Marx in the Anthropocene

Facing global climate crisis, Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism more clearly
demonstrates its importance than ever. Marx in the Anthropocene explains why
Marx’s ecology had to be marginalized, and even suppressed by Marxists after
his death, throughout the 20th 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), Kohei 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 light on
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 20th century.

Saito Kohei is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. His book

Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political
Economy (2017) won the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His second book, Hitoshinsei
no Shihonron [Capital in the Anthropocene] (2020), has sold over 500,000 copies
in Japan and received the Asia Book Award, 2021.
Marx in the Anthropocene
Towards the Idea of
Degrowth Communism

Kohei Saito
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 For Teinosuke Otani
My teacher, devoted friend
 Contents

Acknowledgements  ix
List of Abbreviations  xiii

Introduction 1

Part I Marx’s Ecological Critique of Capitalism and Its Oblivion

1. Marx’s Theory of Metabolism in the Age of Global Ecological Crisis 13
2. The Intellectual Relationship between Marx and Engels Revisited
from an Ecological Perspective 43
3. Lukács’s Theory of Metabolism as the Foundation
of Ecosocialist Realism 73

Part II A Critique of Productive Forces in the

Age of Global Ecological Crisis
4. Monism and the Non-identity of Nature 103
5. The Revival of Utopian Socialism and the Productive Forces of Capital 136

Part III Towards Degrowth Communism

6. Marx as a Degrowth Communist: The MEGA and the
Great Transformation after 1868 171
viii | Contents

7. The Abundance of Wealth in Degrowth Communism 216

Conclusion 245

References 251
Index  268
 Acknowledgements

While working towards the completion of this project since 2017, I have received
generous assistance in various ways from scholars and friends all over the world.
My approach to Marx’s writings benefited immensely from my direct engagement
with an ongoing project of new complete works of Marx and Engels, the
Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. I owe a great deal to my colleagues from the Marx-
Engels-Gesamtausgabe, in particular Gerald Hubmann, Timm Graßmann, Regina
Roth, Claudia Reichel, Jürgen Herres, Rolf Hecker and Carl-Erich Vollgraf in
Berlin, Germany.
I also benefited from the JSPS Overseas Research Fellowship (2016–17),
which enabled me to stay at the Department of Sociology at the University of
California–Santa Barbara to conduct research with Kevin Anderson. His Marx at
the Margins gave me indispensable inspiration for starting this book project. Ryuji
Sasaki and Soichiro Sumida from Japan read and commented upon the entire
manuscript. This time, again, they helped improve the logical consistency and
clarity of the text. In addition, I have frequently discussed this project with my close
colleagues Tomonaga Tairako, Makoto Itoh, Hideto Akashi, Kengo Nakamura and
Midori Wakamori, who always provided me with immense encouragement and
important suggestions. Patrick Eiden-Offe, Judith Dellheim and Terrell Carver
also read and gave me invaluable comments on parts of the manuscript. Others
offered comments in response to talks and papers presented at various conferences
and lectures, especially Michael Heinrich, Frieder Otto Wolf, Christian Zeller,
Bob Jessop, Babak Amini, Bini Adamczak, Kaan Kangal, Paula Rauhala, Joel
Wainwright, Martin Wagner, Yibing Zhang, Ingo Stützle, Michael Löwy, Nick
Srnicek, Michael Hardt, Paul Mason, Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster.
During the research, I had precious opportunities to attend various
international conferences and seminars. Earlier versions of parts of this book have
x | Acknowledgements

