Thank you so much for your kind introduction.
I think now you know about my book, Karl Marx Eco-Socialism.
Today I'm going to talk about something new.
In the last section, people talked about the feasibility of the transition.
But I think this section is more about imagining utopia,
because I think one of the main importance
of the humanities today, in the Anthropocene,
is about regaining a new kind of utopia or imaginary,
because the capitalism became such an obvious fact to us.
But I think within capitalism,
we cannot really solve this problem of climate crisis.
That's why we need to imagine a much more radical,
different kind of future today.
And also, this is my love call to diagnose people,
because I think based on my new reading of Marx,
- you know, some Marxists treated degrowth people very badly,
but I'm friendly and supportive of the view of Degrowth.
So this is what I'm going to talk about today.
I'm going to share my PowerPoint,
and since the time is
quite limited, I go
as fast as I can.
Today I'm going to talk about the climate crisis
and ecological revolution, and I deal with three different kinds
of imaginative future vision.
And I criticize two and I defend the last one
that eco-socialism, basically.
We are living in the Anthropocene.
I think we talked about it yesterday.
So I'm not going through this.
But the situation, it looks like the end of the future, as Bill McKibben argued.
But this end of nature did not realize any human domination over nature.
Rather, what we are witnessing today is increasing uncontrollability of nature.
And some people talk about the return of nature,
the extinction of species, desertification, super hurricanes, soil erosion,
- that these are problems that humans cannot really adequately solve.
So after 30 years of the famous
Fukuyama's declaration about the end of history,
what we are witnessing under this
celebration of global capitalisms
is the end of human civilization.
The whole point is:
We need a much more radical
vision, a much more radical theoretical framework.
I'm not going to talk about how fast we need
to reduce the carbon dioxide because everyone knows about this.
But the whole point is that it seems very unlikely that we can attain
zero carbon emission by 2050
with this current pace of economic growth.
That's why people are talking about
"System change, not Climate Change" everywhere.
But the point is or the question is: What kind of systemic change do we want?
That's I'm going to talk about.
One is, of course, Green Capitalism.
People talk about the Green New Deal everywhere.
And I characterize Green New Deal as Climate Keynesianism.
I'm not rejecting Green New Deal as such,
but I'm basically criticizing here
Climate Keynesianism, the kind of Green New Deal,
as suggested by the supporters of the Green Capitalism.
In this context,
the pandemic is a very interesting case.
Pandemic marks
the end of the neoliberal austerity and the beginning
of the new age of the fiscal stimulus.
It's very surprising that even politicians
and big corporations are welcoming
the government spending increase.
And I think these people have been talking about austerity
for such a long time, but now they're talking about green investment a lot,
because this is a kind of welcome situation for many corporations.
It opens up new opportunities for huge investment
to revive the real economy stagnating in the last 20 years.
But now they can even get the support from the government.
And this is also the end of the financial capitalism.
So pandemic creates the situation
that is characterized by two ends: The end of neoliberal austerity
and the end of financial capitalism.
So they are going to go into using this Green New Deal policy,
invest in solar panels, electric vehicles and whatever
they really need to rebuild the entire social infrastructure.
So we we are witnessing the opening up of new
ways of investing in the real economy.
So they expect
or they hope that this economic growth, through the greening
of the entire economy, offers a possibility to attain
the broader consensus, not just among the elites,
but also from the lower and middle class in the Global North:
creating new jobs,
you know, booming economy,
rising wages and rising demand, etc..
But this is nothing but the formation of a new kind of the "imperiale Lebensweise",
the imperial ways of living, in the age of the climate crisis.
As Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand discussed
the "imperiale Lebensweise" after World War II.
But this is a new phase in the climate crisis.
It will only lead to ecological imperialism, I assume,
not just because of the myth of decoupling.
As Kallis and Hickel convincingly demonstrated
we have not witnessed any absolute decoupling
in the current growing system of economy.
But also the problem is that Green Capitalism is not fast enough
to tackle the climate crisis, especially because short term profit
is not compatible with long term universal metabolism of nature.
