Marx in the Anthropocene - a brief critical review

 When I was younger climate change appeared worrying but distant, something that would be harmful to future generations, a matter of extreme concern but not an immediate problem. Today, climate change is here. June 2023 has broken record after record for high temperatures, and extreme weather is the new normal. We seem to be entering a room which is, perhaps, literally burning down. North America has been blanketed in smoke from forest fires, temperatures are so hot in parts of Europe that people are dying.  We are in the hot 20s and likely to enter the hungry 30s, a decade where agriculture is disrupted and starvation stalks the world.

The duty of revolutionaries is clear. Capitalism generates climate change so we must make revolution and displace this mode of production, which in the words of the late great indigenous leader Hugo Blanco, is increasingly a mode of destruction. We must also work practically to cut emissions, taking on the suicidal might of big oil, while adapting to the negative effects of extreme and volatile weather.  Without revolutionary theory, Lenin suggested, there can be no revolutionary movement. The task of theory in the face of climate crisis is to reflect, refine and generate concepts that better equip us to make both revolution and reform. This is increasingly a question, frankly, of survival. We must assess new published texts in terms of their utility in this regard.

One prominent contribution is the book Marx in the Anthropocene, subtitled ‘Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’. Written by the Japanese academic and philosopher Kohei Saito, it has been widely praised as a new intervention examining Marx’s ecological thinking. Saito has written several books on ecosocialism, Marxism and climate change. It is worth reviewing Marx in the Anthropocene in terms of its material effects. In short, does it help or hinder efforts to create both the reformist and revolutionary forces and their subsequent effects to better survive the crisis we have entered?

Saito’s central argument is that much of Marx’s work is productivist and anti-ecological but that an epistemological break occurred, with the later Marx recanting his earlier views and embracing what might now be described as degrowth communism. Like Saul on the road to an ecological Damascus, Marx underwent a dramatic change of heart, moving from an advocacy of ever increasing and ever more polluting industrial growth to an embrace of sustainable ecological development, symbolised by the Mir, a form of Russian peasant commune. Marx, it might be said, moved like the East German intellectual Rudolph Bahro, ‘from Red to Green’.

Marx in the Anthropocene (postcolonialpolitics.org)

Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism (review)

Kuhn, Rick (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. University of Illinois Press.

Henryk Grossman (1881-1950) was a Jewish Polish Marxist. Rick Kuhn has produced a very interesting biography of Henryk. Grossman was active as a young man in revolutionary organisations but is best known for his research into Marx's theories of economic crisis.

There is an awareness today that capitalism is an ecologically unsustainable economic system. Moral critique is not, however, a sufficient basis for serious action. If we see capitalism as unsustainable and destructive in other ways, perhaps it is worth returning to Marx's analysis of how it can be overcome and replaced.

Marx argued that capitalism was prone to cyclical crisis, suggesting that these were linked to a declining rate of profit and tended towards a final crisis.

Marx's interpretation of why crisis occurs is difficult to pin down precisely. This is because his life's work of studying capitalism was unfinished and also because the crisis is likely to be multi-sided.

Marx too worked at different levels of abstraction. Volume One of Capital, tries to show how a pure and abstract model of the capitalist economy would work. Volumes Two and Three add additional features to the model.

Grossman became a prominent student of Marx's crisis theory. He criticised Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in The Accumulation of Capital, where she argued that crisis was a product of under consumption and led to imperialism as a means of temporarily maintaining the system by finding new markets for unsold commodities.

Kuhn's book has whetted my appetite for reading more about and from Grossman. Capitalism for much of the late 20th century and, perhaps until, the financial crisis of 2008/2009 looked like the only game in town. A game that delivered prosperity, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of Third Way politics from the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the left, on economics, moved to the right.

Capitalism is looking less like a system that delivers today in 2023.

Kuhn, who comes, I think, from the International Socialist tradition of Tony Cliff, is some distance from my politics. I am also little mystified as to the the title 'the recovery of Marxism', I guess a reference to the reformism of the Second International. Kuhn, like Brecht and Lukács, made his peace with the Eastern Bloc rather than embrace the Trotskyism of those like Kuhn. These are small points and minor context, it is a great book.

