The growing anxiety on the left over our current ecological crisis has reignited an old debate over the significance of technological progress under capitalism. Should we accelerate past current impasses or pull the emergency brake? Should we, as the luxury communists and abundance liberals would have it, go all in on growth, or is it finally time, as degrowth communists insist, to burn it all down?
While recent public conversation has been dominated by the abundance agenda, it is the degrowth perspective that dominates the discourse in intellectual and academic circles. The most visible contemporary advocate of this view is Marx scholar Kohei Saito, whose 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene sold over five hundred thousand copies in Japan and was later published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. In it Saito recalls a not-so-distant past, when human beings lived sustainably in relation to nature. Life under these conditions of abundance, Saito argues, was predicated on resources like water and land being held in common rather than privately owned. This balance was shattered in the sixteenth century with the enclosure of the commons by a nascent capitalist class. Enclosure created artificial scarcity: life’s necessities were no longer freely available to all but had to be purchased with wages earned through labor. Competition among capitalists fueled industrialization and commodity production beyond human need, devastating both workers and the environment. To restore that equilibrium, he argues, we must repeal the growth imperative of capitalism and return to a system of common possession, where production is organized to meet needs without violating the limits nature imposes.
It may come as something of a surprise that a book by a Marx scholar arguing for communism would sell half a million copies in Japan. But Saito’s story captured the political imagination of a generation that had lived through decades of economic stagnation while neoliberal policies fueled massive growth in the West and in neighboring China. His book helped reframe Japan’s relative weakness as an ethical, political and environmental strength. While his narrative has yet to achieve the same level of renown in the English-speaking world, his account of degrowth has been warmly received among socialists, giving theoretical yet accessible heft to the ecological populism of figures like Greta Thunberg. Like Thunberg, Saito starts from the premise that the endless pursuit of growth is destroying the planet, and the most urgent political task is to bring it to an end.
No doubt, Saito is right to call into question our unsustainable degradation of nature. He is, however, wrong to think that moving forward requires abandoning nearly all aspirations to technological progress and growth. While technological progress should never be understood as an end in its own right, it may yet serve as the enabling condition of our flourishing. That Saito cannot see this is due to his conviction that the only conception of growth possible is the one specific to capitalism. To uncover the possibility of an idea of growth untethered to capitalist logic, we must return to the Hegelian roots of the Marxist tradition.
The idea that Hegel is somehow compatible with Marx—that is, the idea of a Hegelian Marxism—is not itself new. In the early 1920s, Georg Lukács published the seminal History and Class Consciousness, a book that transformed rarefied Hegelian ideas like “self-consciousness” and “spirit” into the building blocks of a theory of class struggle. Most famously, Hegel’s notion of a world-historical Geist, “the subject-object of history,” becomes in Lukács’s hands the proletariat itself—the working class as a collective agent tasked with realizing human freedom. But there was a catch. The Hegelian ideas that enabled Marxists to recast class struggle as a struggle for agency and class consciousness were inherited with suspicion. Marx had famously promised to “invert” Hegel—to overturn the idealist priority of thought over reality, of mind over world. For Marx, life and history are not the work of the mind; rather, mind is the product of living, historical labor. A Marxist appropriation of Hegel thus seemed to hit an interpretative wall.
And yet the materialist tradition that called itself Hegelian never paused to ask what Hegel actually meant by “thinking”—or what kind of being he held “mind” to be. More striking still, it passed over in silence Hegel’s decades-long attempt to root reason in the structure of organic life. These omissions are inseparable. Hegel doesn’t treat thinking as a disembodied or purely intellectual process. He treats it as a form of life: a way of being a living, embodied creature, one that determines its own ends and establishes as its highest end its own freedom.
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Much of today’s socialist left focuses on redistribution: tax the rich, fund a robust welfare state, “no more billionaires!” But one of the most powerful strands of contemporary Marxism—the Wertkritik, or “value-form” critique—argues that the central problem with capitalism lies not in how wealth is distributed but in how it is produced. Indeed, Wertkritik underscores a core insight in Marx’s Capital: the way wealth is distributed stems directly from how it is produced.
Under capitalism, wealth takes the form of value—measured in the amount of “labor time” required to produce it—and derives from the fact that workers are able to produce more value than would be strictly required to sustain them. The surplus or “unpaid” labor performed by workers is not created by simple wage theft. In fact, it is rarely realized, but for Marx, workers actually do receive, on average, the full value of their own labor power: the amount needed for their own reproduction. Surplus value arises because workers labor beyond what is required to reproduce themselves, generating an excess appropriated by capitalists as profit. Without that surplus, capitalists cannot maintain the means of production or invest in new, more efficient ones.
