Time Is On Our Side?

 “Slow Down – the Degrowth Manifesto” by Kōhei Saitō, 2020 / 2024

This is the ‘hot’ Marxist book, which was originally titled ‘Capital in the Anthropocene,” but is now changed to a more trendy title.  What is frustrating about this book is its repetition of ‘conventional’ and ‘common’ explanations of what is wrong with Marxism as if they were true for all. In effect whose explanations is he talking about?  Evidently “all Marxists of the twentieth century.” Saitō claims to discover a new, late-stage Marx who overturns Marx's own flawed ‘traditional’ conceptions of the 1850s and ‘60s, principally Eurocentrism and productivism.  To my mind the weight of political correctness, anti-communism and being au courant on Saitō’s thinking is implicit throughout the whole book, along with the eagerness of a young academic to brand his own version of Marxism.

So Saitō wobbles all over the place, implying things he later corrects, ignoring actual Marxist terms and issues, and finally comes out for a ‘degrowth communism’ that will be achieved by the gradual work of cities, cooperatives, self-management, citizen assemblies, mutual aid and individual efforts.  “Degrowth” is a flawed popular slogan, as even in this book it’s clear not all growth is forbidden.   It is not a return to the forest or farm certainly.

GREENWASHING POLITICS

On the other hand Saitō opposes the Green New Deal and ‘green Keynesianism’ as a ways that are meant to re-invigorate capitalism.  That is exactly the way it is seen by Democrats and their co-thinkers like Gore and Biden.  The GND will not stop climate change but actually acts as an accelerant and placebo.  After detailing the problematics of electric cars, battery production, raw earths, slave labor, environmental despoliation and more, he reminds us that he’s still for the creation of solar, biomass, water and wind energy for a future society.  Thomas Friedman’s techno-optimist assertions that new tech will solve all climate problems is in his sights though, as new tech will be woefully insufficient.  

As you can see the concept of 'growth' hinges on the definition of the necessary technologies and production angles that can deal with the climate catastrophe and those that are useless or destructive.  His problem with the GND is that the GND does not target consumer and growth capitalism, which is the essence of the system. Saitō makes clear it is capital’s whole functioning that has to be abolished to save the planet, humanity and maybe even the working-class.  His solution to growth is a ‘steady state’ economy that is sustainable and human, not profit-based or GDP-focused, not just swapping out e-cars for gas ones.

Saitō opposes dangerous geo-engineering fixes, nuclear power, ethanol, palm oil deforestation, MMT, rampant greenwashing and the U.N.’s growth-based “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG).  He argues against various other ‘degrowth’ theorists that include capitalism in their schemas.  Like many he knows individual consumerist efforts to deal with climate change will fail.  He assails the ‘imperial mode of living” which externalizes environmental and economic problems to the global South. This ‘ecological imperialism and exploitation of the periphery is reaching a limit according to him. He notes the ‘great acceleration’ of carbon emissions that started after WWII, and further increased after the end of the cold war in 1989-1991. This clearly puts himself outside the ‘all industry is bad’ camp of deep ecology.  The chart he has in the book show carbon emissions starting to rise around 1848, the year the Communist Manifesto was published.

MARX’S Errors and Exits

Saitō treads much of the same ground covered earlier by theorists like J.B. Foster about Marx’s environmentalism, as Marx saw the exploitation of nature as accompanying the exploitation of workers.  Soil, forests, animals and water were all of concern, with capital’s treatment of them creating a ‘metabolic rift’ between humans and nature. Saitō claims that Marx rejected productivism at this point when he saw that merely increasing all production was not a feasible path.  He bases his view of Marx’s ‘productivism’ on questionable interpretations of several paragraphs.  In the process Saitō rejects historical materialism or any role for capital in creating better technology, though later he admits that we have to take advantage of improvements in technology that help the social economy. 

Yet Marx never maintained that production by itself would promote socialism.  That role was reserved for class struggle – something Saitō never mentions. The working-class barely gets a nod in the text, but the ‘caring class’ does. The support of Marxists for a revolution in mostly non-capitalist Russia and China or Marx’s own support for the 1848 and 1870s revolutions in very early capitalist Europe and France testifies to that.  No one was waiting for anything.  Now capital is ‘overripe’ of course and somewhat rotten.  

Russian 'mir'

Marx’s parallel research into the Russian ‘mir’ or 'obshchina' – peasant communes that collectively owned the land give Saitō the idea that Marx had finally rejected Eurocentrism, as now a rural country like Russia could more easily move towards communism.  He defines Eurocentrism as Marx maintaining that all societies had to go through European-style capitalism, as if Marx were a Menshevik or a Bernstein.  Saitō points out that in Germany there were also self-sufficient peasant communes called the Markgenossenschaft that blocked outside trade, held land in common and rotated plots among the commune members.  He then alludes to their presence in the global South, trying to undermine Marx and Engels’ view that feudal, tributary, slave or patron/client states actually dominated these regions. Even Graeber didn't assert this in 'The Dawn of Everything."  Certainly communal living still existed in places, as all historical development is ‘combined and uneven,’ such as the ejidos of Mexico.  But it’s not as if China or India or Egypt were run by communes.  At least he cites nothing, not even in his home country Japan.  Saitō follows this by saying he does not want to go back to subsistence and autarkic farming communes anyway, nor can society do this at this point in history.

