The alternative is degrowth communism which is founded on sharing abundant communal wealth and abolishing artificial scarcity

Marx’s idea of degrowth communism is founded upon the radical abundance of communal wealth (genossenschaftlicher Reichtum). It does not require unlimited growth because the abundance of common wealth can be multiplied by abolishing the artificial scarcity of the commodity and money and by sharing social and natural wealth with others. This offers an important insight for reconstructing how Marx after 1868 strove to find a way of repairing the metabolic rift, which he characterized as ‘irreparable’ in volume III of Capital. Carl-Erich Vollgraf judges that Marx’s language here is haunted by an ‘apocalyptic metaphor’ that leaves no space for the future optimism and that he would not have used the same expression in the final manuscript if he were able to complete volume III (Vollgraf 2016: 130). Vollgraf ’s concern arises from the fact that, when reading Capital, volume III, one cannot find Marx’s explanation about how ‘the freely associated producers’ would be able to ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’. Marx’s silence here signifies the incomplete character of Capital.

Under a productivist reading, the subsequent remark about ‘accomplishing [the regulation of human metabolism with nature] with the least expenditure of energy’ ‘instead of being dominated by it as a blind power’ is understood as the manipulation of natural phenomena through intensive and extensive usage of technologies. Of course, the rational regulation of natural law is essential for the sake of successfully carrying out labour. However, one should also recall that human metabolism with nature came to be dominated by a ‘blind power’ not only due to a lack of natural scientific knowledge but due to the reified social relations that exist under capitalism. For Marx, this is the main reason labour in capitalism cannot be carried out ‘in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’ even given today’s level of technology. Alien social power of capital is so strong that the recognition of natural law alone does not allow humans to regulate their metabolism with the environment in a ‘rational’ (that is, sustainable) manner and leads to the waste of so much energy and resources for the sake of infinite capital accumulation. Seen from this perspective, the human metabolism with nature under capitalism turns out to be irrational because it is far from satisfying social needs ‘with the least expenditure of energy’. This is why as long as the dominance of this blind power of reified things persists, the metabolic rift will be ‘irreparable’.

However, the question remains as to why the conscious regulation of means of production and subsistence under socialism would realize a more rational metabolic exchange with nature. This point is not necessarily clear in Capital, and the sustainability of socialism cannot be taken for granted. In fact, if a socialist society continues to raise its productive forces in order to satisfy all kinds of human needs, it would be a catastrophe for the environment. A more equal society is not automatically more sustainable. While the earth has biophysical constrains, social demands are potentially limitless. Marx thus came to admit that the principles of a steady-state economy need to be rehabilitated in Western society. In this context, it is worth revisiting Capital retrospectively from the standpoint of degrowth communism in order to envision a more sustainable future.11 There are at least five reasons that communism increases the chance of repairing the metabolic rift compared with capitalist production.

First, the aim of social production shifts from profit to use-values. Capitalist production continues to expand, endlessly seeking after the maximization of profits. Capital is concerned about use-values only insofar as they are required for selling products. Due to this marginalization of use-values, products that are not essential for social reproduction or that are destructive of humans and the environment – for example, SUVs, fast fashion and industrial meat – are mass produced, as long as they sell well. At the same time, goods and service that do not make a profit are under-produced, no matter how essential they are. Marx’s point is that by abolishing the law of value, it becomes possible to shift the focus of social production to the production of higher use-values and their quality would be freed from the constant pressure of infinite economic growth. It is true that in some sectors production must improve (not grow) because some essential sectors are currently underdeveloped in capitalism. This improvement requires reallocating money and resources to provide better education, care work, art, sports and public transportation. These sectors, however, do not aim for unlimited growth, and in this sense they are already realizing a stationary economy today – a university that grows at the rate of 3 per cent per year would be absurd. The qualitative improvement of education, for example, cannot be measured using GDP.

Looked at from a different angle, these sectors are not fit to increase productivity.12 Much essential work cannot be fully automated but remains labour intensive. Consequently, it is often treated as ‘unproductive’ compared with other industrial sectors that become more and more capital intensive through mechanization. Unlike the industrial sectors whose production can double and triple with the introduction of new machines, the productivity of care work such as nursing and teaching cannot increase in the same manner. In many cases, these caring sectors cannot increase productivity without sacrificing use-value and increasing the risk of incidents and maltreatment. There are thus innate limits to the increase of productive forces imposed by the nature of care work, this creates the problem known as ‘Baumol’s cost disease’. The more society shifts towards essential work that produces basic use-value, the slower the entire economy is likely to become.

