Kohei Saito, a Japanese philosophy professor, advocates ‘degrowth communism’ as an approach to the climate crisis. This book focuses upon Marx’s recently rediscovered but previously unpublished ecological notebooks. He suggests that Karl Marx shifted from a productivist logic towards an ecological critique of both capitalism and economic growth in his later years. Saito hints that this apparent transformation of Marx’s thinking was largely suppressed and ignored.
After 1868, Saito suggests, Marx moved his focus from completing Capital to investigating environmental science. This, it is claimed, might be seen as an epistemological break, leading to a different, potentially greener former of Marxist orthodoxy. Marx’s ecological studies went unpublished, and Saito argues that Engels subtly edited Marx’s work to suggest a more straightforward advocacy of industrial development. The argument previously developed by John Bellamy Foster, that Marx utilized the concept of a metabolic rift to explain environmental problems, is also promoted in Marx in the Anthropocene. Saito further suggests that Rosa Luxemburg’s apparent ignorance of Marx’s use of this concept indicates a repression in Marxist thought of both the notion of the metabolic rift and a wider discussion of environmental issues.
The metabolic rift is used to criticise the apparent monism of diverse new materialists, including Bruno Latour, by Saito, suggesting that while Marx and indeed Engels, saw humanity as part of nature, they also advocated a conceptual division between the categories of nature and human society for analytical purposes. Georg Lukacs is described as a rare example of a post Marx Marxist who utilized the concept of the metabolic rift, in ‘Tailism and the Dialectic’, another previously unpublished text.
In the final chapter it is argued that communism provides the basis for an ecological society because it removes the short-term profit motive and allows for communal access to goods and services, which potentially can lead to reduced resource use. Communism provides, perhaps, the means of achieving prosperity without growth.
Saito undertakes two key tasks in this book. First, he suggests that productivist readings of Marx’s work are open to considerable challenge. Second, he focuses specifically on the contents of Marx’s ecological notebooks. He largely succeeds in both these tasks, basing his conclusions on a close textual reading of the notebooks.
Saito is far from revolutionary in his interpretation of Marx’s work and explicitly builds on earlier scholarships. It has long been clear that, in the last decades of his life, Marx moved in a new direction, one that might be seen as critical of what was presented as ‘Marxism’ during the early twentieth century.
The publication of Marx’s ethnographic notebooks, drafted in this period, suggested that instead of putting his energy into completing his economic works, he became fascinated with indigenous peoples, perhaps as inspiration for communism. A draft of a letter to a Russian activist, discussed in the text Marx and the late Russian Road, suggests that rather than exclusively working through a teleological path of industrialism, Marx considered the Russian peasant commune the mir, as a possible alternative route to Communism. Thus Saito’s work deepens an understanding that Marx was rethinking some of his earlier conclusions rather than revolutionising our understanding of his work.
Two criticisms I think are pertinent to Saito’s approach here. One is the question of agency; this is a Marxism of textual analysis rather than a Marxism of political movement and transformation. Assuming that we accept Marx as a ‘degrowth communist’ and view this as a desirable goal, how do we make degrowth communist revolution? Engels is criticised by Saito, but Engels’ editing and energy made Marx’s work more accessible. Political theory needs, perhaps, to be mobilised.
A second criticism is that there is a danger of a rather frozen and, above all, undialectical view of Marx and Engels’ work. At different periods, thinkers have different thoughts; contradictions and openness are apparent in all bodies of literature. Above all, Marx worked with dialectical contradictions. Capitalism was, through his various research and publications, both the best thing and the worst thing. Of course from the Paris Manuscripts, through to Capital, radical ecological thought flashes through the texts. Engels, independently of Marx, in his ‘Letters from Wuppertal’, written when he was just 18 identified river pollution as a problem. In his first major publication The Condition of the English Working Class, he illustrated how workplace toxins were killing people. Marx and Engels worked with contradiction in environmental and other matters. Saito makes an impressive contribution, but this is neither the first nor the final word on Marx’s ecological texts.