“The World is on Fire”: Kohei Saito on Marx, Capitalism and the Climate Crisis

As the world careens from multiple catastrophes – cyclones, floods, droughts, fires, pandemics, conflicts, wars and much more – fuelled by the climate emergency, ongoing attempts to understand the roots of ongoing crises have unsurprisingly accelerated and intensified. The erstwhile smug dismissals of any talk of the climate crisis as a “hoax” continue to resurface – articulated recently in the words and actions of Trump – a more insidious and manipulative political and corporate strategy over the years has been to stop denying that there’s a problem while engaging in frantic, well-organized and well-funded greenwashing.

The goal of the political and economic powers that be, is to continue with capitalist ‘business as usual’ while simultaneously pretending to take action to deal with the challenge of climate crisis. Catchy formulas and practices such as ‘recycle, reuse, reduce’, the obsessive measurement of individualistic one’s ‘carbon footprint’, the worse than window-dressing endless charades the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings – now pretty much captured by the fossil fuels industry – the various Protocols, Accords and yet more meetings attended by politicians and executives in their carbon offset private jets for photo-ops, to strike new business deals and of course, also to sign off on agreements with the full knowledge that are not enforceable.

The dominant ideology that for long has rubbished and dismissed any concern with the climate – except as providing new opportunities for yet more capital accumulation – has now been transformed into hegemony. Everyone, especially the worst emitters and polluters have rebranded themselves as greener than thou. Given how deep they are immersed in the neoliberal, corporatist universities, unsurprisingly, many academics too, either wittingly or unwittingly, have also contributed to this process – via delusional Ecological Modernization Theory etc. – by touting technological innovations as solutions.

Of course, there is no shortage of activists and academics – not necessarily mutually exclusive categories – who organize, protest, write, analyze and push back at the relentless, determined greenwashing. Despite their differences of emphases and disagreements, one thinks of academics such Naomi Klein, John Bellamy Foster, Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Amita Baviskar, Jason Hickel among others. Contributing to these ongoing critical discussions, Kohei Saito, an academic at University of Tokyo dramatically captured the public imagination with the publication of his Hitoshinsei no Shihonron or Capital in the Anthropocene (2020). The fact that the book sold over 500,000 copies is an obvious indicator of the immense thirst for critical analyses that cuts through the impenetrable fog generated by the elaborately choreographed and staged sponsored greenwashing rituals. 

While considering the entire corpus and logic of Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, Saito pays particular attention to his unpublished Ethnological Notebooks – a project that Marx undertook towards the end of his life – comprising of extensive notes on the important analyses of non-Western societies by some of the leading anthropologists of his time – Kovalevsky, Morgan, Phear, Lubbock, Money and Maine. Starting with the now uncontroversial and indeed undeniable “The world is on fire” first sentence, Saito deftly demolishes and dispatches the dominant, entrenched and profoundly misleading image of Marx as unilaterally committed to productivism via the domination and exploitation of nature.

Until the translation and publication of the Ethnological Notebooks it was generally assumed – by his admirers as well as critics – that throughout his life Marx was a proponent of the idea that the development and maturation of capitalism was a necessary precondition for the socialist project of the redistribution of resources. Among other issues, towards the end of his life, Marx was very interested in the possibilities of non-Western societies where land was held communally, of bypassing the degradations and horrors of industrial capitalism en route to various forms of socialism.

In addition to his over the work of anthropologists on communities without private property in land, Marx’s correspondence with the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich clearly establishes his interest in the revolutionary potential of the mir or the Russian village communes with local self-government and no private property in land. While some of these issues have been discussed by Teodor Shanin in his book, Late Marx and the Russian Road – and indeed he relies on Shanin and others – the value of Saito’s analysis is the explicit, detailed connections he makes between Marx’s keen interest the structure of non-Western communal societies and their implications for the current climate crisis.

Kohei Saito’s work constitutes a groundbreaking, remarkable contribution to not just a re-consideration of the ongoing value of Marx’s analysis of making critical sense of the climate crisis but also the possible as well as plausible future socialist strategies and trajectories of the current crises thanks to unrestrained, uncontrolled genocidal capitalism.

Zaheer Baber is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is the author/editor of several books that include The Science of Empire (State University of New York Press, 1996); Secularism, Communalism and the Intellectuals (Three Essays, 2006); CyberAsia (Brill, 2005); (with Joseph M. Bryant) The Global Condition of Humanity (Bloomsbury, 2010). He has also published articles and essays in journals such as The British Journal of Sociology; Current Sociology; International Sociology; Critical Sociology; Journal of Contemporary Asia; The Times Literary Supplement; Nature; Economic and Political Weekly etc.