Intro to Marx 11/13 on Marx's late writings and Kohei Saito's *Slow Down* on Degrowth Communism

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces the Marx 11/13 seminar on the Late Marx in conversation with Kohei Saito and his manifesto for degrowth communism, *Slow Down* (2020) @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/11-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 11/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1113 The video recording of the seminar Marx 11/13 with Kohei Saito is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/zn6HwiRh23E?si=Kjt3PRHyH61WrdPf Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** This is the full length introduction to the seminar, Marx 11/13, where we read and discuss the late work of Karl Marx in conversation with Kohei Saito from the University of Tokyo and his manifesto for degrowth communism, titled *Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (2020)*. The late Marx is of particular importance to scholars like Kohei Saito because it is during his final years that Marx expands his repertoire to engage a wide range of areas outside the classic corpus of political economy that he had focused on from the 1840s to the 1860s. In his final years, Marx explores scholarship in chemistry and the natural sciences on the effects of advanced agricultural technologies and practices on the ecosystem. He reads works on the history of political development in India, Russia, and Algeria. He consults the work of anthropologists on pre-capitalist societies and on land use and communal practices in ancient Rome, among early Germanic peoples, in South America, and among the indigenous peoples in America. During the period, Marx publishes far less than he had in earlier decades but takes copious notes that fill volumes of the new MEGA2 edition of his and Engels’ collected works. His most important writings from these final years include the drafts and final letter he wrote to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich in February-March 1881; the preface to the second Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto that he and Engels published in 1882; the Critique of the Gotha Program that he published a few years earlier in 1875; and the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his late studies. These texts form the backbone of the late Marx that Kohei Saito analyzes in his work Slow Down. What is unique about Saito’s work is that he marries the late Marx with an argument for degrowth communism. While others have wedded the late Marx to ecological movements and ecosocialism, Saito goes further and argues for degrowth. His theory of degrowth includes, at its heart, an argument for worker cooperatives, consumer coops, and mutual aid. It embraces the idea of an economic regime of mutually reinforcing cooperative initiatives and thus forms a direct link to the idea of coöperism. It is deeply provocative and represents a formative interpretation of Marx and Marxism. This full-length introduction provides background on the late Marx and Kohei Saito's work. Welcome to Marx 11/13!