But also the problem is that Green New Deal basically strengthenes
the ecological imperialism and unequal exchange of labor,
resources and environment, environmental damage.
This is very characteristics to "imperiale Lebensweise"
The reducing of CO2 in the Global North
by building solar panels of electric vehicles
or whatsoever is realized only through intense,
much more intensive and extensive robbery of nature in the Global South.
And this tendency is already becoming apparent in the last few months,
in the rising price of lithium, the cobalt and nickel
and the other kinds of rare earths is just prices going up
because all the countries are now expecting a the huge demand in the future.
So in this ecological imperialism,
the capital accumulation can go on and on,
but not a free and just sustainable development.
So the economic crisis can be postponed successfully,
but ecological crisis becomes only worse
and severe, especially in the Global South.
So we need to challenge much more radically the green capitalism.
I don't have time because I want to talk about Marx
in the second half, so I'm not really arguing in detail.
But many people, like Kallis and Hickel, already demonstrated,
that this kind of Green New Deal doesn't really work.
Only works for the Global North.
So I think in the Anthropocene, even though Chakrabarty
doesn't really want to talk about capitalism anymore,
in the Anthropocene, I'm not sure if she talked about capitalism yesterday, but
she doesn't talk about capitalism,
but I think if we really, want to solve
this problem of climate crisis, we need to challenge capitalism.
And that's why there's a growing interest in Ecosocialism and Degrowth
And we're invite it today as speaker, I hope.
I'm basically defending
the position of eco socialism,
but I also want to show that eco socialism
is quite compatible with Degrowth,
and the Marxist vision of ecosocialism is compatible with degrowth, too.
However, as Zala just talked about in the introduction,
Marxism is quite a notorious for the Promethean vision of future.
Prometheanism is basically about absolute domination of nature
through technologies.
And the problem is,
that the eco socialism is not always green,
it's rather brown, I would say,
and I have been trying to demonstrate
that eco socialism is green.
And Marx himself was quite seriously interested in the problem of ecology.
But again, this is what I have been confronting
in the last few years, is that this defense: the passionate
defense of Prometheanism, even among the left!
Ray Brassier famously defended the Prometheanism,
and he basically called for reviving of the Promethean idea
as the central identity of Marxism.
And there is a clear affinity
between Marx and the eco modernism like Breakthrough Institute, etc.,
and those people basically argue that Anthropocene already signals
too much intervention in nature, too much human intervention.
So we cannot retreat from this situation.
... once famously called it the ...,
but it's basically about necessity of further
human intervention or further control of nature
for the sake of the survival of humanity, if not human emancipation.
So some Marxists argue for further usage of nuclear power plants,
geoengineering, all the negative emission technologies.
And they even criticize
the degrowth movement as a kind of "folk politics".
"Folk politics" basically means that it's just local small scale
and minoritarian social movements that doesn't have any impacts
upon the global capitalism.
We need to challenge the system, says Zizek for example,
we need to really challenge the global capitalism as a world system.
So, "folk politics" is a very inadequate way of challenging this system.
Like the Occupy movement, that didn't change anything.
That's what they say.
People like Aron Bastani in his book
"Fully Automated Luxury Communism" basically celebrates
the new technologies
as the foundation of post-capitalism.
They hope that the technological development
under capitalism creates post-scarcity future
and it will ultimately "blow capitalism sky high".
That expression comes from the "Grundrisse".
But obviously, Marx did not simply praise the capitalist
development of productive forces as a progress of history,
simply because of the fact
that technology under capitalism is not neutral at all.
This is what he argues in "Capital":
the problem of productive forces of capital.
The point is basically, that productive forces of capital
is about increasing productive forces
for the sake of domination over workers and nature.
The capitalist development of technologies is not about
liberating workers from work.
It's about disciplining them, controlling them, commanding over them.
It only reinforces the regime of capital.
It only builds further domination over workers.
And Richard York and Clark also argue
that the captilalist technology
as a productive force of capital can only shift
the metabolic rift, but it can never really repair it.
