Degrowth, fetish, and capital's ecological crisis

This essay is a sympathetic attempt to wrestle with ‘degrowth’. It takes the form, mainly, of a critical engagement with two recent books, Matthias Schmelzer et al’s The future is degrowth, and Kohei Saito’s Marx in the anthropocene. These are worth considering because they’re relatively systematic and rigorous efforts at synthesizing the proliferating landscape of ‘degrowth’ perspectives in the former case and of articulating the bases of a Marxist conception of ‘degrowth’ in the latter. I’m prompted to try to put these thoughts together by the publication this week of yet another bad faith, slightly odd critique of degrowth, ostensibly from the left. There are absolutely limits to degrowth perspectives, on both analytical and political terms. But it’s a source of some frustration for me that left critics of degrowth have (with a few notable exceptions) largely missed the mark. So, here’s me trying to articulate my issue both with degrowth perspectives themselves, and with the majority of left critiques thereof (using this blog for the first time in a while…)

I think any meaningful Marxist critique of degrowth needs to reconcile two points which seem ultimately inarguable:

1) A reduction of material throughputs to the global political economy is vital. Indeed, arguably this reduction will happen one way or another. Eco-modernist fantasies -- left and right -- about enabling sustainable mass consumption through the electrification of everything gloss the brute material fact that solar, wind, and nuclear power generation depend on finite and non-renewable minerals just as much as fossil fuels do. ‘Renewable’ energy is a bit of a misnomer, really. Simply put, there’s not enough cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, or uranium on earth to replace current energy use from fossil fuels (even setting aside the social and ecological damage done by extracting those minerals, deploying them to produce usable energy, and disposing of them).

It’s possible this material problem might be offset somewhat by e.g. improvements in battery efficiency, recycling, further exploration for new deposits of cobalt, lithium, copper and nickel. Alternatively, miraculous advances in direct air capture of CO2 might allow some continued burning of fossil fuels. And, Matt Huber and other left eco-modernists have a point when they claim that one reason why we don’t have any of these things is that there is a contradiction between the relations of production and forces of production under capitalism. The competitive dynamics inherent to capitalist production absolutely do inhibit innovations or activities that aren’t sufficiently profitable.

But it is nonetheless still uncertain at best whether under socialism any of these innovations could take place at sufficient scale or speed, even if unshackled from the imperatives of capital. Socialism could unshackle productive forces from the limits posed by anarchic market coordination, it could permit innovation for social good rather than for profit. But socialism won’t unshackle us from the material limits of the planet. Decarbonization without planned reductions in energy and material use thus promises to avert the worst of catastrophic climate breakdown, but only at the cost of chaotic and unplanned energy shortages and depletion of vital minerals. If we take ‘degrowth’ ultimately to mean a planned reduction in energy and material use on a global scale -- a ‘reduction in material throughput’ as many degrowth advocates put it -- then it is indeed, as Schmelzer et al put it, ‘degrowth or barbarism’ (p. 21). This is perhaps the signal contribution of degrowth perspectives, in asking us to grapple with the material limits of planetary systems. Of course, a ‘planned reduction of material throughputs’ is but one, contested, definition of ‘degrowth’. Which brings me to the second point…

2) In flattening out the contradictions of capitalist development into imperatives for ‘growth’, ‘degrowth’ offers up a blunted and ultimately politically ambivalent diagnosis and critique of capitalism’s ecological degradation. Degrowth in the sense of a reduction of material and energy use is necessary. Yet it’s an object of debate even amongst degrowth advocates whether that requires reductions in consumption and production on a global scale, or their socialization and transformation. It’s equally unclear who will lead a ‘degrowth’ transition, and if you scratch the surface its chief advocates seem to rely a lot on the notion that swaying the amorphous thing that is ‘public opinion’ about the feasibility and desirability of degrowth will drive policy change -- a vanguardist politics without a specific mass or class to lead. This blurriness ultimately has important political consequences as well. As Kai Heron has aptly put it, ‘Degrowth’s simplified conceptual apparatus has obscured the political stakes of a green transition to such an extent that it has been adopted by various irreconcilable traditions: from anti-capitalists to those pursuing a reformist politics of redistribution and reduced consumption’. Leftist eco-modernisms might be accused of a false clarity about the subjects of historical change -- a fetishized ‘working class’, often operationalized in the form of unionized industrial workers, that probably obscures as much as it reveals about the working classes globally, and about actual prospects for socialism. But degrowth perspectives often lack a clarity of any kind here. Insofar as there is a political vision here, is an odd amalgam of ‘top-down’ policy proposals and small-scale experiments.

