Kohei Saito and the critical ecology of Karl Marx – Reprint from Esteban Mercatante

MLRG.online 1 May, 2025

Esteban Mercatante – “Kohei Saito and Karl Marx’s critical ecology”:
ESTEBAN Mercatante ( Esteban Mercatante | @Emercatante)
Originally published as “Kohei Saito y la crítica ecológica de Karl Marx”:
At: Mercatante in SEMANARIO; 02. 04.23
NB: Any language errors are due to our own translation via google translate.

With the 2017 publication of “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy”, which was released in Spanish as La naturaleza contra el capital. El ecosocialismo de Karl Marx and is currently having its first edition in Argentina by Ediciones IPS, Kohei Saito quickly became an essential reference in Marxist discussions on ecology and capitalism. In Japan, his book “Capital in the Anthropocene” became a bestseller, selling half a million copies in 2020.

In his research, Saito aimed to systematize the evolution of Marx’s thought on the relationship between social and natural metabolism, giving significant importance to the unpublished notebooks in this reconstruction for the first time. These works, which are being published—for now in their original German—with the new editions of MEGA (Marx and Engels Gesamtausgabe, i.e., Collected Works of Marx and Engels), for which Saito is one of the authors, include a large number of notebooks containing drafts and reading notes compiled during Marx’s final years. During this period, the German revolutionary placed increasing emphasis on the study of various natural sciences, as can be seen from the books reviewed. The fundamental interest of these investigations, in Saito’s opinion, was to establish how the development of capitalism altered the balance with natural metabolism.

In 2022, Saito published “Marx in the Anthropocene -Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism” in English, which picks up the thread of his previous works, specifically the aforementioned “Capital in the Anthropocene”. But the core of his approach, this time, lies in the nature of the communist project that Marx would have (re)formulated in his later years, which Saito defines as a degrowth communism. Below, we will explore key aspects of Saito’s work and discuss some of his perspectives on Marx, Marxism, and communism.

Unpublished Marx
The novel aspect of Saito’s work is a thorough and systematic study of Marx’s unpublished notebooks. During the years from 1868 to 1883, during which Marx completed no less than a third of the notebooks he kept throughout his life, the presence of themes linked to physiology and other natural sciences, Saito points out, is predominant. This would be an example of the importance Marx gave to ecological issues and how they are affected by capitalism. This was not reflected in published texts because during that period Marx did not complete any new work for the press, beyond the changes made to translations or reissues of Capital, some of which Saito highlights as the result of these new theoretical concerns. Saito ventures that the delay in completing volumes II and III of Capital, which were ultimately left to Engels, is due to this profound reconsideration of the place of the ecological question in his theoretical edifice, which led him to profoundly rethink the outline of his critique of political economy. Had Marx managed to express his new reflections, Saito maintains, he would have given a much more privileged place to ecological criticism. Hence, the great value of the notebooks, which provide, in his opinion, a way of approaching Marx’s idea of how Capital should be completed, is a very different one, the author asserts, from what Engels captured.

The Concept of Metabolism
In reconstructing Marx’s thought, Saito gives a central place to the concept of metabolism. This allowed Marx “not only to understand the universal and transhistorical natural conditions of human production, but also to investigate its radical historical transformations during the development of the modern system of production and the growth of the productive forces” [1].

The notion of metabolism, which emerged from chemistry and physiology, became very popular during the first half of the 19th century. The concept was originally developed to describe the physical and chemical processes in organisms that convert or use energy. These complex, interrelated processes are the basis of life at the molecular level and enable the diverse activities of cells: growth, reproduction, maintenance of their structures, and response to stimuli, among others. Prior to Marx, there are precedents for the extension of the concept of metabolism “to philosophy and political economy to describe the transformations and exchanges between organic and inorganic substances, through the processes of production, consumption, and digestion, both at the individual and species levels” [2].

A direct reference for Marx was Justus von Liebig, a chemist whose studies on the degradation of soil nutrients caused by capitalist agriculture were closely studied by Marx. But Saito emphasizes Marx’s “relative independence in his use of the concept of metabolism,” since, while “Liebig’s contribution to the development of Marx’s theory of metabolism is undeniable, the Grundrisse also confirms that Marx did not simply adhere to Liebig’s concept of metabolism.” [3]

In Marx’s case, we can find three dimensions in which the concept operates, which can be observed both in the Grundrisse and in Capital: “metabolic interaction between humans and nature,” “metabolism of society,” and “metabolism of nature.” [4]

Following John Bellamy Foster [5], Paul Burkett, and others, Saito articulates this theory of metabolism with the idea that the irrationality of capital, characterized by alienated relations within society and in its relationship with nature, inevitably leads to a metabolic breakdown. This notion appears twice in Capital, linked in both cases to the effects of the concentration of population in urban areas due to the development of large-scale industry, and the advance of capital in agriculture. Marx, following Liebig, discusses how the large-scale land ownership produced by the capitalist agricultural reconfiguration:

“…reduces the agricultural population to a constantly diminishing minimum, opposing it with an ever-increasing industrial population, crowded into the cities; thereby creating conditions that cause an unhealable rupture in the continuity of the social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life, as a result of which the soil’s strength is squandered, a squandering that, by virtue of trade, extends far beyond the borders of the country itself [6].”