So long as wealth is measured in value, some must sell their labor power while others must appropriate the surplus. Redistribution—however aggressive—leaves this structure intact. It doesn’t touch the underlying form of production, which necessitates wage labor, profit-seeking and the relentless drive to increase efficiency. This dynamic has fueled extraordinary technical and scientific advances, but it does so blindly—indifferent to environmental destruction, to the well-being of producers or consumers and ultimately to its own long-term viability. It leads, in fits and starts, to the displacement of workers by machines and, paradoxically, to a falling rate of profit, since workers remain the source of the surplus. Attempts to merely ameliorate capitalism, whether through environmental protections or minimum-wage raises, threaten profits, restrict capitalists’ hiring capacity, promote unemployment and thus—according to Marx—engender crisis. The task, then, is not merely to redistribute wealth but to transform the way it is produced—to abolish not just billionaires but the value form of social reproduction itself.
The deepest insight of value-form critique is that workers and capitalists alike are dominated by the drive to profit, which they both depend on for survival: capitalists must reinvest and expand, and workers, while free to sell their labor to whom they please, must sell it to someone. Yet Wertkritik also neglects something essential. The pain of contradiction and discontent that animates class struggle presupposes some conception of a purpose that orients our actions—a purpose we take ourselves to be failing to fulfill. In the capitalist social form, our purpose is to constitute ourselves, both individually and collectively, as free.
Following his hero Aristotle, Hegel holds that, like artifacts (tools, artworks), living organisms are defined by their purposiveness: each of their parts serves a function and contributes to a whole, itself oriented toward an end. But unlike a table or a knife, the purpose of a magpie, say, is not imposed from without or relative to the ends of a designer. Its purpose is internal. The magpie exists for the sake of its own form—not merely to survive but to flourish, to realize the capacities that define what it is. And it inhabits a meaningful environment, comprised of things that show up as “good for” or “bad for,” conducive or inimical to its flourishing.
So far, this is textbook Aristotle. Now, in his most challenging but important work, the Science of Logic, Hegel pushes the notion of rational life in an unexpected direction. The idea of rational life is meant to pick out those animals—human beings—that not only discriminate between the helpful and the harmful but do so in light of ends they themselves endorse. What Hegel adds is that those ends must be ends that they take others to share. This opens up a “space of reasons”: a world in which one’s actions are, at least in principle, justifiable to other agents. For Aristotle, human flourishing lies in rational activity in accordance with virtue. Insofar as we are political animals, this means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason. Hegel radicalizes this thought by showing that “the right reason” must consist in shareable ends we regard as self-given, rather than as imposed by nature or the divine. To flourish is not just to act rationally or virtuously but freely.
Consider the surgeon. To perform a complex operation is not merely to execute a series of physical motions—the reductive, “mechanistic” view of human action that came to prominence following Descartes. What Hegel shows is that, in the case of our surgeon, if her movements are to count as actions for which she is responsible rather than mere events, like a thunderstorm, they must be undertaken in view of a shared end: preserving a patient’s health. The surgeon’s actions are guided by norms that distinguish successful from unsuccessful procedures—norms that allow her decisions to be explained, justified and evaluated by others in the institutional setting: doctors, nurses, patients. You can “John Wayne it” in the surgical suite on occasion and still count as practicing medicine; but you will not be a doctor in any meaningful sense if you do not aim at the fundamental end of the patient’s well-being.
Crucially, the rational form of life involves more than just technical know-how concerned with the best or optimal way to satisfy our purposes. We perceive and respond to the world as meaningful in light of ends that are themselves subject to justification, contestation and possible revision. We can ask whether our fundamental ends are rational, worth sustaining. For example, I might be acting entirely in accordance with shared surgical standards, doing what I have tacitly authorized my colleagues to expect of me and thereby autonomously realizing my own avowed intentions, all while experiencing my activity as surgeon as profoundly alienated. Perhaps my hospital pushes medically unnecessary surgeries just to stay afloat, or, as an NHS doctor, I am consistently forced to perform operations on the cheap, cutting corners I know to be medically and ethically significant.
Hegel’s radical eudaimonism—his Aristotelian idea that reason-governed activity and the human good are ultimately identical—reveals what Wertkritik leaves out: we are not mere cogs in a machine that we can’t control, and we cannot understand ourselves as merely controlled by impersonal economic laws. To do so would be to explain capitalism’s persistence at the high cost of under-theorizing our agency. While even the alienated NHS doctor is responsible for his own actions—no force outside him can ultimately dictate his acts or ends—for his actions to be truly free, they must be satisfying in their own right, the institutional space of reasons consistent with who he takes himself to be.
Marx himself brilliantly theorized how the illusion of economic determinism arises in his account of commodity, money and capital fetishism. The way we have organized production in modernity, he shows, necessarily generates the illusion that we are being puppeteered, our actions predetermined by an immutable “law of value.” But this is just that, an illusion. The point is not that we cease to be agents but that we become alienated from our agency, to the extent that we misrecognize ourselves as mere cogs.
