Oliver Eagleton in The Ideas Letter:
Intra-Marxist debates are famously irascible, even when their stakes are low. Yet in recent years this intellectual tradition has been further fractured, at the same time as it has been focused and reanimated, by the gravity of the climate crisis. The character of a future egalitarian society, and the most viable way to get there, have been contested by two environmentalist camps: degrowthers and eco-modernists. The first argues that capitalism’s drive for perpetual expansion is the cause of planetary breakdown, and demands a slower, “steady-state” alternative based on less production and consumption. The second claims that this expansionism has created the technological preconditions for a sustainable society, which the working class must now bring to full fruition, rather than aiming for any aggregate contraction. It remains to be seen whether these positions can be reconciled. Yet in broad terms, it is clear that they are clashing expressions of the same phenomenon: the reemergence of a utopian sensibility on the left – one that is determined to identify history’s direction of travel following the premature announcement of its end.
The degrowth school, which has long asserted that humanity’s material impact exceeds the planet’s biophysical capacity, has gained ground with several recent eco-socialist tracts. Kōhei Saitō’s Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), which sold half a million copies in Japan and has been translated into English as Slow Down (2024), describes an apparent shift in Marx’s late thought: away from a naïve faith in the infinite potential of technology towards a sober recognition of ecological limits. The contemporary environmental movement, writes Saitō, must heed this rejection of Prometheanism and abandon the notion of developing the “productive forces” (which, in the lexicon of historical materialism, means the machinery and infrastructure used in the production of goods). It should rather advocate a reduction of resource use in the Global North, establishing a new model of democratic planning to decide what’s needed and what isn’t.
More here.