Foster, and Saito agrees with this, believes that Marx developed a systematic view of capitalism’s tendency to produce, on different levels, this “unhealable rupture” between social and natural metabolism. In our opinion, the idea of a systematic development of this approach in Marx is questionable. There is abundant evidence that Marx became increasingly interested in the ecological problem as part of his critique of political economy, and his method is the basis for a profound ecological critique today, such as that developed by Foster, Burkett, Saito, Malm, and many other authors. This does not mean that such a systematic critique of this dimension is deployed in Capital or in Marx’s unpublished works.

For Saito, the concept of metabolism is key to Marx’s methodology. It allows him to avoid ontological dualism (considering nature and society as completely separate entities), defending an ontological monist position. “The basic idea of Marx’s theory of metabolism is […] that humans always produce as part of nature and that their activities become increasingly intertwined with extrahuman nature in the course of capitalist development” [7]. But monism in Marx does not mean considering it to be an undifferentiated unity. “A critical analysis of this social power inevitably requires separating the social and the natural respectively as independent spheres of inquiry and analyzing their intertwining thereafter” [8]. The distinction is necessary because “capitalist social relations ‘exercise an alien power over reality’” [9]. Saito contrasts this Marxist methodology with the extreme, undifferentiated monism found in contemporary authors such as Bruno Latour or, in the eco-Marxist camp, Jason Moore. Saito argues that, through the notion of metabolism, Marx is able to develop a “methodological dualism,” which starts from ontological unity (society is part of nature and not an independent entity) but separates the levels of analysis to capture the interactions between the spheres of nature and society, which form a differentiated unity. In his proposal of ontological monism and methodological dualism, Saito follows Andreas Malm, who defends what he defines as a “substance monism with property dualism.”

Although Saito’s reflection on the concept of metabolism in relation to Marx’s method may be suggestive, there are two caveats that arise in this regard. The first is that it may seem somewhat forced to confine the entire discussion of Marxist method and epistemology to the category of metabolism. This runs the risk of losing some of the richness and complexity of the entire development of categories that Marx sought to produce in his effort to reproduce concrete reality in thought. Second, the category of methodological dualism is debatable. It may be more accurate—although these are not necessarily opposing positions, far from it—to point out, as other scholars point out in defining how Marx understood the unity/differentiation relationship Saito points to, that, rather than a methodological dualism, Marx developed an emergent materialism. This means understanding that reality is articulated in different levels of complexity and hierarchy, within which specific properties can emerge that distinguish, without separating, different subsystems or levels of reality.

Metabolism, after Marx, a missing link?
According to Saito, few Marxists would have been able to understand the importance of metabolism in Marx’s theory. In Marx in the Anthropocene, he revives István Mészáros, who popularized the notion of sociometabolism in his reading of Capital, while also highlighting Marx’s analysis of the relationship with nature. Along similar lines, Saito emphasizes that Luxemburg also gave importance to the concept of metabolism, noting that “the accumulation of capital is a process of metabolism that occurs between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production” [10].

For Saito, another key element in the recovery of the concept of metabolism is György Lukács. The discussion begins with the rather famous footnote in History and Class Consciousness, in which the Hungarian writer affirmed that the dialectical method can only be applied to society, and its extension to nature is not appropriate. With its critique and sharp separation of methods for the study of nature and society, this approach by Lukács is traditionally considered what Saito, following other authors, considers a characteristic feature of “Western Marxism,” or its mainstream, since Saito recognizes that it is a broad and heterogeneous category: the sharp separation between the methods applicable to the study of nature and society, proposing an exclusive focus on the latter and relegating the study of nature. Breaking away from the mechanism that characterized Stalinism, Western Marxists, or some of their leading exponents, aimed to “provide a more sophisticated theory of society without falling into a mechanistic worldview” [11]. But they did so in such a way that they “completely excluded the sphere of nature and the natural sciences from Marx’s social philosophy” [12].

“History and Class Consciousness’ generated heated debates and criticism. In an unpublished work, “Tailism and Dialectics”, Lukács clarified his approach, giving it a very different meaning from the sharp separation between the spheres of nature and society. It is here that the concept of metabolism, absent in “History and Class Consciousness”, appears.