been presented at meetings of the Historical Materialism Conference (London),

the Japan Society of Political Economy (Tokyo) and Marx-Collegium (Toronto).
My deepest gratitude goes to Marcello Musto, who is a close collaborator on
my important projects. I attended several key international conferences that
he organized at York University (2017), ADRI in Patna, India (2018), and the
University of Pisa (2019). Through these conferences, I had the opportunity to
share my thoughts with other scholars and develop my ideas significantly. The
publication of this book is an outcome of the support received from the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Partnership
Development Grant (890-2020-0091), ‘The Global History of Karl Marx’s
Capital’, which is also a collaborative project with Marcello Musto.
Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams at Witts University kindly invited
me to Johannesburg for a week to give three lectures there in the summer of
2018. Leslie Esther and Alex Colas organized my visit to London to receive the
Deutsche Memorial Prize awarded to my previous book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism
(Monthly Review Press, 2017) and give other lectures and presentations in
November 2018. I also want to thank Markus Gabriel and Sebastian Breu for
organizing an international conference at the University of Bonn in June 2019,
in which I presented the chapter on Georg Lukács. Sighard Neckel also invited
me to an annual conference, ‘Unsustainable Past – Sustainable Future?’, at the
University of Hamburg, which gave me an invaluable chance to discuss the
relationship between Marxian economics and degrowth in the age of ecological
crisis. In addition, the book is greatly indebted to Seongjing Jeong, who in 2018
kindly invited me to join a Korean research group for Social Science of Korea
for ‘Postcapitalism and the Innovation of Marxism’ funded by the Ministry of
Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of
Korea (NRF-2021S1A3A2A02096299). International research with Korean
scholars, including Sangwon Han, Seung-wook Baek, Hyun Kang Kim, Vladimir
Tikhonov and Minzy Koh, helped widen the scope of the project. The research
is also supported by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science ( JSPS Kakenhi
Grant Number JP20K13466).
Some of the main ideas were developed during the preparation of my previous
book Hitoshinsei no Shihonron (Capital in the Anthropocene) (Tokyo: Shueisha,
2020), which turned out to be unexpectedly popular in Japan, selling half a
million copies. I owe its great success to my editor Yuka Hattori, who devoted
an enormous amount of time and energy to the book. Part of the current book
can be regarded as a more rigorous and academic version of the Japanese book,
and its clarity comes from her editorial assistance. Obviously, the current book
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. Anwesha Rana from Cambridge
 Acknowledgements | xi

University Press patiently helped me in the preparation of the current book

despite a significant delay in manuscript delivery due to the global pandemic in
2020–2022. I only hope the delay gave me more time to deepen my arguments.
Special thanks go to Alexander Brown for his careful proofreading during the
last stage of book production. Furthermore, Jacob Blumenfeld kindly helped me
translate some German texts into English. All remaining errors are, however, my
own.
I thank all publishers and editors for permission to draw on material from
the following articles in the preparation of the indicated chapters. The content is
significantly modified, enlarged and updated for the current book:

• C
 hapter 1, ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolism in the Age of Global Ecological
Crisis’, Historical Materialism 28, no 2 (2020): 3–24.
• C hapter 2, ‘Marx & Engels: The Intellectual Relationship Revisited
from an Ecological Perspective’, in Marx’s Capital after 150 Years Critique
and Alternative to Capitalism, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Routledge,
2020), 167–83.
• Chapter 7, ‘Primitive Accumulation as the Cause of Economic and
Ecological Disaster’, in Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, ed. Marcello
Musto (New York: Palgrave, 2021), 93–112.

Finally, it would have been impossible to complete the project without my family,
Mao, Lichto and Lisa, who always supported and encouraged this project and
gave me the passion to envision a better world in this dark time.
 Abbreviations

Capital I Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London:

Penguin, [1890] 1976).
Capital II Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. Ben Fowkes (London:
Penguin, [1890] 1976).
Capital III Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London:
Penguin, [1894] 1981).
Grundrisse Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London:
Penguin, [1857–8] 1973).
IISG Sig B 91 Internationaale Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Karl
Marx – Friedrich Engels Papers, Teil B Exzerpte von Karl
Marx, Nr. 91.
MECW 12 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 12
(New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004).
MEGA II/10 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe,
section II, volume 10 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, Akademie Verlag,
De Gruyter, 1975–).
MEW 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz
Verlag, 1956–68).
 Introduction