That's the problem
that we just witnessed in my critique of the Green New Deal.
It's just about "imperiale Lebensweise" in the global north, but the problem
is simply shifted to somewhere else and to some other kind of people.
But the problem of the rift remains all the time.
So what I problematize,
what I see in Bastani is the poverty of philosophy
or poverty or imagination, because Bastani can imagine
a post-capitalist and a post-scarcity future
only based on capitalist technologies
such as EV and electric vehicles and solar panels,
more artificial meat and asteroid mining, etc..
But this is not the way that we should be aiming.
Why?
- By the way, this is my new book, "Das Kapital im Anthropezän"
and it just appeared in Japanese. -
Basically, I'm arguing for de-growth communism
But what I argued in this book,
- I'm currently writing an English version of it -,
but if I very roughly summarize:
What we witness in Bastani is the persistence of Capitalist Realism:
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."
That's Mark Fishers' capitalist realism.
I'm calling for regaining
much more radical post-capitalist imaginary,
because without such imagination, ecological revolution
ends up simply demanding accelerating
what already exists, such as basic income, modern monetary theory,
Green New Deal, global tax, full automation...
simply accelerating what already potentially exists.
It's not really different from what capitalism offers.
That's my conviction, and that's also what Zizek points out
as the paradox of radical policies.
Here's what it means: In order to realize the ideal kind of basic income.
Green New Deal, or modern monetary theory, because, you know, basic income
could be utilized by more conservative people to cut social welfare, etc..
So if you want to have really emancipating
kinds of Basic income or Green New Deal, the power of the social movements
must be so strong, really strong,
so strong that even we can overcome capitalism!
Because otherwise conservative people or right wing people simply dominate
the basic income and they use it for other purposes.
So we really need to have a strong power
to beat those enemies. But if we can beat enemies,
why do we preserve capitalism?
If we can be enemies, we should simply abolish
capitalism as such.
So the main contradiction is that
they want to have some radical vision through radical policies,
like Modern Monetary Theory, or basic income or whatsoever.
But they want to conserve fundamental characteristics of capitalism,
such as wage labor, market competition and economic growth, etc..
So these are not very convincing ways of imagining an utopia,
because utopia can be more characterized by: less work,
more commons, more creative activities, sex or whatsoever.
But this is something that has been seriously
marginalized and oppressed under the capitalism mode of production.
And in order to bring up this kind of marginalized utopia
back into the table again, I think it is also necessary
to redefine abundance and scarcity.
And this is why the humanities is very important, because we can
have this new definition of these concepts so that we can have
a more non-productive post-scarcity society.
And this is also conducted recently
by Benavan, in his critique of full automation.
But in any case
I do this by going back to Marx.
And the problem is that basically under capitalism
we can never have abundance.
Capitalism is a system that is
ultimately essentially characterized by scarcity,
because capitalism aims at endless growth endless capitali accumulation.
So it is really, no matter how much it develops,
it is always scarse. And capital also creates
scarcity through commodification of the entire world.
And this is what John Bellamy Foster problematizes
is paradox of wealth or the Lauderdale paradox.
It just is about how the increase
of private wealth is fundamentally characterized
by the decline or decrease of public wealth.
Because if we remember
about primitive accumulation, it's about
dissolving the commons
in order to create the private wealth.
So from the beginning, capitalism,
is characterized by this creation of artificial scarcity.
That's the first negation of capitalism.
Primitive accumulation is the beginning
of this creation of artificial scarcity
for the sake of increasing private riches.
And Marx quite consistently, argued that
the second negation, "die Negation der Negation"
as the rehabilitation of the earth,
He says that the capitalist production begets its own negation.
This is the negation of the negation.
It does not re-establish private property
but it does indeed establish
individual property on the basis of the achievement of the capitalis era,
namely cooperation and the possession in common over the earth, "die Erde"
and the means of production produced by labor itself.
So Marx is quite equal socialist here, right?
That the Earth, "die Erde" doesn't belong to anyone.
It just it must be a common.