His discovery of Marx’s unpublished notes and documents in the massive MEGA – Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe  – archive is the source of his ideas on Marx’s ostensible late-life ideological shift.   

TERMINOLOGY

Saitō discusses the issue of various forms of decoupling GDP and CO2 emissions, which he sees as impossible in a capitalist framework, based on the ‘growth trap’ and the ‘productivity trap,’ which both accelerate commodity production.  This involves the “Jevons paradox,’ which states that improvements in efficiency and productivity will actually increase energy and commodity production, as investment and consumption move elsewhere.  In other words, 'recyclable' plastic means more single-use pop bottles.  The ‘market,’ the corporations and the rich cannot and will not stop climate change, as they are the main beneficiaries.  He shows the huge limitations of Negative Emissions Technologies (NET) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which use massive amounts of land and water.  He reminds us that the global U.N. IPCC plan is based on economic growth continuing.  He also reminds us that the ‘dematerialization economy’ (AI, the internet, software, etc.) is based on huge material inputs.  He shoots down Pinker and Gate’s ideas of climate adaptation.  He looks at ‘doughnut economics’ (?) which tries to estimate the level of production the earth can handle while supplying the world population with the basics.  He estimates that very little redistribution of food or electricity would be needed to do this.

DEGROWTH

Saitō’s grid for the 4 responses to climate catastrophe are:  barbarism, climate fascism, climate Maoism and degrowth communism. The middle two are both authoritarian, centralist methods that he does not favor.  This goes to another issue.  Nearly all of Saitō’s ideas are local.  The word ‘planning’ is only used once.  He favors democratic control, but has no idea how this is going to work on a regional, national or international level.  Later he says that we cannot get rid of the state, so again, he spends pages explaining one idea, then corrects it in one sentence. What kind of state is not clear, though he mentions ‘citizen’s assemblies’ of 150 people or so, which is clearly inadequate.  China has used ‘top down’ methods to attempt to blunt carbon, but it has also accelerated others, including coal and private capitalism in its version of neo-liberalism. China is not Maoist and hasn’t been since the late 1970s, so it’s not clear what he means by climate Maoism except under the control of a central Party hierarchy and Politburo, not of workers democracy or any democracy. 

He notes that there is money to be made by disaster capitalists and ‘disrupters’ as the climate crisis gets worse and who see the whole thing as a profit opportunity.  Even disaster bonds are having a moment.  Saitō claims that getting rid of the consumer economy and capitalist ways of looking at wealth can be countered by ‘radical abundance’ which seems to consist of a happier, more stable and creative lifestyle full of non-alienated work and shorter hours, along with the human basics.  So it's not just living out of a locker and bunk-bed in a barracks. He wants to counter the image of degrowth as austerity, as he points out capitalism creates scarcities in food, housing, health care, education, jobs, peace and the like while blindly following the fraught GDP goal.

Saitō repeats Occupy’s deceptive 99% number, as if the only problem was the 1%, when his own figures show between 10-20% of the world benefitting the most from the consumer economy.  His intention is to even out the disparities between the global north and the global south, which makes 99% a deceptive number.  Nor does he imply there are classes of wealth within the global south. China is now the largest individual emitter by far, a country not in the global north, with India and Brazil doing their share too.

So whose going to lead the charge for degrowth communism and participatory socialism?  His predictable laudatory heroes include:  the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the Zapatistas, Via Campesina, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, Mondragon, BLM, the Spanish United-Left Party and cities like Barcelona.  If this patchwork gives you hope, be my guest.  He reminds us that the CoVid epidemic, the 2008 crash and the long stagnation of the Japanese economy led to reductions in growth and emissions.  His basic strategy is to “gradually expand the commons” which seems like a form of left-liberal utopianism in the fight against the presently growing climate catastrophe. 

Time is not on the side of fighting climate change, nor is the state of our social movements.  What Saitō lacks is an all-around revolutionary Marxist approach which his social-democratic and academic tendencies seem to forbid. But he does take a hard line against capitalism itself in this book, which is a refreshing change given the environmental movement’s wide-spread reformism.

The Guardian weighs in on degrowth. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/27/what-is-degrowth-can-it-save-planet

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Shock Doctrine” (Klein); “Marx and the Earth,” “Ecological Revolution,” “The Robbery of Nature” (all 3 by Foster); “Bullshit Jobs” (Graeber); “The Deficit Myth” (Kelton); “Living in the End Times’ (Zizek); “Reading Negri” (Negri); “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani); “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (Malm); 'Against Doomsday Scenarios" (Foster); "A People's Green New Deal," "Hothouse Utopia," "The Dawn of Everything" (Graeber).   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / August 22, 2024