David Black
June 26 2023
The Limits of Politics in the Anthropocene
In recent years Left Populism has lost momentum; seemingly eclipsed by the paranoid nativism of the Far Right, or recuperated by zombified social democracy. ‘We’ may still be the ‘99 per cent’, but the implied one per cent are still in charge, and, according to Greta Thunberg, the planet is burning amid ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’. So, whatever happened?
The rise of Left Populism took place in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. Those years saw the emergence of the Occupy! movement in the USA, which powered up the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the Indignados movement in Spain which did likewise for the Podemos party. In Greece, the populist upsurge led to the formation of the Syriza coalition, which became the government in 2015. Populism had traction all over Europe, including Britain – where it took the form of a revival of the Labour Party Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn – and in various parts of South America.
According to Pablo Iglesias, general secretary of the Podemos party, ‘the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels’. One of the key sources of populist synthesis was the book On Populist Reason (2005) by Argentine political theorist, Ernst Laclau. Populism, according to Laclau, is ‘the political act par excellence’ which constructs the concept of the ‘people’. Politics is not reducible to traditional Leftist representations of classes or social forces, e.g., workers, peasants, racial or sexual minorities. Rather, the political is about discourse — language.
Swedish Marxist, Carl Cassegard, says Laclau’s book is
‘a theoretization of populism as a way in which the political is constituted as an least seemingly autonomous realm, independent of social forces in an almost quasi-transcendental way.’
Outside of the world of political discourse there is nothing to constitute a changeable process of social reality. In terms of Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistics theory, the relation is between the signifier (the political stirrings of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘underdogs’ against the unaccountable alien power of the ‘elite’) and the thing signified (the ‘power of the people’). Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Laclau denotes the idea of the ‘people’ as the imaginary subject’s unattainable object of desire. Laclau’s concept of the ‘people’ is also homologous with the noumenal world in which Kant confines freedom and morality—for Kant there is nothing outside of the categories of the understanding that can constitute any sort of transcendence. Hegel describes Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself as a bit like Hamlet’s father’s ghost: you can’t grasp it or make even make ‘sense’ of it, yet it is real in that it exercises moral power over Hamlet’s actions.
The New Left Utopians
Theorists of 21st century Populism believe they are on the ‘right side of history’ because of the possibilities afforded by technology. Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso: 2019), was widely reviewed in mainstream media. During the Lockdown, millions of white-collar workers found that the abundance of technology in their homes made the daily commute and the management office both seem anachronistic. Andy Kessler, in the Wall Street Journal (17 May 2021) saw a connection between this phenomenon and Bastani’s book:
‘At first I thought it was a joke. I still do… Cue rainbow-belching unicorns, The Atlantic wrote that “the vision is compelling.” The New York Times helped promote it. And it sure feels like the Biden administration is trying to implement it. Naturally, it’s complete baloney.’
Like other hostiles, Kessler didn’t get to Bastani’s main pitch, which was an attempt to rebrand Marxism by re-interpreting Marx’s insights in the light of 21st century technology. Here, Bastani is in the company of Paul Mason (in Postcapitalism: A Guide To Our Future), Ash Sarkar (his colleague at Novara Media) and various ‘technological utopians’ and ‘left accelerationists’. They all draw their theoretical framework from the concept of the ‘General Intellect’ which Marx sets out in a text known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in his Grundrisse (which lay unpublished for 100 years). Marx conducts a thought experiment. Assuming a society consisting only of workers and capitalists, market competition compels capitalists to introduce new machines and thus acquire extra surplus. The capitalist innovators in productive technology increase their profits and drive their slower-moving competitors out of business. However, unless the scale of production expands more rapidly than the rate of increase in productivity, less workers will be employed. The increasing investment in fixed capital is accompanied by the lessening of value produced by workers in society as a whole.
‘General Intellect’ denotes the accumulated knowledge of this society. The intellect becomes generalised to such an extent that the dominance of mental over mental labour – what Alfred Sohn-Rethel terms the ‘autonomous intellect’, based on the Kantian transcendental subject – reaches the point where the division itself is universally seen as anachronistic. So, as the development of social collaboration and free knowledge destabilizes the market mechanism and the system of private property, the capitalist mode of production breaks down. Marx writes:
‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.’ (145)
The idea of the General Intellect has resonated in some unexpected places. Samuel McIlhagga in Foreign Policy (May 28, 2023) writes: ‘Marx shares an optimism with Silicon Valley about the potential for rapid technological change but is also far more skeptical about the short-term uncontrolled effects machines will have on human beings.’ The problem McIlhagga sees with Marxists of the Boomer and Millennial generations is that they have relied too much of Marx’s Capital:
‘It’s not that Marx can’t help the new post-COVID-19 generation understand its own forms of accelerating social, economic, and natural dislocation. But Generation Z would be wise to trade Marx’s Das Kapital for his long-neglected Grundrisse.’