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The crux of the problem, I think, is that most degrowth perspectives want to hold at least two different and arguably irreconcilable meanings of ‘growth’ at once. Paradoxically, the effective critique of growth in one sense perhaps only underscores the disutility of the other for grasping the (ecological) problem with capitalism and for articulating a meaningful anti-capitalist politics. Let me explain what I mean.

On one hand, degrowth starts from a critique of economic ‘growth’ (that is, GDP) as a measure, target, and ideological fixation. The critique rightly notes that GDP as such is reflective not of overall social well-being, or even really of the ‘economy’ in the colloquial sense, but of the economic and geopolitical priorities of policymakers in a few leading states in a particular mid-twentieth century historical context. In other words, degrowth perspectives seek to historicize, denaturalize, and critique GDP as a measure of human well-being. Schmelzer et al. recapitulate some of this history in broad strokes, while Schmelzer’s own previous work has outlined this history in considerable detail.

This critique of ‘growth’ is compelling to me. GDP is a troublesome measure with a much more recent history than we tend to assume, as is the very concept of the ‘national economy’ as a discrete sphere of activity which GDP seeks to measure. The separation of ‘the economy’ as a discrete space of private activity governed by market prices from state and civil society is one of the chief conceits of liberal governance.

Insofar as GDP represents a measure of total monetized transactions, it is literally the commodity fetish, in its most ‘dazzling form’ (per Marx) as money, aggregated and reified into a single statistical measure meant to sum up the entirety of a ‘national’ economy, the latter itself a fiction necessitated by the contradictory division of the governance of capitalism as a global system into territorially bounded states. GDP is abstraction upon abstraction and mystification upon mystification. And there is little doubt that the measure of GDP occludes many important things about ‘the economy’ and how it works in the process. As feminist critiques have long rightly highlighted, for instance, the construction of ‘the economy’ obscures the unpaid caring labour essential to the reproduction of ‘the economy’. Schmelzer et al. also rightly point to ideological functions of growth -- the growth fetish increasingly serves as an aim of policymaking in and of itself. (Though, I’d argue these are actually of a piece with the fetishization of ‘the economy’ through the construction of GDP. Both are part of the wider political process of class formation and the construction of a fragile bourgeois hegemony.)

So, on one hand, the first degrowth critique is of growth as a fetish, as an instrument of statecraft that emerged out of a particular conjuncture and has taken on a life of its own. But on the other hand, degrowth critiques also depend on a ‘deeper’ meaning of growth as a structural tendency of capitalism, and crucially, the primary source of capitalism’s tendency to degrade and deplete the natural world.

This is not to say that ‘degrowth’ advocates expect capitalism to produce continuous economic growth -- they are well aware of the pervasive crisis tendencies and embedded tendencies to uneven development inherent in capitalism. The argument is pitched more in terms of ‘growth dependence’ -- capitalism cannot survive without aggregate growth. Schmelzer and colleagues use the phrase ‘dynamic stabilization’ -- capitalism perpetually papers over the cracks through aggregate expansion. This is perhaps clearest in the distinction drawn by degrowth advocates between ‘degrowth’ and capitalist recession (see Schmelzer et al. p. 21). Recessions are chaotic, unplanned, and painful precisely because they ostensibly represent the breakdown of growth in societies dependent on growth, and, as such, often necessitate radical and painful measures to re-start growth. Degrowth, by contrast, is about the democratically planned reduction of throughputs, and about the decommodification of basic needs. Hence the refrain, ‘Their recession is not our degrowth’.

There’s a notable kind of affinity here between degrowth positions and ‘metabolic rift’ strands of eco-Marxism. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that probably the most prominent expressly Marxist ‘degrowth’ position -- that is, Saito’s -- starts from the ‘metabolic rift’ position, nor that it is with the Monthly Review school of eco-Marxism centered on the metabolic rift theory with which Schmelzer et al primarily engage, nor that it is specifically in a recent issue of Monthly Review that leading degrowth proponents have sought to engage with eco-Marxist debates. It’s perhaps worth dwelling on these here because they make some of the limits of a critique of growth as a structural tendency of capitalism most apparent.

Much of the content of Saito’s book is an exercise in Marxology. His core claim is that Marx had, indeed, had an ‘epistemic break’ in his thinking, but not the Althusserian one commonly assumed between the early ‘humanist’ Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the later ‘scientific’ one of the three volumes of Capital. Instead, in the 1870s, Marx had engaged deeply in a study of the natural sciences and come around to a position of ‘degrowth communism’. The theory of the metabolic rift, then, is repositioned as the lynchpin of Marx’s ecological thought and his vision of post-capitalist society.

