unherd.com
Capitalism is destroying the planet and “degrowth communism” is the only way to save us from extinction. That, at least, is the argument of Kohei Saito, the “rising star of contemporary Marxist thought”, whose Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save The Earth was a bestseller in Japan and has just been published in English. The idea, says Thomas Fazi, is radically to reorganise society to eliminate mass production and consumption, replace production for sale with production directly for use, and decarbonise the economy.
Most Marxists would reject the part of this vision that repudiates mass industrial production, but Saito claims that Marx himself was moving towards such a position towards the end of his life, rejecting his old idea that the developed West was the model towards which the whole world was moving, and embracing instead the “archaic, steady-state, communal societies” of the pre-capitalist world.
Perhaps Saito is right about that, but he is blind to his own “Eurocentrism”. Although he claims to speak on behalf of the “Global South”, in truth his concerns reflect a “very particular worldview”: that of relatively affluent Westerners, especially youngsters of the millennial and Z generations. His “apocalyptic, doom-laden” approach to the climate is “at odds with climate science itself”, and is a specifically Western phenomenon. That makes some sense, as material needs have largely been met in the West, and so people have starte
