Since the mid-2010s, there has been a surge in articles and books supporting the idea of degrowth – a leftish environmentalist, economic argument against ‘growth-obsessed’ capitalism. Such is the depth of support for degrowth on the left, that some self-described Marxists even claim that Karl Marx himself was actually an environmentalist and early advocate of degrowth.

With the influential Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo, has gone even further. He claims that not only was Marx an ‘ecologically conscious person in the modern sense’, he was also a ‘degrowth communist’.

Contemporary Marxists like Saito are free to propound some vision of ‘eco-socialism’, or to dream of some red-green alliance, should they wish to do so. The problem is that they try to do so by tendentiously ‘reconstructing’ Marx in ways that cut against the very grain of his thought. There is no trace of ‘degrowth communism’ in Marx’s actual work. In fact, Marx staunchly opposed the proto-green, counter-Enlightenment forces of his own time.

Read the full critique of the fantasy that Marx was a degrowthist here.