And I, when I read this,
I realized how ecological Marx could be.
And I started
doing research in his notebooks and I realized more and more
how his engagement with ecological issues
was actually much deeper than other people previously assumed.
And I showed this by editing the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.
But I'm not going into detail of this.
But anyway, Marx clearly regarded the rehabilitation
of sustainable production as the central task of socialism.
That's why I call his socialism eco-socialism.
And this is the view that Marx already
developed in "Capital" Volume 1 for example, in this passage here.
But the problem is that there are some passages that seem
kind of contradictory,
and one passage is this one, in the critique of the Gothaer Programm
written in 1871, after "Capital".
Here he seems quite Promethean.
He says in this famous passage.
"In a higher phase of communist society,
after the productive forces have also increased
with the all-round development and all the springs of the common wealth,
"genossenschaftlicher Reichtum" flow more abundantly
- only then can the narrow horizon or bourgeois right
be crossed in its entirety, and society inscribe on its banners:
From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs."
So here he's saying about how the wealth flows more abundantly
and that people can consume a lot.
And that's why people like H. Daly, the famous conomist
of the state economy, criticized this passage.
He says how Marx is determinist and economy growth
is always crucial in order to have abundance, etc..
But it doesn't make sense, right?
Because, if Marx was already ecological in Capital Volume 1, written in 1867,
why was he so naive in 1871?
And I think one important hint
is this expression
the abundance of "genossenschaftlicher Reichtum".
So it's not about abundance
of private wealth.
He says: We need to overcome the "narrow horizon of burgeois right".
If we want to have the abundance of material wealth,
if you want to have more and more of what we as individual
can consume, we are still trapped in the narrow bourgeois horizon.
But we need to overcome this.
This is what he says.
And then we have the true abundance of wealth,
as "genossenschaftlicher Reichtum", the common wealth.
And this is very interesting, actually.
If you read in this way, Marx is basically talking
in this "Negation der Negation"
about re-habilitating the common wealth
and that's the foundation of the abundant society.
The post-scarcity society is about
rehabilitating this abundance of "genossenschaftlicher Reichtum",
not consumptionist material goods.
So I want to say that the abundance of the "genossenschaftlicher Reichtum"
is not equivalent to the unlimited access to abundant goods.
Otherwise, communism society would simply repeat the same form
of private riches of capitalism.
Since primitive accumulation created artificial scarcity.
Communism reverses the order with the aim of recovering
the radical abundance of the common wealth, making it
equally accessible to everyone at the cost of private wealth.
So I'm running out of time.
So I'm going to my conclusion Its basically:
Marx' eco-socialism is characterized in the following way:
It is based on Marx conviction that the capitalism is a system
with perpetual scarcity due to its drive for unlimited capital accumulation.
It can never end.
It needs more and more and it creates abundance.
But it's always caracterized by scarcity.
So they want more.
That's how we are now facing this climate crisis.
And against this unlimited growths.
Marx was basically arguing for rehabilitating the abundance
of common wealth.
Abundance of wealth through commonification.
That's the "genossenschaftlicher Reichtum"
in that passage of his critique of the Gothaer Programm.
an increasing commons and reducing work time
and increasing time for non-consumptionists activities such as art, sports, sex
care work or whatsoever, as well as decreasing the environmental damage
can be quite central to Marx's own eco socialism.
That's my point. Of course, thats eco-socialism, you can simply say so,
but also Marx' own view was quite compatible with this.
And although Kate Soper in her recent book
criticized Marxism,
but I think what she suggests as "alternative hedonism"
is quite compatible with my own reading of Marx text
and this is really the new culture, and this is the topic of our section.
So the system is changing and the new culture emerges
or the transformation of the system must be accompanied by the creation
of new values and a new culture, because otherwise we end up
with producing more and more.
And that's why I want to highlight eco-socialism without growth,
this is what Kallis says, it quite compatible with Marx
own vision opposed to scarcity societies,
and it is precisely our radical alternative
to capture this abundance in the age of climate crisis.
Thank you so much.