Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito

This book is an English version of Natur gegen Kapital: Marx’ Ökologie in seiner unvollendeten Kritik des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016), which was based on my dissertation. In that German edition, I thanked Andreas Arndt, who, as my supervisor, always motivated and inspired me in Berlin, and my Japanese colleagues Shigeru Iwasa, Teinosuke Otani, Tomonaga Tairako, Ryuji Sasaki, Hideto Akashi, and Soichiro Sumida for their comments and constructive criticisms throughout the project. I was also grateful to the MEGA editors in the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW), notably Gerald Hubmann, Claudia Reichel, and Timm Graßmann, who encouraged me to struggle with Marx’s notebooks. Thanks also to Frieder Otto Wolf, Harald Bluhm, Michael Heinrich, Michael Perelman, Ingo Stützle, Kolja Lindner, and Elena Louisa Lange for their helpful comments in various conferences.

Preparing the English manuscript, I was lucky to receive additional help. First of all, I want to thank Kevin Anderson who kindly hosted me as a visiting scholar in the department of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He provided me with opportunities to share my research with the members of the department as well as the International Humanist Marxist Organization in Los Angeles. I cannot thank John Bellamy Foster enough. He has been very supportive, publishing my articles in Monthly Review and publishing this book with Monthly Review Press. At each stage of the project, his comments and editing always improved the clarity and preciseness of the writing. I also cannot give adequate thanks to Brett Clark, who read my first English draft and significantly improved it with his careful and accurate reading. Thanks to his help, it became possible to convey my interpretation in a foreign language, although any remaining errors must of course be attributed to me. I am also grateful to Michael Yates from Monthly Review Press, who together with its editorial committee offered an unknown Japanese scholar this wonderful opportunity to publish my first English book. Finally, I would like to thank Martin Paddio at Monthly Review Press, and copy editor Erin Clermont, for their hard work during the publication process.

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science financed my research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, enabling me to complete this book.

Introduction

For quite a long time, the expression “Marx’s ecology” was regarded as oxymoronic. Not just critics of Marx but even many self-proclaimed Marxists believed that Marx presupposed unlimited economic and technological developments as a natural law of history and propagated the absolute mastery of nature, both of which run counter to any serious theoretical and practical consideration of ecological issues such as the scarcity of natural resources and the overloading of ecospheres. Since the 1970s, when grave environmental threats to human civilization gradually but undoubtedly became more discernible in Western societies, Marx was repeatedly criticized by new environmental studies and an emerging environmental movement for his naïve acceptance of the common nineteenth-century idea advocating the complete human domination of nature. According to critics, such a belief inevitably led him to neglect the destructive character that is immanent in the modern industry and technology that accompanies mass production and consumption. In this vein, John Passmore went so far as to write that “nothing could be more ecologically damaging than the Hegelian-Marxist doctrine.”¹

In subsequent years, the critique against Marx’s “Prometheanism,” or hyperindustrialism, according to which unlimited technological development under capitalism allows humans to arbitrarily manipulate external nature, became a popular stereotype.² Consequently, it was not rare to hear the same type of critique, that Marx’s theory, especially with regard to ecology, was fatally flawed from today’s perspective. His historical materialism, it was said, uncritically praised the progress of technology and productive forces under capitalism and anticipated, based on this premise, that socialism would solve every negative aspect of modern industry simply because it would realize the full potential of productive forces through the radical social appropriation of the means of production that were monopolized by the capitalist class. Marx was depicted as a technological utopian who failed to grasp the “dialectics of Enlightenment,” which would ultimately bring about the vengeance of nature when the ultimate productivism was realized.³

This particular critique, which was common in the Anglo-Saxon world, remains widely accepted in Germany, Marx’s homeland. Even in recent years, Thomas Petersen and Malte Faber repeated the widespread critique against Marx’s productivism, albeit without much textual analysis. According to these German scholars, Marx was “too optimistic in terms of his supposition that any production process can be arranged in such a manner that it does not incur any environmentally harmful materials.… This optimism of progress is certainly due to his great respect for the capitalist bourgeoisie, which is already documented in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.”⁴ Rolf P. Sieferle, another German scholar, also rejected the possibility of Marx’s ecology because Marx wrongly believed, based on his historical understanding of capitalism, that the “limits of growth of natural factors would be uncoupled”

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