In his recently published book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Kohei Saito contends that:
‘Almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world’s richest 20 percent’ and that our exploitative ‘imperial mode of living’ allows us enjoy an ‘extravagant lifestyle’ at the expense of workers in the Global South – an echo of the discredited Leninist theory of the ‘labour aristocracy’.
Moreover, suggests Saito, it is ‘we’ who are ‘coddled by the invisibility of our lifestyle’s costs’ who inflict far more damage on the environment than do they – our fellow workers on the other side of the planet. ‘We’ will ‘not be able to truly combat climate change if we all fail to participate, as directly interested parties, in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living’. That means disengaging, starting now under capitalism, from consumer culture ‘while also reducing the volume of everything we consume’. At the end of the day there seems to be little here to distinguish Saito from what the de-growth eco-pessimists have to say, apart from his invocation of ‘communism’.
Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips make a valid point in their review of Saito’s book:
"Saito also sees this primarily not as a battle between classes of workers and capitalists, but global regions: “the injustice of socially vulnerable people in the Global South countries bearing the brunt of climate change although the carbon dioxide was emitted, for the most part, by the Global North, which brought on this disaster.”
When it comes to who in the Global North is responsible, Saito is more liable to point at himself and other workers than capital: “Our rich lifestyles would be impossible without the plundered natural resources and exploited labor power of the Global South”’ (Jacobin, 9 March 2024,).
Was Marx productivist?
Saito also claims that, as far as Marx was concerned, there was an ‘epistemological break’ in the latter´s writings that began sometimes during the 1860s.
This epistemological break has been characterised as representing a move away from a ‘“linear, progressive view” of history, marked by “productivism” and “Eurocentrism”, and towards a new vision of communism’. Saito does at least accept that ‘communism’ means a moneyless, wageless, classless and stateless alternative to capitalism which is based on the twin principles of free access to socially produced wealth and voluntaristic labour as the basis of wealth production.
In short Marx, according to Saito, abandoned historical materialism and the acceptance of capitalist technological progress in favour of ‘de-growth communism’ in which the needs of the population would be catered for within clear limits imposed by nature itself.
Marx did indeed acknowledge the necessity and importance of capitalist technological progress in preparing the ground for a future communist society, but his standpoint cannot plausibly be called a ‘productivist’ one. There are many passages in the early writings of both Marx and Engels that suggest a deep concern with the environmental impact of economic growth and are hardly compatible with the kind of Promethean or productivist outlook sometimes attributed to them. Their assessment of capitalist technological advancement as being ‘progressive’ was contingent inasmuch as it suggests there will come a point when it could no longer be characterised as such. At this point it would become redundant or even reactionary as a mode of production.
Limits to lifestyle changes
You cannot expect capitalism to gradually disappear through the incremental accumulation of minor adjustments to the way we live and do things. The whole system is fundamentally held together and underpinned by the brute fact of minority ownership and control of the means of wealth production and the consequent alienation of the great majority from these means. It is only when the latter take matters in hand and seek to democratically bring about fundamental change from the bottom up that capitalism will finally disappear.
We cannot hope to bring about the fundamental change required through mere lifestyle changes within the framework of existing capitalist society. This is not meant to discourage individuals from wanting to make such changes. These could conceivably help even if only in symbolic, more than practical, terms. But the basic problem we face as a society is not really the result of individuals somehow having made the wrong lifestyle choice.
Saito is not entirely wrong, however. ‘Lifestyle choices’ matter up to a point insofar as they are bound up with the question of social values. After all, a working class, still receptive or responsive to the values that underpin a capitalist consumer ideology, would surely not yet be ready to undertake the transformation of society itself. Their readiness to do that surely presupposes a transformed worldview on their part. In other words, a shift in values.
It is difficult to see how a strategy of, today within capitalism, ‘reducing the volume of everything we consume’ is going to succeed. Reducing consumption means reducing the market demand for the good in question. Normally, the response of businesses in these circumstances would be to reduce the price of this good. In other words, to reboot or stimulate market demand.
You as one individual might indeed have the strength of will and moral resolve to resist the lure of a bargain offer but there is nothing to say that your neighbour will follow suit. This is the problem with the system; it has the uncanny knack of being able to pick us off one by one so long as we confine our thinking to its conceptual parameters.
We cannot buck the market while we live in a market economy. It is this that sets limits on what we can achieve by way of lifestyle changes. Only by eliminating capitalism will we be in a position to adapt how we produce and consume in ways that suit ourselves and our long-term future on this planet.
Robin Cox
No comments:
Post a Comment