“… Lukács insisted that the concept of “metabolism” is indispensable to correctly understand the key theme of “History and Class Consciousness”, namely, avoiding the ontological dualism of Nature and Society and the one-sided approach to society. This one-sidedness is exactly the consequence into which Western Marxism fell by ignoring Marx’s concept of “metabolism” [13].”

Engels vs. Marx?

In Saito’s opinion, one of the main reasons why Marx’s ecological thought remained hidden for so long is none other than his great friend, editor, and co-author of so many classic works, Friedrich Engels. Although Engels became involved in the study of nature early on, and already reflected in “The Condition of the Working Class in England” on the devastating effects of capital accumulation on the environment (the effects of which fell particularly on the working class), his perspective would have been very different from that of Marx. Furthermore, in Saito’s opinion, Marx would have developed a much more informed reading than Engels in numerous scientific debates during the last years of his life. Although Engels was aware of this, Saito observes, he continued to claim after Marx’s death (in 1883) that Marx recognized that, of the two, Engels was the expert on these topics. In the second edition of “Anti-Dühring”, in 1885, Engels asserted that Marx “only little by little, intermittently, and sporadically” followed the rapid development of the natural sciences, even though, as Saito observes, his firsthand knowledge of all the manuscripts Marx had left behind should have revealed to him Marx’s advances in this field.

Among the differences in approach that Saito seeks to emphasize between the authors, he observes that Marx does not feature the idea of “the revenge of nature,” which Engels proposes to refer to the blind forces that intervention in nature can unleash, resulting in unexpected outbursts that can endanger certain social formations, or even humanity as a whole. Despite Engels’s warning, Saito finds in his approach, in “Dialectics of Nature” and other works, the idea that knowledge of the objective laws of nature has a practical meaning, which, in his opinion, is none other than the “mastery” and “control” of nature. To achieve the realm of “freedom,” humanity must become the “real and conscious master” of nature [14].

But for Saito, a formidable gap opens between Marx and Engels in the notion of metabolism. Saito observes that Engels “did not appreciate Liebig’s theory of metabolism.” Indeed, “in “Dialectics of Nature”, he referred to Liebig’s concept of metabolism in the context of criticizing him as a ‘dilettante’ in biology” [15]. While Engels shared Liebig’s theory of theft, he rejected his vitalist vision, “with its separation of biology from chemistry and its inexplicable principles supposedly exclusive to living beings” [16]. Liebig believed that the origin of organic life could not be due to evolution from inorganic matter, but rather accepted the hypothesis that “eternal life” had been “imported” to the planet from universal space [17], a notion against which “Engels correctly argued,” says Saito, “that life is the process of metabolism that historically arose and evolved from inorganic non-life” [18]. Saito recognizes, as we see, that Engels was correct in his criticisms of Liebig. But at the same time, he observes that these criticisms negatively influenced Engels’s ability to evaluate the contributions of the concept of metabolism, and especially to appreciate Marx’s appropriation of it, which was not exclusively a tribute to Liebig.

This rejection by Engels of Liebig’s concept of metabolism would have had important consequences, in Saito’s opinion. When reconstructing the third volume of Capital from Marx’s manuscripts, Engels would not have been able to grasp Marx’s independent appropriation of the concept of metabolism, which went far beyond the German chemist’s limited meaning. His rejection of Liebig’s theory, and not simply a matter of making the text more accessible, Saito suggests, would have led him to introduce modifications to Marx’s original text. Thus, he shows us that the original text of the famous passage on the metabolic rift, quoted above, was originally worded as follows:

“[In] this way [large-scale land ownership] produces conditions which cause an irreparable rupture in the interdependent process between social metabolism and the natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil. The result of this is a squandering of the soil’s vitality, and commerce carries this devastation far beyond the limits of a single country [19].”

Saito himself acknowledges that Engels’s modification “may appear subtle” [20]. But he nevertheless offers a symptomatic reading of this modification.

The concealment of the discovery of the ecological Marx revealed in Marx’s late notebooks, the difficulty in capturing and capturing it in his edition/writing.

Marx vs. Marx?

In “Nature vs. Capital”, Saito did not identify an abrupt break in Marx’s thought. But in his most recent work, “Marx in the Anthropocene”, the Japanese scholar argues that a sharp break or shift occurred in Marx’s reflection on history, development, and ecology, which became particularly pronounced after 1868, that is, when the first edition of Capital had already appeared.

Unlike his previous work, Saito does not hesitate here to describe the “early Marx”—a period that extends almost to the end of his life, although he points out various instances of evolution and self-criticism—as simply “Promethean,” “Eurocentric,” “ethnocentric,” “productivist.” He even falls into the anachronism of classifying Marx as an accelerationist for some of his approaches, when this movement emerged at the end of the 20th century and gained influence in the last decade.

At the same time, Saito asserts that the late Marx, which appears in his last drafts as well as in some subtle modifications introduced in the reissues or translations of Capital, would have undergone a profound process of self-criticism. Moreover, he would not only have re-evaluated those aspects of his thought that displayed Eurocentrism, Prometheanism, and a fervor for the development of productive forces. He would have even profoundly re-evaluated his perspective on the role of the development of productive forces as the driving force of the contradictions that lead to social transformation, and the place that such development should have under communism—the latter issue we will address in depth later.

What changed in such a short time, between Saito’s first book and the present, to cause such a marked shift in his view of the evolution of Marx’s thought? The reason cannot simply be that the MEGAs reveal an unknown Marx, because, as we saw, what changed was Saito’s perspective on Marx’s already published works, compared to the assessment he gave of them in his 2017 work, “Nature vs. Capital.” In this case, these are not new documents that reveal something different.

The main reason we can find for this change in Saito’s perspective on the evolution of Marx’s ideas is that it allows him to emphasize, by contrast, the shift made in recent years by the German theorist. The debates on nature expressed in readings and drafts from his later years, or the redefinition of the peasant commune and its probable role in the break with capitalism in the countries where it survived, based above all on his exchanges of letters with Russian revolutionaries, such as the famous response to Vera Zasulich, which Marx ultimately did not send [21], are some of the main examples that Saito offers of this “epistemological rupture” – the reference to Althusser is explicit in Saito – that led Marx to place the metabolic rupture at the center of his theory, which would become the fundamental contradiction of this mode of production. Already in “Nature Against Capital,” Saito criticized the researcher Lucia Pradella for warning against “a tendency now influential in MEGA studies to search for a ‘new Marx’” [22]. It is precisely this “new Marx” that for Saito is in his last notebooks. In Marx in the Anthropocene, this argument is further reinforced. He does so somewhat contradictorily, because near the end of the essay, he admits that “Marx clearly continued to believe that technological development under capitalism provides the necessary material conditions for the leap to socialism.” That is, he admits that, in any case, the shift in this regard was not as pronounced in Marx, even though he immediately adds that “his dialectical method led him to emphasize more vehemently the negative and destructive side of technologies.” [23] We agree with this last point, but it is neither a revelation nor a shift of the “new Marx.” In fact, in his youth, Marx criticized the Prometheanism of authors like Proudhon, something documented by John Bellamy Foster in The Ecology of Marx.

As with Saito’s arguments regarding Engels, there isn’t much originality in what he argues here. He essentially repeats what has been said many times about the exaggerated ruptures in Marx’s thought, without much foundation (and which in some cases Saito himself refuted in his first book).

Of course, this does not mean minimizing the importance of Marx’s own critical approach to his own ideas, and the corrections to which these were often subjected. His perspective on certain problems, such as the colonial question or the metabolism between capital and nature, did not remain unchanged throughout his life. In “Nature Against Capital”, Saito clearly identifies how Marx increasingly complexified his approach to the problem of productive forces, introducing more concrete definitions; among others, the specification of “productive forces of capital,” which Saito considers relevant to highlighting that the development of technologies is never neutral, or important categories such as cooperation and real subsumption, which did not yet appear in the Grundrisse of 1857-58. Also clear is Marx’s reevaluation of Asian societies, which, in his early writings, based on flawed sources—and perhaps on some prejudices he gradually shed—he considered as tending toward stagnation and a lack of evolution. This re-evaluation of the dynamics of non-capitalist formations, coupled with a deeper intuition about the “uneven and combined” effects that the subsumption of capitalism was producing throughout the planet, amalgamating capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production—as when, in the epilogue to the second edition of Capital, he maintains that in Germany “[W]e suffer not only from the living, but also from the dead” [24]—allowed him to glimpse the possibility that some non-capitalist social relations, such as the Russian commune (mir), could be the basis for a transition to socialism without going through capitalism. These conclusions, reached by Marx, mark a change from previous positions. However partial or problematic some of Marx’s formulations or approaches may be, which in some cases were critically reviewed and corrected throughout his life, they are not sufficient to construct an “early Marx” laden with the whole series of negative aspects that Saito attributes to him. Marx became a more emphatic critic of colonialism from the late 1850s onwards, when he began to more emphatically address England’s nefarious role in Ireland and India; however, this shift in emphasis does not transform his previous positions into Eurocentric ones. Yet all these modifications, in some cases significant, do not constitute the radical break in Marx’s thought affirmed in “Marx in the Anthropocene”.

Unlike Saito, it seems to us that a systematic and consistent reading of Marx’s elaborations shows that both in his youth and in his later years, the German revolutionary grasped the potentialities created by the capitalist mode of production, while at the same time being able to observe—or, in most cases, rather, divine or anticipate—its darkest ramifications. Marx’s immanent critique of capitalist modernity always emphasized the need to reappropriate—which also means criticizing and redirecting or reconfiguring—the productive forces of capital. Neither Prometheanism nor productivism without further ado, nor outright rejection. Beyond the evolutions or lessons we can find in Marx, it is difficult to substantiate that he abandoned this tension. It is more doubtful, as well as untimely, to think that Marx could have embraced a “decretionist communism.” Let’s look at this question in more detail.

Productive Forces, Metabolic Rift, and Communism
Before delving into the notion of “decretionist communism” that he finds in Marx, Saito makes a series of highly pertinent critiques of what he identifies as a revival of utopian thought expressed in several of the post-capitalist approaches of authors such as Aaron Bastani, Paul Mason, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, among others, who, despite their differences, agree in emphasizing technological solutions to the contradictions of this mode of production.

Of course, this doesn’t mean minimizing the importance of Marx’s own critical approach to his own ideas and the corrections to which they were often subjected. His perspective on some problems, such as the colonial question or the metabolism between capital and nature, did not remain unchanged throughout his life. In Nature vs. Capital, Saito clearly identifies how Marx increasingly complexified his perspective on the problem.

“…Promethean ideas are once again gaining great influence within political ecology. In fact, ecomodernist ideas are becoming hegemonic as the ecological crisis deepens. Now, the development and application of gigantic technologies and science seems to be the only solution fast enough and on a sufficient scale to address the grave threat of climate breakdown [25].”

Saito debunks several of the fallacies underlying post-capitalist approaches.

“Fully automated post-capitalism propagates an alternative hope that everyone will continue driving electric SUVs, changing their smartphone every two years, and eating cultured meat burgers,” he asserts [26].

Saito points out an interesting paradox, which is similar to what we have also criticized these post-capitalist approaches on other occasions. The author states that

“…hidden beneath the optimistic tone of this technocratic vision is in fact a pessimistic ‘capitalist realism,’ which holds that there is no strong class struggle to challenge existing social relations and fundamentally break away from the capitalist way of life. People are deprived of the power to transform the system, and that is why technology must play a central role in filling the agency gap left behind [27].”

Hence, as we stated in our critique, the unfathomable abyss between the horizon of the future we are invited to embrace and the tasks of the immediate present. We start from a radical perspective on the possibilities embedded in the disruption already underway. But the path to achieve this lies in doubling down on “neo-reformist” strategies. Between post-capitalism and the present, the only clear roadmap lies in seeking to revive welfare state policies, with some innovations such as promoting a universal basic income and other similar measures, but without challenging the power of capital. An “invention” of the future that ends up being quite nostalgic.

Saito concludes that this productivist vision of post-capitalism “ends up endorsing capitalist standards of value under the guise of a grandiose emancipatory project for infinite production and consumption.” It renounces “the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class and accepts the reified agency of machines as the subject of history” [28].

Now, faced with these approaches based on technological fetishism, what communist strategy and perspective can be countered? Saito, as we anticipated, claims to have discovered a “decretionist communism” in Marx. A key link in establishing this perspective would have been his study of pre-capitalist agricultural communes during his later years.

The commune, whose history throughout Europe—and also in non-European forms—Marx traced during his later years by studying a vast bibliography, would have revealed to him how social formations based on a balanced, rational metabolism between nature and society could be sustained, which countered the “unhealable rift” that capitalism tended to produce. What characterized the agricultural commune, and which Marx valued much more positively in his mature assessment than he had in earlier texts, was its tendency toward stationary reproduction. That is, these societies were characterized by reproduction on a more or less similar scale, unlike capitalism, with its necessarily expanded reproduction to sustain capital accumulation. Stationary reproduction implies a balanced metabolism, as it allows for the fulfillment of the cycles of waste absorption—which also explains why there is no rift between the countryside and the city—and nutrient recovery. Saito emphasizes that the draft responses to Zasulich were not an isolated expression, but part of a more global revaluation of the agricultural commune.

“In the 1880s, Marx recognized that the persistent stability of communes without economic growth is the underlying basis for achieving a sustainable and egalitarian metabolic interaction between humans and nature. This stands in stark contrast to Marx’s earlier negative comments on the stationary state and invariability of Asian communes in the 1850s and even in Volume I of Capital [29].”

Although we were already familiar with Marx’s intuition about the possibilities that, determined by ongoing capitalist globalization, could arise from “uneven and combined development”—although he could barely have intuited this concept, which Trotsky would develop several decades later—in Russia, Saito places it within a broader and deeper framework of reflection, and this is both novel and interesting. The same can be said of the connection he finds between Marx’s research on pre-capitalist societies and that of the natural sciences, exploring authors such as Carl Fraas as well as the aforementioned Liebig. The confluence of both agendas in Marx demonstrates, in Saito’s opinion, the effort he made to consider the “sustainability” of a future post-capitalist society.

