April 2025

Kohei Saito, probably the current leading Marxist exponent of degrowth, was born in 1987 and raised in Tokyo. By his own description, he was “more right wing” while in high school, and it wasn’t until he began his undergraduate studies in 2005 at the University of Tokyo that he first encountered Marx and began to think about social and economic problems in a structural way.[1] Saito quickly withdrew from the University of Tokyo after winning a Freeman Asian Scholarship to attend Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 2005 to 2009, where he studied German. During his first year at Wesleyan, Saito “volunteered to help build houses for survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.” Saito notes that this experience had a major effect on him, exposing him to the intensity of inequality and poverty in the United States, motivating him to “study more about why poverty exists.”[2] Saito then began a masters degree in philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2009, after which he did a PhD in philosophy from 2012 to 2015 at the Humboldt Universität Berlin under the supervision of Andreas Arndt, a scholar of Hegel and Feuerbach, among others, with no special interest in ecology. While working on his PhD, Saito was partly inspired to study the conjoining themes of Marx and ecology when the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster prompted him to consider “how capitalism is not just simply exploiting workers but also seriously degrading the environment.”[3] 

Through Arndt, Saito became part of the MEGA project, or Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, which aims to create a complete critical scholarly edition of the writings of the two founders of historical materialism. A first attempt at such a project was begun in the Soviet Union in the 1920s through the Marx-Engels Institute, founded and directed by David Riazanov, a Russian revolutionary scholar and historian who also wrote one of the first biographies of Marx and Engels. While the Marx-Engels Institute made great progress in the initial scholarly analysis and codification of Marx’s writings, publishing twelve volumes, the project was stifled when Riazanov was dismissed from the Institute and exiled in 1931, later to be executed during Stalin's Purges in 1938. Under Stalin an emphasis was laid on the formation and protection of a dogmatic orthodoxy regarding Marx’s writings and theory, implying that the Party, and Stalin himself, had already achieved a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of Marx's work. To suggest otherwise through the mere act of historical and theoretical study of the broader corpus of Marx and Engels was to court accusations of political deviation, reaction, and ultimately treason, with Riazanov being one victim among a host of prominent scholars of Marx including Isaak Illich Rubin and Evgeny Pashukanis. An entire generation of Marx and Engels scholars was all but annihilated by the late 1930s, putting back the study of Marx by decades.

Systematic, scholarly codification and analysis of the writings of Marx and Engels was set back in the Soviet Union, and the contributions of the Marx-Engels Institute lay dormant for the next thirty-five years; the combination of Soviet orthodoxy, Stalinism, WWII, and the Cold War made such a project both ideologically inconvenient and materially impossible. Not until the middle of the 1960s was the project revived through cooperation and exchange between Soviet and East German scholars, although no new scholarly edition of Marx and Engels appeared under its imprimatur until 1975.  The historical discontinuity—between the 30s and the 60s—has led researchers sometimes to distinguish  between MEGA1 and MEGA2—while the usage of MEGA today most commonly refers to this second post-1960s scholarly project. 

Like its predecessor, the latter undertaking has also run into major interruptions and setbacks. With the decline and then collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification in the early 1990s, together with the generalized liberal-capitalist sense of the end of history, the project stalled as its old institutional and national backers slipped away. In response to this crisis, a new scholarly body was founded in Amsterdam in 1990 to provide a home for the MEGA, the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES), which has carried the project forward to this day.[4] It was while working on his PhD that Saito became part of the MEGA project through the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften editorial research team. Crucially for Saito’s later development as a thinker, this work gave him unique access to Marx’s unpublished later notebooks post-1868, the fourth and likely final section of the MEGA, which is still in the process of being edited and published. Saito’s work on the MEGA became the basis for his dissertation, which analyzed Marx’s relationship with ecological issues and ecological scholarship in the last fifteen years of his life. 

