Book Review: A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism,Critique of Political Economy,and the Concept of Metabolism by Ryuji Sasaki

Interweaving biographical, theoretical and political levels of analysis, Sasaki’s New Introduction usefully reframes Marx’s work to show how his long preoccupation with the character of social change underpinned both his mature theory of capitalism and his late turn towards ecological concerns. Although the book remains focused throughout on Marx’s own writings, rather than on the details of the contemporary secondary literature, its argument implicitly surveys a number of emerging themes in the MEGA era of global Marx-research. (Sasaki, a professor of economics at Rikkyo University, has been a member of the MEGA editorial group in Japan.) The bulk of the book is divided into three long chapters. The first and third are organized mostly biographically and chronologically, while the second reconstructs the theoretical project of Capital. Two appendices examine methodological questions more closely.

The opening chapter reconstructs the development of Marx’s ‘new materialism’ up to 1848. (Sasaki uses the term ‘new materialism’ in a colloquial sense, to distinguish Marx’s project from the old materialisms culminating in Feuerbach; he does not have in mind the more technical meaning of the term associated especially with the non-Marxist work of authors in science and technology studies like Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour.) Sasaki presents Marx’s materialism primarily in terms of a ‘conception of social change’ that only took shape as he abandoned the Young Hegelian conviction that correct ideas alone – ‘enlightenment’ – would be sufficient to transform society; as Marx instead developed his own account of historical transformation in terms of productive forces, social relations and class struggle, he quickly arrived at the language of the free ‘association’ of workers as the keyword of his communist politics. (‘Association’ recurs as a major conceptual thread throughout the book.) The chapter’s especially rich analysis of Marx’s relationship to Bruno Bauer will be of particular value for readers interested in the earliest writings.

The longer second chapter shifts away from the intellectual-biographical mode, systematically reconstructing Marx’s critique of political economy. Focused mostly (but not exclusively) on Volume One of Capital, this chapter is the strongest section of the book, offering an exceptionally compact yet capacious outline of Marx’s theory of value and its significance for his work as a whole. Sasaki steers clear of strongly Hegelian readings of Capital (such as that associated with Kozo Uno); instead, he extends the value-form approach pioneered in Japan by Samezo Kuruma, bringing it together with the related interpretations developed in the early Soviet Union by I. I. Rubin and in contemporary Germany by Michael Heinrich. Sasaki emphasizes Marx’s critique of ‘the personification of reified things’, not simply as an analysis of commodity fetishism but as the key to the character of value and the ‘power of capital’ itself. Partly converging with Moishe Postone’s critique of ‘traditional Marxism’ writ large, he argues that Marx did not see private ownership of the means of production as the fundamental problem with capitalist social relations; instead, Sasaki points to the particular character of capitalist wage-labour, which reproduces such private ownership, as Marx’s basic object of critique. The book’s two appendices develop these core insights much more fully: the first examines the centrality of labour to Marx’s method (sharply distinguishing Marx’s account from Hegel’s), while the second analyses the theoretical structure of Capital in terms of its analysis of reification. Less oriented towards the lay reader, these appendices should be of independent interest to scholars already acquainted with the wider theoretical debates.

The third chapter resumes the more biographical approach of the first, showing how Marx’s interest in the concept of ‘metabolism’ (as emphasized, now familiarly, by authors such as John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito) led him to a range of new questions dealing not only with ecology and the sciences but also with gender, the family and ‘premodern’ forms of community. On one hand, Sasaki makes a compelling argument that we can understand the wide-ranging character of Marx’s late interests (as attested by the research notebooks appearing in MEGA/IV) in terms of the problems opened up by the metabolism-concept; on the other hand, the force of that argument remains more intellectual-historical than theoretical. For example, while Sasaki demonstrates effectively that we should understand the ethnological notebooks as one outgrowth of the turn to metabolism, it remains less clear how this should concretely reshape our interpretation of Marx’s account of the family; likewise, while he shows that Marx came to see ecological contradictions as a fundamental impetus for resistance to capitalism, he is more reserved on how this connection might actually reshape the political theory of class struggle today. The primary strategic insight is that Marx’s late work already embraces the significance for working-class politics of alliances with ‘social minorities’, with ‘the premodern community’ and with ‘natural scientists’ – and perhaps with ecological forces themselves (pp. 167–168).

For at least some readers, the book’s most significant omission – given its self-presentation as an introductory text – will be the absence of any real attention to Engels, who fades almost entirely into the background. Sasaki seems to endorse the view not only that Engels sought primarily to systematize a ‘worldview’ foreign to Marx’s method but also (implicitly) that his own contributions to their shared work lie outside the scope of that project’s most essential concerns. Certainly this is a defensible position, one shared by many other scholars today; but it also remains a deeply contested one, particularly in the very debates about Marxism and ecology that Sasaki otherwise emphasizes so strongly.

This gap aside, however, Sasaki’s book is a strong contribution to the growing world of (re)introductions to Marx’s work. It is distinguished in that crowded field by his sophisticated treatment of the theory of value and his engaging synthesis of themes from many corners of global Marx-studies today.