The world is on fire. We are experiencing ‘the end of the end of history’
(Hochuli, Hoare and Cunliffe 2021). With the rapid deepening of the
global ecological crisis in various forms such as climate change, oxidation of
the ocean, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, desertification, soil erosion and
loss of biodiversity, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of ‘the end of history’
after the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
(Fukuyama 1992) is approaching a totally unexpected dead end today, namely
the end of human history. In fact, the triumph of neoliberal globalization only
accelerated the rapid increase in environmental impacts upon the earth by
human activities since the end of the Second World War – the so called ‘Great
Acceleration’, the age in which all major socio-economic and Earth system
trends record a hockey stick pattern of increase (McNeil and Engelke 2016)
– and ultimately destabilized the foundation of human civilization. Pandemic,
war and climate breakdown are all symptomatic of ‘the end of history’, putting
democracy, capitalism and ecological systems into chronic crisis.
Many people are well aware of the fact that the current mode of living
is heading towards catastrophe, but the capitalist system does not offer an
alternative to the juggernaut of overproduction and overconsumption. Nor
is there any compelling reason to believe that it will soon do so because
capitalism’s systemic compulsion continues to employ fossil fuel consumption
despite consistent warnings, knowledge and opposition. Considering the fact
that rapid, deep decarbonization that could meet the 1.5-degree-Celsius
target of the Paris Agreement requires thorough transformative changes in
virtually every sphere of society, more radical social movements embracing
direct action have emerged, demanding to uproot the capitalist system
2 | Marx in the Anthropocene

(Extinction Rebellion 2019). In this context, when Greta Thunberg denounced

the ‘fairy tales of eternal growth’ in a speech, she made it explicit that the
capitalist system that aims for infinite accumulation on a finite planet is the
root cause of climate breakdown.
This represents a new historical situation, especially to Marxism that has
been treated like ‘a dead dog’ after the collapse of actually existing socialism.
As environmentalists learn to unequivocally problematize the irrationality of
the current economic system, Marxism now has a chance of revival if it can
contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a
thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision
of post-capitalist society. However, this revival has not taken place so far, and
persistent doubts remain about the usefulness of having recourse to the Marxian
legacy in the 21st century. Marx’s political optimism most plainly expressed in
The Communist Manifesto has been repeatedly cited as evidence of his notorious
and unacceptable productivism and ethnocentrism.
It is surely too naïve to believe that the further development of productive
forces in Western capitalism could function as an emancipatory driver
of history in the face of the global ecological crisis. In fact, the situation
today differs decisively compared with that of 1848: capitalism is no longer
progressive. It rather destroys the general conditions of production and
reproduction and even subjects human and non-human beings to serious
existential threat. In short, Marx’s view of historical progress appears
hopelessly outdated. In this situation, if there is a slight hope of a revival of
Marxism in this historical conjuncture, its essential precondition is the radical
reformulation of its infamous grand scheme of ‘historical materialism’ that
pivots around the contradiction between ‘productive forces’ and ‘relations of
production’. This constitutes the central topics of this book in order not to end
(human) history but to envision another clear, bright future from a Marxian
perspective without falling into pessimism and apocalypticism in the face of
global ecological crisis.
Such a project cannot avoid the problem of ‘nature’. This is all the
more so because the end of the ‘end of history’ brought about the end
of the ‘end of nature’. Bill McKibben (1989) once warned that the idea of
nature that the modern world presupposed for a long time is gone for good
because global capitalism considerably modified the entire planet, leaving
no pristine nature untouched.1 This situation is now generally called the
Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a ‘major geological force’
(Crutzen and Stroermer 2000: 18) with massive scientific and technological
power capable of transforming the entire planet on an unprecedented scale.2
The reality of the Anthropocene is, however, far from realizing the
modern dream of human emancipation through the domination of nature.
 Introduction | 3