Saito published a book version of his dissertation in German in 2016: Natur gegen Kapital: Marx’ Ökologie in seiner unvollendeten Kritik des Kapitalismus. Saito then received a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science grant to be a visiting scholar at the University of California-Santa Barbara, working in the sociology department with Kevin Anderson.[5] Anderson, one of the most influential Marxist sociologists in English, has also been part of the MEGA project. And, in California, Saito, through Anderson, was also introduced to the International Marxist-Humanist Organization.[6] The IMHO seeks to carry forward the ideas of Raya Dunayevskaya, an American Marxist who was born in the late Russian Empire and emigrated to the US in 1922 as a teenager. In the US she later became a prominent Trotskyist and was briefly Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico in 1937/38, before breaking with him in 1939, setting off on a long career as a heterodox Marxist and revolutionary theorist before her death in 1987. The humanism promoted by Dunayevskaya and the IMHO considers Marxism to be an ethical doctrine derived from the Enlightenment, against official Soviet doctrine and Althusserian interpretations.[7]

A further strand of Saito’s thought comes from his engagement with the US-based Monthly Review, to which he’s contributed book reviews and articles since 2014. Under the editorship of the Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster since 2006, Monthly Review has become a consistent organ of Marxist ecological thought, in which a more or less classical Marxism is allied to a vision of “ecological civilization.” In this framework, Marx counts equally as a theorist of the “metabolic rift” between capital and nature as also of the social rift between capital and labor, in which the overcoming of capitalism involves not just the reconciliation of the social rift but also the metabolic rift, indeed the two being one and the same. Saito has also maintained close links with some Japanese Marxists, particularly Teinosuke Otani, to whom he dedicated Marx in the Anthropocene, calling him “my teacher, devoted friend.” Otani, who died in 2019, was one of the most distinguished and influential Marxist economists in Japan and the world, and was also a leading MEGA editor, being the representative of the Japanese MEGA team from 1998 to 2015.

Saito then sits at the intersection of multiple schools and trends in Marxism, connected by the MEGA project, from Raya Dunayevskaya-inspired Marxist humanism, the Monthly Review school of ecological Marxism, and Japanese Marxist economics. From the MEGA project, he took a scholastic and exegetical approach to the Marx-Engels corpus; from Raya Dunayevskaya-inspired Marxist humanism, he took an ethical concern with Marx; from Monthly Review he took a concern with ecology; and from Japanese Marxist economics, he took a rigorous standard of engagement with Marx and economic theory. Saito, then, is a characteristic representative of the work of the MEGA project, which is beginning to carve out its own distinct school of Marxism based on its close readings and scholarly hermeneutics of the original writings and notebooks of Marx. The Marx of the MEGA school is in many ways distinct from traditional understandings of Marx. As Marcello Musto put it, “the end of Marxism-Leninism [official Soviet Marxism] finally freed Marx’s work from the shackles of an ideology light years away from his conception of society. Recent research has refuted the various approaches that reduce Marx’s conception of communist society to superior development of the productive forces. For example, it has shown the importance he attached to the ecological question: on repeated occasions, he denounced the fact that expansion of the capitalist mode of production increases not only the theft of workers’ labor but also the pillage of natural resources. Marx went deeply into many other issues that, though often underestimated, or even ignored, by scholars of his work, are acquiring crucial importance for the political agenda of our times.”[8] 

This last sentence of Musto’s, however, brings out several ambiguities in the MEGA project that also preside over Saito’s work: Is the aim of exegetical work mainly to establish a truer philological picture of Marx’s thought? Or is it instead mainly to bring out “many other issues”—than labor organizing and explicit class struggle, say—that are more salient in our time than they were for the first generations of Marxists? Does a newer, ecological Marx contradict or merely complement an older “economistic” Marx? And is it necessary that the historical-materialist thought vital to the 21st century be discoverable, in a nutshell, in Marx’s own work? Or is it merely convenient for contemporary politics?

Kohei Saito established himself as a leading practitioner of MEGA school Marxist hermeneutics with his first book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, published in 2017 by Monthly Review Press. Saito, through a rigorous reading and analysis of the unpublished notebooks of the late Marx, advanced an interpretation of Marx as a thinker deeply engaged with natural science and ecological concerns, as against the traditional interpretation of Marx as a Promethean obsessed with the continual growth of technology and production at the expense of nature. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism was a minor sensation, winning the 2017 Deutscher Prize and putting Saito at the forefront of a burgeoning school of theorists who sought to square ecological concerns and climate change activism with Marx and Marxism. This was hardly a novel intervention by Saito, however, as he explicitly built upon the earlier work of John Bellamy Foster. In his 2000 book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Foster had already advanced the argument that the late-period Marx had become concerned with ecological issues in a manner that was applicable to modern politics. Saito built upon this essential argument due to his access to the MEGA project and a further body of unpublished notebooks by Marx, beyond what Foster had been able to access almost two decades prior. Saito then was not necessarily breaking new ground with Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, so much as culminating a prior strain of interpretation and argument through an expanded scholarly apparatus and source base.

