In Marx and the Anthropocene, Saito continues the project developed in his earlier book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, in which he delved deeply into Marx and Engels’ vast corpus of unpublished work to explain their engagement with environmental issues.Īt first glance, a painstaking analysis of Marx’s private notes on, say, soil chemistry might seem arcane or even cultish: a doomed attempt at quote-mining to refashion a 19th century thinker according to contemporary tastes. The young Marx’s enthusiasm for solids melting into air sounds rather different with the environment collapsing all around us. Think of the Communist Manifesto and its giddy zeal for the transformative program of the bourgeoisie: “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation …”. Saito blames this on the longstanding association between socialism and the Promethean notion that nature can and should serve as raw materials for human ends. The social crises associated with the environmental emergency have not, as yet, spurred the Marxist revival one might expect from an era of political and economic tumult.
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