Thread by @MarkHBurton

No to reform! My review of Kohei Saito's 'Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism'.
| Steady State Manchester steadystatemanchester.net/2023/05/02/no-…
#Saito #degrowth #Marx #anthropocene #BookReview

"Saito’s key finding, and key argument, is that the later Marx rethought his earlier positions, both as a result of, and as a reason for, pursuing extensive studies in the physical and biological sciences, on the one hand, and pre-capitalist societies on the other."

"Marx thoroughly revised his position. That included abandoning the notion of stages of history and, critically, the idea that socialism must follow capitalism, standing on the pillars it had erected."

"Saito uses his findings to reconstruct what Marx’s new philosophy was – 'degrowth communism'."

"Two key ideas underpin the argument. 1, Marx adopted the concept of the “metabolic rift”, the disturbance of the natural regenerative cycles of what we now call ecosystems, a result of the massive resource and energy transfers occasioned by the capitalist mode of production."

"2, Marx came to revalue pre-capitalist social systems with their land tenure & property arrangements, not uncritically or romantically, but as systems to build upon where capital had not yet dominated & as sources of insight for how a post-capitalist world might be organised."

Real subsumption implies that,
"To get off the road to ecological catastrophe requires such fundamental changes that we can only partly imagine them, being mentally colonised by the capitalist imaginary, whether we like it or not."

"Marx was still reworking his ideas, drawing on his extensive studies, at the end of his life and that, together with his failing health, is why he never published his revised framework."

More to do!

Read the full review, here:
steadystatemanchester.net/2023/05/02/no-…