Il capitalismo ci spingerà all’estinzione? | Saitō Kōhei incontra Dario Bassani | Lucy sui mondi

Il capitalismo ci spingerà all’estinzione? | Saitō Kōhei incontra Dario Bassani | Lucy sui mondi

It’s too late to save uh the planet. We will have more inflation, more natural disasters, more conflicts, more inequality. So in this book I discussed four futures and the one uh that is closest that we are now entering is climate fascism. [Music] Welcome to and it’s a wonderful pleasure to have you here in this interview for Lucy on the worlds. Thank you so much for being with us and it’s it’s particularly a pleasure because we have here one of the most prominent Marxist scholars in the world right now. Ah that’s an exaggeration. That’s an exaggeration. But I mean in Marxism is dying or maybe that’s a deep crisis and you are you are an exponent of the crisis. But I think not because in 2018 you were one of the youngest recipient of the Deutsche Prize which is one of the most prestigious prize for Marxist studies right now and your books on Marx’s connection with the ecological crisis have resonated very deeply not just in Japan but also in the rest of the world and the capital in the anthroposine had so much resonance if I think I’m right that it it also increased the sales of the capital by KL Marx in Japan. Is it is that so? So, it’s quite it’s quite interesting, but I would like to start um I’m really curious about your political education because I think that people um approach the work of Marx right now. You say it is in crisis somehow, but it also have a new actuality in some way. Uh I think in the popular imagination marks is sort of seen as a relic of the past but I I think one of the great merits of your books in is that you you really try to reactivate it to reactivate his heritage in a way that’s very relevant to our current situation. So um I wonder how did you become a Marxist? Were you always leftist in your youth? Was it something that was passed in your high school environment maybe or in your family or was it just an intellectual endeavor? Yeah. So compared to you know the famous European Marxist it’s not like I’m coming I’m not coming from those you know family tradition with Marxism not at all. And I wasn’t really uh political when I was young. So I came rather late uh to the the socialist idea. I think the beginning was around 200 one uh it was like a 911 and then after that I war when I was like high school student 16 and then that time uh people like Nom Chomski talked about you know of course against the war but then that’s how I started reading some of his works and then become more interested in uh socialism and so on but I never read marks when I was in high school it’s only after I entered the the University of Tokyo. So, it’s like when I was 18 and uh I thought it was like really good. I mean uh I had some issues with war and uh the you know the inequality in Japanese society in at high school but I didn’t really know how to like explain these situations and then when I connected these problems with capitalism like from critical perspective it made more sense to me that’s how I started reading uh uh many books on marks and contemporary capitalism from Marxist perspective but uh I have to admit at that time uh I wasn’t really paying attention to ecological issues but uh financial crisis 2008 convinced me that what Marx is saying has some uh importance even in today’s society. So that’s why I decided to go to Germany to study uh more seriously like Marxism the marks and then after that then there’s a 2011 like a big very big earthquake uh in Japan and then Fukushima nuclear disaster right so that really made me more conscious about how capitalism not only exploits workers and creates uh economic crisis but also this gigantic technology for the sake of massive consumption of production also creates ecological disruption in our relationship to nature and so that’s how I became more ecological but for me it was always important to connect these uh reading of marks with issues like inequality or Iraq war and then later Fukushima nuclear uh disaster and then now more of climate change. So for me I it was always Mark’s analysis that helped me to understand the uh ongoing crisis of chapterism. It’s it’s it’s quite interesting when when you do this chronology because I think it’s it’s the chronology of a lot of millennial trauma. And I think one of the reasons your books resonated so much is because we also recognize a sort of both intellectual and emotional and political response to this kind of crisis. But I digress. when you came to Germany, you in the years started working on a very ambitious project which is the the mega the Marxel Gazanto Gab which is a fantastic work. It’s the new edition of the complete works of Marx and Angles. So a thing that I find really fascinating in your work is that it’s not a pure philosophical speculation in the Marxist tradition. It’s a strong context a very strong contact with the texts with the with the manuscripts and uh and you found some very surprising things in these manuscripts I think that really challenge our ideas our preconceived ideas like on carmax and one of the of the things that I found most shocking was Marx’s interest in science in the natural science so what what did you find there yeah so you know after the financial crisis 2008 I decided to go to Germany I thought there will be because I I went to actually US to study uh uh my bachelor undergrad’s uh education and then I was disappointed that there are not many people talking about Marxism. So I decided to