**Kohei Saito, //Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and\\ 
the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy//**

{{:saito.jpg?150|Karl Marx's Ecosocialism}}

Paperback, 308 pages\\ 
Monthly Review Press, 2017\\ 
ISBN: 9781583676424

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world’s most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a “Promethean.” According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance — a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, and not only from mainstream environmentalists.

Kohei Saito’s //Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism// challenges such accusations. Delving into Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks — published only recently and still being translated — Saito argues that Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. “It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx’s] critique of political economy,” Saito writes, “if one ignores its ecological dimension.”