Transition is Inevitable, Justice is Not
Kohei Saito, trans. Brian Bergstrom, Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £22.00, ISBN 9781399612975
reviewed by Sam Gregory
In his 2006 film about Stalinism, Joebuilding, Jonathan Meades explains how the Soviet Union set out to bend the environment, as it did people, to its will. ‘[Stalin] was a greater force than nature, he created inland seas, his slave labourers died in their thousands digging bloated canals more ostentatious than utility demanded. . . their function was to prove the state’s might. Like many autocrats before him, Stalin determined to control the climate. Unlike them, he partially succeeded.’
This, we can infer from Kohei Saito, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the youngest-ever recipient of the Deutscher Memorial Prize for scholarship in the Marxist tradition, epitomises the ‘productivist’ tendency of the USSR, a strain of thought which Saito argues in Slow Down, newly translated into English by Brian Bergstrom, is an aberration of Marx’s later ideas.
Saito is an editor of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), an exhaustive project to publish everything ever written by Marx and Engels — every letter, every note, every comment scribbled in the pages of another book. This marginalia according to Saito — and, unless we’re willing to skim the 65 volumes of the MEGA published so far, we’ll have to take his word for it — shows that at the end of his life Marx was moving away from an earlier faith in productivism and towards a form of ‘degrowth communism’ (Saito’s term), spurred by obsessive reading of early books on ecology and nature systems.
Saito’s assertion is that, in the rush to complete the two outstanding volumes of ‘Das Kapital’ after his friend’s death, Engels overlooked this quietly radical shift in Marx’s thought and finished the books based on older published writings, in the process unwittingly laying the ground for some of the 20th century’s worst environmental catastrophes.
Echoing arguments made by writers like Jason Hickel, Saito makes a convincing case that endless economic growth — whether in the service of capitalism or socialism — on a finite planet will ultimately be self-terminating for us as a species. Saito posits that a transition to degrowth communism, a socialist variant of steady-state economics, is the only way out of this death spiral. He argues that, while some economists have suggested there may be a way to ‘decouple’ growth from carbon emissions via a form of ‘Green Keynesianism’, none have yet shown that (at least at the speed and scale required to avert disaster) this is anything other than wishful thinking.
The truth, Saito writes, is that infinite growth is a non-negotiable feature of capitalism (which, of course, isn’t to be confused with commerce, which existed before capitalism). Without growth, the whole sorry circus grinds to a halt. The author points to the increasingly frequent climate events around the world that indicate this contradiction between capitalism’s inalienable need for growth and the boundaries of earth’s systems is already manifesting itself — often in the world’s poorest places. ‘Climate change,’ writes Saito, ‘is forcing humanity into nothing less than an overdue reckoning with harsh reality and a radical rethinking of the Imperial Mode of Living that has made us so dependent on extractivism and externalisation.’ Referencing capitalism’s tendency to export its harms to the Global South, he continues: ‘The exhaustion of the periphery is bringing us all closer to a historic turning point that will render the present system unable to function.’
While transition is inevitable, justice is not. As Saito puts it: ‘As capitalism collapses, will the world be plunged into chaos, or will a different, more stable social system replace it?’ To flesh out an image of what this more stable social system might look like, Saito returns to Marx. Put simply, he advocates a transition away from an economy based on exchange value, which incentivises those of us in the Global North to consume far beyond the limits of what the planet can sustain, towards one based on use value.
Such a society would, to put it glibly, require a lot of organising. How do we ensure this transition doesn’t end up with a society overseen by an all-powerful, Soviet-style state — a scenario that Saito calls ‘Climate Maoism’? The answer lies in the commons, and truly democratic forms of collective ownership over the ‘radical abundance’ that we’d all have access to once the artificial scarcity essential to the functioning of capitalism is dismantled. Here, Saito builds on the work of writers such as Guy Standing to outline how, if properly stewarded and with the incentive to plunder the planet’s natural resources removed, we can avoid Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’, in which capitalism’s inbuilt logic of exploitation and exhaustion leads to overfishing, over-mining and so on.
These new forms of green collectivism will only succeed if they’re based on what André Gorz calls ‘open technologies’ (those that can be accessed by a wide range of people, such as solar panels and the internet) as opposed to ‘locking technologies’ (those that increase centralised state power, such as nuclear power or geo-engineering). As a real-world example of what this could look like, Saito cites community-owned energy projects (like the Energise Barnsley initiative) that aim to opt out of the grid (and therefore the volatility of the global energy market) and instead generate energy within communities themselves on a use-value basis.
Saito proposes that these models, where essential resources are created near to where they’re used without a profit motivation, could be applied to housing, food, transport and so on. In doing so, we could arrive at a point that George Monbiot calls ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’ — where our shared resources are characterised by the kind of radical abundance that meets everybody’s basic needs while staying within our planetary limits.