But reinterpreting Marx’s eco-socialism through the lens of the rift introduces some odd interpretive choices into Saito’s work. An illustrative passage concerns Saito’s discussion of one of the key passages of Capital for the metabolic rift theory. In Volume III of Capital, during his discussion of capitalist agriculture and ground rent, Marx notes that large-scale capitalized agriculture

‘reduces the agricultural population to an ever-decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the boundaries of a single country. (Liebig)’ (p. 949 - emphasis added)

This passage is also one of the key touchstones for John Bellamy Foster’s original development of the metabolic rift thesis. Saito’s intervention focuses on highlighting Engels’ editorial contribution to this passage, showing how it ultimately minimizes the importance of the concept of metabolism to Marx’s thinking. As Saito notes, Engels re-words the phrase in italics above. Marx’s original draft reads, instead, that large-scale landownership provokes an irreparable rift ‘between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the laws of the soil’ (qtd. p. 53). Engels’ editorial intervention, in Saito’s view, because it omits the phrase ‘natural metabolism’ and replaces ‘soil’ with ‘life’, obscures the central logic of the metabolic rift and more generally of Leibig’s concept of metabolism to Marx’s mature thinking. It is in keeping with a more fundamental difference between Marx and Engels on the relationship between the social and the natural, with Engels ultimately (unlike Marx) insisting on an ecosocialism conceived in terms of the domination of nature.

But, if Saito is right that Engels’ editorial changes seem to have altered, if subtly, the meaning of Marx’s passage, his reinterpretation also ironically lifts the discussion of the ‘metabolic rift’ out of the context of the discussion of ground rent in which it is placed. Foster’s reading of the published version does much the same. For Saito, it is indicative that one of Marx’s core critiques of capitalism is that it induces a logic of production and valorization on an ‘ever-expanding scale’ leading to the depletion of natural metabolism. In Saito’s thinking, in the original passage Marx is highlighting the global danger inherent in the rift between the logics of social metabolism and those of natural metabolism. In a word, ‘the unique set of capital’s metabolic organization aiming at its own infinite valorization with an ever-expanding scale is incompatible with the natural laws that exist prior to capital’ (Saito, p. 53).  

Yet the wider (and unfinished) set of chapters on ground rent within which this comment is nested suggests a rather different reading. Marx does indeed emphasize a contradiction ‘between the private ownership of land and a rational agriculture, the normal social use of the land’, but crucially this is a contradiction which finds expression in multiple forms. Notably, Marx’s discussion of large-scale landownership and reference to Liebig is in fact quite brief here, consisting of a paragraph at the end of the section. It comes after a much more extensive discussion of the ways in which capitalist property relations inhibit the development of agriculture which is primarily focused on the barriers to capitalization of smaller landholders. And even in the case of large-scale agriculture, the disruption to ‘natural metabolism’ that Marx emphasizes is at least as much about the removal of people and their bodily metabolisms from the land as it is about any impulse to expansion. Taking the discussion of ground rent as a whole, Marx is not claiming that capitalist property relations produce a uniform tendency towards production on an ever-expanding scale, but rather simultaneous and contradictory impulses that accelerate development in some places while restricting it in others. As Marx sums up:

‘instead of a conscious and rational treatment of land as a permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of human generations, we have the exploitation and squandering of the powers of the earth… In the case of small-scale ownership, this results from a lack of the resources and science needed to apply the social productive powers of labour. In the case of large landed property, it results from the exploitation of these resources for the most rapid possible enrichment of the farmer and proprietor. In both cases, from dependence on the market price’ (p. 949).

I’m not going to claim any authority with respect to Marx’s and Engels’ respective contributions to this chapter, nor to Marx’s authorial intent. However, the notion that capital is inherently and unequivocally expansionary, and that this is the primary source of the ecological devastation wrought by capital, is neither helpful politically nor seemingly especially true to Marx’s position.

There’s an important sense in which any argument about capitalism as an inherently expansionary set of social relations is in tension with the ‘GDP as fetish’ position outlined above. If talking about ‘growth’ as a fetish that actively obscures what is happening with the organization of capitalist production and reproduction, it also does a bad job of telling us what it is about capitalist relations of production which drives ecological breakdown. Growth has two faces here -- as a technical apparatus of postwar capitalist statecraft and as an engrained compulsion of capitalist development. Growth is ironically at once intensely historicized and denaturalized in this first face and rendered a transhistorical dynamic of capitalist development in the second.