To be fair, many contemporary theorists do claim that the law of value is social and historical in nature and thus can be changed. But by emphasizing the “mute compulsion” of production while neglecting our rational agency—the reasons we have for sustaining the value form—such accounts can’t properly distinguish the rules, norms and purposes that govern social life from mechanical laws of nature. Unless we understand ourselves as being behind the wheel and thus responsive to reasons for working in the way we do, we cannot account for the possibility of change—for how other, better reasons for doing things differently might gain a foothold. Without a conception of human agents as self-conscious and reason-responsive, there would be no striving, no protest, no struggle.
Contrary to the widely held view of a break between Marx’s early “Hegelian” writings and his later “scientific” work, his economic notebooks from the late 1850s show that he remained committed to a logic of purposiveness throughout. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Marx argues that, just as the end of a plant in consuming resources is ultimately itself, human beings’ consumption “ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as a purpose.” This self-conception—our shared awareness of what it is to live—is the ultimate “object of production.” Hegel’s account of the “logical” conditions of intelligibility of human agency allows us to fully entitle ourselves to this challenging thought, and more importantly, to recover our sense of responsibility for our measure of social wealth. At bottom, we justify our capitalist form of life to one another in terms of the freedom to set our own ends and the equality between exchangers promised by the market. Herein lies the emancipatory dimension of capitalist production: our purpose is not merely to survive or to produce goods, but to produce ourselves as free and equal producers. Such purposes give the system its ethical force. At the same time, they also constitute the very standard by which the value form of wealth can be criticized and its irrationality laid bare.
The concept of rational life tells us that a mode of production is justified not when it maximizes output or efficiency, but when it enables its participants to see their productive activity as an end in itself, shareable with others. This does not mean a return to pre-industrial simplicity, as Saito suggests. But it doesn’t imply the hyper-accelerationist spirit of the “overabundance” theorists, either. Rather, in sharp contrast to both Saito and the advocates of abundance, it means rationalizing growth itself: producing not for the accumulation of value, but for the sake of our flourishing as the rational kind of animals we are.
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Working out the ethical foundation of Marxism may seem like a purely philosophical exercise, but it has direct implications for how we think about socialist politics today. To see why, let us return to Saito’s vision of communism as a form of social life opposed to growth—a vision that has not only been influential within academic circles but has also resonated with many on the left. Saito’s narrative of the emergence of capitalism is, as we’ve seen, a “fall” narrative. In the Edenic precapitalist state, resources were plentiful because they were held in common and the basic needs of all were met. The Enclosure Acts that British parliament began to pass in the seventeenth century privatized previously open fields, ushering in an age of scarcity and competition—as well as endless growth, laying waste to the environment.
Yet as several commentators have noted, Saito’s narrative entails a form of romantic anti-capitalism. Saito understands Marx’s late work on “primitive communism” as the discovery of a new standpoint of critique of capitalist modernity. The idea is that prior to capitalism, there were communities that not only held natural resources in common but were also nonhierarchical, egalitarian and democratic in nature. Degrowth communism advocates a return to these early forms of community.
Anthropologists have questioned this characterization of premodern societies, but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, several problems persist. First, Marx saw as deeply emancipatory the bourgeois recognition of the rights of the individual, which was essential to establishing our collective responsibility for determining how we live: for the first time in human history authority was conferred—at least in principle—on each and every individual. Second, Marx held that primitive communism would have to be re-achieved in a higher form. While Saito does affirm this in passing, he glosses over its implications, which are devastating for the degrowth picture.
Genuine reestablishment of the commons would require two things. On the one hand, it would require redemption of the technological development that surplus production under capitalism has made possible. This would involve, for example, employing labor-saving technologies not just to increase efficiency but to enable us to engage in forms of work we find worthy of our dignity and consistent with our conception of flourishing. On the other hand, a renewed commons would entail radicalizing the principle of democratic self-determination that has defined bourgeois modernity. This would involve the producers deciding cooperatively how and what we produce, rather than having the answers to these questions dictated by the market and the profit motive. More generally, this would mean contesting Saito’s one-sided vision of capitalism as a regression from an original Edenic condition rather than as a progression entangled in contradiction.
Under capitalism, the drive to profit may generate labor-saving technologies, but they are environmentally destructive, deskilling for workers and indifferent to the well-being of consumers. In Marx’s words, machines are so designed that laborers become mere “appendages” to them. Saito’s opposition to the growth of the productive forces takes for granted this model of growth specific to capitalism. But technology can come to serve other ends. Moishe Postone, one of the foundational figures of the Wertkritik tradition, famously observes that under communism, “the machines themselves will be different”—transformed by the new ends they would be made to realize.