Satio’s book ends with a call to action: we cannot transition to a society rooted in equity and sustainability without mass collective action. The alternative isn’t just the miseries and indignities of capitalism, as it was in the late 19th century, or the horrors of fascism, as in the early 20th century, but the complete extinction of us as a species and the obliteration of the world around us.
This, we can infer from Kohei Saito, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the youngest-ever recipient of the Deutscher Memorial Prize for scholarship in the Marxist tradition, epitomises the ‘productivist’ tendency of the USSR, a strain of thought which Saito argues in Slow Down, newly translated into English by Brian Bergstrom, is an aberration of Marx’s later ideas.
Saito is an editor of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), an exhaustive project to publish everything ever written by Marx and Engels — every letter, every note, every comment scribbled in the pages of another book. This marginalia according to Saito — and, unless we’re willing to skim the 65 volumes of the MEGA published so far, we’ll have to take his word for it — shows that at the end of his life Marx was moving away from an earlier faith in productivism and towards a form of ‘degrowth communism’ (Saito’s term), spurred by obsessive reading of early books on ecology and nature systems.
Saito’s assertion is that, in the rush to complete the two outstanding volumes of ‘Das Kapital’ after his friend’s death, Engels overlooked this quietly radical shift in Marx’s thought and finished the books based on older published writings, in the process unwittingly laying the ground for some of the 20th century’s worst environmental catastrophes.
Echoing arguments made by writers like Jason Hickel, Saito makes a convincing case that endless economic growth — whether in the service of capitalism or socialism — on a finite planet will ultimately be self-terminating for us as a species. Saito posits that a transition to degrowth communism, a socialist variant of steady-state economics, is the only way out of this death spiral. He argues that, while some economists have suggested there may be a way to ‘decouple’ growth from carbon emissions via a form of ‘Green Keynesianism’, none have yet shown that (at least at the speed and scale required to avert disaster) this is anything other than wishful thinking.
The truth, Saito writes, is that infinite growth is a non-negotiable feature of capitalism (which, of course, isn’t to be confused with commerce, which existed before capitalism). Without growth, the whole sorry circus grinds to a halt. The author points to the increasingly frequent climate events around the world that indicate this contradiction between capitalism’s inalienable need for growth and the boundaries of earth’s systems is already manifesting itself — often in the world’s poorest places. ‘Climate change,’ writes Saito, ‘is forcing humanity into nothing less than an overdue reckoning with harsh reality and a radical rethinking of the Imperial Mode of Living that has made us so dependent on extractivism and externalisation.’ Referencing capitalism’s tendency to export its harms to the Global South, he continues: ‘The exhaustion of the periphery is bringing us all closer to a historic turning point that will render the present system unable to function.’
While transition is inevitable, justice is not. As Saito puts it: ‘As capitalism collapses, will the world be plunged into chaos, or will a different, more stable social system replace it?’ To flesh out an image of what this more stable social system might look like, Saito returns to Marx. Put simply, he advocates a transition away from an economy based on exchange value, which incentivises those of us in the Global North to consume far beyond the limits of what the planet can sustain, towards one based on use value.
Such a society would, to put it glibly, require a lot of organising. How do we ensure this transition doesn’t end up with a society overseen by an all-powerful, Soviet-style state — a scenario that Saito calls ‘Climate Maoism’? The answer lies in the commons, and truly democratic forms of collective ownership over the ‘radical abundance’ that we’d all have access to once the artificial scarcity essential to the functioning of capitalism is dismantled. Here, Saito builds on the work of writers such as Guy Standing to outline how, if properly stewarded and with the incentive to plunder the planet’s natural resources removed, we can avoid Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’, in which capitalism’s inbuilt logic of exploitation and exhaustion leads to overfishing, over-mining and so on.
These new forms of green collectivism will only succeed if they’re based on what André Gorz calls ‘open technologies’ (those that can be accessed by a wide range of people, such as solar panels and the internet) as opposed to ‘locking technologies’ (those that increase centralised state power, such as nuclear power or geo-engineering). As a real-world example of what this could look like, Saito cites community-owned energy projects (like the Energise Barnsley initiative) that aim to opt out of the grid (and therefore the volatility of the global energy market) and instead generate energy within communities themselves on a use-value basis.
Saito proposes that these models, where essential resources are created near to where they’re used without a profit motivation, could be applied to housing, food, transport and so on. In doing so, we could arrive at a point that George Monbiot calls ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’ — where our shared resources are characterised by the kind of radical abundance that meets everybody’s basic needs while staying within our planetary limits.
Satio’s book ends with a call to action: we cannot transition to a society rooted in equity and sustainability without mass collective action. The alternative isn’t just the miseries and indignities of capitalism, as it was in the late 19th century, or the horrors of fascism, as in the early 20th century, but the complete extinction of us as a species and the obliteration of the world around us.