[ The days when Marx’s ideas were assumed to be incompatible
with environmentalism and in need of greening are thankfully past. But
of course, the degrowth debate is far from settled.]
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DISCOVERING A GREEN MARX: KOHEI SAITO’S MARX IN THE ANTHROPOCENE  
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Ryan Moore
August 21, 2023
Protean
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*
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_ The days when Marx’s ideas were assumed to be incompatible with
environmentalism and in need of greening are thankfully past. But of
course, the degrowth debate is far from settled. _

,

 

It’s always seemed a little strange that less has been said about
the final 15 years of Marx’s oeuvre than any other period of his
writing. In contrast, his early works—particularly the unpublished
texts that came to be known as _The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844_ and _The German Ideology_—became objects of
endless study after they were unearthed by Russian scholars. And
equally so, the extensive notebooks that Marx wrote in the late 1850s
in preparation for _Capital_ (compiled as the _Grundrisse_) have
proven an intellectual goldmine for those seeking connections between
his youthful philosophical musings and his mature economic analysis.
Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus _Capital_ in
1867; by then, he had already written the bulk of manuscripts that
would be posthumously edited into its second and third volumes.

Yet the years that came after, from 1868 until Marx’s death in 1883,
are considered his least productive and consequently least-studied
period, though he was still wrestling with urgent theoretical issues.
During this time, Marx was focused on questions about potential
pathways to communism—particularly after 1871, when the Paris
Commune briefly flourished, only to be brutally repressed. A few years
later, Marx penned a critique of the program presented in Gotha by the
Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, in which he famously
invoked the enduring socialist motto: “From each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs.”

In his last years, Marx searched for anthropological evidence of
collective social relations in pre-capitalist societies. He read
widely about non-Western and Indigenous peoples around the world; the
annotations from these texts would later be compiled by the
anthropologist Lawrence Krader into _The Ethnological Notebooks of
Karl Marx_. His final intellectual challenge came from Russian
revolutionaries who wanted to know if he thought that the rural
communes of the tsarist period could provide a foundation for
socialism, allowing Russia to bypass capitalism entirely. Marx would
reply: he thought this possible indeed. 

In _Marx in the Anthropocene_ (Cambridge University Press, 2023),
Kohei Saito attributes a newer theoretical framework to this late
Marx: that of degrowth communism. Saito analogizes Marx’s thinking
of that period to the current degrowth movement
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which envisions a post-capitalist economy that can deliver a
reconceived standard of social well-being while remaining within the
natural limits of the biosphere. A number of books have already been
written about Marx’s ecological consciousness and his critique of
the “metabolic rift” between nature and society under capitalism.
However, Saito’s work—both in _Marx and the Anthropocene_ and
his earlier book _Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism_ (Monthly Review Press,
2017)—stands out for its use of a copious collection of notes that
Marx took after 1868 from his readings on biology, botany, chemistry,
geology, minerology, and other fields of the natural sciences. These
notebooks have only become available during the past decade as part of
the second _Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe_ (_MEGA²_). Drawing on these
newly discovered late works, Saito illuminates a formerly invisible
dimension of Marx’s thought—and not a moment too soon as our world
begins to catch flame.

The most controversial of Saito’s arguments (at least among some
Marxists
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is his assertion that after 1868, Marx ditched his initial conception
of historical materialism. Saito maintains that late Marx’s writings
reveal a decisive break with any sort of linear, evolutionary
metanarrative in which history progresses in stages that are
determined by the development of productive forces. This oft-cited
thesis, succinctly summarized by Marx in his 1859 preface to _A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, posits that a
contradiction between the social relations of production and advances
in productive forces turns the former into “fetters,” and thus
“begins a new era of social revolution.” This emphasis on
productivity as the engine of change has been called “Promethean”
for its ethos of domination over nature; certainly, it is also
Eurocentric in its conception of what constitutes socioeconomic
development. At this time, Marx replicated widespread, largely
unquestioned assumptions: that progress was the result of
technological innovation, and that Western Europe was the model for
growth around the world.

