Degrowth Communism and Metabolism
Kohei Saito on how we need to talk about Engels
‘Revolutions are the locomotives of history.’ - Karl Marx
‘But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to pull the emergency brake.’ -Walter Benjamin
‘It is surely too naïve to believe that the further development of productive forces in Western capitalism could function as an emancipatory driver of history in the face of the global ecological crisis… .’ - Kohei Saito
Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Beyond Historical Materialism?
Environmental activists, inasmuch as they pay any attention to Marxism, tend to dismiss it as ‘productivist’. It is not hard to see why. According to Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, written in 1859, revolutions happen when ‘the material productive forces of society’ become fettered by the existing relations of production and property: ‘The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’
As the basis for ‘historical materialism’, these insights were not completely original. Marx wasn’t aware that as far back as 1656, James Harrington, the Cromwellian author of the utopian work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, argued that the dissolution of the Stuart monarchy in 1649 hadn’t come about because of the Civil War, but because the war was itself a result of socioeconomic changes: the transfer of lands from the Crown, aristocracy and Church to the gentry and yeomanry; and the freeing of tenants from military service to feudal barons. Furthermore, Harrington’s productivist ‘materialism’ served the interest of property owners, not the property-less such as the Leveller radicals: ‘industry of all things is most accumulative, and accordingly of all things hates levelling.’
The base-superstructure model may have been useful for explaining the rise of the capitalist classes and their historic ‘mission’ to destroy the fetters of the old feudal orders, as happened in the English and French revolutions. It does not, however, explain how commodified capitalism in the 21st century manages to destroy its own fetters and constantly shift the ground under its all-consuming totality (nor does Left productivism in the form of back-to-the-future accelerationism).
Kohei Saito says it important not to take the apparent ‘productivism’ of the 1859 Critique as Marx’s ‘last word’ on the theory of historical progress. On the contrary, Saito suggests, the totality of Marx’s writings — right up to his death in 1883 — provides crucial support, not for a reformist ‘ecosocialism’ with illusions in carbon emission ‘targets’ and ‘green jobs’, but for the revolutionary idea of ‘de-growth communism’.
Metabolism - Lukács versus Engel
Kohei Saito’s research includes previously unavailable texts now published by the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), including Marx’s notebooks on geology, botany and agricultural chemistry, which were intended for use in completing his unfinished volumes II and III of Capital. They are concerned with ‘…various practices of robbery closely tied to climate change, the exhaustion of natural resources (soil nutrients, fossil fuel and woods) as well as the extinction of species due to the capitalist system of industrial production’.(4)
Marx’s theory of Metabolism addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. Here, Saito raises the issue of differences between Marx and Engels on the question of ‘nature’, first raised by George Lukács in 1923 in History and Class Consciousness.
Lukács, in attempting to rescue historical materialism from the distortions and vulgarisations heaped on it by Second International Marxism, traces the problem back to Engels’ formulation of dialectics in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (published in 1886, three years after the death of Marx):
‘The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels — following Hegel’s mistaken lead — extended the method to apply also to knowledge of nature.’ (75)
Engels, turning Hegel’s idealist dialectic on its head, makes the case that the object is determined not by its concept but by its own natural development in the objective world. This a process is seen as independent of human consciousness, which is seen as determined by its reflected object.
Engels sees the discoveries of science as essentially in step with the forward march of scientific socialism. In Engels’ judgement of Hegel’s dialectical thought, especially his Science of Logic:
‘That which survives independently of all earlier philosophies is the science of thought and its laws — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.’(Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach — not quoted by Saito)
Engels even thought that science could refute the idealist ‘crochet’ in Kant’s epistemology: the problem of the ‘thing-in-itself’ as a barrier to concrete expansion of knowledge. Lukács challenges this view, pointing out that in Kant’s epistemology the problem of the thing-in-itself is no barrier to concrete expansion of knowledge:
‘On the contrary, Kant, who sets out from the most advanced natural science of the day, namely from Newton’s astronomy, tailors his theory of knowledge precisely to this science and its future potential.’ (History and Class Consciousness,132)
And:
‘But Engels’ deepest misunderstanding consists in his belief that the behaviour of industry and scientific experiment constitutes praxis in the dialectical, philosophical sense. In fact, scientific experiment is contemplation at its purest.’(Lukács 85-86)
Lukács sees Engels’s analysis as a lapse into metaphysical materialism, because it leaves out the ‘crucial determinants of dialectics — the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories…’ (24) Lukács questions the neutrality and objectivity of modern science:
‘When the ideal of scientific knowledge is applied to nature it simply furthers the progress of science. But when it is applied to society it turns out to be an ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie’. (77)
History and Class Consciousness was heavily criticised by theorists who had been schooled in Engelsian dialectical materialism. Lukács was accused of undermining ontological monism with a dualist approach that drove a wedge between natural science and social science; and of promoting an ‘”idealist” social constructivism of nature’. (79)
Lukács wrote a lengthy response to his critics (Rudas and Deborin) in 1926 entitled, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic. Lukács never published it, as the political climate within the Comintern was no longer conducive to philosophic debate. The manuscript, which he believed to have been lost, was discovered decades after his death in the archives of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and translated by Esther Leslie.
