A Communist Degrowth Manifesto
What's good isn't new and what's new is boring (and horrifying sometimes)
Kōhei Saitō tries to talk us down before launching into his manifesto: "I am of course familiar with the standard objections that degrowth is impossible and communism is a nightmare.” But after grinding through a few hundred pages of Marxist exegesis and what-aboutist dunking on rich countries, I'm still pretty sure degrowth is impossible and communism is a nightmare.
Here's Saitō’s argument in a nutshell:
Economic growth in rich countries destroys the environment and exploits poor countries' cheap labor.
This is inherent to growth. Green Keynesianism (stuff like the European Green Deal or the IRA) can't stop this. Kate Raworth's donut economics can't stop this. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism can't stop this.
We can have abundant property in the commons (as opposed to private property or state-owned property) and a society that prioritizes usefulness over market value.
That's the only way we can deal with our environmental problems.
I grow increasingly skeptical with each point: (1) probably, though not necessarily; (2) maybe; (3) probably not, also watch out for Mao; and (4) fairly sure not. Saitō’s claims are often true, but they're also overconfident and at times scary.
Communism is a nightmare
We get this nice chart showing where Saitō thinks the climate crisis is taking us:
Spoiler: that fourth quadrant, "X", is degrowth communism and supposedly the only path forward. Why the "communism" label? Why not just be a left-libertarian? This is one of the most baffling parts of the book for me. Saitō spends a chapter giving Marx desperate chest-compressions, lamenting that Marx has been read as an accelerationist instead of a degrowther. Saitō discovered some notes from the end of Marx's life revealing a turn away from growth, and this is supposed to be a big deal:
[Marx's degrowth views remaining undiscovered] is why during the 150 years that have passed since the publication of Capital's first volume, Marxism couldn't be used to analyze environmental problems as stemming from the ultimate contradiction within capitalism, and the crisis of the Anthropocene has been allowed to worsen to its present state.
It's weird how people go to grad school then decide the world turns on 19th century intellectual history. The idea that Exxon executives wouldn't have shuttled along climate change if they'd recognized the full breadth of Marx's critique of the imperial mode of living reminds me of this Onion sketch where a Trump supporter reads Judith Butler and becomes woke.
Okay, maybe the idea is Marx-inspired governments would have been more eco-friendly and successful if they'd followed Marx's anti-growth turn. But, e.g., Lenin didn't care much about doing what Marx said. In fact, Lenin was already kind of a degrowther—he was cool with skipping the "grow a bunch and industrialize" part of Marxism and tried to start a communist revolution in a country of peasants.12 People who run countries don't do it by carefully following philosophers' prescriptions.
Misplaced faith in the commons
Anyway, Saitō has great faith in commons property—things like Linux or the ocean that neither the government nor private individuals own and anyone can access. He thinks way more stuff should be in the commons, like drinking water:
“Water exists in abundance, at least in Japan and in many countries in the Global North. Water possesses unassailable use-value, as everyone needs it to live. For this reason, it should be freely accessible and belong to no one. But water has become a commodity circulating in plastic bottles.”
But if water were so abundant, how could you make money by bottling and selling it? Saitō would say the people bottling and selling water are introducing fake scarcity by yoinking the water from the commons and profiting. But the scarcity seems real to me. It's not like 𝑇𝐻𝐸 𝑃𝐸𝑂𝑃𝐿𝐸 have unlimited access to potable water until Poland Spring steals it from them.3
I struggle to wrap my head around Saitō’s vision of commons property. Over and over he talks about how moving things into the commons creates abundance. The phrase "radical abundance" appears twenty times in the book, but it sounds to me like just playing slippery word games until free stuff appears. For example, he writes, “There is a radical abundance of solar and wind power. They are truly unlimited and free.” Well, the sun and the wind are free, but the means of extracting energy from them definitely aren't. I'm deeply unconvinced his degrowth agenda would lead to abundance rather than poverty.
He should be more scared of authoritarianism
Saitō is not unconcerned with state power. He warns against "climate Maoism," the third quadrant in the above table wherein the state responds to climate change by “jettisoning the free market and liberal democracy and creating a centralized authoritarian dictatorship." Saitō sees his degrowth communist philosophy as a way to prevent this kind of catastrophe.
But other passages in the book leave open important questions about how exactly we arrive at his brand of communism. Historically, that gap gets filled by gangsters, leeches, and murderers. Consider this spooky-ass use of the passive voice:
Production would no longer be organized around creating value but rather around producing use-value as determined through social planning. Put a different way, fulfilling people's basic needs would be prioritized over increasing the GDP. This is the grounding principle of degrowth.