While it was an impressive scholarly apparatus of extraordinarily fine-grained textual analysis and interpretation, Saito’s first book suffered from a lack of clarity as to its broader implications. Bluntly, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism could be countered with “so what?” While it is on its face interesting that Marx in his later years made a serious engagement with ecology and natural science, this occurred in unpublished notebooks, and Marx had a wide range of intellectual interests throughout his life. Why and how do the late-in-life unpublished writings of a polymath who wrote enough to fill dozens of volumes change our understanding of his project and his politics, and what implications, if any, do they have for both the theoretical and practical challenges of today? 

Exegesis and hermeneutics, while able to highlight forgotten or previously unknown aspects of Marx, cannot alone answer this question. Saito’s first book then should be seen as having raised this question and laid the groundwork for a potential answer, without providing one itself. With Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, published in 2022, Saito finally answered this question, moving beyond textual analysis of Marx to connecting that analysis and its implications to the history of Marxism and the political tasks of the present. A compact but ambitious work, Marx in the Anthropocene makes interventions variously in understanding the relationship between Engels and Marx, the influence of György Lukács, Western Marxism, utopian socialism, conceptions of nature, epistemological breaks in Marx’s thought, the nature of post-capitalist society and communism, and of course current debates on the Anthropocene and degrowth.

Saito’s English-language body of work was recently expanded with the early 2024 publication of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (the book’s American title), tamer than the title of the British edition, Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth. While it was published in English almost two years after Marx in the Anthropocene, Slow Down actually comes first chronologically, as it was originally published in Japan in 2020. In Japan, Slow Down was originally published as Hitoshinsei no Shihonron. Compounding the title confusion, Hitoshinei no Shihonron is referred to by Saito as translating to Capital in the Anthropocene in English, but it is a separate and distinct work from the closely titled Marx in the Anthropocene. Slow Down/ Hitoshinsei no Shihonron is the work that truly made Saito’s reputation, selling approximately half a million copies in Japan, a massive and surprising publishing phenomenon. 

Though Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down are different texts, they form parts of a more-or-less unified project. In the acknowledgements to Marx in the Anthropocene, Saito writes that the book can in part “be regarded as a more rigorous and academic version of the Japanese book [Slow Down/Hitoshinsei no Shihonron]...” Saito also states that Marx in the Anthropocene is “not a translation of the previous Japanese book. Rather, it builds on wholly new arguments with a more careful reading of materials and the reconstruction of key debates on Marxian ecology in recent years.”[9]  We can see the two works forming a cohesive whole: Slow Down is a popular work, while Marx in the Anthropocene is an academic one. While distinct in the details, both books ultimately advance the same basic argument. In Slow Down Saito uses references to modern politics and popular leftist literature, discussing Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, and David Graeber to advance the argument of the relevance of the late Marx in designing a degrowth society. Slow Down has a breezy, punchy style, broken up by large subject headings and one or two page expositions, lending it the air of an extended essay. When reading, it is not hard to see why it became such a best-seller. Yet Slow Down is a work of political exhortation, not so much one of political and scholarly theory. To truly understand Saito’s political position of degrowth, it is necessary to engage with the scholarly arguments of Marx in the Anthropocene.

Saito argues in Marx in the Anthropocene that there is a major epistemological break in Marx’s late thought from 1881 onward, in which Marx moved away from a vision of post-capitalism as involving endless growth towards a vision of post-capitalism based on communitarian equality and sustainable shared life as expressed in peasant communities, or “communism in living,” which Saito describes as a “stationary and circular economy without economic growth” [Saito’s emphasis]. Saito directly compares this to Louis Althusser’s original conception[10] of an epistemological break in Marx’s thought between the young, romantic Marx and the older, scientific Marx.[11] However, by implication Saito means that Althusser’s epistemological break between the young and mature Marx must be seen as inadequate to fully make sense of the changes in Marx’s thought. The third and final epistemological break is what should be seen as the last and definitive for interpreting Marx and his theory of communism. For Saito, “Marx’s idea of communism itself [Saito’s emphasis] significantly changed in the 1880s as a result of his conscious reflection upon earlier theoretical flaws and the one-sidedness of historical materialism.”[12] To get to this conclusion Saito makes interlocking arguments that begin methodologically with the foundation of “Marxism” as such in the late 19th century with Engels. 

