but may reveal what is the true potential of any one person. None other than Piketty has unknowingly pointed to this difficulty when he stated: “I always exclude what economists often call (unfortunately, to my mind) ‘human capital,’ which consists of an individual’s labor
power, skills, training, and abilities (my
emphasis).”56
It might be suggested that this very subject be the next item on the list of subjects which Marxist scholars dedicate themselves, rather than to focus solely on structural manifestations which focus only on consequences and not the causes of inequality produced by capitalist societies. We have already discussed the proposals put forth by Piketty; but Saito and his arguments also suffer from him holding a similar perspective. For example, Saito not only argues that new research confirms Marx understood and held strong views on ecology, but that data related to changes in our current climate crisis evidence that Marx was correct about the horror capitalism imposes. But this is evident from Marx’s own writing: for example, “the “sensuous external world” is the “material in which his labour is realized, in which it is active, out of which and through which it produces things.57 It is also derived logically from Marx’s own arguments that capitalism would ultimately, because of its insatiable need to produce capital, deplete environmental resources: “Thus, the more the worker appropriates the world of sensuous nature by his labour the more he deprives himself of the means of existence.”58 So, a person must ask: what do such apologetics accomplish?
This question has more and more come to the fore with detailed arguments of Saito’s now becoming available through publication of his 2023 work, Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism. A recent example is John Bellamy Foster’s rebuke of Saito’s thesis in an article titled, “Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism,” published in the June 1st edition of the Monthly Review. Foster argues:
If Marx’s theory of metabolic rift was not better known among Marxists prior to this century, this had nothing to do with Engels’s alleged suppression of Marx’s ideas, a claim for which there is no concrete basis. Rather, it had to do
with the reality that the metabolism concept was embedded in the deep structure of Marx’s work and thus was often overlooked, while a great deal of what he wrote on this was incomplete, and developed only in his later years. More importantly, much of Marx’s science, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, was well ahead of the socialist movement itself and would only be taken up as new problems presented themselves.59 It was the development of ecosocialism a century after Marx’s death that led to the rediscovery and reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, rather than the reverse. This unearthing of Marx’s ecological argument was partially enabled by the substantial (if somewhat indirect) influence that it had exerted, along with the work of Engels, on subsequent socialist ecological analyses within natural science and materialist philosophy.
For this reason, Foster goes on to argue:
Rather than perpetuating old divisions within the left, it is necessary today to bring Marx’s social-metabolism argument together with Engels’s dialectics of nature, seeing these analyses as integrally related. The object should be to unite the first and second foundations of Marxist thought, providing a broader material basis for the critique of the capitalist mode of production as the essential ground for a revolutionary ecosocialist praxis in the twenty-first century. By contrast, the subject of what constitutes value in terms of individual thoughts and thinking – as opposed to products produced through labor – might well prove more useful as it goes to what may, in fact, be the most valued component of human identity or personal character, as they are things which not only reside in the one space that is truly private but may reveal what is the true potential of any one person – which would by definition go to his or her character, needs, and desires. And is this not what Marx was really chasing with the notion of “each according to his ability, each
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