go to Germany expecting that in the country of car marks uh there will be more uh discussion on marks and then I was disappointed again to find out that uh at the university uh especially after the reunification in 1991 and they don’t they basically kicked out all the Marxist right so it was really kind of desert uh not many people talking about marks at university anymore but uh lucky Lucky I was in Berlin and then people are actually talking about mark there like a reading groups and activists outside university. But also for me what interesting and important was as you mentioned this uh encounter with uh this project of uh complete works of marks and angels which actually takes place outside the university which is edited in this academy of sciences. Since I went to uh this academ of sciences, I found out that Max was really reading uh so many books on natural sciences and uh he was interested in issues like exhaustion of the soil uh deforestation and even uh extinction of species. So that was like really eye opening for me because at that time I was really interested in how uh capitalist development actually creates uh ecological disasters and then Max was witnessing of course not a nuclear disaster but uh at the time of course the exhaustion of the soil was a huge social issue and then scientists were talking about how we can actually create new technology to prevent and or like you know what’s the reason for for this kind of exhaustion and so like like lot of lively debate going on and then Marx was also paying attention to these issues and then that actually creates a uh conditions for reading marks because we used to believe that uh Markx was quite optimistic about capitalist development because capitalism of course exploits workers but also create a lot of innovations and new technology. So once workers take control of those means of production, they can just utilize all those wonderful technologies. Everything will go smoothly. Exactly. And then overcome all the environmental issues and so on. It’s called productivism. Yes. But uh Max was actually not that naive. That’s something that I realized. He was kind of naive when young. But as he became older and then that’s how he started reading more natural sciences seriously and that’s how he witnessed precisely because of the capitalist technologies the the development of productive forces uh there are so many problems because these technologies are invented in order to exploit from workers and also from nature more efficiently. So that’s creation right if these technology are inherently exploitive or destructive how could we use these technologies in the future society and then that really resonated with this problem of nuclear power plants could we use nuclear power plants uh in socialist society and uh I came to the conclusion basically it’s not possible because these technologies are still dangerous but also It’s very anti-democratic undemocratic technology. It requires a lot of concentration of technology, information and monies and so on. I think my interpretation created some u you know there of course people in the 70s and 80s who already discussed something similar but yes my approach was basically going back to Marx’s own writing that he is really trying to integrate comprehensive critique of capitalism with more much more critical uh ecological uh perspective. So I think that’s really useful even to understand the ecological crisis like climate change. So I think in your book it’s very interesting the way in which you deal with Marx’s interest in science because you show on one hand a kind of optimism but also on one hand a kind of pessimism. So uh on on one side we have science as a tool for capital’s dominion of nature for extraction for workers exploitation but on the other hand we also have science as a mean to contrast alienation to retake control somehow. So I’m just curious about your take on this. Yeah yeah so if you read his notebooks you can more clearly see how his idea shifted. Uh so when he was young he was more optimistic and then as time goes on he became more critical of capitalist technologies but but that doesn’t mean that the marks became like so pessimistic or he didn’t become kind of like go back to nature abandon all the technology of course not he still uh recognizes and we all do recognize that the technologies are often uh indispensable necessary conditions for overcoming in puberty, hunger and better communication and you know create a lot of conditions for democracy and freedom and so on. So I think we need to like distinguish and uh I learned a lot from French philosopher Andre Gold. He distinguishes two kinds of technology. One is open technology. So that creates more uh conditions for democratic management of uh you know our communication or our relationship to nature and the other one is closing technology or locking technology that creates more domination and so on and I think the contrast is very uh clear. One is atomic nuclear power plant is uh the manifestation of this locking technology and that creates uh of course the concentration of technology but creates inequality between big cities and the countryides like Tokyo and Fukushima but also global north and south. The all the is coming from the global south. the labor of extraction is dangerous and then it is imported to Japan but then after the usage now Japan is talking about exporting these nuclear waste to Mongol or somewhere else to you know keep it underground so that’s really lot of exploitation lot of extraction lot of inequality and then if you compare that