Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

Abstract

In the last fifteen years of his life, Marx produced the equivalent of a third of his study notebooks and, in fact, half of this final set deals with topics such as biology, chemistry, botany, geology and mineralogy. The meaning of such dedication had already been associated, in the commentary literature, with the continuation of a philosophical tradition of universal materialist explanation and, alternatively, with the interest in the economic-political question of the theory of land rent. Saito's book offers us a third possible reading of this fact, suggesting that Marx's interest was a consequence of the gradual unfolding of an ecological dimension in his critique of political economy.