By MICHAEL LÖWY*
Considerations on three books by Kohei Saito
Classical ecologists often dismiss Karl Marx as “productivist” and blind to ecological problems. A growing number of eco-Marxist texts have been published recently that strongly contradict this common misconception. The pioneers of this new research are John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, followed by Ian Angus, Fred Magdoff and others, who helped transform the famous socialist publication Monthly Review in an eco-Marxist magazine.
Their main argument is that Karl Marx was fully aware of the destructive consequences of capitalist accumulation for the environment, a process he described through the concept of a “metabolic rift” between human societies and nature. We may not agree with some of their interpretations of Karl Marx’s writings, but their research has been decisive in a new understanding of his contribution to the ecological critique of capitalism.
Karl Marx, continuities and changes
Kohei Saito is a young Japanese Marxist researcher who belongs to this important eco-Marxist school. His first book, Nature versus capital, is a very valuable contribution to the re-evaluation of the Marxist legacy from an ecosocialist perspective.
One of the great qualities of his work is that – unlike many other scholars – he does not treat Karl Marx’s writings as a systematic set of texts defined from beginning to end by a strong ecological commitment (according to some) or a strong non-ecological tendency (according to others). As Kohei Saito argues very convincingly, there are elements of continuity in Marx’s reflection on nature, but also very significant changes and reorientations. Furthermore, as the book’s subtitle suggests, his critical reflections on the relationship between political economy and the natural environment are “unfinished.”
Among the continuities, one of the most important is the issue of the capitalist “separation” of human beings from the earth, that is, from nature. Although this theme had already appeared in Manuscripts from 1844, after the publication of The capital (1867), Marx turned his attention to pre-capitalist societies, in which there existed a form of unity between producers and the land. He considered that one of the essential tasks of socialism was to re-establish the original unity between human beings and nature, destroyed by capitalism, but at a higher level (negation of the negation).
This explains Karl Marx’s interest in pre-capitalist communities, both in his ecological discussions (for example, the German chemist Carl Fraas) and in his anthropological investigations (the historian Franz Maurer): both authors were considered “unconscious socialists”. And, of course, in his last important document, the “Letter to Vera Zasulitch” (1881), Marx argues that, through the suppression of capitalism, modern societies could return to a higher form of an “archaic” type of collective ownership and production. I would say that this belongs to the “romantic anti-capitalist” moment of Marx’s reflections… In any case, this interesting insight by Kohei Saito is very relevant today, when indigenous communities in the Americas, from Canada to Patagonia, are at the forefront of resistance to capitalist environmental destruction.
However, Kohei Saito's main contribution is to show the movement, the evolution of Karl Marx's reflections on nature, in a process of learning, rethinking and remodeling his thoughts. Before The capital, we find in Marx's writings a rather uncritical assessment of capitalist “progress” – an attitude often described by the vague mythological term of “Prometheanism”. This is evident in the Communist Manifesto, which celebrates the “subjugation of the forces of nature by man” and the “exploration of entire continents by culture”; but it also applies to London notebooks (1851), at Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 and other writings from these years.
Interestingly, Kohei Saito seems to exclude the floorplans (1857-58) of his critique, an exception that, in my view, is not justified, when we know how much Marx admires, in this manuscript, “the great civilizing mission of capitalism”, in relation to nature and pre-capitalist communities, prisoners of their localism and their “idolatry of nature”!
The shift occurred in 1865-66, when Karl Marx read the writings of the agricultural chemist Justus Von Liebig and discovered the problem of soil depletion and the metabolic rift between human societies and the natural environment. This would lead, in volume 1 of The capital – but also in the other two unfinished volumes – to a much more critical assessment of the destructive character of capitalist “progress”, particularly in agriculture.
After 1868, reading another German scientist, Carl Fraas, Karl Marx would also discover other important ecological issues, such as deforestation and local climate change. According to Kohei Saito, if Marx had managed to complete volumes 2 and 3 of The capital, would have given more emphasis to the ecological crisis – which also means, at least implicitly, that, in its current unfinished state, not enough emphasis is given to these issues.
More founder than prophet
This brings me to my main disagreement with Kohei Saito: in several passages of the book, he claims that, for Karl Marx, “the environmental unsustainability of capitalism is the contradiction of the system” (p.142); or that, towards the end of his life, he had come to consider metabolic rift as “the most serious problem of capitalism”; or that the conflict with natural limits is, for Marx, “the main contradiction of the capitalist mode of production”.
I wonder where Kohei Saito found, in Marx's writings, published books, manuscripts or notebooks, such statements... It is not possible to find them, and for good reason: the ecological unsustainability of the capitalist system was not a decisive issue in the 1945th century, as it has become today: or rather, since XNUMX, when the planet entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene.
Furthermore, I believe that metabolic rift, or conflict with natural limits, is not “a problem of capitalism” or a “contradiction of the system”: it is much more than that! It is a contradiction between the system and the “eternal natural conditions” (Marx), and therefore with the natural conditions of human life on the planet. In fact, as Paul Burkett (quoted by Saito) states, capital can continue to accumulate in any natural conditions, however degraded they may be, as long as there is no complete extinction of human life: human civilization can disappear before capital accumulation becomes impossible.
Kohei Saito concludes his book with a sober assessment that seems to me to be a very apt summary of the issue: The capital (the book) remains an unfinished project. Marx did not answer all the questions nor did he foresee the current world. But his critique of capitalism provides an extremely useful theoretical basis for understanding the current ecological crisis. I would therefore add that ecosocialism can build on Marx’s ideas, but it must fully develop a new eco-Marxist confrontation with the challenges of the Anthropocene in the 21st century.