with more open technology uh example is solar power of course that also requires a lot of extraction But at least it really allows more democratic horizontal management of electricity production that everyone can be even the owner on the producer of those energies. But of course the problem is extraction. So that’s why I think that here comes the not like super optimistic idea. Okay, we have renewable energy so we can just like produce many things and then overcome the all the ecological crisis and so no that’s not the case because technology is always accompanied by those extraction and the resource and energy usages. So we cannot uh infinitely try to grow and then that’s how maps became much more critical about just you know taking the power of capital by workers and then we can just maximize. So this idea of maximization is something that marks clearly abandoned in his late life and then I think that’s very important because we uh even today’s society we tend to think that uh with green new deal or with some kind of you know green technologies uh we can just continue uh the current way of life without really changing anything and I think that sounds quite easy and attractive but the problem of the transformation to the sustainable society just and sustainable society requires much more radical rethinking of our way of life uh and also the mode of production and I think it really creates the interesting uh sphere of thinking and discussions and and I think one of the great merits of your book is that you you succeed to seize the sustainability term back from the liberals somehow and you do with a very interesting concept which is I think a concept that uh travels all the way across your your work which is the concept of uh of metabolism of stuff like so what is metabolism and what is the metabolic rift and how does it explain capitalism’s incompatibility with life on this planet on the long run so as Mark read many books on natural sciences uh some people of of course played more important role for him and then one of the central figures is Eustus phone a German uh chemist and then his central concept is this metabolism stop and basically Marx took this concept from him to understand the nature uh society relationship and his idea is very simple basically that we have to work upon nature and then extract act resources and energies and you know many things out of nature and then produce in order to satisfy our desire. So the you know this is a process of pro production and consumption extraction. Then after the production and consumption there will be you know waste there will be uh carbon dioxide and there will be many other things that you just have to go back to nature or we have to reuse or recycle and so on. So this process this kind of circular process is what marks uh and DB called metabolism. I mean that sounds today quite intuitive. But what Mark Max uh made it interesting is he was really deeply interested in how this uh basically in all society we have always this metabolic interaction but how this metabolic relationship is reorganized and transformed from the perspective of capital in our society because capitalism has a very unique way of organizing this metabolic interaction. Why? Because our society is producing things not for the sake of satisfying our needs but for the sake of maximizing profit or economic growth or marks expression capital accumulation. It’s all about growth basically. It’s not about use value. Exactly. So if there’s no mark distinguish use, value and value and then it’s about value and that means many things uh this is a more ecologically complicated process of interaction the metabolism but uh capital just pay attention to this very abstract notion of profit to organize this metabolic process and what’s going to happen basically Mark says uh you know market expands economy expands and even accelerates but the natural metabolism, the nature, how things are produced by nature, wood, animals and you know fossil fuel, they don’t really change, right? So the there is a very strong tension between social metabolism of money, commodity and capital on the one hand and then the metabolism of nature on the other hand. And he says there will be a very deep lift. Mhm. you know basically the chasm emerges and then that’s what marks for metabolic lift and that was a time that marks was discussing there’s like a deforestation exhaustion of soil as I said but today we are witnessing the disruption of carbon cycle for example that’s about manifestation but we also witnessing nitrogen cycle because we spend like so much of uh art the chemical fertilizer in the agriculture so these are like the lapures or the rift that our society, capitalist society creates. And then his conclusion is basically that capitalism try to fix this uh rift by inventing new technologies and so on. But he thinks it’s not possible to fully repair it only shifts it to somewhere else like just uh you know shift it to global south or shift it to local people like poor people and so on. So that’s actually really what’s happening today too, right? Like like rich people basically are much more responsible for climate change but they have means and money to escape from negative impacts of climate change and the people in Bangladesh or Pakistan suffer more. So that’s the basically shifting the lift to someone and somewhere else. But my point is basically so Mark recognized that in order to really uh fix this rift we have to basically abandon the society that is driven by the logic of profit maximalization. So that’s how he comes to this