Abstract: Japanese scholar Kohei Saito attempted to “reconstruct Marx's critique of ecological capitalism” from the perspective of textual research and proposed the practical approach of “de-growth communism”.However, upon examining his argumentation process, it becomes clear that Kohei Saito has misunderstood Marx's ecological theory: first,in his analysis of the theory of material metabolism, he emphasizes “matter” while neglecting “people”; second, he confuses the concepts of “labor process” and “material metabolism between humans and nature”; third, he reverses the root and consequence of contradictions in capitalist production; and fourth, he fabricates a dichotomy between “two Marxs”, thereby fragmenting Marx's thought. The methodological flaws of Kohei Saito's approach lie in two aspects: firstly, his dialectics lost the critical and revolutionary characteristics of Marx's dialectics; secondly, his research process did not reflect the essence of Marx's method of “rising from the abstract to the concrete”. Kohei Saito's viewpoints and propositions have a strong idealistic color and lack the examination of “real people and their historical development”, thus making it difficult to accurately grasp Marx's ecological theory.

Key words: Kohei Saito, Marx, material transformation, ecological Marxism, de-growth communism