Marx in the Anthropocene

In the Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the Anthropocene is that tiny 300,00 year slice of it in which humans have left their unmistakable mark everywhere. Beset by rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and wildfires, human activity has destabilised the Earth’s biophysical systems to the point of collapse. How do we move forward, recognising and respecting our natural limits, so that we may renew them? Degrowth is one answer, and Kōhei Saitō believes that Marxism can give it an intellectual basis. Marx in the Anthropocene draws upon a collection of Marx’s letters and journal entries that have only become available in the last decade or so with the publication of MEGA. Through them, Saitō attempts an ambitious recasting of Marx as an ecological thinker, and interprets Marxism as the ecologically sound philosophy that we desperately need today.

(The Collected Publications of Marx and Engels, known in German as the Marx-Engels Gesamteausgabe (MEGA), is a compilation of everything the pair ever wrote. MEGA² is a collection of their ecological writings, which Kōhei Saitō helped to prepare.)

Marx’s best known book Das Kapital, was published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. Volumes 2 and 3 only appeared after his death. It was his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels, who finished them up and published them for him. Core to Saitō’s argument is that the new writings of Marx reveal how his thinking was moving in different directions after 1868, some of which overturn or clarify earlier assumptions made in Volume 1.

In his studies of non-western societies, Marx came to reject the Eurocentric assumptions of his historical materialism, namely that all societies must develop and pass through the same stages on the road to communism. Saitō points to a notable letter that Marx wrote to Vera Zasulich in 1881, in which he agreed that the ideas of Das Kapital may not be entirely relevant to the Russian context. There the Narodniks argued that the mir, a traditional kind of peasant commune, could become the nucleus of a uniquely Russian socialism that would altogether bypass the industrialised, capitalist stage of history.

Marx was also highly influenced by the writings of Justus von Liebig, a German agricultural chemist who made the observation that plants need minerals like nitrogen and potassium in order to grow. Liebig was concerned with how urban centres were disrupting the circulation of nutrients back to the soil. The growing urban/rural divide created a situation in which food was exported to the cities, but organic waste was not returned back to the countryside, implying the slow depletion of soil fertility. In other words, he identified a disruption in a biophysical process, brought about due to the way in which human society was organised.

Marx captured the essence of this disruption in his idea of metabolism [Stoffwechsel]. In certain traditions of Marxism, this idea mainly referred to the circulation of materials and energy within human society, such as the labour and power and resources used to create and distribute goods or services. Because society also depends on natural resources, there is an obvious ecological reading to the concept. Saitō gives a detailed (but ultimately not very interesting) genealogy of the idea, starting with Engels, who unwittingly modified the phrase “natural metabolism” to omit the word “natural”. Later, György Lukács, another influential Marxist philosopher, wrote a work called History and Class Consciousness, which spawned its own lineage called “Western Marxism.” Despite invoking Marx’s concept of metabolism, reception of what Lukács’ wrote often understood him as saying that the dialectical method should only be applied to human activities, not nature, thereby stripping the idea of metabolism from its ecological implications.

The word “metabolism” is borrowed from biochemistry, where it refers to the ways in which energy circulates in a given system. Human metabolism, for example, is the totality of ways in which our body ingests, absorbs, transforms, breaks down, uses up, and excretes nutrients. If we think of nature and society as two co-dependent parts of a systematic whole, then we also can understand them as a collection of metabolic processes, some social, others natural, operating according to their own parameters. The concentration of minerals in the soil gives rise to our ability to farm it in order to produce food, which in turn impacts the composition of minerals in the soil. With more workers or slaves, or better tools, I could bring in the harvest faster. If I had a combine harvester, I could do it in a few days. On the other hand, the manufacturing and use of a combine harvester requires an entire system of resource extraction and industrial production, as well as natural deposits of petrol and coal and metal, which only form in the earth according to biophysical processes that are thousands of years longer than the agricultural season.

Although we may compensate for the limits of a biophysical process, humans really only have control over the social processes. In a capitalist economy, those social processes are reconstructed and accelerated in the pursuit of private wealth accumulation, exacerbating the imbalance between social and biophysical processes. Modern ecosocialists call this “metabolic rift”. By annihilating “spatial and temporal distance” and “speeding up in favour of a shorter circuit of capital” (28), capitalism improves production and turnover, but uses up natural resources faster than they can be replenished. Although capital may get around this by cutting costs, expanding production, offloading the negative externalities, or otherwise finding new ways to achieve the same thing, the rift is never definitely solved, only shifted elsewhere.

Going back to the example of soil fertility, Europe initially solved its problems by importing guano from South America. When that ran out, chemists like Liebig discovered how to manufacture fertiliser from ammonium, which required the burning of even more fossil fuels; the problem shifted from the scarcity of guano to the scarcity of petrol and gas.

That Marx is actually a bike-riding, sandal-wearing greenie came as something of a shock to me. Saitō is the first to admit Marxism’s stereotypical association with fire and industry, and the movement’s historic coupling of social and technological progress. In the present day, “Promethean Marxists” continue to accuse ecosocialists like Saitō of things like “Malthusianism” and “ontological dualism”, terms which I imagine to be uttered in the same tone of voice as an inquisitor bringing forth a charge of heresy. The middle section of this book takes up a pre-emptive defence of Saitō’s reading of Marx against its Promethean alternatives.

