Modern followers of Marx who want to give a theoretical background to their new ecological movement believe that it was the depletion of the soil brought about by the initial intensive exploitation of the large landed properties that made Marx speak of “conditions that cause irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and physical metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.
All those who have dealt systematically with Marx’s work are faced with a radical question regarding the last phase of his work. Marx in the second half of the 1850s and the 1860s carries out an impressive and pioneering research that is both a theory of capitalism as a mode of production and a critique of economic theory and ideology up to that time, culminating in the publication of the First Volume of Capital as well as the writing of the manuscripts which were posthumously published as the Second and Third Volumes. However, from one point on he decides to broaden his research and study natural sciences as well as ethnology, keeping a lot of notes with long passages from what he reads, a habit he had since his youth. Even more, on the occasion of the correspondence with Vera Zasulich, an important figure of the Russian revolutionary current of the Narodniks, Marx seems to argue that for some societies the “compulsory” transition from some kind of dynamic capitalist development is not necessary, as necessary ” vestibule’ for socialism.
The full grappling with these aspects of Marx’s later research has been greatly assisted by the gradual appearance of the volumes of the new edition of The Answers to Marx and Engels, MEGA2, begun in the 1970s and still continuing, which following modern rules for critical editions includes the manuscripts, the original editions but also the multitude of notes by Marx himself, opening the way for new readings of Marx’s work.
One of these focuses on how Marx gradually breaks with a conception of historical progress based on the degree of development of the productive forces. On the contrary, in “Capital” we can find a scheme of how at the heart of historical development are not the productive forces in their linear historical development, but the relations of production that lie behind social (rather than “physical” or “technical”) forms such as the commodity or exchange value, while in the late Marx we find a conception of history and communism that has nothing to do with the simple development of the productive forces.
Ecosocialist perspective
Such a reading is attempted by the Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito in his book “Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’, released in late 2022 by Oxford University Press, after first being a publishing event in the original Japanese edition, selling 500,000 copies. Saito is in conversation with a particular tradition of Marxists who have been trying in recent years to formulate a modern ecosocialist perspective that does not simply add some ecological demands but tries to see how Marx’s thought can better explain why we are facing an imminent ecological catastrophe and why this it has to do with the core of capitalist social relations. This concerns both theorists such as John Bellamy Foster who focus on the concept of the metabolic rift, i.e. the gradual clash between social and physical metabolism mentioned by Marx, and theorists such as Andreas Malm who focus on how our dependence on minerals fuel was not the result of some technical necessity but of the demands of capitalist accumulation. The interesting thing is that he does it by insisting on a Marxist tradition centered on thinkers such as Giorgi Lukacs or Istvan Mezaros.
The proposal for another relationship with nature
Above all, however, Saito’s originality lies in how, through a well-documented reading of late Marx, he not only traces the way in which the latter seeks in pre-capitalist social forms, such as the Russian peasant community, alternative forms of non-capitalist organization, but also a thought that it seeks another relationship with nature, a kind of social metabolism that does not conflict with the natural, does not exhaust natural resources and prevents the risk of ecological destruction. For Saito, Marx essentially advocates the possibility of another version of “wealth” that is about real quality, sociability, the release of people’s potential, and not just the endless production of things that are not necessary. Against this background, Saito sees Marx towards the end of his life essentially shifting to what he might describe as a communism of dedevelopment, a project to confront the ecological crisis through a different social organization that focuses on cooperative organization of the economy and a different prioritization of needs and not in various variants of “techno-utopia”.
The irreparable rift
It was the depletion of the soil brought about by the initial intensive exploitation of the large landed properties that caused Marx to speak of “conditions which cause an irreparable breach in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism provided for by the natural laws of the soil. The result of this is the waste of the vitality of the soil, and commerce carries this destruction far beyond the limits of a country.’