The Productive Forces of Capital
The idea of the General Intellect and capitalist breakdown did not make it into Marx’s Capital Volume 1 or into the never completed volumes II and III. The reason for this, according to Kohei Saito in his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, is because there was a decisive shift in Marx’s conception of history, which occurred sometime between 1863 and 1866. This is shown in a draft from that period, entitled ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’. Here, the ‘two sides’ of production – relations and forces of production are subsumed as the ‘productive forces of capital’. This is closely tied to two other concepts: ‘cooperation’ and ‘real subsumption of labour under capital’. What it shows is not how capitalism breaks down — to our benefit – but how breaks loose — to our cost.
Industry, in the shift from manufacture to machinofacture, introduces new technology and develops new ways of organising distribution and production. This revolutionising of relations between workers and capitalists is theorised as the shift from ‘formal subsumption’ of labour to ‘real subsumption’. Real subsumption reduces the price of labour power by increasing productivity. The independent labour of the individual is nullified. The capitalist, who now commands the means of production (objectified labour), employs living labour in an inversion of the ‘relation of subject and object’. Marx refers to this inversion as ‘a personification of the thing and a reification of the person’. Cooperation, in revolutionising and extending the division of labour, is enforced across whole industries and society as a whole:
‘To the extent that the worker creates wealth, living labour becomes a power of capital; similarly, all development of the productive forces of labour is development of the productive forces of capital’.
Marx’s theory of ‘Metabolism’ addresses how the transhistorical, interactive relation of humans with the rest of nature undergoes a ‘metabolic rift’ which is historically specific to productivist capitalism. The rift is an effect of the systematised ‘robbery’ of nature’s resources and the social oppression that enforces it. The ‘automation utopians’ avoid the problem of productivism and technological determinism by focussing on populist electoral politics, and constructing a new ‘political subjectivity’ of forces for social change.
Saito warns that this concentration on the purely political concedes to capital the option of reacting to metabolic rifts by means of metabolic shifts, such as introducing geo-engineering ‘in the name of stewardship of the earth… to manage the entire ecological system at the cost of enslaving people – especially in the Global South through the metabolic shift – to heteronomous regulation by technologies’. Capital is able to deal with problems by simply shifting them elsewhere. It can do so spatially, by transferring the metabolic robbery system to places in world beyond democratic oversight; and temporally, by leaving the problems and the human costs to be solved and paid for by succeeding generations.Saito writes: ‘…politics alone is not able to change society because the extension of democracy to the economic realm will face an insurmountable limit when it comes to challenging and undermining the power of capital.’ Populist electoralism has a tendency to be hijacked by the right or recuperated by the centre. Cassegard writes:
‘Populism isn’t necessarily radical. Examples of the extension and unification of equivalential chains in the name of the people abound in institutionalized politics. That, after all, is how most mainstream political parties in modern liberal democracies work.’
Getting Real
Bastani highlights a quote from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, which envisions the ‘higher phase of communist society’ as where
‘labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’
Ecosocialists have expressed reservations about this statement because it appears to be ‘productivist’; i.e. an argument for the exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. Bastani doesn’t regard this as too much of a problem as he thinks that high-tech can make production more eco-friendly if it is organised rationally and democratically:
‘So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.’
Saito, addressing the concerns about ‘productivism’, suggests that development of productive forces Marx envisages in the Critique is not equivalent to merely quantitative increases in production of the same commodities as under capitalism. For Saito, communism would have a ‘stationary state’ economy for satisfying real human needs, and would actually make it less productive, where necessary:
’This reorganization of the labour process may decrease productivity by abolishing the excessive division of labour and making labour more democratic and attractive, but it nonetheless counts as the “development” of productive forces of social labour because it ensures the free and autonomous activity of individual workers.’
Saito gives five reasons why de-growth communism would increase the chance of repairing the metabolic rift.
Firstly, whereas capital, in its drive for unlimited growth and profit, is bound to make and sell non-essential and harmful products, the abolition of the law of value would allow the reallocation of resources to essentials such as care and real luxuries such a art, sport and travel.
Secondly, unnecessary labour, especially energy and resource-consuming ‘bullshit jobs’ would be eliminated..
Thirdly, de-growth communism would transform the remaining realm of necessity to make the content of work more attractive.
Fourthly, the abolition of market competition for profits would de-accelerate the economy and ease pressure on the biosphere.
Finally, ‘Through collective decision-making processes, workers have more room to reflect upon the necessity of their products, egalitarian relations of class, gender and race, and environmental impacts.’
Saito’s case for a de-growth Marx is at the same time an argument for humanist communism. Anti-humanism, faced with the Anthropocene, takes such forms as technological determinism, deep-green catastrophism, Bible-prophesies and ‘hidden hand’ of libertarian economics. But an existential problem does not have a political/ideological solution. Political promises are usually lies; and ideologies serve to rationalise capital’s personification of things and reification of persons. We need materialism, not as a secular religion of pseudo-scientific rationalism, but as a method for dealing with material problems.
References
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: 2019
Carl Cassegard, ‘Laclau and the return of the people’ (https://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2014/06/laclau-and-return-of-people.html)
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Translated by Karel Ludenhoff • Introduction by Peter Hudis • Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press/Spectre: 2022