Underlying these problems, I think, is a simultaneous elision of the interests of capitalists with capitalism, and of the ahistoric totality ‘nature’ with its dynamic constituent systems. Aggregate growth is not a concern of specific capitalists, who are concerned with their own capacity to capture expanded shares of total surplus value. (The only real exception to this are the specific subset of holders of finance capital in the business of lending to governments, they care a lot about aggregate GDP growth because the latter does translate directly into their ability to realise surplus value.) Individual capitalists are compelled to ‘grow’, but this does not necessarily or even normally translate into an aggregate expansionary dynamic. In David McNally’s apt phrasing, ‘Capital does not invest in order to boost Gross Domestic Product… it invests in order to expand itself via the capture of shares of global surplus value’. The competitive dynamics of capital accumulation produce a spatially and temporally uneven pattern of reproduction laden with contradictions and crisis tendencies. Uneven development and periodic crises are as much core, necessary, systemic dynamics of capitalist relations of production as is growth. Particular capitalists can, and historically often have, escaped or loosened the discipline of the market, and made eye-watering profits even at the expense of accumulation in general -- the most salient recent example is surely the record profits being made by oil and gas producers in 2022 and 2023, even as skyrocketing energy prices force businesses to close. (Nevermind the longer-run contradiction between the needs of capital accumulation in general and the breakdown of the climate.) Particular capitals are usually more than happy with the stagnation and decline of accumulation in general, especially insofar as it is manifested in particular national territories, as long as their own profitability can be maintained.

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So why does this all matter?

For one thing, if aggregate growth doesn’t give us much purchase on the behaviour of particular capitalists, or an accurate picture of the core dynamics of capitalist accumulation, it’s also not a particularly helpful explanation for the ecologically destructive tendencies implicit in capitalism. Something like James O’Connor’s ‘second contradiction’ thesis -- in which particular capitals systematically externalize the necessary social and ecological ‘conditions of production’, and tend as a result to deplete and toxify the natural world and the working classes on which capitalist production and reproduction depend across multiple scales, inducing falling profitability and increasingly costly efforts to maintain the conditions of production -- is probably more helpful.

If we take seriously the argument from least some degrowth advocates that growth is an ideological apparatus or a fetish, then having the debate about capital’s ecological destruction on the terrain of growth risks misdirecting us. I find it odd that this isn’t followed through, though, to the seemingly logical conclusion that an argument about whether ‘growth’ as such can be decoupled from rising emissions is somewhat moot. The problem, in short, is capital’s anarchic relations of value. Capital creates a panopoly of uneven development riven by contradictions, not a singular growth logic. Capital also, in the process, tends to deplete and toxify the natures it encounters and assembles. Indeed, the depletion of the natural world should probably be read as a significant cause of stagnating or falling productivity and profitability in many instances. None of this is the result of ‘growth’ per se, so much as the anarchic and alienated compulsion to valorize combined with the externalization of the conditions of production.

But by the same token, there is also no meaningful socialist stake in defending ‘growth’ as such -- it’s a very strange move for ostensibly socialist or Marxist critiques of degrowth to get into this territory. If we want a rationally and democratically planned economy based on collective ownership, then ‘growth’ in the fetishized sense measured by GDP is entirely beside the point. If we want decisions about production made on the basis of use values rather than exchange values, then surely we are talking about doing away with ‘growth’ as such. As noted at the outset, that such an economy and society would need to be planned on the basis of reducing material throughputs is a brute material fact -- degrowth or barbarism.

But then, to stop here is also evidently to leave more questions than answers. Most of all, how do we actually bring about a democratically planned society and economy? Who might do so? Insofar as the fetish of ‘growth’ is part of the ideological and administrative apparatus of the capitalist state, an outgrowth of the separation of ‘economy’ and ‘politics’ at the core of liberal governance, then it is in need of critique. But that’s not a critique, in and of itself, that offers up a meaningful socio-ecological politics. In no small part, this is because the ideology of ‘growth’ is only one part of the array of mystifications, fetishes, and coercive mechanisms through which capitalism reproduces itself politically. After all, capitalism as a mode of production had been around for several hundred years before the twentieth-century invention of ‘growth’ as such. But this critique only gets us so far -- dismantling the growth fetish doesn’t tell us much concrete about how capitalism actually works, nor how its end might be brought about.

The upshot is that degrowth perspectives have the signal merit of highlighting what is unquestionably a necessary condition for our collective survival amidst planetary crisis, but cannot provide either a sufficient critique of capitalist social relations or a concrete idea for how to start to bring that condition about. This is where the limits of ‘growth’ as an analytic lens are limits of ‘degrowth’ as a political project. If degrowth is a policy programme, whether the capitalist states that actually exist in the present could implement it is very much unclear. If degrowth is an experimentalist project made up of so many community level initiatives, it is unclear how the large-scale ‘planning’ of degrowth is meant to come about

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