Climate change accompanied by sea-level rise, wildfires, heatwaves and

change of precipitation patterns shows how the ‘end of nature’ dialectically
turns into the ‘return of nature’ (Foster 2020); the earth and its limits are
more and more tangible in such a way that humans can no longer control
nature’s power. It even subjugates them as an independent and alien force.
In other words, the modern Baconian project is collapsing. Confronted with
this increasing uncontrollability of nature, various critical theories of nature
including eco-Marxism take up the urgent task of rethinking the relationship
between humanity and nature (Rosa, Henning and Bueno 2021). However, the
dominant narrative of the Anthropocene is a monist approach characterized by
the hybridity of the social and the natural (Latour 2014; Moore 2015), which
is critical of Marxism. In contrast, the current project aims to enrich the debate
concerning the human–nature relationship by putting forward Marx’s dualist
methodology based on his theory of metabolism.
This theoretical task has important practical implications today. By
comprehending Marx’s method correctly, we can also recognize the unique
contribution his work offers to recent debates on post-capitalism. And here is
the third ‘end’ of post–Cold War values, that is, ‘the end of capitalist realism’.
Mark Fisher (2009) once lamented that ‘capitalist realism’ – the sense that
‘it is easier … to imagine the end of the world than of capitalism’ ( Jameson
2016: 3) – severely constrains our political imagination, subjugating us to the
regime of capital. The same tendency is discernible in environmentalism: ‘It
is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is
to imagine a real change in capitalist relations’ (Žižek 2008: 334). However,
as the multi-stranded crises of economy, democracy, care and the environment
deepen, the tendency of which was strengthened even more by the COVID-
19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War, there are growing calls for
radical ‘system change’. Both Slavoj Žižek (2020a) and Andreas Malm
(2020) argue for ‘war communism’, while John Bellamy Foster (2020) and
Michael Löwy (2015) defend the idea of ‘ecosocialism’.
In addition, there are intensive discussions on ‘life after capitalism’
( Jackson 2021) even among non-Marxist scholars. Thomas Piketty’s (2021)
dictum that it is ‘time for socialism’ is exemplary here, but a more ecological
version of the same argument can be found in Naomi Klein’s explicit
endorsement of the idea of ‘ecosocialism’:
Let’s acknowledge this fact [that the Soviet Union and Venezuela are
unecological], while also pointing out that countries with a strong
democratic socialist tradition – like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay –
have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world.
From this we can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but
4 | Marx in the Anthropocene

that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn

from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and
the interconnection of all of life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at
collective survival. (Klein 2019: 251; emphasis added)3
This is a remarkable shift, considering the fact that Klein is not a Marxist.
Once Ellen Meiksins Wood (1995: 266) argued that ‘the issues of peace and
ecology are not very well suited to generating strong anti-capitalist forces. In
a sense, the problem is their very universality. They do not constitute social
forces because they simply have no specific social identity.’ Today’s situation
concerning ecology looks quite different from Wood’s time precisely because
the planetary crisis provides a material basis for constituting a universal
political subjectivity against capital. This is because capital is creating a
globalized ‘environmental proletariat’ (Foster, York and Clark 2010: 47) whose
living conditions are severely undermined by capital accumulation.
Inspired by these recent attempts to foster imagination and creativity for
a more free, egalitarian and sustainable life, I draw upon Marx’s theory in
order to put forward a wholly new Marxian vision of post-scarcity society
adequate to the Anthropocene. Such a revival of Marx’s ecological vision
of post-capitalism aims to enrich the discursive constellation around the
Anthropocene, connecting this new geological concept to the contemporary
issues of political economy, democracy and justice beyond the Earth sciences.
This new ecosocialist project for the Anthropocene is also supported by
recent philological findings, thanks to materials published for the first time in
the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). The MEGA publishes in its fourth
section Marx’s notebooks on the natural sciences, and the scope of Marx’s
ecological interests proves to be much more extensive than previously assumed
(Saito 2017). Although these notebooks were neglected even by researchers
for quite a long time, recent studies demonstrate that through his research in
geology, botany and agricultural chemistry, Marx intended to analyse various
practices of robbery closely tied to climate change, the exhaustion of natural
resources (soil nutrients, fossil fuel and woods) as well as the extinction of
species due to the capitalist system of industrial production.
Consequently, ecological aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy
have become one of the central fields for revitalising the Marxian legacy in
the Anthropocene. His concept of ‘metabolic rift’, in particular, has come to
function as an indispensable conceptual tool for the ecological critique of
contemporary capitalism (Foster, York and Clark 2010; Foster and Burkett
2016). This concept substantiates Marx’s critique of the destructive side of
capitalist production by demonstrating that it can be applied to contemporary
ecological issues such as global warming, soil erosion, aquaculture, the livestock
business and the disruption of the nitrogen cycle (B. Clark 2002; Clark and
 Introduction | 5