Saito maintains that a dramatic about-face is apparent in the
post-1868 writings: “Finally discarding both ethnocentrism and
productivism, Marx abandoned his earlier scheme of historical
materialism.” Saito describes this transformation of late Marx’s
thought as a kind of epistemic break, invoking the same term that
Louis Althusser used to describe Marx’s original leap in 1845 from
philosophy to historical materialism. Marx’s departure from
ethnocentric notions of social development was already apparent in his
studies of non-Western societies, particularly in the _Ethnological
Notebooks_ and his letters on Russian communes. Saito further reveals
how, at the same time, Marx was intensifying his study of the natural
sciences in order to deepen his critique of capitalism’s metabolic
rift with the planet. Pre-capitalist forms of what Marx called
“indigenous communism” were coming into focus as small-scale
models of egalitarian social relations based on sustainable
connections with nature. Having overcome ethnocentrism and
productivism, Saito argues, Marx died having reached a position
congruent with that of modern degrowth communists.

The modern environmentalist movement, which emerged in the later
decades of the 20th century, would widely dismiss Marx as a relic of
Promethean thought who erroneously equated social progress with
control over nature. Greens generally regarded him as an outmoded
figure with unreconstructed views of productivity and technology. It
certainly didn’t help that actually existing socialist states had
industrialized with a reckless disregard for nature, or that labor
unions in capitalist nations prioritized demands for jobs and higher
living standards over the environment. Marxism and environmentalism
were often assumed to be antithetical political ideologies, reflecting
a division between red and green movements that endured through the
end of the 20th century.

Even eco-socialists who utilized Marx’s concepts in advocating for
alternatives to capitalism were still reluctant to view him as an
environmentally conscious theorist whose ideas might inform their
movement. It was largely accepted that Marx and Marxism needed an
ecological perspective grafted on to the critique of political
economy—to be “greened.” One consistent objection was that Marx
failed to recognize the natural limits of economic growth and did not
account for how resource depletion and ecological devastation can
imperil the accumulation of capital. The eco-socialist
journal _Capitalism Nature Socialism_, started in 1988 at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, would play a significant part in
this greening of Marx and Marxism. The journal’s founding editor,
James O’Connor, proposed that a “second contradiction of
capitalism
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arises when factoring in the rising costs from the exploitation of
natural and social conditions of production. The prevailing assumption
was that Marx’s ideas on their own were an insufficient foundation
for eco-socialism—they needed to be amended with additional sources
of contradiction and infused with a green perspective.

The consensus about Marx’s lack of ecological consciousness would be
broken by two significant works of scholarship published around the
turn of the century. John Bellamy Foster’s _Marx’s
Ecology_ (2000) revisited his philosophical turn to materialism in
relation to nature and science, an intellectual trajectory Foster
traced back to the young Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus. Meanwhile,
Paul Burkett’s _Marx and Nature_ (1999) reconstructed the
ecological dimension of Marx’s value analysis, emphasizing
nature’s contribution to production and the potential for crisis
stemming from capitalism’s “externalities.” By drawing out the
elements of ecology in Marx’s philosophy and economics, Foster and
Burkett issued complementary challenges to their eco-socialist
contemporaries. Instead of adding an ecological viewpoint to Marx’s
thought, Foster and Burkett insisted it had been there all along.

Following Foster and Burkett’s lead, 21st-century scholarship has
fruitfully utilized Marx’s notion of metabolism (_Stoffwechsel_) to
describe the interaction of nature and society, along with the rift
opened by capitalism’s robbery of land and labor alike. Marx’s
critique of this metabolic rift has since been invoked in numerous
studies of urgent environmental issues. Saito’s research using the
post-1868 notebooks in the _MEGA²_ has furnished additional
material that can offer a deeper understanding of Marx’s ecological
thought. The fourth section of the _MEGA²_—yet to be
completed—collects the annotations, excerpts, and comments in
Marx’s personal notebooks. Saito estimates that a third of these
notebooks were written in the last 15 years of Marx’s life; among
those, more than half examine subjects in the natural sciences.

Saito’s findings from these manuscripts were presented in the second
half of _Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism_, which was honored in 2018 with
a prestigious award for Marxist scholarship, the Deutscher Memorial
Prize. _Marx in the Anthropocene_ also draws on the late notebooks
in the _MEGA²_, but it addresses a wide spectrum of issues related
to a rapidly growing subfield of literature on Marxism and ecology.
Saito initially developed some of these ideas while writing an earlier
book published in Japan, _Hitoshinsei no Shihonron_ (_Capital in the
Anthropocene_)—a surprising commercial success that has sold a half
million copies
[[link removed]]. _Marx
in the Anthropocene_ engages further with current forms of radical
ecological thought, as Saito builds a case for degrowth communism.

