o
§
Marx’s Ecological Notebooks
Kohei Saito recently received a PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University,
Berlin. In 2015 he was a guest researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences, where he helped edit Marx’s notebooks on natural science.
Karl Marx has long
been criticized for his so-called ecological “Prometheanism”—an extreme
commitment to industrialism, irrespective of natural limits. This view,
supported even by a number of Marxists, such as Ted Benton and Michael Löwy,
has become increasingly hard to accept after a series of careful and
stimulating analyses of the ecological dimensions of Marx’s thought, elaborated
in Monthly Review and elsewhere. The Prometheanism debate is not a mere
philological issue, but a highly practical one, as capitalism faces
environmental crises on a global scale, without any concrete solutions. Any
such solutions will likely come from the various ecological movements emerging
worldwide, some of which explicitly question the capitalist mode of production.
Now more than ever, therefore, the rediscovery of a Marxian ecology is of great
importance to the development of new forms of left strategy and struggle against
global capitalism.