York 2005; Longo, Clausen and Clark 2015; Holleman 2018).4 Part I of the
current book develops the metabolic rift approach further as the theoretical
and methodological foundation of Marxian political ecology. In addition to
Marx, Part I enriches Marxian ecology by dealing with Friedrich Engels, Rosa
Luxemburg, Lukács György and István Mészáros, because their texts help
comprehend the theoretical scope of the marginalized concept of ‘metabolism’
in Marxism.
However, this project is not simply about how to understand Marx’s
concept of metabolism more correctly. The task of developing Marxian ecology
based on the concept of metabolic rift is worth carrying out as it has a practical
relevance: different approaches to the ecological crisis will provide different
solutions to it. In this context, it is noteworthy that ‘post-Marxist’ attempts
to conceptualize the human–nature relationship in the Anthropocene
against the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ have emerged. They are committed to
philosophical monism. The proponents of the monist view problematize an
‘ontological dualism’ of Marxism (Castree 2013: 177) that they claim fails to
adequately understand the ontological status of nature in the Anthropocene.
Since capitalism thoroughly reconstructs the entire environment, nature as
such does not exist, but is ‘produced’ through capitalist development. Monists,
transcending ontological binarism, insist on replacing it with relational
thinking: everything is a ‘hybrid’ of nature and society. Jason W. Moore
(2015) in particular directs this critique against the concept of ‘metabolic rift’,
claiming that it falls into the Cartesian dualism of ‘Society’ and ‘Nature’. He
instead puts forward a relational understanding of human–nature metabolism.
Yet monism once again revives a failed Prometheanism for the
Anthropocene, justifying the ever-increasing intervention in nature. Such a
‘geo-constructivist’ approach maintains that there is already too much human
intervention in nature in the Anthropocene (Neyrat 2019). Therefore, any
attempt to stop the intervention in fear of environmental destruction is
irresponsible and disastrous because the process is irreversible. According to
the geo-constructivist approach, the only way forward is ‘stewardship’ of the
earth by remaking the whole planet in order to secure human existence in the
future, if not human emancipation. This revival of the Promethean project is
sneaking into Marxist efforts to renew their vision of a post-capitalist future
(Mason 2015; Srnicek and Williams 2016; Bastani 2019). In this context, Part
II of this book offers a reply to various monist and Promethean currents in the
Anthropocene through the lens of Marx’s methodological dualism.
After critically examining the theoretical limitations of both monist and
Promethean views, Part III elaborates on Marx’s ecological vision of a post-
capitalist society in a non-productivist manner. Using the new insights offered
by the MEGA, it demonstrates that through interdisciplinary research in the
6 | Marx in the Anthropocene

natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, the late Marx experienced a
theoretical breakthrough – coupure épistémologique in an Althusserian sense
(Althusser 2005) – after 1868. His last vision of post-capitalism in the 1880s
went beyond ecosocialism, and it can be more adequately characterized as
degrowth communism. This previously unknown idea of degrowth communism
begets useful insights to transcend persistent ‘capitalist realism’. While there
is growing interest in radical approaches today, it is not sufficient simply to
develop an ecosocialist critique of contemporary capitalism. Only by going
back to Marx’s own texts is it possible to offer a positive vision of a future
society for the Anthropocene. Such a radical transformation must be the new
beginning of history as the age of degrowth communism.
However, if Marx really did propose degrowth communism, why has no one
pointed it out in the past, and why did Marxism endorse productivist socialism?
One simple reason is that Marx’s ecology was ignored for a long time. It is thus
first necessary to trace back the moment of its suppression. This genealogy of
(suppressed) Marxian ecology starts with Marx himself. Referring to Marx’s
notebooks on the natural sciences that are published in the MEGA, Chapter
1 establishes Marx’s concept of ‘metabolic rift’ by highlighting the three
dimensions of the ecological rifts and their spatiotemporal ‘shifts’ mediated
by technologies on a global scale. This original insight into capital’s constant
expropriation of nature as the root cause of the metabolic rift was deepened
by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital, which problematized
the main ‘contradiction’ of capitalism due to its destructive impacts upon the
people and environment in non-capitalist peripheries.
Although she employed the concept of ‘metabolism’, Luxemburg
formulated it as a critique of Marx’s narrow view of capital accumulation.
Her critique implies that Marx’s concept of metabolism was not properly
understood even at that time. This misunderstanding was inevitable because
many of Marx’s writings were unpublished and unavailable to Luxemburg.
Yet this problem also originates in Engels’s attempt to establish ‘Marxism’
as a systematic worldview for the proletariat. In order to trace the original
deformation of Marx’s concept of metabolism, Chapter 2 reconstructs Engels’s
reception of Marx’s theory of metabolism by carefully comparing Engels’s
editorial work on Capital with Marx’s original economic manuscripts as well
as their notebooks published in the MEGA. This investigation reveals subtle
but decisive theoretical differences between Marx and Engels, especially in
terms of their treatment of metabolism. These differences prevented Engels
from adequately appreciating Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, so the concept
of metabolism came to be marginalized in Marxism.
This marginalization is clearly documented in the historical formation
and development of Western Marxism in the 1920s, which further diverged
 Introduction | 7

from Marx’s original insight into metabolism and his methodology. Here the
problem of the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels came to have
a significant influence because it determined the entire paradigm of Western
Marxism. Famously enough, Western Marxism highlighted the rigorous
differentiation of Marx and Engels, accusing the latter’s illegitimate extension
of dialectics to the sphere of nature as a cause of Soviet Marxism’s mechanistic
social analysis. However, despite their harsh critique of Engels, Western
Marxists shared the fundamental assumption with Soviet orthodox Marxism
that Marx had little to say about nature, thereby neglecting the importance of
his concept of metabolism and his ecological critique of capitalism.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the founder of Western Marxism,
Lukács György, is an exceptional figure in that he clearly paid attention to
this concept of metabolism. Although his critique of Engels’s treatment of
nature in History and Class Consciousness had an immense impact on Western
Marxism, he actually had a different approach to the problem of nature
that was formulated as part of his theory of metabolism in his unpublished
manuscript of 1925–6 titled Tailism and the Dialectic. This manuscript
was unknown for a long time, so Lukács’s intention in History and Class
Consciousness was not properly understood, and he was repeatedly criticized
for various theoretical inconsistencies and ambivalences. However, looking at
Tailism and the Dialectic, it becomes clear that his treatment of the relationship
between humans and nature shows a continuity with Marx’s own dualist
methodology that analytically distinguished between the social and the
natural. With this methodology, Lukács’s theory of metabolism provides a
way of developing Marx’s ‘non-Cartesian’ dualism of Form and Matter as a
critique of modern capitalist production. Nevertheless, his unique insight was
suppressed by both orthodox Marxism and Western Marxism, leading to the
marginalization of Marxian ecology throughout the 20th century.
Since Marx’s dualist method is not correctly understood, the concept of
metabolic rift continues to be exposed to various criticisms. Chapter 4 deals
with Marxist versions of the monist view represented by Jason W. Moore’s
‘world ecology’ as well as by Neil Smith’s and Noel Castree’s ‘production
of nature’. Despite their obvious theoretical differences, their monist
understanding of capitalism shows how misunderstanding Marx’s method
generates problematic consequences that have practical relevancy.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the failure to understand Marx’s method
also results in the recent revival of the Promethean idea among Marxists.
These utopian Marxists draw upon Marx’s Grundrisse and argue that a third
industrial revolution based on information technology (for example, artificial
intelligence [AI], sharing economy and Internet of things [IoT]) combined
with full automation could liberate humans from the drudgery of work and
8 | Marx in the Anthropocene