A major assumption made by Saito in his argument is that the early Marx advocated for a type of endless growth or a continuous build-up of productive forces which was conceptually similar to modern ideas of economic growth as they became standard and hegemonic post-WWII. However, this assumption goes against the kind of historicization that Saito champions for studying the later Marx. That is: does Marx ever actually say or even imply that his vision of post-capitalism involves endless growth, as we understand what that term means today? Marx does sometimes imply, reasonably enough, that capitalism is ultimately a fetter upon the development of the productive forces. And this could be said to imply that he’s in favor of “more productive forces,” i.e. growth forever. But at the same time, capitalism fetters the durability of goods and promotes obsolescence for reasons of profit-making. Might not the development of the productive forces mean longer-lasting machines making longer-lasting goods with less biophysical inputs, and made in factories closer to where the products are ultimately to be delivered? “Development of the productive forces” is not as clear-cut a concept as it might seem, and does not automatically imply contemporary notions of “growth.” This raises a legitimate concern that rather than actually reading the pre-1881 Marx with the same rigor as he does the post-1881 Marx, Saito presents a post-1945 reading of Marx on growth. 

Saito’s overall argument rests on Marx’s concept of a metabolic relationship between humanity and nature, as later theorized and built upon by Rosa Luxemburg, István Mészáros, Paul Burkett, and John Bellamy Foster.[13] Capitalism creates a rift in this metabolic relationship, inherent to capitalism itself, which threatens the very existence of humanity, nature, and capitalism. Capitalist crisis is thus a crisis of nature, insofar as it disorders the metabolism between humanity and nature, as mediated by labor.

Saito argues that there is a direct link between the varying readings of Marx on this issue and different kinds of political practice. For Saito, Marxian hermeneutics/exegesis is no dry academic affair, but rather a vital political task; indeed for Saito, though he does not come out and state it directly, it appears to be its own form of political practice for him. If one takes Marx seriously as a resource for determining the appropriate form of political action, then one’s Marxism, based on a specific interpretation of Marx, has a direct consequence in the world of politics. It is imperative then that we get Marx right, and understand how others have gotten Marx wrong.

For Saito, the origin of the misinterpretation of Marx’s relationship to ecological thought was Engels himself, whose work had lasting consequences within Marxism  during the 20th and 21st centuries. Engels, during his admirable efforts to transform Marx’s unpublished notes into the second and third volumes of Capital, made subtle changes to the wording of multiple passages by Marx, specifically those relating to the discussion of the metabolism between humanity and nature. These changes, small but impactful, were likely motivated by Engels’ own deep-seated views on natural science and the relationship between humans and nature, as seen in his own writings Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature.[14] Given their close intellectual relationship, Engels may have assumed that any changes he made were justified by his understanding of his friend. This is not mere fancy, as Marx even wrote a chapter in Engels’ Anti-Dühring, one example of how Marx and Engels often functioned as co-authors and united figures in the same project.[15]

Saito reads the published standard versions of Capital volumes II and III against the original notebooks by Marx, as published in the MEGA, in order to show the changes made by Engels. For instance, in his original draft notebooks Marx wrote about how large-scale landownership “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.”[16] Marx also referenced Justus von Leibig at the end of the passage, a German chemist whose work on soil depletion Marx read deeply later in his life, and who Saito argues had a key impact on the development of Marx’s ecological thought and the concept of the metabolic rift. Saito shows how Engels, when editing this passage as part of Capital, volume III, modified the wording to remove the reference to a natural metabolism and changed the term “soil” to “life,” also removing the reference to Liebig.[17] Saito concludes that it is “precisely due to this difference between ‘Marx’s later writings’ and Engels’s understanding of dialectics’ that the concept of metabolism and its ecological implication were marginalized throughout the 20th century.”[18]

Western Marxism was correct to mark a differentiation between Marx and Engels, but was wrong about the form of the differentiation, associating the latter with a Soviet, scientistic interpretation of Marxism that led into mechanistic dogma. Western Marxism sought to preserve and salvage the dialectical dynamism of Marx. The main characteristic of Western Marxism “is the dismissal of Engels’s dialectics of nature by highlighting its fundamental difference from Marx’s social philosophy.”[19] Yet, due to Engels’s role in editing Capital and his writings on natural science, Western Marxism came to see Engels as the figure who had deep concerns with ecological and natural scientific topics, while Marx was believed to have written little to nothing on these issues. This resulted in a “marginalization of Marxian ecology throughout the 20th century”[20] by both Orthodox and Western Marxism. In reality, the true differentiation between Marx and Engels was over their particular understanding of ecology. “By excluding the sphere of nature, Western Marxism restricted Marx’s conclusions to society, and their discussions came to pivot around the concept of ‘reification’ as a normative foundation for a critique of capitalism.”[21]