A key example of the kind of “excess” that degrowth opposes is the production of luxury goods. This opposition misses how such goods, even under capitalism, often express a real—if distorted—social need. In a remarkable passage, Saito reduces the production of luxury items like Ferraris to a mere function of the drive to profit and “social status,” which “resides,” he claims, “solely in its scarcity.” In Saito’s communes, we would be content to drive Honda Civics, since the use value of the two vehicles is “the same.” But the point of the Ferrari is not just to get from point A to point B but to do so well, beautifully even. Our means of transportation should be reflective of the dignity and nobility of human life.
The point here is not to defend capitalist luxury but to transform it; Ferraris, after all, are infamously gas-guzzling, exemplifying how in our current form of life, beauty and noninstrumental activity are often at cross-purposes with our flourishing. The point is that even after the revolution, we would want to go beyond merely optimizing our means of transport for sustainability and survival. How might our modes of self-movement be made intrinsically satisfying, worthy of our shared dignity and sustainable over time? Our tools must be understood as expressive of our end of flourishing—which includes as an essential dimension acknowledgment of the material conditions of our own rational activity.
Against the supposed Prometheanism of the Marxist tradition, Saito concludes that society must conform to these limits by “degrowing” the productive forces—optimizing for sustainability rather than efficiency and for subsistence rather than luxury or profit. Yet Saito’s vision takes for granted the end of subsistence as well as the external character of ecological limits. This is why he, for example, rejects nuclear-energy technologies in any form as a “Promethean” transgression of ecological limits. As a result, degrowth reduces politics to the management of our own abstemiousness under naturally given restrictions. It limits us to debating the best means of compliance with environmental constraints—whether austerity or contraction of the productive forces—while making no room for collective deliberation about our ends.
If we accept Saito’s technocratic realism, we are headed not for the democratic and egalitarian community he promises but for an ascetic regime of self-restriction—ruled from above by environmental experts, oriented by external, allegedly set ecological lines. Degrowth communism risks becoming eco-authoritarianism in a Marxist guise. Yet Hegel helps us see that work like Saito’s is premised on a false dichotomy—the choice is not between growth and degrowth but capital growth and rational growth. Degrowth communists miss that “growth” is identical with the good of all life forms. In English, we even use a vegetative metaphor to translate the classical term eudaimonia for our fulfillment of the good: flourishing. All living beings must grow beyond their present condition through the generation of new matter—such as new cells—just to maintain their lives. In higher-order animals, this growth also entails expansion into new parts of their environment and the metabolism of novel resources. And in animals like us—rational animals—growth means more: we sustain ourselves not only by regenerating our matter or exploiting new resources but by reorganizing the very way we live. As Marx argues, human society is thus a special part of nature, not something that stands outside it. For us, flourishing is inseparable from the transformation of the technical and social means by which we reproduce our lives. To renounce growth altogether would be to renounce the very process through which all living beings—including rational beings—maintain themselves.
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The right-wing allergy to climate science and vaccination schemes is not simply dogged irrationalism; the hostility to “experts” not simply heroic stupidity. The rational kernel of climate denialism lies in the classic Kantian dictum: sapere aude, think for yourself, which has degenerated into the mantra “do your own research.” The point here is not that the science is wrong; it isn’t. The point is that it is used to short-circuit democratic debate and to introduce austerity and environmental-regulatory measures that disproportionately affect working people.
We can, and should, contest the denialism of the right but also acknowledge that recognition of the reality of ecological limits is a collective and democratic achievement. This does not mean that anything goes, that whatever we say is good just is good. The Hegelian view, recall, allows us to envision a form of collective end-setting through which we determine what our flourishing amounts to. But for our conception of flourishing to be consistent, we must come to see reason as essentially embodied, a way of being a living creature. As rational beings, we must, in other words, acknowledge that the vulnerability of the environment is our own vulnerability, that we cannot sustain ourselves without maintaining the integrity of the ecological whole. To return to the possibility of nuclear power, we must see how it raises questions that we must answer democratically: Can it enable the self-maintenance of our present ecological whole? Can it be intergenerationally sustainable? Can it express our collective end of flourishing?
If ecological limits are understood as limits we ourselves set through democratic deliberation, the political question then becomes how to best organize, and to expand or contract, production to accord with our end of flourishing. We could thereby recognize the temperature ceiling, for example, as a self-given limit, as a condition of technological progress and of the good life underpinning it. The task, then, is not endless growth for its own sake. Nor is it degrowth, which accepts and inverts the logic of capital, optimizing for sustainability instead of efficiency, subsistence rather than GDP. Rather, the task is to rationalize growth: to expand and develop the forces of production so that they might better enable and express the fundamental end of animals like us. In other words, our freedom.