There is a directly Marxist appeal for a Promethean solution to climate change. It goes something like this. One of the irrationalities Marx identified in capitalism is the fact that the pursuit of private wealth does not always result in the optimal production and allocation of goods. Arriving at a sustainable, “net-zero” economy is an example of this. It will require a transition away from fossil fuels towards alternate sources of energy, such as solar or nuclear. It means the insulation of houses, the installation of heat pumps, the building of walkable cities, the discovery of less carbon-intensive, plant-based food sources. It may mean ambitious projects, like the capture and sequestration of carbon, or the outright re-engineering of Earth’s biophysical systems to accommodate human needs. In today’s world, which largely operates on the capitalist assumptions of private property, vested wealth depends on the exploitation of fossil fuels. It is unlikely to make any sudden moves against its own economic interests. Here, the Promethean argues, is the case for socialism. By overthrowing capitalism, central planning can remove the “fetters on the forces of production”, redirecting human effort and ingenuity into those enterprises which are most likely to help humanity adjust to a life without fossil fuels.

Such arguments always strike me as a bit naive and optimistic. They rest on the assertion that human tenacity will always overcome what ever it encounters—as if an outright collapse of the whole sclerotic mess were simply impossible. An economy based on solar or nuclear is not without its own formidable social and technical challenges, including the storage and long-distance transmission of electricity, as well as the human cost of mining the blood metals necessary to do this. New technology is already emerging which will cut down on the amount of cobalt necessary for rechargeable batteries, which will hopefully mean less exploitation of child and forced labour in the Congo. This is but one example. The damage to homes and habitats and people, however, has already been done. Even if the immediate problem in front of us seems to have a solution, as Saitō points out, the rift is only ever moved, never eliminated. The second-order consequences of what we do is never clear.

If central planning were to work, then climate change, being a global issue, would require a global consensus. Will it arrive in time? I do think that Marxism, by emphasising the social and historical laws that attend human history, neglects its more personal and agentive dimensions. Conflicting interests are not always synthesised and sublated into some rational whole, but sometimes only resolved through outright violence. On the world stage there will always be room for misunderstanding and disagreement, for ego and ill-will. We might conclude that a functional world government is impossible, even before we get to the logistical nightmare of planning for the entire world. Local problems can’t always be understood with global reasoning.

Answers to climate change which seek to exploit the productive forces of capitalism may only ratify its social inequities. “Technocratic visions, despite their bold claims of emancipation, reproduce the non-democratic and consumerist relations of domination and subjugation…” (171) Vast, capital-intensive projects like carbon capture or space exploration are only possible when there is a vast concentration of wealth and power, whether that be in the capitalist’s top-hat or the UN secretary’s manila folder.

Marxists and Socialists, fearful of endorsing any position which might be seen as giving cover to the idea that the developing world should not have the same wealth and luxury as the first world, have been reluctant to endorse degrowth. Enthusiasm for the idea that social planning can overcome any natural limits sometimes crosses over into the denial of physical reality. Natural resources are finite. They cannot be “arbitrarily utilized for satisfying unlimited human desires.” (288) The rift can only be shifted so much. One way or another, the world economy will eventually experience a contraction, and it will be the poorest countries which suffer most.

There has been a persistent conflation between emancipation and equality on the one hand and material abundance on the other. A good deal of our material desires are themselves the product of an artificial scarcity brought on by the social relations of late consumer capitalism. No-one cares about having beautiful clothes or the latest iPhone or visiting the most exotic holiday destination before the insecurity of not having those things is placed in our heads by the aggressive sales and advertising tactics of the attention economy. Degrowth is old-fashioned in its anti-consumerist, anti-materialist message. It rejects the false dichotomy of luxury or poverty by the simple recognition that even the most refined, sumptuous consumer is neither free nor happy.

If it is not already clear, this is a book more about Marx than about degrowth. Saitō’s interest is mostly in the reception and lineage of Marxism, and how it can be reconciled with modern degrowth and ecosocialist ideas. What you take out of this book will largely be determined by your patience in wading through the tedious minutiae of those debates. I am not that interested in Marxism, hence I found it quite dull.

A few things have to be said about Saitō’s attempt to reconstruct Marxism. Drawing on previously unavailable sources may yield new insight into Marx’s intellectual journey, but it’s not at all clear that this is of general interest to the argument. Saitō falls into the trap of reading too much of the man into his work. We can’t always take letters or journals as conclusive evidence of belief, and if we are going to argue from lacunae, one has to wonder how long it will be until something else comes out which overturns everything we thought we knew about Marx in 2024. Maturation or change in a person’s world view is to be expected, but we can’t take the mere fact of change as proof that the earlier beliefs were wrong. At this point, Marxism is bigger than just Marx, so an appeal to his ultimately unknowable intentions are not very convincing.

Although I feel great sympathy for Saitō and for degrowth, I wasn’t persuaded by this book. It may formulate an abstract acceptance of natural limits from Marxist first principles, but despite covering so much theoretical ground, it achieves remarkably little in the way of a concrete philosophical or political framework. It’s not clear anyway why Marxism is uniquely placed to understand and resolve the issues of the Anthropocene. If greening Marx requires abandoning historical materialism as a law of historical progress, we seem to have lost one of the main reasons for accepting it in the first place, namely its claims to universality and predictability.

It must also be said that metabolic rift is not exclusive to the emergence of capitalist society: urbanisation, the division of labour, and environmental collapse all predate it. It is a tautology to say that human activity uses up the stock of finite resources. The relevant point is where we draw the line. What should we take and how much? Despite rightfully excoriating first-world living conditions as “an imperial mode of living”, Saitō never comes close to saying what we would have to give up to achieve some sense of proportion.

Marxism seems like a poor basis for degrowth. It is not intrinsically joined to the hip of ecological politics. Historical examples of actually existing socialism(s) did not correct their ecocidal tendencies, as with the shrivelling up of the Aral sea. We could interpret Marxism as implying a form of degrowth communism. But why? The whole activity struck me as convoluted and contrived. Degrowth and Marxism neither need each other, nor strengthen each other’s case, and that may be my most important takeaway from this book.