Saito asserts that creationist communism is a post-scarcity society, that is, it is characterized by an abundance of wealth. But this wealth does not simply mean more material goods or greater per capita consumption. Saito draws on a discussion of Marx’s work in the Grundrisse to substantiate another notion of wealth. In that 1857 draft, Marx posed:

“…if wealth is stripped of its limited bourgeois form, what is wealth but the universality of the needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc., of individuals, created in universal exchange? [What but] the full development of human dominion over natural forces, both over those of so-called nature and over one’s own nature? [What but] the absolute elaboration of one’s creative dispositions without any other presupposition than prior historical development, which makes this total plenitude of development the objective, that is, the development of all human forces as such, not measured against a pre-established standard? [What but] an elaboration as a result of which man does not reproduce himself in his determined character but produces his total plenitude [30]?”

Capitalism, which is based on the alienation of the means of production among labor, whereby labor only accesses the fruits of production by selling itself as a commodity in exchange for a wage, imposes a restricted notion of wealth that denies any possibility of this full development of human potential. Saito observes that “Marx problematized this tendency of capital as the impoverishment of social wealth under the accumulation of an ‘immense collection of commodities'” [31].

Marx also incorporated the notion of “natural wealth,” similarly threatened by the development of capitalism [32].

Saito observes that capitalism, which is characterized by the increasing production of commodities (the form in which, as Marx notes at the beginning of Capital, wealth “appears” in this mode of production) and which is presented by its apologists as a locomotive for the production of abundance, is at the same time characterized by certain forms of production of scarcity. Scarcity in capitalism is different from that of preceding societies in that “it is a social scarcity” [33].

“This social scarcity is also “artificial” because the wealth of social and natural resources was originally abundant in the sense that it possessed no value and was accessible to community members. Scarcity must be created through the wholesale destruction of the commons, even if this creates a disastrous situation for many in an economic and ecological sense. Lauderdale provided cases in which edible products were intentionally discarded and arable land was deliberately wasted so that market supply could be limited to keep commodity prices high. Here the fundamental tension between wealth and commodity is manifest, and this is the “paradox of wealth” that marks the historical peculiarity of the capitalist system [34].”

For Saito, abundance of wealth and creationist communism can be compatible because it involves a denial of wealth in the narrow sense permitted by capitalism. It involves opening up a horizon that makes it possible to achieve social and natural wealth in a broader sense, which is denied by capitalist commodification.

“Once the artificial scarcity of capitalism is overcome, people, now free from the constant pressure to earn money thanks to the expanding common wealth, would have an attractive option to work less without worrying about the degradation of their quality of life. […] Without market competition and the endless pressure for capital accumulation, freely associated labor and cooperative production could possibly reduce the workday to just three to six hours. Only then will people have sufficient time for non-consumerist activities such as leisure, exercise, study, and love. In other words, it is possible to reduce the scope of need not by increasing productive forces, but by restoring communal luxury, which allows people to live more stably without the pressure of being subjugated to the wage-labor system [35].”

Saito is right when he points out that a central Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production lies in the impoverishment it imposes on labor by establishing an alienated relationship with it, as a commodity, and forcing it to serve capital to sustain the ever-present cycle of accumulation. The dynamic of production for production’s sake, which aims for the maximum possible or socially tolerable extension of labor time in pursuit of valorization, denies all possibilities for the development of social wealth in the broad sense posed in the quote from the Grundrisse we quoted above. Similarly, this dynamic devastates the wealth of nature. Laying the foundations for the recovery of a broader notion of wealth, which can only begin through the capitalist “expropriation of the expropriators” in order to initiate a reorganization of social production along different lines, is a key point of Marx’s approach.

It is also accurate to argue that Marx aimed at establishing a balanced metabolism between society and nature, as can be seen in Capital:

“Just as the savage must struggle with nature to satisfy his needs, to preserve and reproduce his life, so too must the civilized person, and must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With its development, this realm of natural necessity expands, because its needs expand; but at the same time, the productive forces that satisfy them expand. Freedom in this realm can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating this metabolism with nature, placing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as if by a blind power; that they carry it out with the minimum expenditure of force and under the conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human forces, considered as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can only flourish on that realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic condition [36].”

Although Marx did not go far enough into prefiguring communist society as such, beyond the outlines of how he envisioned the beginnings of the transition toward it, we can agree with Saito that he understood it as a formation characterized by a rather stationary reproduction. That is, opposed to the systematic expanded reproduction that characterizes capitalism. The economization of labor time spent in social reproduction, to gain free time, rather than the increase in production, would be its guiding principle.

