Joseph Schumpeter (1951: 293) once said, ‘Capitalism is a process, a stationary capitalism would be a contradictio in adjecto.’ Degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, and it is essentially an anti-capitalist project. However, there has been little intellectual dialogue between degrowth and Marxism in the past mainly because of the latter’s alleged Prometheanism. This needs to change, and, fortunately, it has already started to change with advocacy for an ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ (Löwy et al. 2022). This situation reflects the theoretical and practical progress of political ecology in the last two decades.

Today, the existence of Marx’s ecology has become undeniable thanks to recent robust attempts by Marxian scholars to critically comprehend the historical dynamics of capital accumulation and its contradictions from an ecological perspective, especially by those ecosocialists who employ the concept of ‘metabolic rift’. This concept opened up a space of critical engagements with other traditions of environmentalism and political ecology, including degrowth. In this context, the recent renaissance of degrowth theory provides a great opportunity to re-examine and update Marx’s vision of a post-scarcity economy. Also inspired by new findings from the MEGA, this book attempted to decisively liberate Marxism from productivist ‘socialism’ by reinterpreting the late Marx as a ‘degrowth communist’.

The positive elaboration of Marx’s vision of post-capitalist society in this book is also an attempt to respond to those who doubt the fruitfulness of investigating Marx’s ecology in his notebooks. It is true that the existence of Marx’s ecology alone does not necessarily mean that his insights are useful today nor justify the need to engage with his political economy. Thus, critics express concerns about whether Marx’s ecology can be applied to the contemporary world because the economic and ecological situation in the 21st century is wholly different from his time, and the level of scientific knowledge is incomparable. Others object that such a ‘greening’ of Marx’s critique of capitalism is a mere imposition of ‘our’ concerns upon Marx’s text, distorting and neglecting the deep flaws and limitations in Marx’s theory. Due to the ‘obsolescence’ of Marx’s theory, critics even conclude that ‘Marxism has become so theoretically marginal that hopes for an “ecological Marx” are now best regarded as illusory’ (Boggs 2020: 83).