Kohei Saito’s Slow Down attempts to argue for a ‘degrowth communism’, but he misunderstands Marx, and sees no revolutionary role for the working class, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

Slow Down is the English translation of Kohei Saito’s Japanese work Capital in the Anthropocene, which became an unlikely hit when it was published in 2020, selling half a million copies. Saito had thought his argument that the climate crisis cannot be addressed without transcending capitalism was ‘too radical to find much of an audience’ (p.viii), but in the event, even capitalists were coming up to him to express their agreement with his ideas, and to ask his advice on what they should therefore do with their businesses.

As Saito himself says, the enthusiasm in Japan for the book probably relates to it resonating ‘with wider social discontentments and anxieties’ (p.viii). In other words, the book’s success was more an expression of a desire for systemic change in general rather being a specific endorsement of Saito’s anti-growth message. As one Japanese fan put it, ‘he doesn’t say there are good and bad things about capitalism, or that it is possible to reform it … he just says we have to get rid of the entire system.’ It was also apparently an expression of interest in Marxism, or, as that Guardian story about the book’s surprise success in Japan expressed it, in ‘strands of Marxism’. This is a cautious allusion to the fact that Saito’s interpretation of Marx is decidedly controversial.

Controversial Marxism

Saito’s argument about Marx here repeats his position set out in his previous English-language publication, Marx in the Anthropocene,ⁱ that while Marx was a ‘productivist’ in his early years, towards the end of his life, he became a degrowth communist. In Saito’s view, Marx realised that ‘blindly accelerating productivity under capitalism would never pave the way for a transition to socialism … Rather than calling for raising productivity under capitalism, Marx now sought to bring about a transition to a separate economic system – that is, socialism, first, and then foster sustainable economic development within that system’ (p.104).

In contrast to the approach of his other books, Saito here is talking to a non-Marxist audience. Members of this audience, he posits, might think that Marxism has ‘nothing to contribute to a conversation about the environment’ because of Soviet environmental destruction, (p.86) or that it necessarily ‘involves the nationalization of modes of production accompanied by one-party rule in the style of the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China… [and is] both outdated and dangerous’ (p.88). As a result, it’s reasonable that his account of Marx’s economics should be simplified. It is less reasonable that in places, that simplification should have garbled Saito’s account into incoherence.

Some of these instances are just demonstrations of the value of a final edit, such as where a discussion of how coal’s transportability enabled mill owners to site production where labour was plentiful, rather than being restricted by geography, is marred by the somewhat startling statement that ‘labour power was comparatively scarce in areas near rivers and streams’ (p.154). It is not hard to think of a long list of major cities on rivers with which to refute this.

Other instances are more serious. Saito’s ‘simplified, broad summary’ of the Communist Manifesto presents its central argument as:

‘Capitalists compete against each other, raising their productivity, which leads to the production of more and more commodities. But workers, exploited due to low wages, can’t afford to buy those commodities. This eventually leads to a crisis of overproduction. The already-exploited workers thus suffer another blow, this time due to the unemployment stemming from this crisis, and rise up en masse, bringing about a socialist revolution’ (p.94).

This combines an under-consumption thesis, that the problem for capitalism is that demand from the exploited workers will be insufficient to the supply they generate, with an immiseration thesis, the idea that workers will automatically rise up if their lives are just made hard enough. Neither of these was Marx’s position, although it is not entirely uncommon for Marx to be seen in Keynesian under-consumptionist terms. It is certainly the case that Marx was neither an under-consumptionist nor an adherent of the immiseration thesis in the Communist Manifesto. Similarly, despite Saito’s claim to the contrary, Marx did not argue in his earlier writings (or indeed, at any point) that ‘raising productivity under capitalism … [would] necessarily lead to the liberation of humanity’ (p.117).

Did Marx convert to degrowth?

Saito’s thesis that Marx converted to degrowth has been thoroughly criticised, for example by Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips in a long essay for Jacobin. As they point out, leaving aside quotations which Marx copied into his notebooks (copying not necessarily representing endorsement), the argument largely rests on one set of texts, the several drafts of Marx’s 1881 letter to the Russian socialist Vera Zasulich. In this letter, Marx speculated that Russian peasant villages, the mir, which had communal property, could go straight to socialism without having first to be remade as capitalist. In other words, Huber and Phillips explain,

‘the Russian mir could leapfrog capitalist development because capitalist development had occurred elsewhere, in the same way that many poor countries have jumped directly to adoption of mobile phones without having to pass through the stages of telegraphy or landlines.’

