"Facing global climate crisis, Marx's ecological critique of capitalism more clearly demonstrates its importance than ever. Marx in the Anthropocene explains why Marx's ecology had to be marginalized, and even suppressed by Marxists after his death, throughout the 20th century. Marx's ecological critique of capitalism, however, revives in the Anthropocene against dominant productivism and monism. Investigating new materials published in the complete works of Marx and Engels (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe), Kohei Saito offers a wholly novel idea of Marx's alternative to capitalism that should be adequately characterized as degrowth communism. This provocative interpretation of the late Marx sheds new light on recent debates on the relationship between society and nature and invites readers to envision a post-capitalist society without repeating the failure of the actually existing socialism of the 20th century"--

Kohei Saito is an associate professor at University of Tokyo. His book Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017) won the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His second book, Capital in the Anthropocene (Shueisha, 2020), has sold over 400,000 copies in Japan and received the Asia Book Award.

Dedication; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Marx's Ecological Critique of Capitalism and its Oblivion: 1. Marx's theory of metabolism in the age of global ecological crisis; 2. The intellectual relationship of Marx and Engels revisited from an ecological perspective; 3. Lukács's theory of metabolism as the foundation of ecosocialist realism; Part II. A Critique of Productive Forces in the Anthropocene; 4. Monism and the non-identity of nature; 5. The revival of utopian socialism and the productive forces of capital; Part III. Towards Degrowth Communism: 6. Marx as a degrowth communist; 7. The abundance of wealth in degrowth communism; Conclusion; References; Index.