For Saito, the main Marxist theorist who simultaneously laid the foundation for Western Marxism via the critique of Engels while also salvaging Marx’s potentially ecosocialist concepts of metabolism and of man and nature was György Lukács. In his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, Lukács correctly emphasized the role of metabolism between man and nature in Marx’s thought, an emphasis continued in Lukács’s later manuscript of 1925-26, Tailism and the Dialectic. Lukács also correctly analyzed Marx's dialectical analysis of the dynamic between humans and nature, which stands opposed to theories which claim that there can be no break between humanity and nature due to capitalism because everything is nature, or that nature is purely socially constructed.[22] Saito goes on to critique a range of theorists, particularly Jason Moore and Bruno Latour, who argue for a monist conception of nature by rejecting the notion of a metabolic rift created by capitalism. Again, however, in setting up this bifurcation between the late Marx and Engels, Western Marxism and Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, Saito does not advance a fundamentally new argument, as this bifurcation was first laid out by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology and other works.

Saito contends that the result of Western Marxism’s ignorance of Marx’s ecological concerns, following from Lukács’s dichotomy between Marx and Engels a misinterpretation of Lukács’s own thought regarding metabolism and nature, has led to a revival of utopian socialism based on Promethean productivism and a doctrine of endless growth. Indeed, Saito holds that wide swathes of Marxist theory today are beholden to a Promethean left accelerationism, a utopian socialism which is “grounded upon Marx’s Grundrisse” and the influence of Western Marxism.[23] Saito further argues that focusing on the Grundrisse has led Marxists to ignore the changes in Marx’s thought that took place in the 1870s and the 1880s, electing instead to retreat “to his Prometheanism of the 1850s,” which has had the consequence of creating a tendency among Marxists today of a “one-sided focus on a political struggle that pivots around electoral politics without challenging the economic structure and consumerist ideas that continue to constrain our political imaginary.”[24] In order to truly understand Marx, and to gain a more viable strategy for anti-capitalist politics in the Anthropocene, we must examine Marx’s writing after 1868.[25] Saito then creates an analytic that divides postwar Marxism into the camps of those who follow the Grundrisse versus those who follow the notebooks of the 1870s and 1880s.

Saito engages in a rigorous analysis of Marx’s post-1868 writings, particularly his unpublished notebooks, in the sixth chapter of Marx in the Anthropocene, complementing and also going beyond his prior research from his dissertation and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Saito shows that post-1868 Marx engaged in intensive reading and research into the fields of agronomy, agriculture, and chemistry. Marx was particularly caught up in the study of the works of Carl Fraas, an agronomist, and Justus von Liebig, an agricultural chemist. During this period, Marx also began reading widely regarding non-European history and societies, particularly histories, traveler’s accounts, and early studies in what would develop into the field of anthropology. Saito characterizes the post-1868 period for Marx as a linked study of “natural science and pre-capitalist/non-Western societies.”[26] As Saito puts it, “After 1868 Marx read books on ancient Rome, India, Algeria, Latin America, the Iroquois in North America and Russian agrarian communes.”[27] During this latter stage of his life in the 1870s, Marx also engaged with Russian socialists, revolutionaries, and intellectuals, particularly those affiliated with the Narodnik movement, reading Nikolay Chernyshevsky, meeting with the sociologist Maxime Kovalevsky, following Russian debates in journals and newspapers, engaging in correspondence with various Russian figures, and even contributing letters to Russian magazines, such as Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1878, on debates over Russian and capitalist development. Saito shows that among the works that Marx read most intensively during this period were Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, James Money’s Java, or How to Manage a Colony, Henry Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, and John Phear’s The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon.[28] Saito argues that through this wider reading, particularly as related to agriculture, Marx began to re-think his earlier theories of the development of capitalism and the nature of a communist future.

