A review of ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’, Kohei Saito (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

If Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto today, it is not inconceivable that they would begin with the sentence: “A spectre is haunting humanity—the spectre of extinction.”

In 1922, the great radical journalist Louise Bryant observed that Lenin drew great strength from the women close to him. Her observation contrasts sharply with the exploitative Lenin who has come to dominate historical studies and biographies.

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, U.S. Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation.

Jason W Moores Capitalism in the Web of Life sets itself the challenge of locating an account of capitalist commodity production inspired by Karl Marx within the biological, chemical and geological totality we normally call nature. The ambition of the book is therefore immense. Moore proposes a method for understanding world history that shows how economic development is connected to long-wave ecological transformations. At a time when humanity faces profound and simultaneous ecological and economic crises, Moore proposes a kind of meta-theory that explains them as the outcomes of a single logic.