Saito’s key finding, and key argument, is that the later Marx rethought his earlier positions, both as a result of, and as a reason for, pursuing extensive studies in the physical and biological sciences, on the one hand, and pre-capitalist societies on the other. In this latest one he widens the discussion, connecting with historical and contemporary debates and the work of key thinkers including Frederik Engels, Georg Lukacs, Rosa Luxemburg, István Mészáros, Herbert Marcuse, James O’Connor, Jason Moore, Noel Castree, Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster. Saito’s previous book explored the evidence for Marx’s “ecological turn” in those notebooks. Saito has for some years made a detailed study of the notebooks that Marx filled after completing the first volume of Capital: these have only appeared in recent years in a collection known by the initials of its German title 5, the MEGA. The book was a surprising best-seller (half a million copies), in Japan, which has a distinctive and innovative Marxist tradition 3 as well as a long-standing tradition of ecological thought and practice 4. So where did the Copernican 2 thinker of the socialist movement, Karl Marx, stand on this issue? Was he of the brown or the green left? That is what Kohei Saito addresses in Marx in the Anthropocene: towards the idea of a degrowth communism. Socialism is not simply the efficient and equitable management of the existing system but a complete alternative. At its heart has been an opposition to turning everything into a commodity 1. However, there is another left tradition that has always questioned the alignment of social progress with material expansion. While the ecological movement has questioned the endless expansion of production, consumption and the consequent acceleration of resource and energy use, the left has often emphasised the domination of nature not just to meet everyone’s needs but to offer a universally high standard of living. Sometimes it has seemed as if the ecological movement and the socialist movement are inevitably at odds. Review of Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge. This review is the personal view of the author.
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