Description: Facing global climate crisis, Karl Marx's ecological critique of capitalism more clearly demonstrates its importance than ever. This book explains why Marx's ecology had to be marginalized and even suppressed by Marxists after his death throughout the twentieth century. Marx's ecological critique of capitalism, however, revives in the Anthropocene against dominant productivism and monism. Investigating new materials published in the complete works of Marx and Engels (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe), Saito offers a wholly novel idea of Marx's alternative to capitalism that should be adequately characterized as degrowth communism. This provocative interpretation of the late Marx sheds new lights on the recent debates on the relationship between society and nature and invites readers to envision a post-capitalist society without repeating the failure of the actually existing socialism of the twentieth century.
Brief description: Kohei Saito is an associate professor at University of Tokyo. His book Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017) won the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His second book, Capital in the Anthropocene (Shueisha, 2020), has sold over 400,000 copies in Japan and received the Asia Book Award.
Review Quotes: 'Marx in the Anthropocene is a deeply restorative project, both analytically and politically. Through a detailed examination of Marx's notebooks on the natural sciences, Kohei Saito reminds us why Marx insisted that the relationship between nature and capitalism was fundamentally unsustainable. The book restores to us a forgotten Marx, one who is eager to learn from precapitalist societies, one who is beginning to see destruction in development. Taking his lead from this longneglected Marx, Saito then builds a powerful argument for degrowth communism, a theoretical approach that aims to reorganize the very notion of abundance to fit the common weal, rather than fit an abstract notion of luxury communism. Marx in the Anthropocene reminds us, again, why anticapitalism is the nutrient that must be urgently added to nature'' Tithi Bhattacharya, author of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto