This book is at times a challenging read, but the author shows how relevant Marx’s thinking is today in addressing the environmental and economic issues we face.
Based on work not published until the 21st century we learn that Marx knew about the dangers of overproduction and the risk of environmental damage to human existence.
Oxford Languages defines the Anthropocene as:
“ … the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.”
To many it is clear that capitalism is responsible for global warming …
“The capitalist system that aims for infinite accumulation on a finite planet is the root cause of climate breakdown”, quoting Greta Thunberg
p.2
But funded by capitalists our political class still seeks economic growth, denying both the environmental harm and the impossibility of perpetual growth.
The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital (1)
The Communist Manifesto has not been out of print since it was first published in the 1840s. Readers of the manifesto today will see that many of the concerns and issues the authors sought to address are still with us.
The young Marx saw that science had enabled humanity to exploit the Earth’s resources to produce whatever was needed for the good of everyone. The mythical Prometheus gave mankind the knowledge of fire, which mankind has used to build huge industrial power and become master of nature. Marx sought to address the human cost of workers being subjugated to enrich a few. The manifesto set out why people should take control of the means of production, distribution and exchange so industry could be used for the good of everyone.
Marx saw industry as the foundation of a society for all to enjoy, and believed that Europeans should take it to the world, but by the time the first volume of Das Kapital (Capital) was completed, Marx was already questioning these Promethean and Eurocentric views. Volumes 2 and 3 were left unfinished for Engels to complete after Marx’s death. Marx himself devoted the last two decades of his life to the study of natural science and pre-capitalist societies.
“Marx aimed at comprehending how disharmonies in the material world emerge in modification to the universal metabolism of nature by the reified power of capital.”
p.62
Metabolic rift
Marx sought to understand the universal metabolism of nature and came to see society and nature as an inseparable complex metabolism. Even in the 19th century it was known that deforestation led to changes in the local climate (p.62). The reader is introduced to the three dimensions of metabolic rift: technological, spatial and temporal. The impact of capitalism on each is examined and argued as the author explains why Marx turned away from his Promethean view, and started to consider how to heal the rift. Engels, on the other hand, believed, and many still believe, that technology has the solution.
In looking at what a sustainable post-capitalist society might look like, Marx turned to history and in particular to non-European society. He looked at rural communes in India, and also at how agriculture was organised in different parts of the Roman Empire. He saw how some societies grew and consumed what was needed, rather than over-producing and becoming dependant on trade. He saw that where the public wealth such as forest and pasture were held in common, stable sustainable low growth economies were possible.
In Das Kapital (1) Marx explained the violence of separating people from the means of subsistence, which David Harvey summarised as follows:
“ … taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatised mainstream of capital accumulation.”
p.218
In England the Enclosure Acts took away access to common land, in Scotland the best agricultural land was enclosed for sport (p. 224), in India he recognised how the British destroyed communal agriculture causing famine (p. 196). We read about Lauderdale’s rule that shows how public wealth declines as private wealth increases (p. 225).
The shadow of Marxism on the 20th century
Engels paid little attention to Marx’s research, so it went unnoticed for a century.
“Engels made Marx available and accessible – enabling Marxism as a doctrine of scientific socialism to have an enormous influence throughout the 20th Century.”
p.175
Different strands of Marxism emerged. Traditional Marxism sought the mechanistic exploitation and domination of nature, responsible for the ecological disasters of the Soviet era. Western Marxism criticised Engels blaming him for the terror of Stalin, but continued to exclude nature from Marx’s social philosophy (p. 47-48). Today many will use “Marxist” as a pejorative term without knowing what Marx believed.
A new enlightenment
Marx saw that capitalism was destroying the planet, his last vision of a post capitalist society was of de-growth communism, the opposite of his earlier Prometheanism.
“Only after Marx completely abandoned productivism and Eurocentrism was he able to fully integrate the principle of a steady state economy as the foundation of the future society.”
p. 209
The final chapters outline a world where common ownership progressively replaces private ownership, production is co-operative, the Earth’s natural resources are cared for in the interest of future generations. In such a world common wealth would be managed sustainably and democratically for the benefit of all.
At our book club a retired teacher bemoaned the demise of history and economics taught as a single subject, “to understand events you need to understand the economics that drive them”. For Marx history was a key to understanding how economies were sustained without growth, a lesson now shared by others such as Michael Hudson in The Destiny of Civilisation and Tim Jackson Life after Capitalism.
Marxists, it seems, have much to offer as we try to avert the environmental and economic catastrophe that we are facing.
Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene; Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2023), 292 pp, £29.99
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