more eco socialist idea of the future society by studying uh natural sciences and I think this is really important even today’s uh climate crisis absolutely and you mentioned the global south and you mentioned like this translation crisis like the the waste is producing some place and then it’s moved somehow in other places but for marks the global south also becomes comes a resource. And this is another surprising thing about your book because I think one of the main reasons of the distrust that the contemporary left has for Marx is that he is still seen as a kind of eurosentric thinker. But you show that this was not the case. Exactly. So Markx was actually studying two things in his late years and one is as I discussed the natural sciences but the other one is surprisingly actually non-western pre- capitalist societies like Russia of course but also Latin America, India, Indonesia and so on. Now what’s really interesting is that yes as you said we often think that Marx is euroentric thinker. Why? Because he’s often associated with this optimistic uh productivist. When uh we have higher capacity of production, higher productive forces, it’s closer to socialism. That means that western societies are of course closer to uh socialism. And that means that he even says in the 1850s that the Indian societies don’t have history because they just those communes are always there for many hundreds and thousands of years without changing. So the British colonialism must come in first and destroy and then maybe Indian society can also you know develop like a British society and then have a socialist revolution. That sounds really old. and even justification of a uh capitalist empire, right? But uh in his late years, he really recognizes this problem. Why? Because it’s really deeply related to ecology because he recognizes now that these capitalist technologies are actually destructive. It’s destroy nature. Is this higher like spier technology compared to nonwestern societies? like you know western societies are much more sustainable for hundreds of thousands of years as I said and then capitalism is coming into Russia or North America killing all those indigenous people and that’s what marks are also like deeply interested right so that means like marks actually started to question that these capitalist technologies are actually not good and that means that the western societies are not necessarily higher or splier to non-western societies. And then he even says it’s like a one or two years before he actually dies. He even says that the western society have to learn like he expressed return uh so return to actually non-western societies in order to overcome the crisis of capitalism in western societies. So he now thinks that it’s not the western capitalism showing the model of future development. He now thinks that the western society must actually learn from the non-western society in order to imagine a much more sustainable and eco society. So this is like a radical transformation that are little known before but thanks to this mega max we now have access to those uh uh process of his studying new materials and new ideas and then we can probably change his uh idea about productivism euroenturism and then he becomes someone much more concerned about issue of ecology, equality of course, but also uh decolonial uh struggle and so on. So, so these are things that actually we today often still have to care uh and that’s why I think the mark’s understanding or critique of capitalism and his idea of future society which I call the growth communism is very important even today. Exactly. And like you mentioned the the main concept of your book which is the growth communism your proposal which has kind of a shock value because we would we would never associate in our like traditional understanding of communism as something that keeps the state the economy stable the GDP stable and you also show uh philological evidence for this which is KL Mark’s letter to Very Yazuich which was a Russian revolutionary. So what is the growth communism and how does it show in that letter? So in the first book the car max ecosocialism I didn’t discuss the growth. I simply said that Markx was deeply interested in sustainability. He was an ecologist thinker after establishing this theory of metabolism, metabolic lift. And then that was 201617 and then 2018 and 19 there was a global ecological uh movement against climate change. uh people like Greater Timbe uh started to organize uh strikes and that had actually a deep influence on me because I recognized that uh still I was uh hoping that after some kind of social socialist uh maybe revolution we will have much more efficient installing uh uh solar panels and electric vehicles and our society will grow even more but in a sustainable way in socialism. But uh yeah people like Greta Tunbe she was basically saying that it’s a fairy tale to believe uh some kind of eternal growth and I was like that’s actually true. I was so e uh imposing today’s uh model of development to future society. But if you really look at uh data about energy and resource consumption, it’s clear that we are simply over consuming and overproducing and uh it’s not simply possible to overcome this problem by making technology more efficient because even if technology become efficient, we often produce even more or even consume more. So that’s really cancels it out. So that’s how I started to be more interested in degrowth ideas. Uh and then they their idea of the colonial eco feminist critic of capitalism and so on. And then uh I so that’s like