As a model for planned economies, Saitō cites a farming co-op in South Africa, citizens assemblies in France, and a decarbonization initiative in Barcelona. I doubt the co-op or citizen assembly model can govern at scale. And in the case of the Barcelona initiative, while Saitō insists the plan is “the result of the collective work done by city residents themselves,” it's still a government program implemented by a small group of people. These things can go poorly! Hayek explained why prices are usually better than plans: “Fundamentally, in a system where the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.”4
Prices can go poorly, of course, but at their best they decentralize societies in ways for which Saitō doesn't provide convincing alternatives. So it's scary when he calls for a "great leap toward a sustainable, just society," while giving only glancing denouncements of the horrors of actually existing communism.
Miscellaneous things I didn’t like
I want to get to the few things I liked about Saitō’s arguments, but first let me get out some random stuff that bothered me in the book:
He uses 34.7°F instead of 1.5°C. Who does that?
He's anti-nuclear.
Saitō’s argument that growth necessarily destroys the planet cites Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb, which made wildly inaccurate doomer predictions. Climate mommy Hannah Ritchie describes how Ehrlich called for eugenics on the basis of these predictions in Not the End of the World.5
He says "consumer dreams can never come true"—bullshit, I love my bike.
Saitō writes as if he's settled some very not-settled debates.6 He self-assuredly and without much justification asserts the original affluent society: "we once worked for a few hours a day and then, once our needs were met, spent the rest of the day at leisure," that capitalism has run its course: "today's society has surely attained a sufficient level of productivity", and previous parts of his book: "now that we know that the key to this survival [of climate change] is equality" (emphasis mine).
Every economic problem is a capitalist nail for his Marxist hammer. He says Manhattan rent prices are sky-high because of capitalism. The only charitable way I can think of reading this is that he's thinking of NIMBY property owners as evil capitalists and I guess just not considering capitalist developers, who would profit far more from more building and cheaper housing than the status quo.
He seems to argue the transition from "the commons of water to the monopoly of fossil capital" was nefarious and not a matter of efficiency. Could we really have had a hydro-powered industrial revolution?
The good stuff (not too much of it)
Saitō’s criticisms of advertising, consumerism, and excessive work resonate with me. The people I grew up around probably would have been happier working less, spending less, and hanging out more. While I can’t stand governments trying to impose these sort of preferences on people, I’m with Saitō on these points, at least in the United States.
But these are old, well-recited critiques of capitalism. Slow Down’s primary original contribution is some new way of reading Marx I don't care about.
I do worry I've closed myself off from Saitō’s arguments because he's a Marxist philosopher.7 He cites Vaclav Smil, a scientist who fled Czechoslovakia a few months before the Soviets closed the border, and when Saitō’s arguments come out of Smil's mouth, I nod along much more readily.8
So I end this book feeling deeply skeptical of Saitō’s efforts to rehabilitate communism—both his practical vision and the language he uses for it. But his core critique of growth could be accurate in a way that would devastate my worldview and lifestyle. I'm pretty nervous and unsure about this.
A New York Times article frames things nicely: "Techno-optimists place their faith in innovation; degrowthers place theirs in social movements. Both sides lay claim to being the genuine realists. Each insists that we simply don’t have enough time to do what the other side wants."9 I don't know if technology will move quickly enough to prevent the worst of climate change. But it seems to be going a lot better than anticipated. The same can't be said for mass social movements so I'm left an uneasy techno-optimist.
"[Lenin] adapted the ideas to Russian conditions in ways Marx would never have imagined. Many historians have argued that the reason Soviet-style Communism developed as it did is that Lenin tried to import a Western creed and philosophy to a backward country, as Russia was" (from the introduction of Victor Sebestyen's biography).
It didn't work out.
See, Flint.
"The Use of Knowledge in a Society," AER, September 1945, p. 526.
From Ritchie’s book: “Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb said that population growth is out of control; we will never be able to produce enough food; there will be large-scale famines; and hundreds of millions will starve to death within decades. Of course, we now know that his predictions did not come true. That’s totally fine: nearly everyone who makes predictions about the future turns out to be wrong. What makes his book so terrible are the inhumane policies he advocated for based on this strong (and wrong) conviction...Not only did he suggest sterilisation programmes, but he also proposed a ‘triaged’ system of who should be left to starve to death. Some countries could be redeemable – they might be able to dig their way out of it. But some countries were a lost cause. Rich countries should withdraw any food aid and support, and just leave them to die.”
This might be a translation issue.
Why are the Marxists always in the English or philosophy departments?
Smil’s biography is amazing. I love understated, productive people who avoid wasteful status games. See also, Bill Watterson.