This leads Saito to his conclusion regarding the importance of the late Marx, particularly the break in his thought after 1881, when Saito claims that Marx shifted his conception of communism towards degrowth. This occurred due to Marx’s turn towards ecological concerns and natural sciences, as laid out in Saito’s first book and the sixth chapter of Marx in the Anthropocene. Saito expands this by showing Marx’s concurrent detailed readings and notes on works about agricultural communes and ancient forms of communal living, mainly via exegesis of the unpublished notebooks in the fourth section of the MEGA, culminating in Marx’s letters to Vera Zasulich regarding Russian agricultural communes and capitalist development. As Saito argues, these unpublished reflections on development and communism show that “Marx’s idea of communism itself [Saito’s emphasis] significantly changed in the 1880s as a result of his conscious reflection upon earlier theoretical flaws and the one-sidedness of historical materialism.”[29]

However, Marx died before his conclusions on ecology and communism as degrowth could be fully integrated into his work, leaving his critique of capitalism unfinished. For Saito, the true task of Marxist theory is to continue this unfinished project. This leads him to his final chapter, where he attempts to reconstruct and transcend Marx’s last writings. As he writes: “Since Marx was not able to elaborate on degrowth communism, it is necessary to revisit the unfinished project of Capital retrospectively, [Saito’s emphasis] from the perspective of degrowth communism, to update its contents. This is an attempt to go beyond Capital in order to concretize his final vision of post-capitalism.”[30] Saito then, through this retrospective reading of Marx, reconstructs a vision of communism based on degrowth, one which seeks to repair the metabolism between humanity and nature that was broken by capitalism. This reconstruction forms the seventh and final chapter of Marx in the Anthropocene. 

For Saito, a theory of degrowth communism following from the late Marx entails the creation of communal abundance via the end of capitalism, in which the process of primitive accumulation is negated, and a commons is established for all. This post-capitalist degrowth communism will be based on democratic and communal labor, which will heal the metabolic rift created between nature and capital. Under degrowth communism, labor will provide for essentials and will contribute to the common good, allowing for leisure and freedom. Concentrations of resources will be distributed equally among all, and labor will not go towards the creation of commodities that do not serve human needs. “In this way, degrowth communism expands the ‘realm of freedom’ without depending on an increase in productivity and even by downscaling production [Saito’s emphasis].”[31]

 Capitalism creates a form of wealth that actually increases scarcity rather than abundance, as it forces humanity to labor in order to create and consume forms of specifically capitalist value via endless growth of production and productivity, or else die of starvation and want. By changing what constitutes wealth and value through ending capitalism, true abundance can be found and labor can be returned to harmony with nature. All this, however, is explained only generally by Saito. While of course Saito’s reconstruction sounds appealing, it is more of a political exhortation than a detailed prescription. There is also little in Saito’s theory of degrowth communism that directly links it to the late Marx beyond its discussion of repairing the metabolic rift. Despite Saito’s claims, there does not seem, at least within his reconstruction chapter, a necessary linkage between the late Marx and the actual theory of degrowth communism, beyond common terminology. The claims of what degrowth communism actually is are so general as to be rendered standard utopianism. 

A further problem for Saito is his argument’s extreme reliance on the late writings of Marx, especially writings that were unpublished, fragmentary, or letters, some of them barely large enough to be considered passages. This is particularly evident in Saito’s treatment of the famous letter to Vera Zasulich, which Saito studies alongside its multiple drafts.[32] The letter drafts and exchange with Zasulich concern the question of peasant agricultural communes in the Russian Empire and the proper form of socialist activism in Russia—should the communes be abandoned as backwards social holdovers that would need to be abolished through industrial development and capitalism on the road to socialism? Or could the Russian socialist movement organize among the communes and use them as a social model for the future communist horizon? As Zasulich posed it to Marx—“You would be doing us a very great favour if you were to set forth Your ideas on the possible fate of our rural commune, and on the theory that it is historically necessary for every country in the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production.”[33] Marx in his official reply noted that  “The ‘historical inevitability’ of” industrial development via the expropriation and destruction of peasant agriculture “is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in Ch. XXXII [of Capital]: ‘Private property, founded upon personal labour ... is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the labour of others, on wage ­labour.’ (loc. cit., p. 340) [Marx is referring here to the French edition of Capital]. In the Western case, then, one form of private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would have to be transformed into private property. The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.”[34] In the drafts Marx went much deeper into the nature and history of the Russian commune, agricultural and industrial development, and the implications for his theory of capitalist production. 