It is a sweeping biography taking in Grossman's whole career including his work with the Frankfurt School, life in America and his last years in East Germany.

The economics probably requires a whole separate book but Kuhn useful shows that Grossman saw the contradiction between use values and exchange values as the source of crisis. Capitalism produces for exchange, it may produce too much or too little of what we find useful, so crisis is inherent. He also notes that Grossman suggested that moving between different models of different levels of abstraction is essential for understanding Marx's crisis theory. Grossman was not a mechanical or deterministic thinker, crisis was not alone sufficient to transform capitalism into communism, but economic crisis was part, a very important part of the picture.

A huge amount of archival work together with clear prose make this a book worth reading for all of us on the left.

A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Paul N. Edwards.

 

A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Paul N. Edwards. MIT Press. 2010

‘If you understand why climate data shimmer, now and always, and why climate predictions too will shimmer, you may come to accept proliferation within convergence. Today, an Enlightenment idea of knowledge as perfect certainty still holds us back from this acceptance. Oddly enough, so too does a widespread relativism – promoted not least by some of my colleagues in science and technology studies (STS) – that elevates virtually any skeptical view to the same status as expert consensus.’ (Evans 2010: 436)

A Vast Machine, running at just over 500 pages, is also a vast book. This is going to be a brief review, so I will miss much. ‘A Vast Machine’ is taken from a statement by John Ruskin, the art critic, inspirer of William Morris (Britain’s most important ecosocialists) and social reformer. He is referring to the science of metrology noting that to advance it will need to extend.

Paul N. Edward’s book is essentially an account of how a vast physical and conceptual machine has been put together to model climate change. I have come across a number of poorly written books both technical and literary about climate change recently, this in contrast is very well written, accessible and almost poetic.

It is haunted by the living ghost of Bruno Latour. If I am frank I really don’t like Latour, I have only dipped in, if I am honest to his ‘Politics of Nature’, and it really didn’t do for me. However, a bit of Latour is probably no bad thing. Certainly, the influence of Latour has positively informed ‘A Vast Machine’, which is neither poorly written or obscurely and ornately over-theorised.

I will explain how I think Latour is important to this text and review Edwards’ thoughts on the largely Latour inspired Science and technology studies (STS). However, this is probably of secondary or even no interest to most likely readers of the book.

What Edwards does is to show in very great detail is how the science of climate change, the development of models, the physical use of satellites, and the construction of institutions has created a network. The network which to repeat is both physical and conceptual, as well as institutional, is the ‘vast machine’ prophesised or, at least, invited by John Ruskin.

Edwards argues that while absolute certainty is impossible, we have a ‘shimmering’ effect, within a range of variables prediction is possible. He notes that the uncertainties of climate change modelling on a global bases can be compared with economic data, we know, for example, when there is a recession.

The intellectual battles and controversies particularly in the US around climate change are well discussed here. How do we know? Well Edwards patiently and in detail shows how the models have been created.

This is where I would note the influence of Latour. We live in a world where conspiracy theories have power. Understanding how anything works, can lead, not just for conspiracy theorists to a misplaced believe in intention, centralised control and simplification. We expect, positive or negatively, that politicians can confidently make things happen. Social change or indeed the conservation of social and political institutions, seems magical.

Latour in his actor-network theory and wider philosophy, I think provides an antidote. He is rigorously anti-reductionist. Man, far from being the measure of all things, is one species with agency but agency, controversial for Latour, if I read him write (not that I have really read him) is a feature of all aspects of reality. Everything to some extent is an ‘actant’.

This extreme horizontality is unsustainable however looking at the vast machine, it is fair to say that there is no centre. Or at least the vast climate machine has not resulted from a decision by one individual or institution.

Instead, Edwards shows, a complex interaction of institutions and individuals, and indeed ‘climate’ has produced the machine. This seems a very non esoteric, very empirically grounded and carefully applied account of the concepts of Latour and other, usually French theorists, to understand the operation of ‘assemblage’ etc.