For Saito, this letter represents the culmination of Marx’s transition from what Saito caricatures as a belief in the inevitable forces of history, production as liberation and capitalism as progress, to degrowth. This is a substantial claim to make about Marx’s thought on the basis of one letter, and one which Saito is only able to reach, in any case, by stretching the reading of that letter further than it can reasonably go. As Huber and Phillips make clear, ‘at no point in any of the drafts [of the letter] did Marx suggest humanity as a whole could have taken a noncapitalist path through to communism.’

On first reading, it is not entirely clear what the discussion of Marx is doing in the book at all. Saito leads into this section with the short statement that: ‘Yes, I am talking about communism. Hence the necessity of bringing degrowth together with the writings of Karl Marx’ (p.86). This does not entirely cover what feels like a jump from the initial chapters on the ills of capitalism in the present day to the discussion of the evolution of Marx’s thought. While Marx’s ideas are, of course, directly relevant to a consideration of ecological destruction under capitalism, you might be excused for feeling that the question of how Marx’s views on degrowth might have changed throughout his life belongs in a different book entirely, rather than in this one. It does not, on the face of it, appear to explain or advance the questions of how to deal with the problems of capitalism raised in the first section of this book.

One explanation for this apparent disjunct is that Saito does however believe that his argument about Marx’s later thought has a direct relevance for how we should approach the climate crisis in the present. As others have noticed, Saito has a tendency to present his arguments about Marx’s beliefs as if Marx were a prophet, whose word we should believe unconditionally and without question. The implication seems to be that if Marx towards the end of his life embraced degrowth, that alone should be sufficient to convince us to convert to it too. For Saito, no further argument about the merits of degrowth is necessary if it can be shown to have been hallowed by Marx.

While Marxists are sometimes accused by the right of adopting Marxism or communism as a form of religion, this is not, of course, a style of argument in which any materialist worth their salt could engage. In the specific instance of the Russian mir, we would simply note that if Marx had adopted the view that the mir represented a route for humanity straight from feudalism to socialism, events would have proved him wrong. The small size of the proletariat compared to the peasantry proved to be a significant obstacle for a successful revolution in Russia. It is also worth noting though that the section on Marx here provides left cover to a set of ideas which might otherwise appear clearly anti-working class.

Voluntary self-limitation and the ‘Imperial Mode of Living’

In his preface to the English-language edition, Saito makes clear that he sees himself as more radical than many other proponents of degrowth. They, he says, ‘are often ambivalent about the need to transcend capitalism. I am not ambivalent’ (p.x). Once we get to the section of the book dealing with solutions, it is, however, striking how much of Saito’s vision of our sustainable future is recognisable from the general degrowth playbook. Workers’ co-ops, mutual aid, localised production and so on all make their expected appearance.

That so much of this is familiar may be why Saito chose not to spell out the thinking behind many of the specific proposals. There is little discussion, for example, of why power generation should be organised on a small-scale, local basis, or acknowledgment of the way that this would magnify renewables’ problems with intermittency. Similarly, there is no explanation here for why co-ordination of some production at regional, but not national, level would be permissible, or why a regional government would be somehow qualitatively different from a national one.

What is also unfortunately familiar from other degrowth works is the call for restraint on modern, urban lifestyles deemed to be self-indulgent and excessive. Saito is careful to state that his is ‘not a nostalgic call to “return to the village!”’ (p.124), but the general picture painted here of the degrowth communist society does end up sounding rather like those low-tech agricultural communes of the Zasulich letter. Saito has commented that ‘people accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo period [1603-1868]’ and it is easy to see why. When, for example, he criticises urban populations for no longer knowing how to grow their own food: ‘all we know how to do anymore is live our urban lifestyles supported by the exploitation of the periphery’ (p.141), it is difficult to interpret the argument in any way other than as a call to abandon modernity.

Early in the book, Saito responds to the criticism that his ideas sound like voluntary poverty with the comment that ‘on the surface, this criticism is correct’ (p.73). He underlines this later by calling for us to ‘voluntarily choose the path of self-limitation’ as an ‘anti-capitalist, revolutionary action’ (p.178). Saito’s point seems to be that while, on the surface, we would indeed be choosing material restrictions, we would be gaining all sorts of intangible benefits in exchange. As he explains:

‘This does not mean that people’s lives will become impoverished. Rather, as the space taken up by mutual aid, independent of money exchange, expands, people will be released more and more from the pressures of work. The amount of time regained by the average person just through this shift would be immense’ (p.171).

Presenting the call for degrowth as a discussion of Marx’s ideas frames it as a discussion of economic systems and their effects on the environment. It quickly becomes clear, however, that this is as much about individual lifestyles and our individual responsibility for them. The lifestyles of everyone in the Global North are characterised early in the book as being typified by ‘cars, aeroplanes, large houses, meat, wine’, but by the end have become simply ‘urban’. They are without qualification ‘rich’ and ‘enriched’, requiring ‘a huge amount of resources and energy to be wasted for the benefit of a very small portion of humanity’ (p.6). They are ‘supported by the exploitation of the periphery’ (p.141) and represent ‘the Imperial Mode of Living’. Simply by living in the Global North, ‘each and every one of us becomes complicit in perpetuating injustice’ (p.14).