Saito's second book, Less!, was published in Japan in 2019 and was a huge success, selling 500.000 copies. It is good news for critical ecology. Its opening chapters are a dramatic synthesis of climate change: the point of no return is at our doorstep, the Anthropocene is heading towards catastrophe. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has not been reached since the Pliocene, 4 million years ago.
The person responsible for this crisis is undoubtedly the capitalist system, which aims at an infinite multiplication of value and unlimited growth, inextricably linked to fossil fuels (and therefore to CO2 emissions).2) since the Industrial Revolution. As Kenneth Boulding observes, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world is either a fool or an economist.” If capitalism is not stopped, it will make the planet uninhabitable for human beings.
How to face this challenge? Kohei Saito makes a profound critique of the ecology compatible with (capitalist) growth: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – “an opiate of the people” –, the green economic growth advocated by the World Bank and even the Green New Deal proposed by Joseph Stieglitz and the American left. It is true, observes Kohei Saito, that we need a New Deal Green: electric vehicles, solar energy, cycle paths, free public transport. But this will not be enough to face the crisis.
It is necessary to break with the capitalist “imperial way of life” and take the path of degrowth, that is, move from quantity – especially of goods, GDP growth – to quality: increasing free time and social protection.
“Degrowth Communism”
Saito calls “degrowth communism” the radical alternative to capitalism, based on the democratic management of common goods such as land, water, electricity, health care and education, removing them from both the market and the state. This proposal can be found in the later writings of Karl Marx, says Kohei Saito, who, however, does not cite any of Marx’s texts in which degrowth is mentioned. While in Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx defends the primacy of the productive forces, from a Eurocentric perspective, from 1868 onwards, thanks to his reading of the biologists Liebig and Fraas – as attested by his reading notes recently published by the new MEGA (“Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe”, the complete texts of Marx and Engels) – began to develop a new perspective.
This culminated in 1881 with the letter (and its various drafts) to Vera Zasulitch, in which he spoke of the traditional rural commune as the source of a communist future for Russia. This was a proposal that broke with Eurocentrism, the primacy of the productive forces and the view of history as “progress”.
It seems to me, however, that Kohei Saito goes too far in claiming to find in Karl Marx’s writings on the Russian rural commune a “positive perception of stationary economies” and, therefore, the premises of “degrowth communism.” More sober and pertinent seems to me his assertion that “nowhere did Marx leave any written trace of what he considered to be degrowth communism.”
Communism, according to Kohei Saito, would be a horizontal network of democratic co-management, in which workers would be owners and managers of the means of production. What is missing from this project is democratic ecological planning. It is true that, in one passage, Kohei Saito mentions the need for “social planning to manage the production of goods for use and the satisfaction of needs” (p. 267), but this important intuition is not developed.
How to get there? Saito speaks of the solidarity economy and cooperatives, acknowledging that, “as Marx pointed out, workers’ cooperatives are exposed to competition from the capitalist market.” Consequently, he concludes, “the entire system must be changed.” He also mentions socialist municipalism, exemplified by Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau (who later, unfortunately, lost the mayoralty). Finally, he refers to social movements and citizens’ assemblies, but his reflection lacks a sociopolitical strategy for revolutionary transformation.
Saito's third book, Marx and the Anthropocene, published in 2022, currently only exists in English. It offers a much more precise analysis of Karl Marx's writings: he locates as the key text of productivist historical materialism not the Communist Manifesto, but the 1859 Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which defines revolution as the suppression of relations of production that have become obstacles to the free development of the productive forces. He also criticizes certain clearly “Promethean” arguments in the floorplans of 1857-58.
As much as his interpretation of Karl Marx’s later Russian writings as a break with productivism and Eurocentrism seems to me correct, his hypothesis of a “degrowth” Marx seems unfounded. But Kohei Saito recognizes the limits of Marx’s thought and the unfinished nature of his project.
In this most recent book, Kohei Saito also demonstrates a much more precise knowledge of modern ecosocialist literature, and thus defines his “degrowth communism” as a variant of ecosocialism that advocates a break with growth.
In conclusion, the proposal for a movement that would tear the commons away from the market and base the “Reign of Freedom” on the reduction of working time corresponds to the ideas of Karl Marx, but degrowth is absent from his writings. The degrowth communism that Saito advocates as an ecological imperative—a communism that demands the end of the “imperial way of life” and the reduction of production through the elimination of useless goods and services—seems to me a beautiful idea for the future, but it is a new idea, created by 21st-century eco-Marxism, of which Kohei Saito is a brilliant representative.
*Michae Lowy is director of research in sociology at Center nationale de la recherche scentifique (CNRS). Author, among other books, of Franz Kafka unsubmissive dreamer (Cem Cabeças Publisher) [https://amzn.to/3VkOlO1]
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
References
Kohei Saito, La nature contre le capital: l'écologie de Marx dans sa critique inachevée du capital. Paris, Éditions Syllepse, 2021, 350 pages. [https://amzn.to/3RgwK8e]
[Brazilian translation] Kohei Saito. Karl Marx's ecosocialism. Translation: Pedro Davoglio. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2021, 352 pages. [https://amzn.to/43XcHTQ]
Kohei Saito. Moins! La décroissance is a philosophy. Paris, Éditions Seuil, 2024, 352 pages. [https://amzn.to/4bBtkX9]
Kohei Saito. Marx and the Anthropocene: towards the idea of degrowth communism. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 300 pp. [Brazilian translation] [https://amzn.to/4iiyhqg]
Kohei Saito. Capital in the Anthropocene. Translation: Caroline M. Gomes. New York, New York, 2024, 226 pages. [https://amzn.to/41yUIAt]
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