To put it plainly as the cliché goes and the English demand, he shows how something works. Stripping out the mystery to show the key steps in understanding the creation of a globalised climate modelling system. From the strongest denier to the most passionate advocate of climate change emergency, this is an essential text for understanding how the modelling has come about.

I think there are wider lessons for social change, if we want to produce effects in the world, we need a more sophisticated understanding of ‘how things happen’. This is a very useful account of ‘how things happen’. Latour is too horizontal, if everything is actant, nothing and everything has the same effectiveness and nothing, perhaps can be understood. Likewise, without being reductionist or totally reductionist, economics has considerable weight.

Edwards rather than spinning some metaphors and bending, consciously or unconsciously some events to add to a narrative, produces a happily detailed study to show how networks have been shaped by actors and vice versa.

Often the book seems to go into too much detail and can be in some chapters a bit of a trudge. This is not though a criticism, to do the work he has set out to achieve this is necessary and Edwards does suggest different reading strategies for different readers depending on one’s perceived needs.

There is far too much to recount, and I have only skim read the 2010 edition, incidentally some of it spent in the romantically named Honey Street in Wiltshire, on boiling days during Britain’s recently hot (climate change induced) summer.

However, to finish I will review some of this thoughts on STS in the last chapter of the 2010 edition.

Edwards ‘proudly’ counts himself (p.436) as an STS scholar, during the 1960s and 1970s he argues it ‘attacked a technocratic elitism that […] seemed to place scientists beyond the reach of moral values and democratic ideals’. Science was a product of power struggles, human things and larger contexts. Like Edwards I would agree that ‘internalist historiography of science’ needs challenging. Science requires a philosophy of science or to put it simply, science doesn’t automatically get it right, and getting it right tells us nothing about the social consequences of scientific discovery.

Edwards description of the social construction of science, reminds me of Latour’s notions of ‘actants’ and the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom in discussing how humans deal as crafts people with institutional and indeed natural materials that can be shaped or ‘constructed’

‘So far, the ‘social construction of knowledge’ idea makes almost literal sense. If you want to build a skyscraper, you start with natural materials: iron ore, trees, gypsum deposits, and so on. […] erecting your skyscraper – requires not only technology but also social organization, coordinated action, persuasion, standards, and norms. Thus any building is made as much from labor relations, design discussions, banking, politics, and other social processes as from metal, wood, or wallboard. In exactly this sense, science constructs knowledge from natural materials through a combination of technical, social and political processes. This is much of the social constructivist argument seems incontestable – and it is exactly how I have approached the climate knowledge infrastructure in this book’ (p.437).

This incidentally is a really useful insight for climate politics. Calling for a ‘Climate Emergency’ act to be passed by a local authority or a national government, might be useful, however it is close to seeing political change as a form of magic or decree. Combatting climate change and adapting to it’s effects, requires a careful interaction with diverse processes. More sophisticated climate action or more sophisticated politics in general requires an attention to social and natural processes. Perhaps, while an indirect lesson from Edwards’ book, this is the most important.

Where Edwards criticises STS is where STS divides between a trust in social judgement and a distrust in the science. He rejects the belief that ‘Science became little more than ideology or groupthink, within which any belief at all might come to count as ‘knowledge’’ (p.437). Seeing how science is shaped and constructed, should not be a license he argues for rejecting science and trusting mere sceptical opinion.

I agree!

My general prejudice, equally, is that theory is essential. Bring on the Lacan, the Althusser, the Marx, the Freud and even in some circumstances the Latour (although I prefer his insights to be distant and reflected through secondary sources) but use the theory to inform rather than using theory as an academic engagement that makes the glass opaque. We need to see where we are going better in the face of rising temperatures, rising social injustice and the threat of accelerating authoritarianism.