That said, can it be said that all of the above is sufficient to affirm the existence of a notion of creationist communism in Marx? As with the “epistemological rupture” that Saito claimed to find in the unpublished texts from 1868 onward, in this case the evidence presented is not sufficient to support the case. What Saito reinforces with his investigations is that Marx’s communist vision was not productivist nor an “automated luxury communism,” as some post-capitalists interpret it today. Something that other authors have already demonstrated, but which is worth reinforcing.

But to understand Marx as a decretionist communist requires rewriting his arguments in light of 21st-century discussions and in accordance with current approaches. Currently, while the technological fetishism positions criticized by Saito dominate, the notion that “decretionism” is the only way out of the climate emergency has also become widespread. As its name suggests, decretionism maintains that the only way to meet greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and achieve a sustainable future is to reduce the scale of production, drastically changing patterns of production and consumption. A problematic aspect is that its emphasis on a technical aspect or an economic goal, rather than addressing social relations, tends to turn it into an abstract approach. Summarizing the debates surrounding decretionism is beyond the scope and scope of this article, but for now, let us say that we believe that decretionism, although its approach inevitably tends to clash with the imperatives of capitalism and, in this sense, is incompatible with this mode of production, is nevertheless an approach that avoids placing strategies for providing a systemic solution at the heart of the issue. Many of its proponents are not even anti-capitalist, let alone socialist. There are even sectors that adopt “decretionist” arguments, in a neo-Malthusian sense, arguing that the ecological emergency forces the working class and the popular sectors to “reduce” their aspirations, as if the excessive consumption of these sectors were the root of the problem, without affecting the prerogatives of the ruling class.

Saito speaks not only of decretionism, but of communism, and links it to a liquidation of the capitalist regime led by the working class, which distinguishes his position from many contemporary decretionists. The proposition of communism without growth is not new; it was already proposed by authors such as Wolfgang Harich in the 1970s. What is novel about Saito is that he does not limit himself to claiming this position as his own, but rather “discovers” that Marx was, in his later years, a decretionist communist.

This, in addition to being anachronistic, seems to us to give a distorted view of the problems of the transition to communism as Marx conceived them. Saito fails to prove that Marx gave any indication of having profoundly reconsidered the clues he left in his texts. It would be striking if the “new Marx” that Saito claims to have found in the unpublished works had not more clearly recognized that he was undertaking such a profound reconsideration of such fundamental problems, had this actually occurred. The precondition for achieving communism is overcoming the threshold of uneven and combined development inherited by capitalism. This means that, although the working class in power can immediately and rapidly implement degrowth to some of the completely luxury products that characterize this system, and that maximum efforts are made to put an emergency brake on the imbalances created by capitalism in the metabolism with nature, seeking balance, during the transition, investment efforts in necessary and postponed social infrastructure will be necessary in numerous areas. If we consider this on a global level, with the inequalities and distortions imposed by the imperialist system, we can get an idea of the challenges of this transition.

Although, as we said, Saito is correct in many of his criticisms of the fetishists of technological solutions, he is one-sided in emphatically dismissing the role that greater development of the productive forces can play in a communist society, in which a balanced metabolism with nature is a central objective. Saito tends to equate all increases in productivity with increases in production volume, and as such, rejects it, emphasizing that abundance can be achieved even by lowering productivity. But Saito ignores an important possibility: that new, more productive technologies can continue to be developed in a communist society, even if it does not always seek to produce more and more as an end in itself—as occurs in capitalism—but rather with the goal of increasing the efficiency of labor in order to economize it. In other words, certain technological developments can be allies of a society that seeks to reduce necessary labor, as long as the goal of maintaining a rational or balanced relationship with natural metabolism is always kept in mind. Along these lines, the Engels quote, about knowing and applying the laws of nature, reproduced above, is used negatively. Saito mentions it because he believes it contains an idea of “dominion” over the natural world.

At the same time, the “technological solutions” to the environmental problems that capitalism is leaving as a legacy to any subsequent economic and social formation, which may be fallacious as a mitigation strategy proposed by green capitalism to continue unbridled growth or as they are approached by post-capitalists with their technological fetishism, may be part of the necessary arsenal in a society transitioning to communism. Technology alone cannot be trusted to resolve the disorders of capitalist development; technology is never neutral; its development depends on the society in which it is embedded. But neither can we turn our backs on the possibility of introducing, under the dominance of other social relations based on the fuller development of people and the search for balance with natural metabolism, technological improvements that lead to achieving these objectives or reversing the burdens left by capitalism.

For all these reasons, neither communism nor the transition to it, as Marx conceived it and as we must conceive it today, can be reduced to the problem or goal of “decretionism.”