Saito begins by tracing the suppression and rediscovery of Marx’s
metabolic theory. From his reading of _Capital_ he extricates new
concepts of the metabolic rift, lending it three dimensions along with
three corresponding methods for shifting (but never resolving) the
crises created by these rifts. Saito explains that Marx’s ecological
critique was unknown for so long in part because David Riazanov, the
Russian editor of the first _MEGA_, had neglected to publish the late
notebooks, dismissing their annotations as “inexcusable pedantry.”
He attributes the revival of Marx’s theory of metabolism to the
Hungarian political philosopher István Mészáros, initially in his
Deutscher Prize Memorial Lecture of 1971, and more systematically in
his mammoth tour de force _Beyond Capital_ (1995). Saito also
maintains that Rosa Luxemburg correctly utilized the notion of
metabolism in theorizing the exploitative relationship between
capitalist centers and pre-capitalist peripheries around the
world—although she originally presented this as a critique of
Marx’s _Capital_.

The question of whether Marx and Engels differed from one another in
their thinking about nature and science is a source of division among
Marxists. The orthodoxy that began to congeal in the late 19th century
viewed them interchangeably, treating Engels as an infallible
interpreter of Marx’s ideas. However, Western Marxist dissidents
insisted there were crucial differences. Whereas Engels applied
dialectics to an understanding of nature as a whole (an approach later
codified into an official Stalinist ideology of dialectical
materialism), Marx employed dialectics solely to analyze human
affairs: matters of society and historical change.

Today’s eco-Marxists typically find more confluence than conflict
between Marx and Engels. For instance, Burkett claims he “was unable
to find a single significant difference in Marx’s and Engels’
respective materialist and class-relational discussions of natural
conditions.” Foster likewise treats Engels’s dialectical analysis
of nature as if it were a perfectly consistent extension of Marx’s
thinking. But Saito, on the other hand, argues that some significant
differences emerge when revisiting _Capital_ in light of the
post-1868 notebooks in the _MEGA²_. Most importantly, Saito shows
how Engels edited a key passage in _Capital, Volume III_, in which
Marx originally distinguished between social and natural metabolism
within agriculture. Engels omitted the words “natural metabolism”
and changed the reference from “soil” to “life.” Saito
maintains that this editorial intervention is indicative of their
differing views on the concept of metabolism, which Marx had
appropriated from Justus von Liebig’s studies of soil depletion in
capitalist agriculture. He concludes that Engels failed to fully
appreciate the intellectual pivot around the concept of metabolism
that characterized Marx’s thought in his late studies of the natural
sciences.
 

György Lukács was the most prominent Marxist intellectual that found
reason to firmly distinguish Marx’s dialectical method from
Engels’s. In his groundbreaking _History and Class Consciousness_,
Lukács admonished Engels for his attempt to extend dialectics to the
knowledge of nature, given that Marx had limited its reach to the
human realms of history and society. _History and Class
Consciousness_ would become a foundational text of Western Marxism.
After it was published in 1923, Lukács came under attack from the
Comintern orthodoxy; a faithful member of the Hungarian Communist
Party, Lukács would eventually recant some of the more heretical
ideas in the book.

Saito, however, challenges the prevailing interpretation of Lukács as
a thinker whose absolute separation of society and nature trapped him
in a kind of methodological and ontological dualism. He argues that
Lukács effectively utilized the concept of metabolism in ways that
were consistent with Marx and could be further developed as a basis
for Marxist ecology. For textual evidence, Saito points to Lukacs’s
defense of _History and Class Consciousness_ in a manuscript that
was not discovered and published until 1996, _Tailism and the
Dialectic_. He insists that Lukács’s approach to the nature-society
relationship was dialectical rather than dualistic (in Hegelese,
natural and social conditions coevolve as “unity-in-separation” or
the “identity of identity and non-identity”). Having exhumed a
metabolic theory from _Tailism and the Dialectic_, Saito argues that
Lukács presents a critical alternative to both classical Cartesian
dualism and the nature-society monism that has more recently emerged
in connection with the green movement.