 

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (A critique)

 Jane Bennett. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

I am critical of Jane Bennett's book 'Vibrant Matter', I will try to briefly explain why. Her book is an example of a number of titles discussing the 'New Materialism'. Associated with Bruno Latour this is a philosophical perspective, an ontology (the study of being), which argues, as far as I understand, that matter has a life of it's own. Human beings rather than having exclusive agency, the ability to act and strategise, are part of a universe of things which act. Mammals, worms, light bulbs, mountains, stars, metal, you name it, are 'actants'. Deep ecology extends moral standing to all of nature, the new materialism goes much further to argues that everything is nature, and everything has agency.

I think there is much to commend this.

However reading Jane Bennett's text I was deeply troubled by a reference to Garrett Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' (Bennett 2010: 27). Hardin was to be blunt a racist, the tragedy is a pessimistic hymn to disaster. Hardin argued that irrespective of individual agency, a free rider problem occurs that means we inevitably tend to degrade common land and other environments.

It is useful to read a text, in my opinion, in terms of its silences. Bennett is silent about Elinor Ostrom. Winning a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, Ostrom questioned the tragedy. Potentially it is a problem she agreed but often individuals can with the appropriate institutions over come it. Ostrom is often met in silence, the silence is particularly loud in Bennett.

Hardin is often dropped into texts, a code of the destructive commons, so common sensical, as to need no discussion. Yet his work demands challenge, his 'Tragedy of the Commons' is used to justify a coercive approach to environmental policy making, he used it specifically to argue for authoritarian policies. It demands challenge, along with his 'Life Boat Thesis', I would argue that metaphors can have material effects and dangerous ones at that.

The stakes of a new materialism are potentially high. Bennett argues that materialism might be a better way of approaching ecological problems than environmentalism, 'the discourse of encountering a vital materiality over that of caring for an environment' (Bennett 2010: 111).

I am not convinced but nonetheless seeing the rest of creation as vibrant rather than passive may have positive implications. We are not the centre of the universe, there is arrogance in humanism perhaps.

And yet? The casual use of the 'tragedy of the commons' trope, makes me suspicious. New Materialism is perhaps about ethics, insert Hardin's grim myth, used by him to advocate repression, and the silence about Ostrom's engagement with this question is problematic.

As Ostrom recalled in an interview in 2010:

Hardin gave a speech on the IU [Indiana University, Bloomington] campus, and I went to it, and he indicated the more general – but then it was that he really was worried about population. He indicated that every man and every woman should be sterilized after they have one child. He was very serious about it. […] I was somewhat taken aback: ‘My theory proves that we should do this,’ and people said, ‘Well, don’t you think that that’s a little severe?’ ‘No! That’s what we should do, or we’re sunk.’ Well, he, in my mind, became a totalitarian.

Why are we still silent about a trope used to justify enclosure and displacement, a trope which poetically promotes an authoritarian environmentalism?

Derrida argues somewhere that the margins, the footnotes, the apparently minor elements of a text can be powerful. The 'tragedy of the commons' is so minor in Bennett's text, with little importance for her argument. And yet margins, the tiny things, that are so trivial are so important.

If we don't get the ethics of how humans interact with humans, how are we going ever get on to our interactions with vibrant matter. Perhaps we won't. Commoning is about the ethics of human cooperation, the anti-commons of enclosure so often a tool for rejecting the ethical as utterly unrealistic.

In turn I think the silence around Elinor Ostrom's political ecology and indeed political ecology, might provide a productive comment on Bennett's ecology of things.Bennett concludes her book with the following creed

'And I know that more needs to be said specify the normative implications of a vital materialism in specific contexts. So I will end with a litany, a kind of Nicene Creed for would be vital materialists. I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things. I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, ... (Bennett 2010: 122) '

I wonder whether Ostrom's challenge to Hardin's authoritarianism might help materialise the materialist creed. After all referencing Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett notes their use of 'associations' and 'assemblages'. Commoners build associations between each other, may be while Latour's 'parliament of things' is rather vague, commons might be extended to the non human, at least, commoning with the newts and crows being considered?

More heat than life: The tangled roots of ecology, energy and economics (Review)

 

Jeremy Walker's book looks at the roots of ecology and economics. Despite the common 'eco' element his core argument is that they are divergent systems of thought. Ecology looks at the inter relationship of different species, economics is focussed on that which we can measure with money alone. 