Finally, let us say that despite Saito’s criticisms of post-capitalist movements for their “capitalist realism,” the political roadmap he proposes is not, in fact, very different. In Capital in the Atropocene, Saito vindicates the experience of municipalism under Ada Colau Ballano’s government, who has led the Barcelona mayor’s office since 2015, having risen to power through the formation of the Barcelona en Comú (BC) coalition, a coalition of the Green Initiative for Catalonia, the United and Alternative Left, Equo, the Constituent Process, Podemos, and the Guanyem platform. For Saito, the Climate Emergency Commission is exemplary due to the broad participation of numerous organizations in the deliberations and development of proposals. That is, it is one of the neo-reformist projects mentioned above. In this book, Saito mentions the need to “expand democracy beyond parliaments by broadening the scope of the commons to the extent of production.” The latter would not be achieved by capitalist “expropriators” but rather through “cooperatives, social property, or civic empowerment” [37], all of which appear to be the creation of “common” spaces without a break from the capitalist regime and its state, but rather as processes that occur within its framework. Although the importance of reaching the realm of production is mentioned, this does not appear to be related to a strategy for the working class to hegemonize within a perspective of profound transformations. Rather, the emphasis is placed on “citizen assemblies” and other similar initiatives to “renew” “parliamentary democracy” in combination with the municipalism embodied by examples such as Barcelona en Comú. In other words, the same “capitalist realism” that he criticized seems to permeate Saito’s perspective.

Final Comments
Beyond the controversies we have raised, Saito incorporates new elements into Marx’s view of the metabolism between society and nature under capitalism, as well as into the reformulation of the notions of wealth, both social and natural, involved in his communist perspective. Although in his search for a “new Marx,” he makes some questionable interpretations and may exaggerate some findings, it is a stimulating work that contributes to pressing issues for discussing an ecosocialist perspective today.

REFERENCES IN NOTES

[1] Kohei Saito, La naturaleza contra el capital. El ecosocialismo de Karl Marx, Buenos Aires, Ediciones IPS, 2023, p. 18.

[2] Ibídem, p. 77.

[3] Ibídem., p. 109.

[4] Ibídem, p. 95.

[5] Foster, John Bellamy, La ecología de Marx. Materialismo y naturaleza, Buenos Aires, Ediciones IPS, 2022, entre otros.

[6] Karl Marx, El capital. Crítica de la economía política. Tomo 3, vol 8, México, Siglo XXI, 1981, p. 1034.

[7] Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthopocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, p. 119.

[8] Ibídem, p. 123.

[9] Ídem.

[10] Citado por Saito en Ibídem, p. 35. La traducción en español disponible en marxists.org, traduce el término alemán Stoffwechsel no como metabolismo sino como “proceso de cambio de materias” (consultado el 22/03/23 en https://www.marxists.org/espanol/luxem/1913/1913-lal-acumulacion-del-capital.pdf).

[11] Ibídem, p. 47

[12] Ibídem, p. 48.

[13] Ibídem, p. 82.

[14] Ibídem, p. 55.

[15] Ibídem, p. 56

[16] Ibídem. p. 57.

[17] Liebig, citado en Ibídem, pp. 56-57.

[18] Ídem.

[19] citado por Saito en Ibídem, p. 53.

[20] Ibídem, p. 56.

[21] En 1881, Marx escribió un borrador de respuesta a Vera Zasulich, perteneciente en ese momento al grupo Naródnaia Volia (La voluntad del pueblo), quien le consultaba su opinión sobre el rol que podía jugar la comuna campesina en una revolución rusa. En los borradores que Marx finalmente no envío, consideraba que, en confluencia con la revolución obrera y socialista en Europa, la comuna rusa podía ser un vehículo para que el reino de los zares llegara directamente al socialismo, evitando el tortuoso pasaje por la acumulación primitiva capitalista que había atravesado Europa occidental.

[22] Citado en Kohei Saito, La naturaleza…, ob. cit., p. 304.

[23] Kohei Saito, Marx in…, ob. cit., p. 138.

[24] Karl Marx, El capital. Crítica de la economía política, Tomo I, Vol 1, México, Siglo XXI editores, 1975, p. 7.

[25] Kohei Saito, Marx in…, ob. cit., p. 137.

[26] Ibídem, p. 160.

[27] Ídem.

[28] Ídem.

[29] Ibídem, p. 208.

[30] Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política, México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1971, p. 447-448.

[31] Kohei Saito, Marx in…, ob. cit., p. 222.

[32] Ídem.

[33] Ibídem, p. 226.

[34] Ídem.

[35] Ibídem, p. 234.

[36] Karl Marx, El capital…, Tomo III, vol 8, ob. cit., p. 1044.

[37] Kohei Saito, El capital en el antropoceno, Barcelona, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2022, p. 302.