Art credit: Gregory Euclide, My possible bending retreated with what was taken yet unused, 2013. Acrylic, corn, hosta, found foam, buckthorn root, PETG, sedum, pine cone, pencil, paper, fern, pine needles, moss, wood. Courtesy of the artist
The growing anxiety on the left over our current ecological crisis has reignited an old debate over the significance of technological progress under capitalism. Should we accelerate past current impasses or pull the emergency brake? Should we, as the luxury communists and abundance liberals would have it, go all in on growth, or is it finally time, as degrowth communists insist, to burn it all down?
While recent public conversation has been dominated by the abundance agenda, it is the degrowth perspective that dominates the discourse in intellectual and academic circles. The most visible contemporary advocate of this view is Marx scholar Kohei Saito, whose 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene sold over five hundred thousand copies in Japan and was later published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. In it Saito recalls a not-so-distant past, when human beings lived sustainably in relation to nature. Life under these conditions of abundance, Saito argues, was predicated on resources like water and land being held in common rather than privately owned. This balance was shattered in the sixteenth century with the enclosure of the commons by a nascent capitalist class. Enclosure created artificial scarcity: life’s necessities were no longer freely available to all but had to be purchased with wages earned through labor. Competition among capitalists fueled industrialization and commodity production beyond human need, devastating both workers and the environment. To restore that equilibrium, he argues, we must repeal the growth imperative of capitalism and return to a system of common possession, where production is organized to meet needs without violating the limits nature imposes.
It may come as something of a surprise that a book by a Marx scholar arguing for communism would sell half a million copies in Japan. But Saito’s story captured the political imagination of a generation that had lived through decades of economic stagnation while neoliberal policies fueled massive growth in the West and in neighboring China. His book helped reframe Japan’s relative weakness as an ethical, political and environmental strength. While his narrative has yet to achieve the same level of renown in the English-speaking world, his account of degrowth has been warmly received among socialists, giving theoretical yet accessible heft to the ecological populism of figures like Greta Thunberg. Like Thunberg, Saito starts from the premise that the endless pursuit of growth is destroying the planet, and the most urgent political task is to bring it to an end.
No doubt, Saito is right to call into question our unsustainable degradation of nature. He is, however, wrong to think that moving forward requires abandoning nearly all aspirations to technological progress and growth. While technological progress should never be understood as an end in its own right, it may yet serve as the enabling condition of our flourishing. That Saito cannot see this is due to his conviction that the only conception of growth possible is the one specific to capitalism. To uncover the possibility of an idea of growth untethered to capitalist logic, we must return to the Hegelian roots of the Marxist tradition.
The idea that Hegel is somehow compatible with Marx—that is, the idea of a Hegelian Marxism—is not itself new. In the early 1920s, Georg Lukács published the seminal History and Class Consciousness, a book that transformed rarefied Hegelian ideas like “self-consciousness” and “spirit” into the building blocks of a theory of class struggle. Most famously, Hegel’s notion of a world-historical Geist, “the subject-object of history,” becomes in Lukács’s hands the proletariat itself—the working class as a collective agent tasked with realizing human freedom. But there was a catch. The Hegelian ideas that enabled Marxists to recast class struggle as a struggle for agency and class consciousness were inherited with suspicion. Marx had famously promised to “invert” Hegel—to overturn the idealist priority of thought over reality, of mind over world. For Marx, life and history are not the work of the mind; rather, mind is the product of living, historical labor. A Marxist appropriation of Hegel thus seemed to hit an interpretative wall.
And yet the materialist tradition that called itself Hegelian never paused to ask what Hegel actually meant by “thinking”—or what kind of being he held “mind” to be. More striking still, it passed over in silence Hegel’s decades-long attempt to root reason in the structure of organic life. These omissions are inseparable. Hegel doesn’t treat thinking as a disembodied or purely intellectual process. He treats it as a form of life: a way of being a living, embodied creature, one that determines its own ends and establishes as its highest end its own freedom.
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Much of today’s socialist left focuses on redistribution: tax the rich, fund a robust welfare state, “no more billionaires!” But one of the most powerful strands of contemporary Marxism—the Wertkritik, or “value-form” critique—argues that the central problem with capitalism lies not in how wealth is distributed but in how it is produced. Indeed, Wertkritik underscores a core insight in Marx’s Capital: the way wealth is distributed stems directly from how it is produced.
Under capitalism, wealth takes the form of value—measured in the amount of “labor time” required to produce it—and derives from the fact that workers are able to produce more value than would be strictly required to sustain them. The surplus or “unpaid” labor performed by workers is not created by simple wage theft. In fact, it is rarely realized, but for Marx, workers actually do receive, on average, the full value of their own labor power: the amount needed for their own reproduction. Surplus value arises because workers labor beyond what is required to reproduce themselves, generating an excess appropriated by capitalists as profit. Without that surplus, capitalists cannot maintain the means of production or invest in new, more efficient ones.