Second, Marx stated in Capital that the ‘reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite’ for the realm of freedom. However, no matter how much capitalism develops productive forces, work hours did not decline during the 20th and 21st centuries. On the contrary, the increasing number of precarious and low-paid jobs compels people to work longer hours. Mass production for the sake of capital valorization also increases non-essential jobs such as advertising, marketing, finance and consulting. Marx wrote about such unnecessary jobs that inevitably increase with capitalist development:

The capitalist mode of production, while it enforces economy in each individual business, also begets, by its anarchic system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of functions at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous. (Capital I: 667)

By reducing the production of non-essential goods that are produced simply for the sake of profit-making, it is possible to significantly reduce unnecessary labour. In other words, this reduction of ‘the realm of necessity’ and the corresponding expansion of the ‘realm of freedom’ can occur by eliminating unnecessary labour and sharing the remaining work among everyone.

The paradox of capitalist production is that ‘necessary labour time’ that corresponds to the reproduction of the labour power of individual workers is actually spent on producing an enormous collection of unnecessary products. In other words, from the social and ecological standpoint, a large part of necessary labour is already unnecessary labour. This manifests in the widespread phenomena of ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018), that is, jobs that even workers themselves know are meaninglessness for society. Even if these meaningless jobs are eliminated in socialism, this does not negatively affect the prosperity of society and the well-being of its members because they were meaningless and unproductive of use-values from the beginning. Well-being can even improve because spending a large part of one’s life upon meaningless jobs is harmful for mental health and these jobs also create meaningless products such as excessive advertisements, intimidation lawsuits, and high-frequency trading. Furthermore, this kind of meaningless labour consumes a lot of energy and resources as well as the support of care workers. The elimination of bullshit jobs would not only reduce social labour time but also immediately reduce environmental impacts without waiting for unrealistic technological advancements in the future.

Certainly, surplus labour and surplus products will remain necessary to some extent to safeguard against unexpected natural disasters, wars and famines.13 However, once the aim of social production is emancipated from the pressure of infinite capital accumulation, there is no need to produce an enormous and even wasteful amount of surplus products. The elimination of excessive surplus products is fully compatible with Marx’s insight into the steady-state economy. This counts as ‘the basic prerequisite’ for the realm of freedom to truly bloom in a post-scarcity economy. In fact, utopians of the post-scarcity economy typically assume 15–25 hours work per week, but this does not necessarily require full-automation of the labour process (Benanav 2020). On the contrary, it is possible to realise such a post-work society by sharing essential work among all the members of society. However, this way of reducing work hours is incompatible with the principle of profitmaking and economic growth.

Third, degrowth communism transforms the remaining realm of necessity in order to increase workers’ autonomy and make the content of work more attractive. This transformation of work is essential because the realm of necessity inevitably remains in a post-revolutionary society. One need not be pessimistic about the transhistorical necessity of labour. As seen above, Marx argued for abolishing ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour’, placing a high value on ‘the all-round development of the individual’ through labour.14 Labour becomes ‘life’s prime want’ (MECW 24: 87). Here Marx adopted a ‘more optimistic view’ of emancipatory labour (Klagge 1986: 776).

Through the real subsumption of labour under capital, cooperation and the division of labour reinforce domination and discipline over workers. The increase of productive forces under capitalism accelerates due to market competition only to establish the ‘despotism of capital’ (Capital I: 793). In this context, the first step for degrowth communism is to abolish the excessive division of labour that turns workers into a partial existence not capable of autonomously collaborating with others to produce an entire product. Marx’s strategy for modifying work, when understood in a non-productivist manner, differs decisively from the emancipation of humans from labour through full automation.15 In his opinion, the problem of capitalist production is that labour lost its content due to the boring repetition of simple tasks without any skill or autonomy, while full automation can strengthen this tendency without making labour ‘life’s prime want’. In order to end this alienation of work, Marx argued for abolishing ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour’. De-division of labour and the expulsion of those machines that deprive workers of their autonomy and independence in the labour process slows down the economy and creates more attractive work as the basis of individual self-realization.16

Although Marx focused on the need to secure ‘attractive work, the individual’s self-realization’ (Grundrisse: 611), this does not mean that labour becomes ‘play’ even in a post-capitalist society, as Charles Fourier once advocated. Indeed, Marx cautioned that this ‘in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like naivete, conceives it’. He continued to argue that

… really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion. The work of material production can achieve this character only (1) when its social character is posited, (2) when it is of a scientific and at the same time general character. (Grundrisse: 611–12)

Marx acknowledged that certain kinds of labour continue to exist in postcapitalism and cause suffering and pain as they are boring and tiresome. These kinds of work need to be reduced with the aid of new technologies. Alternatively, a just society needs to fairly allocate dirty or unpleasant tasks through work rotations instead of imposing them on those with less power.17 If excessive division of labour is replaced by fairer rotation of work and equal distribution of collaborative work, this protection of the ‘general character’ of labour is likely to slow the production process, but this is welcome in degrowth communism.