 Yet how can so much of Saito’s argument hang on the drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich when these have been well-known to Marxists for many decades? What were people missing in them for so long? Indeed, in his analysis of the drafts, Saito draws much upon Teodor Shanin’s 1983 work Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries of Capitalism.’[35] The letter drafts are generally taken to indicate the possibility of leapfrogging industrial development to get to socialism, in the case of peripheral capitalist development, later taken up by Lenin. But Saito makes a particularly grandiose claim for the letter drafts in Slow Down, arguing that the letter “holds within it the ultimate culmination of Marx’s ideology.”[36] Saito uses the letter drafts to claim that Marx late in life abandoned stagist (and thereby Eurocentric) theories of history altogether, with the implication being that industrial development and thereby growth are unnecessary to the attainment of communism. Yet while the letter and drafts are obviously interesting and important regarding Marx’s thought, can they really be held to be the culmination of his thought? It is doubtful that this holds up under scrutiny. Can these late letters be valued more heavily than Marx's other works without Saito begging the question and assuming his audience is already on the degrowth train?

Saito suffers from extrapolating too much from Marx’s late notes and drafts. Can we really say that Marx changed his ideas of communism and the nature of history based on an expansive reading of his notebooks? Many of the formal arguments and debates in the late Marx which Saito highlights are tied directly to Russia and its potential path of development in the context of the 1870s and 1880s. Saito extrapolates from Marx’s writings on Russia to discern Marx’s views on the non-Western world in general. Does this not reinforce a kind of Russian universalism, in which Russia is taken as a stand in for the entirety of the world outside Europe? Rather than moving away from Eurocentrism, Saito may be relying on a different geographical fetishization. And this is not to even begin to address the thorny question of whether Russia at the time should or should not be considered part of Europe.

There is a tension at the heart of Saito’s work regarding the consequences of his methodology. While Saito’s erudition and hermeneutical brilliance are undeniable, the MEGA school’s empirical focus of taking in the totality of Marx’s writings, digesting every scrap of paper into an ever larger view in order to frame the “correct” understanding of Marx’s project, results in troubling implications regarding Marx’s intellectual development. Saito’s approach assumes that the chronological progression of Marx’s thought indicates its increasing theoretical coherence and development. In this sense, the later the writings of Marx, the better, especially if they go against or revise previous elements of Marx’s thought, showing how Marx’s project had changed post-Capital. However, does the later in life revision of one’s previous thoughts necessarily indicate that the revision is the better or “true” version of one’s thoughts and intellectual project? Who has the authority to say what the true project of Marx was, given that throughout his life Marx was constantly revising, editing, and engaged in continuous new thinking? Why does the Marx of 1880 take precedence over the Marx of 1860? Much of this new reading of Marx is also based on unpublished works that were not written with the intention of amending Marx’s central political writings and the project of Capital. Would this kind of hermeneutical analysis pass muster with any other thinker? At times this borders the edge of absurdity, with Saito’s basic argument being that Capital must be revised in interpretation through a series of notes and jotted ideas and private letters late in Marx’s life. At what point does such a detailed reading break down into a newer and more complicated exegesis of a presumed-to-be totalizing and monolithic intellectual body of work? While Saito talks of a later epistemological break from 1881, the truth may be more disquieting: that as a man of world historical genius, Marx’s thought was nothing but a series of epistemological breaks, rather than a constantly-building progression of intellectual development. This means that studying Marx is less about trying to parcel together a coherent system than it is about a continuous engagement with a set of questions and problems, which can produce varying answers. 

Indeed, why should one’s degrowth communist politics emerge from Karl Marx? The first and worst reason is rote pedantic scholasticism—we don't want to do anything or make any claims and arguments unless the writings of Marx himself approve of it. A second and better reason would be that Marx gives us a theory regarding degrowth that provides things that we don't already know, which point the way toward political action. Yet Saito fails to persuade that studying Marx improves or develops rather than merely confirming our pre-existing rationale for degrowth. A third reason would be the best—that situating degrowth communism as a key element within Marxism, indeed the culmination of Marxism, opens up implications about degrowth which degrowth without Marxism cannot attain. That is, does awareness of ecological crises affect our understanding of how the general law of capitalist accumulation plays out, specifically in our time? Does Marxism show us that the imperative of degrowth can't be answered so long as the imperative of capital accumulation prevails? And did Marx sense any of this?