So long as wealth is measured in value, some must sell their labor power while others must appropriate the surplus. Redistribution—however aggressive—leaves this structure intact. It doesn’t touch the underlying form of production, which necessitates wage labor, profit-seeking and the relentless drive to increase efficiency. This dynamic has fueled extraordinary technical and scientific advances, but it does so blindly—indifferent to environmental destruction, to the well-being of producers or consumers and ultimately to its own long-term viability. It leads, in fits and starts, to the displacement of workers by machines and, paradoxically, to a falling rate of profit, since workers remain the source of the surplus. Attempts to merely ameliorate capitalism, whether through environmental protections or minimum-wage raises, threaten profits, restrict capitalists’ hiring capacity, promote unemployment and thus—according to Marx—engender crisis. The task, then, is not merely to redistribute wealth but to transform the way it is produced—to abolish not just billionaires but the value form of social reproduction itself.
The deepest insight of value-form critique is that workers and capitalists alike are dominated by the drive to profit, which they both depend on for survival: capitalists must reinvest and expand, and workers, while free to sell their labor to whom they please, must sell it to someone. Yet Wertkritik also neglects something essential. The pain of contradiction and discontent that animates class struggle presupposes some conception of a purpose that orients our actions—a purpose we take ourselves to be failing to fulfill. In the capitalist social form, our purpose is to constitute ourselves, both individually and collectively, as free.
Following his hero Aristotle, Hegel holds that, like artifacts (tools, artworks), living organisms are defined by their purposiveness: each of their parts serves a function and contributes to a whole, itself oriented toward an end. But unlike a table or a knife, the purpose of a magpie, say, is not imposed from without or relative to the ends of a designer. Its purpose is internal. The magpie exists for the sake of its own form—not merely to survive but to flourish, to realize the capacities that define what it is. And it inhabits a meaningful environment, comprised of things that show up as “good for” or “bad for,” conducive or inimical to its flourishing.
So far, this is textbook Aristotle. Now, in his most challenging but important work, the Science of Logic, Hegel pushes the notion of rational life in an unexpected direction. The idea of rational life is meant to pick out those animals—human beings—that not only discriminate between the helpful and the harmful but do so in light of ends they themselves endorse. What Hegel adds is that those ends must be ends that they take others to share. This opens up a “space of reasons”: a world in which one’s actions are, at least in principle, justifiable to other agents. For Aristotle, human flourishing lies in rational activity in accordance with virtue. Insofar as we are political animals, this means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason. Hegel radicalizes this thought by showing that “the right reason” must consist in shareable ends we regard as self-given, rather than as imposed by nature or the divine. To flourish is not just to act rationally or virtuously but freely.
Consider the surgeon. To perform a complex operation is not merely to execute a series of physical motions—the reductive, “mechanistic” view of human action that came to prominence following Descartes. What Hegel shows is that, in the case of our surgeon, if her movements are to count as actions for which she is responsible rather than mere events, like a thunderstorm, they must be undertaken in view of a shared end: preserving a patient’s health. The surgeon’s actions are guided by norms that distinguish successful from unsuccessful procedures—norms that allow her decisions to be explained, justified and evaluated by others in the institutional setting: doctors, nurses, patients. You can “John Wayne it” in the surgical suite on occasion and still count as practicing medicine; but you will not be a doctor in any meaningful sense if you do not aim at the fundamental end of the patient’s well-being.
Crucially, the rational form of life involves more than just technical know-how concerned with the best or optimal way to satisfy our purposes. We perceive and respond to the world as meaningful in light of ends that are themselves subject to justification, contestation and possible revision. We can ask whether our fundamental ends are rational, worth sustaining. For example, I might be acting entirely in accordance with shared surgical standards, doing what I have tacitly authorized my colleagues to expect of me and thereby autonomously realizing my own avowed intentions, all while experiencing my activity as surgeon as profoundly alienated. Perhaps my hospital pushes medically unnecessary surgeries just to stay afloat, or, as an NHS doctor, I am consistently forced to perform operations on the cheap, cutting corners I know to be medically and ethically significant.
Hegel’s radical eudaimonism—his Aristotelian idea that reason-governed activity and the human good are ultimately identical—reveals what Wertkritik leaves out: we are not mere cogs in a machine that we can’t control, and we cannot understand ourselves as merely controlled by impersonal economic laws. To do so would be to explain capitalism’s persistence at the high cost of under-theorizing our agency. While even the alienated NHS doctor is responsible for his own actions—no force outside him can ultimately dictate his acts or ends—for his actions to be truly free, they must be satisfying in their own right, the institutional space of reasons consistent with who he takes himself to be.
Marx himself brilliantly theorized how the illusion of economic determinism arises in his account of commodity, money and capital fetishism. The way we have organized production in modernity, he shows, necessarily generates the illusion that we are being puppeteered, our actions predetermined by an immutable “law of value.” But this is just that, an illusion. The point is not that we cease to be agents but that we become alienated from our agency, to the extent that we misrecognize ourselves as mere cogs.
