When I was younger climate change appeared worrying but distant, something that would be harmful to future generations, a matter of extreme concern but not an immediate problem. Today, climate change is here. June 2023 has broken record after record for high temperatures, and extreme weather is the new normal. We seem to be entering a room which is, perhaps, literally burning down. North America has been blanketed in smoke from forest fires, temperatures are so hot in parts of Europe that people are dying. We are in the hot 20s and likely to enter the hungry 30s, a decade where agriculture is disrupted and starvation stalks the world.
The duty of revolutionaries is clear. Capitalism generates climate change so we must make revolution and displace this mode of production, which in the words of the late great indigenous leader Hugo Blanco, is increasingly a mode of destruction. We must also work practically to cut emissions, taking on the suicidal might of big oil, while adapting to the negative effects of extreme and volatile weather. Without revolutionary theory, Lenin suggested, there can be no revolutionary movement. The task of theory in the face of climate crisis is to reflect, refine and generate concepts that better equip us to make both revolution and reform. This is increasingly a question, frankly, of survival. We must assess new published texts in terms of their utility in this regard.
One prominent contribution is the book Marx in the Anthropocene, subtitled ‘Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’. Written by the Japanese academic and philosopher Kohei Saito, it has been widely praised as a new intervention examining Marx’s ecological thinking. Saito has written several books on ecosocialism, Marxism and climate change. It is worth reviewing Marx in the Anthropocene in terms of its material effects. In short, does it help or hinder efforts to create both the reformist and revolutionary forces and their subsequent effects to better survive the crisis we have entered?
Saito’s central argument is that much of Marx’s work is productivist and anti-ecological but that an epistemological break occurred, with the later Marx recanting his earlier views and embracing what might now be described as degrowth communism. Like Saul on the road to an ecological Damascus, Marx underwent a dramatic change of heart, moving from an advocacy of ever increasing and ever more polluting industrial growth to an embrace of sustainable ecological development, symbolised by the Mir, a form of Russian peasant commune. Marx, it might be said, moved like the East German intellectual Rudolph Bahro, ‘from Red to Green’.