The second part of _Marx in the Anthropocene_ reckons with a range
of ideas that have arisen to address our age of global ecological
crisis. The theory of metabolism and the non-identity of nature
provide the foundation for Saito’s critique of this spectrum of
contemporary thinkers. A familiar target is Jason W. Moore, who has
criticized the concept of metabolic rift as a kind of Cartesian
dualism that schematically replicates the separation of nature from
society. Saito also takes aim at proponents of the “production of
nature”—i.e., those who emphasize the social construction of our
perceptions of natural forces while dismissing or downplaying the
environmental limits to socioeconomic development.

This perspective originated with among some Marxists who suspected
environmentalism had been infected with neo-Malthusianism; today, it
is espoused by self-proclaimed ecomodernists, like those associated
with the Breakthrough Institute. Although this chapter surveys a
disparate collection of ecological thought, Saito addresses them as
forms of “monism” because they all theoretically dissolve the
nature-society binary from one direction or another. He presents the
theory of metabolism as a superior, dialectical method of conceiving
this connection between nature and society: inseparable but
irreducible, co-evolving in a relationship rife with conflict and
contradictions.

Saito’s next chapter engages with the current vision of
post-capitalist society that has been dubbed “fully automated luxury
communism.” Marxists with this perspective imagine a future world of
abundance and free stuff, which will be able to minimize human labor
as a result of advances in automation, digital technologies,
information sharing, and artificial intelligence. Saito objects that
this amounts to a new brand of utopian socialism, influenced by a
revival of Promethean thinking among some of today’s Marxists.

Their vision of a totally automated society that has greatly
diminished the need for labor draws theoretical inspiration from a
section of Marx’s _Grundrisse_ known as the “Fragment on
Machines.” In it, Marx suggests that with the increasing automation
of production under capitalism, the material wealth of society becomes
unmoored from the value created by labor—in his words, “the
creation of real wealth comes to depends less on labour time and on
the amount of labour employed.” This contradiction contains the
seeds of a crisis that could lead to the collapse of capitalism.
Automation and investment in fixed capital unintentionally open new
possibilities for post-capitalist societies, in which people could
enjoy more free time while collective knowledge is accumulated in what
Marx called the “general intellect.”

Saito opposes this post-capitalist imaginary of automation and
abundance. Marx, he explains, quickly abandoned the line of thinking
found in the “Fragment on Machines.” Beginning in his economic
manuscripts of the early 1860s, Marx introduced a crucial distinction
between “formal” and “real” subsumption. Whereas formal
subsumption involves capital taking advantage of preexisting labor
practices, _real_ subsumption is a more comprehensive transformation
of the productive forces and social relations that constitute the mode
of production. Under these conditions of labor’s real subsumption
under capital, the growth of productive forces is a means of
deskilling the workforce, subjecting them to surveillance and time
discipline while placing control of the labor process in the hands of
management.

In short, the real subsumption of labor under capital makes it
increasingly difficult to separate the relations and forces of
production in the way that Marx did during the late 1850s; instead,
social relations of domination are baked into technological and
organizational “innovation.” Saito maintains that Marx had begun
to turn away from his materialist conception of history, which
suggested that productive forces could simply be expropriated and made
into instruments of emancipation. On the contrary, a revolution
against capital would require a thorough demolition and reconstruction
of the technical and organizational foundations of society.

Saito unfurls his full vision for degrowth communism in the third and
final part of _Marx in the Anthropocene_. Here, he draws on the
fourth section of the _MEGA²_: Marx’s post-1868 notebooks about
the natural sciences, which were published only recently and remain
untranslated. Saito asserts that this period represents a “great
transformation” in late Marx’s thinking that departs from his
previous perspective on historical materialism. He situates these
notebooks in the context of late Marx’s research on non-Western
collective societies (the _Ethnological Notebooks_) and his
correspondence with Vera Zasulich about Russia’s rural communes.
Saito concludes that Marx’s ideal of post-capitalist society changed
during these years, as he transcended the trappings of Eurocentrism
and Promethean productivism en route to something analogous to
degrowth communism.