To be fair, many contemporary theorists do claim that the law of value is social and historical in nature and thus can be changed. But by emphasizing the “mute compulsion” of production while neglecting our rational agency—the reasons we have for sustaining the value form—such accounts can’t properly distinguish the rules, norms and purposes that govern social life from mechanical laws of nature. Unless we understand ourselves as being behind the wheel and thus responsive to reasons for working in the way we do, we cannot account for the possibility of change—for how other, better reasons for doing things differently might gain a foothold. Without a conception of human agents as self-conscious and reason-responsive, there would be no striving, no protest, no struggle.
Contrary to the widely held view of a break between Marx’s early “Hegelian” writings and his later “scientific” work, his economic notebooks from the late 1850s show that he remained committed to a logic of purposiveness throughout. Drawing on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Marx argues that, just as the end of a plant in consuming resources is ultimately itself, human beings’ consumption “ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as a purpose.” This self-conception—our shared awareness of what it is to live—is the ultimate “object of production.” Hegel’s account of the “logical” conditions of intelligibility of human agency allows us to fully entitle ourselves to this challenging thought, and more importantly, to recover our sense of responsibility for our measure of social wealth. At bottom, we justify our capitalist form of life to one another in terms of the freedom to set our own ends and the equality between exchangers promised by the market. Herein lies the emancipatory dimension of capitalist production: our purpose is not merely to survive or to produce goods, but to produce ourselves as free and equal producers. Such purposes give the system its ethical force. At the same time, they also constitute the very standard by which the value form of wealth can be criticized and its irrationality laid bare.
The concept of rational life tells us that a mode of production is justified not when it maximizes output or efficiency, but when it enables its participants to see their productive activity as an end in itself, shareable with others. This does not mean a return to pre-industrial simplicity, as Saito suggests. But it doesn’t imply the hyper-accelerationist spirit of the “overabundance” theorists, either. Rather, in sharp contrast to both Saito and the advocates of abundance, it means rationalizing growth itself: producing not for the accumulation of value, but for the sake of our flourishing as the rational kind of animals we are.
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Working out the ethical foundation of Marxism may seem like a purely philosophical exercise, but it has direct implications for how we think about socialist politics today. To see why, let us return to Saito’s vision of communism as a form of social life opposed to growth—a vision that has not only been influential within academic circles but has also resonated with many on the left. Saito’s narrative of the emergence of capitalism is, as we’ve seen, a “fall” narrative. In the Edenic precapitalist state, resources were plentiful because they were held in common and the basic needs of all were met. The Enclosure Acts that British parliament began to pass in the seventeenth century privatized previously open fields, ushering in an age of scarcity and competition—as well as endless growth, laying waste to the environment.
Yet as several commentators have noted, Saito’s narrative entails a form of romantic anti-capitalism. Saito understands Marx’s late work on “primitive communism” as the discovery of a new standpoint of critique of capitalist modernity. The idea is that prior to capitalism, there were communities that not only held natural resources in common but were also nonhierarchical, egalitarian and democratic in nature. Degrowth communism advocates a return to these early forms of community.
Anthropologists have questioned this characterization of premodern societies, but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, several problems persist. First, Marx saw as deeply emancipatory the bourgeois recognition of the rights of the individual, which was essential to establishing our collective responsibility for determining how we live: for the first time in human history authority was conferred—at least in principle—on each and every individual. Second, Marx held that primitive communism would have to be re-achieved in a higher form. While Saito does affirm this in passing, he glosses over its implications, which are devastating for the degrowth picture.
Genuine reestablishment of the commons would require two things. On the one hand, it would require redemption of the technological development that surplus production under capitalism has made possible. This would involve, for example, employing labor-saving technologies not just to increase efficiency but to enable us to engage in forms of work we find worthy of our dignity and consistent with our conception of flourishing. On the other hand, a renewed commons would entail radicalizing the principle of democratic self-determination that has defined bourgeois modernity. This would involve the producers deciding cooperatively how and what we produce, rather than having the answers to these questions dictated by the market and the profit motive. More generally, this would mean contesting Saito’s one-sided vision of capitalism as a regression from an original Edenic condition rather than as a progression entangled in contradiction.
Under capitalism, the drive to profit may generate labor-saving technologies, but they are environmentally destructive, deskilling for workers and indifferent to the well-being of consumers. In Marx’s words, machines are so designed that laborers become mere “appendages” to them. Saito’s opposition to the growth of the productive forces takes for granted this model of growth specific to capitalism. But technology can come to serve other ends. Moishe Postone, one of the foundational figures of the Wertkritik tradition, famously observes that under communism, “the machines themselves will be different”—transformed by the new ends they would be made to realize.