In particular the growth imperative in modern economics is unsustainable. This has accelerated Walker argues with neoliberalism.

His suggestion, I think, is that 'economics' has more gravity in our society and tends to bend ecology, or at least ecological policy making, into market based solutions such as carbon trading.

There is much of interest in this book. The mention of fire ecology and the use fire by indigenous populations, particularly in Australia, suggests a system of sophisticated environmental management, much of which was destroyed by colonialism. A topic I was introduced to in my first degree in environmental archaeology in the 1980s, one I think I need to return to and read more about. Walker outlines some key sources on this.

While ecology is largely positively contrasted with economics, Walker notes that ecology as a science has been influenced both by colonialism and way, think of the cybernetics of the Rand corporation feeding into both academic and popular approaches.

Climate change is a key theme through out the book, which while it has a sharp polemical edge is an academic and well argued text.

One concept, the book introduce me too, and I am a great believer in the productivity of concepts (even when they are being used to challenge productivism), I picked up in the book was that of  'agnotology'. This is the opposite of 'epistemology'. Where as epistemology is the study of how knowledge is produced, agnotology is the study of how ignorance is produced and sustained.

I have long held via Althusser and Spinoza that silences must be studied. That which isn't spoken of is often significant.

I guess this brings me to one small criticism. The silence about Elinor Ostrom. The very different reasons why authors are silent about Elinor Ostrom, could fill a book (a library?). I guess she simply doesn't neatly fit in. Her lack of fit is one of the most important things about her, she certainly read both the ecology and the economics, often her research included teams of both natural and social scientists.

I guess Walker's criticism of the evolution of 'resilience' could be used as a criticism of her work. I think it is important, though, to see how concepts can be mobilised and taken in different directions. How we do this is an area worthy of discussion. Concepts rather than being 'essential' can mutate, perhaps everything if pushed far enough can evolve into its opposite. I guess to conclude that this book that discusses the trajectories of 'eco', is making this point.

Are you a pervert or just hysterical? A review of The unbearable lightness of climate populism by Swyngedouw, Erik

'Fetishistic disavowal refers to living through an ideological fantasy that structures the practices of social life in a manner that we can both know the truth of the situation yet act in a different way, without losing subjective or social consistency or coherence. With respect to climate change, this refers not to climate denial, but rather to the repression, disavowal, or foreclosure of the Real mechanisms that produce the climate crisis, namely what David Harvey (2019) calls the ‘mad dance of accumulation’, driven by the expanded circulation of capital and choreographed by class dynamics and other socioecological conflicts and struggles that animate this process, and their displacement around a fetishized ‘thing’ (greenhouse gases) that becomes the quilting point around which both fear and hope revolves and discourse and action crystallizes. As such, ecology operates as ‘the new opium for the masses’ (Žižek 2008b). ' Swyngedouw 2022:4

The political ecologist Erik Swyngedouw has provided a Lacanian-Marxist critique of most climate change activism. I think there is a danger (always) of hyperbole and simplification in such critiques. Lacan can also be difficult to grasp, I am certainly no expert, there are those who might contest Lacan's legacy for climate change politics. Nonetheless I think Swyngedouw 's paper, published in Environmental Politics is interesting. 

(Erik Swyngedouw (2022): The unbearable lightness of climate populism, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2022.2090636 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2090636)

Lacan was a French psycho-analyst, his work was Freudian but indebted to the emerging structural linguistics of the 1960s. He has strongly influenced a range of social theorists including Althusser, Foucault and more recently Žižek.

Again I am no expert but I suspect that the notion that there is a lack or absence with which we structure our personalities is an important insight. I think this is derived from Hegel as much as from Freud.

To put things simply, we may have political commitments, which rather than being based on real 'empirical' facts are based on strong emotional attachments. This isn't to call anyone out, we all have personalities, our personalities are based on lack, to anchor ourselves we have strong emotional investments in particular symbols. By the way, this is my vulgar reading, little to do with Erik's reading.

By climate populism Swyngedouw means mainstream climate campaigning. Given the crisis unfolding we demand action from governments to save us from climate apocalypse.