This is the labour aristocracy theory, that either all workers or a section of the working class in the Global North is paid off by the bourgeoisie with the spoils of imperialism. It is in no way a Marxist position, ignoring as it does the way in which workers in the Global North have had to fight for advances in wages, conditions, welfare and so on, and that workers in the Global South are exploited by national and imperialist bourgeoisies, not by other workers.

As expressed here, it represents the conclusion that the problems of capitalism are caused by the greed and irresponsibility of the working class in the Global North. Even capitalism’s need for growth is not understood here as a matter of economics but as a result of short-term political choices. Saito follows the productivity trap explanation for growth under capitalism, that rises in productivity mean that the same amount of production can be delivered with fewer workers, but ‘politicians hate high unemployment rates. For this reason, there’s a huge amount of pressure for the economy to keep expanding indefinitely so as to maintain the rate of employment’ (p.40). Growth is therefore ultimately the fault of the selfish, short-sighted workers, insisting on wages to buy their meat and wine, despite the damage to workers in the Global South and to the planet.

While Saito does take care to outline what he sees as the compensations in degrowth communism for the dramatic drop in living standards it would entail for the Global North, you’re left with the strong sense that this drop is in any case deserved. We are sinful for ‘internalis[ing] to an extreme extent the sheer desirability of the Imperial Mode of Living’ (p.14) and must expiate our guilt with some much-needed austerity. Saito opens the introduction to the Japanese edition with the comment that individual actions like using a reusable shopping bag or carrying a thermos for your coffee ‘function like Catholic indulgences’ (p.xiii) and the religious overtones persist throughout.

Degrowth and Malthus

It will be apparent that at its heart, this is a Malthusian position. As in Malthus, the blame for environmental destruction ultimately lies with the industrial working-class. While Saito is clear in his rejection of capitalism, it is also clear that he sees modern, industrial production as inherently destructive of the environment. Strict limits on production to only the absolutely necessary (as always, who decides what is or is not necessary is not well-defined) will be required under any system to address the climate crisis. The transition from capitalism to communism is needed in order to manage this as fairly as possible and to give people the compensation in terms of free time, community and so on, for the drastic decline in their material standards of living.

Saito does say at one point that the technological advances made under capitalism should be retained (p.124), but the general tenor of the discussion is that they wouldn’t be, and indeed Saito also says that in many instances, the new degrowth communist society would have to start from scratch. Given the criticism of urban lifestyles, it is difficult to interpret this as anything other than an argument against industrialisation, regardless of the mode of production. Whether it would be possible to maintain anything like the modern size of population in these straitened, post-urban conditions is not discussed, but is a valid question.

This bears very little resemblance to the Marxist position that in a system run democratically for the benefit of everyone, humanity should be able to come up with technological solutions to ecological problems. As Engels wrote in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, freed from the irrationalities of capitalist profit-seeking, human labour could always extend what might appear to be the natural limits of production: ‘the productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the application of capital, labour and science.’ⁱⁱ The ‘radical abundance’ which Saito is right to seek should be able to be a genuine abundance, not simply austerity for all.

There is also, of course, the question of how to persuade people voluntarily to fight for their own immiseration, a particularly difficult argument in a cost-of-living crisis. The consideration here, such as it is, of how to overthrow capitalism in favour of degrowth communism is perhaps the weakest element of the book. It demonstrates that it is not only necessary to read Marx’s writings, but to understand them.

The proletariat and revolution

There is very little here that rises to a theory of how to achieve revolutionary change. In some places, Saito implies that the system will be changed simply by individuals changing their behaviour, as for example when he posits that: ‘these actions will combine to become a huge groundswell that will rein in the power of capital, reform democracy and decarbonize society’ (p.238). The impression is that this is as much about moral deserts as it is about achieving political change. The actions which will form this groundswell are as disparate as getting involved in a community farm or working for an environmental NGO, and Saito assures us that ‘it doesn’t matter the form it [action] takes’ (p.237).

This position is reminiscent of that of the nineteenth-century utopian socialists, whose approach of attempting to withdraw from capitalism rather than taking it on directly was criticised by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: ‘they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.’ⁱⁱⁱ Saito does not show an awareness of this history, or of the histories of initiatives like the co-operative movement. He lauds modern co-ops in Barcelona as ‘the first step towards the transition to a form of sustainably participatory socialism based on mutual aid and away from an economic model based on exploitation and plunder’ (p.218) without any explanation of why they are different from their nineteenth- and twentieth-century precursors.

