Kohei Saito’s Ecological Interpretation and Reconstruction of Marxist Political Economy: On Alternative Solutions to “Degrowth Communism”

Kohei Saito believes that the unfinished aspect of Marx's critique of political economy is ecological criticism, which reprsents a rediscovery of Marx's political economy through careful study of Marx's natural science notes and important texts in his later years in MEGA². On the one hand, Kohei Saito borrowed and absorbed the previous statements of Foster and others in the theory of “Metabolic Rift”. On the other hand, he further explained the formation and transfer of “Metabolic Rift” from the natural material cycle, space, and time levels, pointing out the increasingly emerging ecological crisis of capitalism in the “Anthropocene” era. Based on this, Kohei Saito constructed a “Degrowth Communism” aimed at finding a post-capitalist social system that transcends the capitalist system, in order to address the alienation of metabolic rift between humans and nature. Kohei Saito's ecological interpretation and reconstruction of Marxist political economy enriches and develops ecological Marxism, but he also fails to properly handle its relationship with historical materialism, lacks class analysis methods, and therefore cannot avoid being utopian.