The final chapter presents degrowth communism as a possible future of
shared abundance, wherein the measure of wealth will be sharply
distinguished from the value-form of capitalism. The point of
departure is Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation: the enclosure
of the commons represents the original negation of the metabolic
interaction between nature and humanity. An anti-capitalist revolution
would accomplish the negation of this negation, restoring our original
unity with nature on a higher level and at a larger scale. Wealth
would be redefined as the use-values provided by nature and society,
rather than an “immense collection of commodities,” as Marx wrote
in the famous first line of _Capital_. Whereas privatization and
commodification create the artificial scarcity that is endemic to
capitalism, degrowth communism would entail an abundance of this
social and natural wealth shared in common.

From this perspective, Saito reconsiders some of Marx’s most
well-known passages about communism. These statements have been widely
understood as evidence of Marx’s Promethean faith in the growth of
productive forces. In particular, his _Critique of the Gotha
Programme_, with its famous call to satisfy “each according to his
needs,” can be interpreted as a demand for unlimited material
abundance to be consumed by everyone, irrespective of natural
capacity. And yet alternatively, Saito maintains that this statement
may also be read from a non-productivist perspective, reconceiving the
measure of abundance as what Marx called common or cooperative wealth
(_genossenschaftlicher Reichtum_).

Similarly, Saito reassesses Marx’s oft-quoted discussion of freedom
and necessity in _Capital, Volume III’s_ chapter on “The Trinity
Formula.” Again, this passage is often understood as an appeal to
expanding the realm of freedom through automation and the domination
of nature, which could shorten the working day and thus minimize the
realm of necessity. But Saito insists that it is possible to maximize
freedom and leisure time without concomitantly increasing productive
forces—especially when we grasp that overcoming necessity is not
only a matter of natural limits, but also of capitalism’s
artificially imposed austerity and scarcity. In sum, novel readings
can be elicited from these passages from Marx when the categories of
abundance, scarcity, freedom, and necessity are understood in terms of
social relationships and our metabolic interaction with nature, rather
than restraining the interpretation to narrow, technical issues of
productive capacity.

_Marx in the Anthropocene_ is a book with tremendous significance for
our historical moment, but it is certainly not without its
shortcomings. Saito’s argument is logically persuasive, but his
textual support is thin; he arrives at strong conclusions based on
short passages from unfinished works and relies heavily on Engels’s
editorial interventions in Marx’s manuscripts. But while it may be
dangerous to read too much into incomplete manuscripts and notebooks,
the fact is that Marx left behind a largely unfinished (perhaps
unfinishable
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work. In itself, the unfolding of his ideas represents a historical
process, as different generations have discovered and further
developed insights from fragmentary texts, placing them in dialogue
with the challenges and conflicts of their own times. Marxists have
found the version of Marx they needed for their particular moment;
today’s eco-Marxists are no different.

Back in 1907, Otto Bauer heralded the 40th anniversary of _Capital,
Volume I_ by reflecting on how he and his contemporaries, unlike
their predecessors, had benefited from access to its posthumously
published second and third volumes. At issue was the cancerous growth
of capitalism into an imperialist monopoly stage dominated by
international finance and joint-stock companies. Whereas revisionists
like Eduard Bernstein insisted that these developments had rendered
Marx’s analysis outdated, Bauer responded that to the contrary, a
richer understanding of Marx’s dialectical method had been made
possible by tracing the reciprocal interdependence and increasing
complexity of his categories as they evolve over the three volumes
of _Capital_. Bauer insisted that this reconstruction of Marx’s
method in relation to Hegel’s dialectics was the key to
keeping _Capital_ relevant for a new era.

Decades later, the discovery and dissemination of the _Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_ provided the intellectual
underpinning for Western Marxism, and would later shape the reception
of Marx’s ideas among the New Left generation. The complete edition
of these notebooks, written in Paris when Marx was 26, was first
published in German in 1932. As they were read and assimilated by
scholars like Herbert Marcuse, the _Manuscripts_ not only supplied
the missing link between Marx and Hegel but also offered a humanist
alternative to Soviet Marxism. Not coincidentally, they were either
ignored or disparaged as immature works by Comintern scholars, and
were later omitted from German and Russian editions of Marx and
Engels’s collected works. David Riazanov, the founder of the
Marx-Engels Institute who first uncovered the 1844 _Manuscripts_, was
arrested by Stalin’s secret police, accused of assisting a Menshevik
counter-revolution, deported to a forced labor camp, and executed in
1938.

