Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth. By Kohei Saito (translated by Brian Bergstrom). Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.99.
It is well known that Karl Marx never completed his major work Capital. Just the first volume was published in his lifetime, and two further volumes, edited by Friedrich Engels, only appeared after his death. Kohei Saito argues here that Marx did not finish Capital because in his later years he became interested in scientific and what would now be called ecological issues. He did not publish much on these topics, but he left a lot of notes and excerpts from other writers, which are only now being put together as part of MEGA (Marx–Engels Complete Works). Saito’s book was discussed in the November 2024 Socialist Standard.
Saito further claims that Marx turned his back on productivism, the view that under capitalism productivity would continue to rise to bring about socialism (a well-known passage from the Communist Manifesto states that the capitalist class had massively expanded the productive forces). Marx argued, for instance, that capitalist agriculture led to depletion of the soil and disruption of the metabolic interaction between nature and humans, and he later praised communes in non-Western societies, such as Russia. This also involved a break with ‘Eurocentrism’, which supposedly involved projecting European history onto the rest of the world.
Saito criticises what he terms Accelerationism, the idea of completely sustainable economic growth. He associates this view with Aaron Bastani, author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (on which see the June 2019 Socialist Standard). He claims that the improved productivity and replacement of fossil fuels envisaged in FALC would in fact lead to ‘increased plunder of the earth’. His solution is degrowth, which for one thing involves a greater spread of the commons and ‘collective management of productive activity’, thereby reducing the artificial scarcity of capitalism and increasing abundance, while at the same time cutting the hours of work needed. Degrowth is simply not possible under capitalism; rather, a steady-state economy based on sustainability is what is needed.
A chapter entitled ‘Degrowth Communism Will Save the World’ presents the author’s positive proposals, divided into five points. The first of these is the transition to an economy based on use value: fulfilling people’s basic needs would be given priority over increasing GDP. But here we meet the first real problem: it is just not clear whether Saito wishes to do away completely with exchange value and the whole idea of GDP. The second point, already mentioned above, is to reduce work hours, which need not imply increased use of automation. Thirdly, abolish the division of labour, as work will be more attractive if it involves a variety of tasks and activities. Further, the production process must be democratised, which includes the use of open technologies, those which ‘relate to communication and co-operative industry’. Lastly, priority must be given to essential work, labour-intensive activities that cannot be automated, such as care work, in contrast to the meaningless ‘bullshit jobs’ identified by David Graeber. A system built on these lines will be ‘equipped to satisfy people’s needs while also expanding the capacity for society to address environmental issues’.
The author summarises his position as follows: ‘the foundation of communism is the equal, communal management of the means of production as a form of commons – that is, as something distinct from private ownership or ownership by the state’. Socialists would agree with this, but unfortunately, he then goes on to accept the existence of the state as a means of getting things done, such as creating infrastructure. Perhaps he does not mean by this some kind of centralised organisation that enforces the rule and interests of a minority, but he could have been a lot clearer here. In fact, his description of future society is mostly fine as far as it goes, but he does not refer explicitly to three crucial aspects, the abolition of the wages system, the ending of production for sale and the abolition of class divisions. Without these, whatever exists will not be socialism/communism, whether it implements degrowth or not.
Paul Bennett
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