make the capitalist system of value obsolete. Despite their celebration of

dream technologies of the future, the old Prometheanism remains. In order to
decisively abandon Prometheanism, it is necessary to focus on Marx’s concept
of ‘real subsumption’ in the 1860s – that is, not in the Grundrisse written in the
1850s. Doing so reveals that Marx’s critique of ‘productive forces of capital’ in
Capital represents a major shift in his view of technological progress under
capitalism. Marx came to realize that the capitalist development of technologies
does not necessarily prepare a material foundation for post-capitalism.
However, his rejection of his earlier naïve endorsement of technological
development posed a series of new difficulties for Marx. Once he started to
question the progressive role of increasing productive forces under capitalism,
he was inevitably compelled to challenge his own earlier progressive view of
history. Chapter 6 reconstructs this process of self-critique in the late Marx.
Only by paying attention to Marx’s theoretical crisis does it become clear
why he had to simultaneously study the natural sciences and pre-capitalist
societies while attempting to complete the subsequent volume of Capital. By
intensively studying these theoretical fields, Marx ultimately went through
another paradigm shift after 1868. It is from this perspective that Marx’s letter
to Vera Zasulich sent in 1881 needs to be reinterpreted as the crystallization
of his non-productivist and non-Eurocentric view of the future society, which
should be characterized as degrowth communism.
This conclusion must be surprising to many. No one has previously
proposed such a vision of Marx’s post-capitalism. Furthermore, degrowth
economics and Marxism have had an antagonistic relationship for a long
time. However, if the late Marx accepted the idea of a steady-state economy
for the sake of a radically equal and sustainable society, there will be a new
space of dialogue between them. In order to start such a new dialogue in a
fruitful manner, the final chapter will revisit Capital and other writings and
reread various passages from the perspective of degrowth communism. In
a word, Chapter 7 aims at the reinterpretation of Capital as an attempt to
go beyond Capital. It will offer a fresh reading of some key passages which
would otherwise turn into a naïve endorsement of productivism. Most notably,
the radical abundance of ‘communal/common wealth’ (genossenschaftlicher
Reichtum) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme signifies a non-consumerist
way of life in a post-scarcity economy which realizes a safe and just society in
the face of global ecological crisis in the Anthropocene.
 Introduction | 9

Notes
1 Bill McKibben does not necessarily deny that pristine nature did not exist even
before the 1990s. He instead highlights that the ‘idea’ of nature as independent
from human intervention can no longer be accepted as a valid conceptual tool
due to the increasing human impacts upon nature. This situation has to do with
the recent popularity of monist approaches, as discussed in Chapter 4, although
McKibben does not participate in these debates.
2 Eugene F. Stoermer already used the term ‘Anthropocene’ in the 1980s, although
he employed it in a different sense. A Russian geochemist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky
developed the concept of ‘biosphere’ in the 1920s in order to highlight human
impacts upon the biological life on a planetary scale, which has relevance to
today’s discussion of the Anthropocene (Vernadsky [1926] 1997; Steffen et al.
2011: 844).
3 Naomi Klein (2020) continues to argue for ‘democratic socialism’ in her more
recent book too. Thomas Piketty (2020) also advocates for ‘participatory
socialism’ not only for the sake of social equality but also for sustainability in the
face of climate change. Their endorsement of ‘socialism’ represents a major shift
in the general political tone towards the left.
4 Other recent literature on the metabolic rift approach includes Moore (2000,
2002), Mancus (2007), McMichael (2008), Gunderson (2011) and Weston
(2014).
 Part I
Marx’s Ecological Critique of
Capitalism and Its Oblivion
 1
Marx’s Theory of Metabolism in the
Age of Global Ecological Crisis*