The first English translation of the _Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844_ was published in 1959, just in time to influence
a generation of New Left intellectuals in Britain and the U.S. The
philosophical musings of young Marx in Paris presented a more humanist
vision of communism, but also established the basis for an
all-encompassing critique of alienation in daily life under
capitalism.

For a generation who sought radical social change but were
disillusioned with Communism, the _Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844_ were a revelation. Raised in the midst of
unprecedented affluence, this cohort would find that the concept of
alienation was applicable not only to the estrangement of labor they
experienced at work but also to the growing commodification of their
consumption, leisure, public space, and time. These revelations called
for nothing less than a revolution of everyday life.

Marshall Berman—the Marxist intellectual best known for his
dissection of modernity and modernism in _All That Is Solid Melts
into Air_—recalled an endearing anecdote: as a teenager in 1959, he
bought 20 copies of the _Manuscripts_ and distributed them as gifts
for Hannukah. Berman recounted the day he walked into a bookstore near
Union Square in New York City and found them priced at 50 cents
apiece:

“…For the next several days I walked around with a stack of books,
thrilled to be giving them away to all the people in my life…
‘Take this!’ I said, shoving the book in their faces. ‘It’ll
knock you out. It’s by Karl Marx, but before he became Karl Marx.
It’ll show you how our whole life’s wrong, but it’ll make you
happy, too. If you don’t get it, just call me anytime, and I’ll
explain it all. Soon everybody will be talking about it, and you’ll
be the first to know.’”

In our time, we might say that Saito is among a cohort of
intellectuals in search of another sort of Karl Marx, one that comes
after 1868. If, for Berman, the _Manuscripts_ were written by Marx
before he became “Marx,” then perhaps Saito can be said to be
looking for a Marx of the time after.

The publication of Marx’s late notebooks in the _MEGA²_ has been
a boon for 21st-century scholarship. A list of keystone texts on the
subject would include Kevin Anderson’s _Marx on the
Margins_ (University of Chicago, 2010), which reconstructed Marx’s
perspectives on colonialism, ethnicity, and nationalism by examining
the later manuscripts and his lesser-known journalistic works on
non-Western societies. Likewise, Heather A. Brown’s _Marx on Gender
and the Family_ (Brill, 2012) made a contribution by drawing from
Marx’s _Ethnological Notebooks_ on pre-capitalist societies to
illuminate his views on patriarchy and women’s oppression. Just as
is the case in matters of ecology, these issues of colonialism,
racism, gender, and patriarchy are self-evidently crucial for the
social movements of our time—and yet it was long assumed that Marx
had nothing significant to say about them. Once again, Marxists are
resuscitating the Marx we need for the struggles of our historical
moment.

The vision of degrowth
[[link removed]] at
the heart of _Marx in the Anthropocene_ is rapidly becoming a
central point of contention on the left. In its summer 2023 special
issue, Monthly Review—the venerable socialist magazine currently
edited by John Bellamy Foster—endorsed an eco-socialist program of
planned degrowth
[[link removed]] and
sustainable human development. However, degrowth has also found
vociferous opponents who, in the name of socialism, continue to
emphasize the development of productive forces
[[link removed]] and
denounce environmentalism as a form of austerity and doom-mongering
[[link removed]]. What
is different today is that Marx has become an indispensable character
in the conversation—far from being consigned to obsolescence, he has
returned as a revered figure, in whose work interlocutors on sides of
the degrowth debate have sought intellectual sanction. Saito’s
intervention is deeply compelling, and will prove instrumental in
bringing Marxist analysis in line with the present-day understanding
of degrowth. The days when Marx’s ideas were assumed to be
incompatible with environmentalism and in need of greening are
thankfully past, thanks in no small part to Saito’s contributions.
But of course, the degrowth debate is far from settled—and the
struggle to recover a reading of Marx that can more comprehensively
illuminate the crises of our time will continue.

_RYAN MOORE teaches Sociology and is the author of Sells like Teen
Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (NYU Press)._

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