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“You can’t have wage rises unless they are backed by improvements in productivity.” This is the bosses’ line on the growing number of pay disputes. On the rail it means replacing 1,950 maintenance workers and 1,000 ticket office staff with machines, cutting routine maintenance by 50%. On the post, automated parcel sorting machines are part of a “modernisation agenda” that is putting 10,000 jobs at risk. The government has even suggested there are productivity gains to be squeezed from NHS workers.
Kohei Saito is an associate professor at Tokyo University and an erudite Marxist scholar. Not a candidate for a best-seller in the non-fiction book world, you might think. But you would be wrong in this case.
<strong>Michael Roberts</strong> reviews <em>Marx in the Anthropocene: towards the idea of degrowth communism</em> by Kohei Saito (Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp300)
It was actually Lenin taking advantage of the already growing revisionism of the gradualists (then called state-socialists) in the 2 nd International who was…