The strength of classical Marxism is to suggest that the ideal of socialism exists as a real historical tendency within capitalism's development. Did Marx suggest that capitalist development, by destroying nature, will bring about and realize degrowth communism? That is the crux of the matter. It’s not just a question of whether capitalism is anti-ecological, or whether ecological socialism would be a good thing to achieve, but more so of whether capitalism is producing or might produce within itself its own antagonist in the form of degrowth communism. Yet, isn’t the proper way to be an Marxist in the early 21st century to attend to ecological problems in all their severity regardless of whether we find explicit warrant for this in Marx and Engels? The groundbreaking nature of John Bellamy Foster’s original “metabolic rift” conceptualization wasn’t just to fulfill our pious claims that Marx and ecology are compatible, but to find in Marx something that (without even Marx quite realizing it) added to our understanding of the general law of capitalist accumulation: namely that one of the laws contained within this general law is that capital will tend to undermine the health of the very metabolism it depends on to function. We don't want just degrowth plus Marx, but to integrate these perspectives. It's not nothing to demonstrate that Marxism and degrowth are compatible, and Saito has done that, which is an important corrective to the views of eco-modernist Marxists who claim that Marxism entails boundless (or at least substantial) industrial growth. The real task, however, would be to show that Marxism properly entails degrowth, and that degrowth entails Marxism, that they are one and the same. But I'm not sure Saito has brought off that very tall order.

Yet, Saito and the MEGA school also show how dynamic Marx was as a thinker, and demonstrate the staleness of many earlier interpretations. Marx, as filtered through prior doctrines, and even in Engels’s valiant though flawed editing, is a much different thinker than the one found in the raw materials of his intellectual process, consuming books by the shelf, trying to fit the entirety of the world within his head. If on the one hand it is  problematic to attempt to identify the  “definitive” Marx, it is just as difficult to pigeonhole Marx, defined as he is by his dynamism. We may be reminded here of Lukacs’s opening of his essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?”: “Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto—without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”[37]

Saito’s book is ambitious, attempting a full scale re-reading of Marx and the Marxist tradition over the last century. While Saito’s conclusions and framework can be criticized, what is most important is the dynamism of his method, and his assertion that Marx’s writings continually provide fresh insights and methods, if one reads them seriously and with rigor. If one were to attempt to prove Saito wrong, then they would have to meet him on his own terms, via a deep reading of Marx and the Marxist tradition. The political vitality of Marx’s writings is the true lesson of Saito’s book: it is a vitality that has yet to be exhausted, and likely will not be until capitalism is ended.

Notes

1. Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno, “Can Shrinking Be Good for Japan? A Marxist Best Seller Makes the Case.” New York Times, August 23, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/kohei-saito-degrowth-communism.html
2. Steve Neumann, "Beyond Capitalism: “Degrowth Communism” for a Sustainable Future." Wesleyan University Magazine, March 2, 2024. https://magazine.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2024/03/02/beyond-capitalism-degrowth-communism-for-a-sustainable-future/
3. Maya Goodfellow, “A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis,” The Guardian, February 28, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/28/a-greener-marx-kohei-saito-on-connecting-communism-with-the-climate-crisis
4. Kiichiro Yagi, “MEGA and the Unhappy Institutionalization of Marxology in the Twentieth Century,” in Neue Perspektiven auf die politische Ökonomie von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels.: Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). Studien zur Entwicklung der ökonomischen Theorie XXXIV., edited by Hans-Michael Trautwein (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2019), 19-44.
5. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 7.
6. Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 7.
7. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today (Lanham: Humanity Books, 2000).
8. Marcello Musto, “New Profiles of Marx after the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²),” Contemporary Sociology Vol. 49, No. 5 (September 2020), 408.
9. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), x.
10. Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2005).
11. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 207-211.
12. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 199.
13. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, translated by Agnes Schwarzschild (New York and London: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968); István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); Paul Burckett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014); John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
14. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 61-68.
15. Ian Angus, "Marx and Engels and the ‘Red Chemist’: The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schorlemmer," Monthly Review 68, no. 10 (March 2017). https://monthlyreview.org/2017/03/01/marx-and-engels-and-the-red-chemist/
16. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 53.
17. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 54.
18. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 68.
19. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 75-76.
20. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 7.
21. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 81.
22. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).
23. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 138.
24. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 138-139.
25. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 162.
26. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 186.
27. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 186.
28. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 190.
29. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 199.
30. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 217.
31. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 236.
32. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 203-206.
33. Vera Zasulich, "Letter from Vera Zasulich to Marx," February 16, 1881.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/zasulich.htm
34. Karl Marx, "The reply to Zasulich," March 8, 1881. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/reply.htm
35. Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the ‘Peripheries of Capitalism’ (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
36. Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, translated by Brian Bergstrom (New York: Astra House, 2024), 106.
37. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 1.