A key example of the kind of “excess” that degrowth opposes is the production of luxury goods. This opposition misses how such goods, even under capitalism, often express a real—if distorted—social need. In a remarkable passage, Saito reduces the production of luxury items like Ferraris to a mere function of the drive to profit and “social status,” which “resides,” he claims, “solely in its scarcity.” In Saito’s communes, we would be content to drive Honda Civics, since the use value of the two vehicles is “the same.” But the point of the Ferrari is not just to get from point A to point B but to do so well, beautifully even. Our means of transportation should be reflective of the dignity and nobility of human life.
The point here is not to defend capitalist luxury but to transform it; Ferraris, after all, are infamously gas-guzzling, exemplifying how in our current form of life, beauty and noninstrumental activity are often at cross-purposes with our flourishing. The point is that even after the revolution, we would want to go beyond merely optimizing our means of transport for sustainability and survival. How might our modes of self-movement be made intrinsically satisfying, worthy of our shared dignity and sustainable over time? Our tools must be understood as expressive of our end of flourishing—which includes as an essential dimension acknowledgment of the material conditions of our own rational activity.
Against the supposed Prometheanism of the Marxist tradition, Saito concludes that society must conform to these limits by “degrowing” the productive forces—optimizing for sustainability rather than efficiency and for subsistence rather than luxury or profit. Yet Saito’s vision takes for granted the end of subsistence as well as the external character of ecological limits. This is why he, for example, rejects nuclear-energy technologies in any form as a “Promethean” transgression of ecological limits. As a result, degrowth reduces politics to the management of our own abstemiousness under naturally given restrictions. It limits us to debating the best means of compliance with environmental constraints—whether austerity or contraction of the productive forces—while making no room for collective deliberation about our ends.
If we accept Saito’s technocratic realism, we are headed not for the democratic and egalitarian community he promises but for an ascetic regime of self-restriction—ruled from above by environmental experts, oriented by external, allegedly set ecological lines. Degrowth communism risks becoming eco-authoritarianism in a Marxist guise. Yet Hegel helps us see that work like Saito’s is premised on a false dichotomy—the choice is not between growth and degrowth but capital growth and rational growth. Degrowth communists miss that “growth” is identical with the good of all life forms. In English, we even use a vegetative metaphor to translate the classical term eudaimonia for our fulfillment of the good: flourishing. All living beings must grow beyond their present condition through the generation of new matter—such as new cells—just to maintain their lives. In higher-order animals, this growth also entails expansion into new parts of their environment and the metabolism of novel resources. And in animals like us—rational animals—growth means more: we sustain ourselves not only by regenerating our matter or exploiting new resources but by reorganizing the very way we live. As Marx argues, human society is thus a special part of nature, not something that stands outside it. For us, flourishing is inseparable from the transformation of the technical and social means by which we reproduce our lives. To renounce growth altogether would be to renounce the very process through which all living beings—including rational beings—maintain themselves.
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The right-wing allergy to climate science and vaccination schemes is not simply dogged irrationalism; the hostility to “experts” not simply heroic stupidity. The rational kernel of climate denialism lies in the classic Kantian dictum: sapere aude, think for yourself, which has degenerated into the mantra “do your own research.” The point here is not that the science is wrong; it isn’t. The point is that it is used to short-circuit democratic debate and to introduce austerity and environmental-regulatory measures that disproportionately affect working people.
We can, and should, contest the denialism of the right but also acknowledge that recognition of the reality of ecological limits is a collective and democratic achievement. This does not mean that anything goes, that whatever we say is good just is good. The Hegelian view, recall, allows us to envision a form of collective end-setting through which we determine what our flourishing amounts to. But for our conception of flourishing to be consistent, we must come to see reason as essentially embodied, a way of being a living creature. As rational beings, we must, in other words, acknowledge that the vulnerability of the environment is our own vulnerability, that we cannot sustain ourselves without maintaining the integrity of the ecological whole. To return to the possibility of nuclear power, we must see how it raises questions that we must answer democratically: Can it enable the self-maintenance of our present ecological whole? Can it be intergenerationally sustainable? Can it express our collective end of flourishing?
If ecological limits are understood as limits we ourselves set through democratic deliberation, the political question then becomes how to best organize, and to expand or contract, production to accord with our end of flourishing. We could thereby recognize the temperature ceiling, for example, as a self-given limit, as a condition of technological progress and of the good life underpinning it. The task, then, is not endless growth for its own sake. Nor is it degrowth, which accepts and inverts the logic of capital, optimizing for sustainability instead of efficiency, subsistence rather than GDP. Rather, the task is to rationalize growth: to expand and develop the forces of production so that they might better enable and express the fundamental end of animals like us. In other words, our freedom.
Art credit: Gregory Euclide, My possible bending retreated with what was taken yet unused, 2013. Acrylic, corn, hosta, found foam, buckthorn root, PETG, sedum, pine cone, pencil, paper, fern, pine needles, moss, wood. Courtesy of the artist
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