Fourth, the abolition of market competition for profits in degrowth communism also deaccelerates the economy:

in the absence of market compulsions, it is more likely that the realm of necessity would change slowly, by adapting innovations from the realm of freedom. The practical implementation of those innovations might take a long time, since the rush to implement changes in process would no longer be enforced by market competition, but instead would need to be decided through coordination among various committees. (Benanav 2020: 92)

In this vein, Aaron Benanav also recognizes that there will be ‘no built-in growth trajectory’ in such a post-capitalist system.18

Finally, what Marx demanded as the abolition of the ‘antithesis between mental and physical labour’ in the Critique of the Gotha Programme is of great significance. This transcendence of the antithesis should not be confused with the de-division between material labour and immaterial labour. Marx’s usage of mental and physical labour rather corresponds to Harry Braverman’s concepts of ‘conception’ and ‘execution’ respectively (Braverman 1998). The problem of the despotism of capital lies in the total deprivation of workers’ subjective power of ‘conception’, so that they are subordinated to the command of capital that decides what, how and how much they produce independently of their will and desires. As a result of the real subsumption, workers simply execute according to the imperative and command of capital. By contrast, the reunification of conception and execution requires establishing substantive equality in the production process among producers beyond their formal equality within market exchange. Marx wrote about communal production from this perspective.

The communal character of production would make the product into a communal, general product from the outset. The exchange which originally takes place in production – which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities, – determined by communal needs and communal purposes – would from the outset include the participation of the individuals in the communal world of products. (Grundrisse: 171; emphasis in original)

The key here is the active participation of workers in deciding what, how and how much they produce. This democratic production is the direct antithesis of the ‘despotic’ character of capitalist production. Associated producers more actively participate in the decision-making process without the imposition of the will of the few. Hierarchal control is incompatible with Marx’s vision of providing more autonomy to the associated producers, but without hierarchy, it takes more time to mediate between different opinions and reach a consensus. Since the increase of productive forces under capitalism relies upon the undemocratic and top-down character of the production process with the concentration of power in the hands of the few, democratic decision-making in the workplace inevitably slows down the entire process of production. The USSR was not able to accept this and imposed bureaucratic control upon social production. 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. Thus, Giorgos Kallis (2017: 12) concludes: ‘Genuine democratic socialism cannot grow at the pace of capitalism, which sidelines and destroys what slows it down.’

Taking into account these five transformations that Marx demanded as conditions of socialism, one may wonder how they could be achieved without degrowth. They also help explain why degrowth communism is more likely to repair the metabolic rift than capitalism. Furthermore, economic growth does not become green simply because it occurs in socialism. As long as economic growth is founded upon the biophysical process of production and consumption, growth is not sustainable after a certain point in any society. In other words, Marx’s ecosocialism needs to be specified as a degrowth one, and this is the conclusion that Marx arrived at after seriously studying natural sciences and pre-capitalist societies after 1868.

It should be clear by now that socialism promotes a social transition to a degrowth economy. The regulation of capital’s reckless attempt to valorize itself creates a greater chance of reducing the working day and thus the environmental impact. More autonomy for workers who are free from the market competition also gives them opportunities to reflect on the meaning of work and consumption. Social planning is indispensable to banning excessive and dirty production and to staying within planetary boundaries while satisfying basic social needs. These transformations reinforce the possibility of slowing down and scaling down the economy in order to create a more sustainable and egalitarian economy. Although it was never recognized during the 20th century, Marx’s idea of degrowth communism is more important than ever today because it increases the chance of human survival in the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

Joseph Schumpeter (1951: 293) once said, ‘Capitalism is a process, a stationary capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.’ Degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, and it is essentially an anti-capitalist project. However, there has been little intellectual dialogue between degrowth and Marxism in the past mainly because of the latter’s alleged Prometheanism. This needs to change, and, fortunately, it has already started to change with advocacy for an ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ (Löwy et al. 2022). This situation reflects the theoretical and practical progress of political ecology in the last two decades.