For quite a long time, Marx’s interest in ecological issues was neglected even
among serious Marxist scholars. Marx’s socialism was said to be characterized
by a ‘Promethean’ (pro-technological, anti-ecological) advocacy for the
domination of nature. Marxists, on the one hand, reinforced this impression by
negatively reacting to environmentalism, which they believed to be inherently
anti-working class and only functioning as an ideology of the upper middle
class. On the other hand, the environmental catastrophe in the USSR –
most notably represented by the ecological collapse of the Aral Sea and the
Chernobyl disaster – reinforced the conviction among environmentalists
that socialism cannot establish a sustainable society. As a consequence, there
emerged a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green in the
second half of the 20th century.
The situation is changing in the 21st century. No matter how devastating
actually existing socialism was to the environment, its collapse and the
triumph of capitalism has only contributed to further ecological degradation
under neoliberal globalization in the last few decades. The ineffectiveness of
conventional market-based solutions to ecological issues resulted in a renewed
interest in more heterodox approaches including Marxian economics (Burkett
2006). At the same time, the collapse of the USSR and the declining influence

*
This chapter draws on material from ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolism in the Age of
Global Ecological Crisis’, Historical Materialism 28, no. 2 (2020): 3–24. Published
with permission. The content is significantly modified, enlarged and updated for the
current book.
14 | Marx in the Anthropocene

of the past dogmas of orthodox Marxism ‘open up an intellectual horizon and

a field of reflection, where theoretical and conceptual issues could be discussed
without being foreclosed by party-line polemics or divisive political loyalties’
(Therborn 2009: 90). This situation both within and without Marxism led to
the ‘rediscovery’ of Marx’s ecology in the last two decades (I).
It was Istvan Mészáros’s theory of ‘social metabolism’ that paved the solid
path to this rediscovery. By investigating Mészáros’s theory of metabolism,
mainly developed in Beyond Capital and The Necessity of Social Control, Marx’s
ecological theory of ‘metabolic rift’ can be more firmly founded upon his critique
of political economy (II). This clarification helps classify the three different
dimensions of ‘metabolic rift’ in Marx’s Capital (III). Correspondingly, there are
three dimensions of shifting the ecological rift, which is why capital proves so
elastic and resilient in the face of economic and ecological crises. However, these
‘metabolic shifts’ never solve the deep contradictions of capitalist accumulation.
Rather, they only create new crises, intensifying the contradictions on a wider
scale (IV). This is what Rosa Luxemburg problematized in The Accumulation of
Capital (1913), in which she applied the Marxian concept of ‘metabolism’ to the
analysis of global unequal exchange under capitalism. Despite her intention in
introducing the concept to criticize Marx, her usage is actually compatible with
Marx’s understanding of the metabolic rift. Her critique is worth discussing
here because it indicates that the problematic reception of Marx’s theory of
metabolism was already taking place in the beginning of the 20th century,
leading to its subsequent neglect (V).

I
The Suppression of Marx’s Idea of Ecosocialism
Since the 1970s, Marx was repeatedly accused of a naïve ‘Promethean attitude’
(Giddens 1981: 60): ‘Marx’s attitude toward the world always retained
that Promethean thrust, glorifying the human conquest of nature’ (Ferkiss
1993: 108). Even self-proclaimed Marxists admitted this flaw. For instance,
Leszek Kołakowski (1978: 412) maintained that ‘a typical feature of Marx’s
Prometheanism is his lack of interest in the natural’. According to critics,
Marx’s productivist view ignored the problem of natural limits and naively
praised the free manipulation of nature: Marx was ‘largely uncritical of the
industrial system of technology and the project of human domination of nature’
( J. Clark 1984: 27).They problematized Marx’s optimistic assumption, inherent
to his ‘historical materialism’, that the development of the productive forces
under capitalism should be sufficient to provide a material basis for human
emancipation. Due to the environmental degradation that occurred under
actually existing socialism, environmentalists felt justified in denouncing that