Swyngedouw contrast this with climate denial a la Trump, and also with a more anti-capitalist approach.

I tend to favour an anti-capitalist approach because capitalism tends to generate climate change and other ecological ills. Nonetheless I am not going to bin mainstream campaigning because we need swift action on climate, as well as looking to dig out the more fundamental under lying causes.

OK, are we perverts or hysterics?  I think both terms are loaded and pejorative. Nigel Farage is a climate pervert (?) and Roger Hallam is hysterical about climate change (?), not sure that clinical terminology is accepted though as anything other than insult. By the way, perhaps there is no 'normal' and no real 'pathological' in Lacan's approach (so incidentally I am rather hazy as to the purpose of analysis in his work?).

The gendered and insulting term 'hysterical' also demands to be addressed. Perhaps challenging the whole Freudian edifice as a patriarchal project?

Anyway sticking with Lacan for the moment, the perverts are in denial about climate change. Essentially climate change policies threaten their enjoyment, so must be resisted.

The hysterics demand action from a master. The discourse of the master, involves appealing to an authority. The authority is blamed, seen as inadequate in its response. However while the hysteric screams at the master and is frustrated,  the hysteric enjoys their symptoms of frustration. Failure to be heard gives the satisfaction of justified anger. The resistance to the Master, the appeals to the master, the conflict with the master, all reinforce the master, in this case as they fail to adequately deal with the climate crisis (think Biden).

The alternative to the discourse of the master is to recognise that the master must not be addressed or even replaced (the work say of a Green Party) but the conditions necessary for a master must be removed.

The idea of the symptom is key to both perverts and hysterics. The symptom is an alien intrusion into an otherwise harmonious system. 'Migrants' and 'carbon dioxide' are such intrusions. For the pervert, migrants are the enemy; for the climate populist, carbon dioxide is the enemy. Remove the symptom and what is natural can be restored. Thus reactionary and 'progressive' populism (is the whole paper sub-tweeting Laclau and Mouffe?)

For Swyngedouw the real contradictions of an unjust system must be addressed, this involves the recognition that the climate crisis is already with us, there is not a homogenous human species and technological fixes are inadequate:

'If we really want to take the ecological condition seriously, we have to displace the question of ecology from a populist frame onto the terrain of agonistic politicization, animated by a sustained fidelity to what Alain Badiou calls a passion for the real possibility and necessity of an egalitarian common world. It is through such political project that a common and enabling climate might be constituted.' (Swyngedouw 2022: 17)

I tend to agree, but don't we know this already? (Once stripped of some of the technical language we might note its capitalism innit!) How do we proceed strategically and tactically? Making change without transforming the system is also going to be necessary because, yes, the climate crisis is here.

A great paper, but academics risk standing as analysts or even masters. Lacan too had great insights but was no revolutionary. I love the insights of Lacan and Badiou (who is also referenced by Swyngedouw) but they provide insights/hints and we need to go far further, far faster.

So Swyngedouw reminds us of a starting point we knew already, well, many of us knew already. How do we intervene to ultimately remove capitalism? Over a century of Marxist praxis hasn't provided an entirely transparent answer, although Marx via Lenin to my mind is a start to any adequate strategy. How do we build the base, serve people, heal the world and intervene practically (and not just in the realm of high theory informed by French masters?)

The Three Body-Problem

 “Pan-Species Communism. It’s an ideology I invented. Or maybe you can call it a faith. Its core belief is that all species on Earth are created equal.”

I have just finished reading Liu Cixin's science fiction novel 'The Three Body-Problem'. I will resist spoilers. 

Nonetheless it has something to say about peace, war, technology, climate change and deep ecology.

Oh and space travel, physics and lots of maths, after all the three body problem is a mathematical challenge.

Reminds me of some of the better classical Doctor Who plots. It starts in the Cultural Revolution, a reminder from the novel that this involved pitched battles with military equipment between different factions. 

It is a novel with a turn the page plot and fascinating concepts. It avoids moral binaries, are the Pan-Species Communists heroes or villains (?), well that is up for debate.