Kohei Saito, the best-selling author of Capital in the Anthropocene, is back with a new book: Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of ​​Degrowth Communism. The book is dense, especially for those unfamiliar with Marxist jargon, who, I suspect, care little whether or not Karl Marx became concerned with nature in his later years.
And yet, the way in which Saito mobilizes Marxist theory to plead for “an abundance of wealth in a growth-degenerate communism” (the title of the final chapter of his book) is as accurate as it is compelling. This is what caught my attention as an economist working on degrowth: Saito’s attempts to reconcile Marxism with newer ideas about alternatives to economic growth could bring criticism of capitalism to an unprecedented level of popularity.
Economic growth creates scarcity
Many people think that growth makes us richer, but what if it was just the opposite?
•Gross domestic product (GDP), a monetary measure of output, can rise because someone privatizes a common good—what British geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by expropriation.” Take a resource that people previously had free access to and start selling it to them.
•This rent extraction may increase GDP, but it does not create anything useful. In effect, by preventing people from accessing the means of livelihood, it creates artificial scarcity.
•The more money accumulates, the more these tricks can be caught and sold, be it natural resources, knowledge, or labor. In a world where everything becomes a potential commodity (in other words, something that can be bought and sold), the ruling rationality favors lucrative activities over others.
•Why would you rent out your apartment to someone for free when you can rent it out on Airbnb? And that’s the catch: once you need money to satisfy your needs, you’re forced to play as a capitalist.
Emergency brake
This self-perpetuating drive to make money forces us to turn more and more of nature into a commodity. The money that companies can make is endless, while the amount of nature at their disposal is increasingly scarce.
There is perhaps no clearer illustration than the record profits of fossil fuel companies amid worsening climate conditions. Degrowth could act as an emergency brake on this vicious cycle, Saito argues, by “putting an end to the constant exploitation of humanity and the robbing of nature.”
Academics define degrowth as a democratically planned effort to reduce levels of production and consumption in order to alleviate environmental pressures. The democratic part is important: the idea is to do it in a way that reduces inequality and improves well-being for all.
It is hard to imagine this happening in capitalism, a system that must constantly expand and generate more. And that’s Saito’s point: Communism is far more likely to achieve these goals.
He reasons that an economy concerned with satisfying human needs is more likely to avoid the production of junk. Without the imperative to get rich or perish, many nature-intensive goods and services would cease to be necessary or desirable.
Saito calls it “a conscious shrinking of the current ‘realm of necessity'”. This Marxist term describes what we consider to be our basic needs. Under communism in degrowth, this sphere would shrink to exclude things and activities that do not contribute to human well-being or sustainability.
It is suddenly possible to organize work differently. Gone is the industrial model of producing something as cheaply as possible while sacrificing the safety and comfort inherent in a collaborative effort.
Instead of competing for market share, companies could work together to achieve common goals, such as restoring biodiversity. De-emphasis on making money would allow society to improve all these things that today we trivialize because they are not profitable.
Such an economy might be slower and smaller in terms of money, but it would be more sustainable and efficient in providing well-being, which is all we should ask of an economy anyway.
Towards a post-scarcity society
Saito’s book is refreshing because it helps end the old dispute between socialists who believe that new technology and the automation of work can bring about an expanding economy with more leisure time, and those who advocate socialism without growth.
Instead of constantly growing the economy by making more things private and tradable, Saito suggests sharing the wealth we’ve already created. This could usher in a new way of life where people can afford to spend less time and effort producing commodities and turn their attention to the things that really matter to them, what Marxists call the realm of freedom. That should start, Saito argues, by restoring the health of Earth’s ecosystems on which everything else depends.
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