‘Tailism’ refers to those Marxists who passively follow the objective course of history as if it proceeds independently of human consciousness. Lukács, in Tailism, insists that his criticism of Engels had not been an attack on dialectical materialism as such. As a monist, Lukács recognises that nature existed long before there were humans to think about it and discover its laws. He does not doubt that science is able to obtain objective and universally valid knowledge of nature. The problem is with the socially conditioned knowledge which passes for nature.
Justus von Liebig, the pioneer of organic chemistry, influenced Marx’s writings on how the transhistorical labour process is transformed into the capitalist valorization process.
Temporally, capital negates the ‘law of replenishment’: the most fundamental principle of ‘rational agriculture’, that demands the return of the minerals absorbed by harvested plants to the original soil. Agriculture in Ireland, Liebig alleged, amounted to a ‘robbery system’ that took more from nature than it put back.
Spatially, the metabolic rift exacerbates the ‘contradiction between town and country’, resulting in urban sprawl and pollution of waterways with waste from agricultural produce, which in previous times would have been ‘given back’ to the soil. In his original manuscript of Volume III of Capital, Marx writes of
‘an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, and trade carries this devastation far beyond the bounds of a single country. (Liebig).’
Saito considers how Engels’ ‘edit’ modifies this passage:
‘…[large-scale landownership] produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself .’ (26)
Saito points out that by omitting the term ‘natural metabolism’, Engels obscures Marx’s method of distinguishing primary and second-order mediation of metabolism. Also, ‘soil’ is changed to ‘life’. Although Engels can be accurately described as an ecosocialist, the role he assigns to ‘metabolism’ in his modification of Capital is ‘not as an ecological analysis of capitalism but as a demonstration that this objective law penetrates the whole of nature encompassing both inorganic and organic beings.’(57)
DeGrowth Communism
Saito sees Marx’s theory of metabolism as the key to the significance of his notebooks on natural sciences, which were written after 1867, when Capital, was published:
‘Hints for imagining the unwritten part of Capital exist in these little-known notebooks… Simply put, Marx aimed at comprehending how disharmonies in the material world emerge due to modifications of the universal metabolism of nature by the reified power of capital.’ (61-62)
Agronomist and Greek scholar Carl N. Fraas’s Climate and Plant World over Time warned against excessive deforestation. On this, Marx writes to Engels:
‘The conclusion is that cultivation – when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point) – leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. So once again an unconscious socialist tendency!’ (62)
Saito argues that Marx was reaching for an idea of degrowth communism founded upon the radical abundance of communal wealth. In the modern world, degrowth communism could be achieved because the abundance of common wealth could be multiplied by abolishing the artificial scarcity of commodity production and by sharing social and natural wealth.(236) Saito gives five reasons why communism increases the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.
Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth, makes and sells non-essential and harmful products as long as they make a profit, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.
Secondly, abolition of the law of value would eliminate unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’.
Thirdly, degrowth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.
Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere.
Finally, as Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme says, in communism, ‘after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want’, there would be no more ‘enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour.’
Saito suggests that in communism, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’ (241-42)
It has been claimed that Critique of the Gotha Program is an argument for productivism, because it says that the ‘productive forces’ will be increased when ‘all the springs of common/co-operative/communal wealth flow more abundantly.’ Saito, however, suggests that
’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’ (233)
This post is extracted from ‘How Green Was Karl Marx’ , an essay published in International Marxist-Humanist and in Links, 2023