolies. Adam Smith knew that. This is not a new insight.”
www.theguardian.com/...
There will be opportunities to achieve a kind of leveling.
It also massively raises labor productivity. I just happened to teach the industrial revolution today. Marx & Engels lived through....THIS. For them, the vast increase of prod. capacity created conditions never before seen in history (& an opportunity to abolish poverty/class 3/x
For people living in the USA and Japan we take for granted these insane, world-historical changes. (Just 100 years ago 40% worked in agriculture in the US - now it's 1.5%) Environmentalists only see industrialization as 'destruction' and harm 4/x
Yes, we're facing serious ecological crises out of this process. But the historical materialist position is (a) capitalist industrialization has by and large been good and made life better for many (if scandalously excluding too many)...and...(b)...5/x
(b) it is capitalism which prevents ecological solutions that are not profitable. There is so much we *could* do to address the ecological crisis but don't because it's simply not profitable for investors. Socialism aims to *expand* our capacities much further. 6/6
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The devil remains in the analytic details of how we would argue for degrowth.
This piece is part of a series from Steve Keen, Climate Change and the Nobel Prize in Economics: The Age of Rebellion. From the previous post:
- William Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics based on his work on climate change.
- Extinction Rebellion, a UK-based youth movement, is demanding policies that would cause net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees.
- William Nordhaus’ research encourages policy makers to manage global climate so it stabilizes at 4 degrees by the mid 22nd century.
- Nordhaus’ research also argues that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would cost the global economy more than 50 trillion US dollars, while yielding benefits of well under US$5 trillion.
In this post, Keen delves into DICE (“Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy”)—the mathematical model underpinning Nordhaus’ work and the flaws in Nordhaus’ methodologies.
Nordhaus’s Damage Function is the first substantive graphic in the DICE manual, and one look at it (see Figure 8) should give anyone—even Climate Change Deniers (CCDs)—cause for concern.
Even if Anthropogenic Global Warming were a myth, even if the temperature rise was being caused by the Sun, would it really be true that a 5 degree increase in the average temperature of the globe would only reduce global GDP by 5 percent?
This is not, as is sometimes believed, the result of Nordhaus applying a high discount rate to the impact of climate change in the distant future. This instead is his estimate of how much lower global GDP would be in the future—say, 130 years from now—compared to what it would have been, if temperatures had instead remained at pre-industrial levels. Given the urgency that characterises the Global Warming debate, this is, on the face of it, an extremely benign view of the impact of an increase in the global average temperature on GDP.
[...]
This alone is enough to reject outright Nordhaus’s assurances about the manageability of climate change. Nordhaus has put the world into a Dirty Harry movie gone bad: having advised policymakers that a simple and low tax on carbon is a Magnum 44 for shooting climate change, they scoff at the danger, telling climate change “‘Do you feel lucky, punk?”. In reality, climate change is armed with a howitzer, and the policy Nordhaus recommends—letting the global temperature reach levels 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels—would unleash that howitzer.
www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
Darn that Marx:
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
SOURCE: Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I, Preface to the First German Edition (London, July 25, 1867), translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels (1887).
Spring 2023 issue, What’s Next for the Climate Left?.
The Inflation Reduction Act included more climate funding than any other legislation in U.S. history—an amount that still falls far short of what is necessary to avert planetary crisis. As Alyssa Battistoni writes in her introduction to the section, “Like the broader U.S. left, the U.S. climate movement has largely grown in response to setbacks and defeats. What will it do in the face of an underwhelming victory?”