In part, the problem seems to lie in the understanding here of what confronting the power of global capital really means. Saito, for example, lauds Barcelona for doing so by taking distinctly non-revolutionary and non-challenging measures such as implementing urban speed limits and cracking down on AirBnB. He also appears to have avoided learning what for Marx was a key lesson of the 1871 Paris Commune, that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’^iv He comments that ‘the citizens’ assembly shows us is that social movements can renovate democratic processes and use the power of the state’ (p.139).

The larger issue though appears to be one which faces many green critics of capitalism: that Saito wishes to argue for overthrowing the system without endorsing proletarian revolutionary organisation. It is remarkable, given Saito’s self-described credentials as ‘a scholar of political thought in the Marxist tradition’ (p.viii), that the proletariat here is notable by its almost total absence, with no entries at all in the index.

There is no proletariat in Saito’s account of Marx’s theories, either in his versions of early or late Marx, and certainly no proletarian organisation. His caricature of early Marx’s view of how revolution would come about has people rising up spontaneously in response to unemployment and omits Marx’s understanding of the proletariat as the only class capable of overthrowing capitalism. It is indeed possible to read Saito as implying that a proletarian revolution would actually be ecologically disastrous. His comment that socialism ‘ended up being an effort to bring about a society in which a nation’s proletarian class would be able to enjoy the material abundance realized by capitalism’ (p.229), without further qualification, could be taken as suggesting that proletarian consumption is, one way or another, always going to be an environmental problem.

This implication shifts the significance in this argument of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich. The question which Zasulich asked Marx and to which Marx was responding was relevant to a world which was not yet entirely capitalist: did areas which had not yet been brought into the capitalist mode of production still have to go through it, or could they skip straight to socialism? Given that the capitalist mode of production is now entirely global, this is a historical question. There is nowhere on earth now which would still have any even theoretical option of moving straight from feudalism to socialism. It is possible however to read Saito as suggesting with the Zasulich letter that Marx meant not simply that the Russian mir could be part of a socialist revolution, given the existence of the proletariat elsewhere in Russia, but that it is possible to have a revolution without the proletariat at all.

This would be a conclusion of more than historical interest. Maybe we don’t have to worry about converting working people to voluntary poverty, but can just go round them? I am sure that Saito would object to being portrayed as anti-working class, or anti-democratic, and indeed he does talk at various points about the benefits to workers of degrowth communism and the importance of engaging them. It is hard not to note, however, how these do not add up to a picture of proletarian involvement in the degrowth communist revolution.

Saito says, for example, that the first step towards revolution must take place at the site of production, but the explanation that follows turns out not to be about workers seizing control of the means of industrial production but about urban farming in Detroit (p.190). It is a geographical statement, not a strategic one. Similarly, while Saito makes various statements in favour of ‘radical democracy’, the prescription here is for citizens’ assemblies, which, although widely supported by parts of the green movement, would remove political participation entirely from people who did not happen to be selected by lot to be on the assembly.

Saito adopts Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s argument that if a movement can mobilise 3.5% of the population, it is likely to succeed.^v In Chenoweth and Stephan’s hands, this is actually an argument for mass movements; it represents the unsurprising conclusion that very large movements with significant popular support can win. The 3.5% has to be actively engaged, which in a UK context in 2024 means getting 2.3 million people on the streets. For Saito though, those who are active are an enlightened minority. Even most of the book’s readers, he says, won’t act: ‘even those who largely agree … will likely still conduct their lives as usual, unable to conceive of what they might do in the face of a demand as enormous as changing an entire social system’ (p.236). The masses, it is clear, will still cling to their lifestyles under capitalism.

Saito is far from the only degrowth writer to argue or imply that working-class consumption is the problem and enlightened anti-consumerism the solution. In view of far-right climate denialism, and the extent to which the climate crisis is being used by right-wing governments as a vote-winner in the populist culture war, it is, however, a dangerous position to take, and one which pushes the chance of meaningful climate action further away.

Saito is correct that capitalism needs to be overthrown, but as a scholar in the Marxist tradition, he should at least be aware that it is necessary also to understand how that might be done. As every Marxist should know, ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’^vi

i Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2023).

ii Frederick Engels, ‘The Myth of Overpopulation’, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844), reprinted in Ronald L Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus, (Lawrence and Wishart, London 1953), p.58.

iii Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (Progress Publishers, Moscow 1986), p.67.

iv Communist Manifesto, preface to the German Edition of 1872, p.9.

v Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works. The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, (Columbia University Press, New York 2013).

vi Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, (London 1981), p.423.