Book Review: “Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism”

It isn’t often you read a book that advocates for arguably the two most evil, destructive ideas ever advocated: Marxist communism and economic degrowth. As Rob Atkinson writes in a book review for The Independent Review, one would be bad. Both, as Tokyo University professor Kohei Saito advocates for, are truly horrific.

Saito, like other Marxist devotees, faces a problem: under orthodox Marxism the utopia of the workers’ revolution cannot happen unless there is significantly more economic growth, for it is only then that workers will be able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner,” as Karl Marx famously wrote in The German Ideology. Indeed, Saito writes, “The Communist Manifesto has repeatedly been cited as evidence of his notorious and unacceptable productivism” (p. 2). In other words, Marx wanted growth. Oh, the horror! But now that the progressive left largely rejects growth in the name of saving the planet (see Atkinson’s 2022 article, “The Abandonment of Growth and the Decline of the West,” The Independent Review 27 no. 2, 201–26), what’s a Marxist to do?

For Saito, the answer is to engage in an esoteric project to rehabilitate Marx for the green era and show that all the nonsense about growth was not really what Marx meant. That the “bourgeois” focus on growth was from Friedrich Engels, not Marx, he asserts. Or it was only early Marx who supported growth. To bolster his claim, Saito cites some collected found scribblings from the great man, showing that in the 1870s he encouraged a Russian revolution even though this was counter to his original idea that the communist revolution could happen only at the late stage of capitalism. Saito quotes Marx as saying that the ideal communist society was actually the pre-capitalist Russian agrarian commune. But notwithstanding Saito’s efforts to turn Marx into an agrarian environmentalist, he ultimately fails. Marx, for all his failures and evil, at least wanted growth and saw it as fundamentally a force for human liberation.

Read the review.