the point I was like I have to uh imagine the formation of alliance between socialist on the one hand and then degrossers on the other hand because they often uh fight each other like socialists say or degrowth people are unpolitic like you know unpopular they just talking about austerity anti-technology and degross people say oh Marxist productivist s and they don’t care about ecology and so on. That’s how I uh saw that oh might maybe I might be able to help this uh debate and then as you said I started looking at his late notebooks and also the letters to better suzage and then basically as I just explained in the previous conversation he was Max was deeply interested in not only ecology but also in the non-western pre-chapterist societies and he highly evaluated these Russian agricultural communes precisely because these societies were not only collectively managing uh production and consumption but as a result they are much more equal but they are much more sustainable and then that condition for equality and sustainability actually comes from this stability of production. following the tradition for many many years. Marks used to think with the example of India these traditional societies must be destroyed because they’re just boring. But now he thinks that all this is actually important because capitalism is dynamic but it’s just simply destroying so many things. He thinks that all those stability is actually also a condition for sustainability and then he thinks that we have the western society have to return to those non-western societies. I think that’s a very interesting moment. He doesn’t use the term deg growth of course but he’s uh he’s closest to this idea of degrowth and then that’s how why I decided to call it his last vision on communism degrowth communism. You reactivate marks on uh sustainability, you reactivate marks on ecology. Uh right now you’re working on a new project in which you are reactivating marks against war. Now we are seeing war ravaging countries like Ukraine, like Gaza. Uh so how can MarkX help us to rethink our current situation? Yeah. So the this book uh I wrote uh in Japanese 2020. So under the influence of these global ecological movements like uh Fridays for future and extinction learian. So at the time we still had you know a lot of hope maybe we somehow could manage uh decarbonization like a rapid decarbonization by 2030 but uh what happened in the last uh especially two three years is started with war in Ukraine but uh there’s the inflation and then the genocide in Gaza and then now uh Trump is reelected and then if you I now live in Germany and then the you know uh RFD this alternative for the extreme right-wing party get 25% of the vote right so it’s like one every four person actually supports in Germany that kind of a uh uh fascist ideas and uh so that the world is divided and uh Trump doesn’t care about climate change. So we we will lose another four years meaning that is almost 2030. Uh and then last year we basically our world temperature is higher uh than more more higher than 1.5° Celsius uh compared to pre-industrial uh time meaning overshooting the Paris agreement target. So the situation is very dark. Uh I think we are now entering to the situation it’s too late to save uh the planet. We will have more inflation, more natural disasters, more conflicts, more inequality. So in this book I discussed four futures and the one uh that is closest that we are now entering is climate fascism. the society characterized by extreme inequality with uh anti-liberal uh racist uh control of uh you know society and so on. So this is a kind of dark uh time that we will witness more in the future in this situation. So I came to recognize the gross communism alone is not enough. Uh I still think this is kind of like bottom up uh radical movement of creating commons is really important uh because we will have more disasters and then we have to help each other more. We have to focus more on caring and repairing nature and so on. So the growth communism is really about that kind of solidarity and care and so on. But at the same time I think now the growth uh needs to learn from socialist tradition of economic planning. Uh I think uh the growth is often too small scale uh and then they can’t really fight against planetary ecological crisis and then this global capitalism is really big. I think now so I learned as a socialist I learned a lot from the growth side in the last five years. uh now I think it’s time that the big grow uh side also learns from socialist side then that’s how you know socialism has a very rich debate of economic calculation planning uh especially in the 20s in soviet of course but also in uh uh Austria there’s this people like autoat and so on there’s a lot of debates on calculation and uh I’m interested reviving uh uh that kind of tradition in order to imagine a way of guaranteeing uh the satisfaction of everyone’s basic needs as well as security and creating the rapid transformation to a more sustainable society in the middle of disaster. So this is something what I call war economy and uh yeah so that’s something that I’m working on right now and then I hope that I can share more of these ideas soon. I can’t wait to read you excited to start. Don’t matter so much. [Music] Lucy

La sopravvivenza della specie umana dipenderà dal superamento del modello economico in cui viviamo. Dall’ecosocialismo al comunismo della descrescita, il filosofo giapponese Saitō Kōhei ha ripensato Marx per il XXI secolo. Lo intervista Dario Bassani, responsabile editoriale di Lucy sui mondi.