Although carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began rising due to the use of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution (mainly coal), nearly half of all fossil fuels were utilized after 1989 when the Cold War ended. It’s staggering to think that in a mere 34 years “we” – mostly the Global North – have used so much energy and so severely degraded the environment. Scientists argue this squandering of resources is the result of excess consumption and lavish lifestyles – what Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, calls the Global North’s “Imperial Mode of Living,” which would not have been possible without the exploitation of resources and labor in the Global South. Yet the Global South accounts for only 10 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions while suffering the worst effects of the climate crisis. “Our way of life,” Saito writes, “is a terrible thing.”
In Slow Down, Saito gives a roadmap out of the climate crisis and toward a socially just economy. He begins by rejecting capitalism and policies that seem promising yet ultimately maintain the status quo. One example is the Green New Deal, which emphasizes “green” technologies like electric cars and solar power. These technologies have been promoted as having the added benefit of stimulating economic growth. Yet many carbon-reducing technologies depend on extracting resources from the Global South and exploiting workers, replacing the quest for fossil fuels with the pursuit of other limited resources, such as lithium and cobalt.
Saito’s argument isn’t against electric cars and solar power, which he agrees can help curb carbon dioxide emissions. Rather, he opposes the continued environmental damage and exploitation of workers, which in places like the Congo include child and slave labor. Furthermore, there is the question of the effectiveness of placing our hopes in technology as the solution to the climate crisis in the current capitalistic economy. For instance, he writes:
“According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), by 2040, the number of electric cars is expected to rise from two million to more than 280 million, but this is expected to result in a mere 1 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.”
In the compulsive expansion of free markets under capitalism, many of the gas cars that will be replaced with electric vehicles in the Global North will find their way to the Global South, which combined with the production of electric vehicles reduces their effectiveness for reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
According to Saito, the central problem is that policy changes that endorse capitalism’s commitment to continued growth, regardless of how promising the technology, continue to displace the burden of production on the Global South and other marginalized populations around the world. “We need to move beyond policy change and toward changing the social system as a whole.”
Saito identifies a “revolutionary trinity” that must take place if we are going to have any hope of curbing carbon dioxide emissions and collectively (not just the wealthiest 1 percent) survive the climate crisis:
- Overcoming capitalism
- Reforming democracy
- Decarbonizing society
According to Saito, “communism is the only viable choice left for a future in the Anthropocene.”
Saito is a philosophy professor at University of Tokyo and a Marxist scholar. He is aware of what most people envision when they think of Marx and communism: the nationalization of production and the limitation of human rights as witnessed in the histories of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. But for Saito, private ownership isn’t the problem, but rather labor and production and how they relate to the environment.
Saito parts ways with the young Marx and instead looks to Marx’s late-life research when he began to take interest in ecology and egalitarian communities. In this unpublished and unfinished work, Marx witnessed the inexorable link between sustainability and equality. Based on these writings, Saito formulated his Degrowth Manifesto “to bring about equality and sustainability” in contrast to capitalism’s “inequality and [endless] want.”
The key to Marx’s late-life thinking was the idea of the commons, which is best understood from the example he found during his research of the Margenossenschaft, Germanic tribal societies living during the time of the Caesars’ reign in Rome. Saito writes:
“These Germanic peoples owned land communally and had strong rules regulating production methods. It was unthinkable within the Margenossenschaft to sell land to anyone outside the community. Other products like timber, pork, wine, and the like were also forbidden to be bought and sold outside the community. … [They] treated land as a shared property. It belonged to no one….”
The Margenossenschaft maintained equality by using a lottery to determine who got to use which parcel of land, regularly exchanging who had the opportunity to farm the most fertile plots. In this way, Saito observes, “by avoiding individual hoarding of wealth, domination and subservience were prevented from arising among the members of the commune.”
Using the example of the Margenossenschaft commons as a springboard, Saito elaborates how Marx’s degrowth philosophy might be reproduced in a modern-day context. He gives numerous examples of present-day efforts at shared labor and resources along with citizen-run democracies, such as the Fearless Cities movement originating in Barcelona, Spain as well as citizen movements in the Global South. He also addresses arguments against degrowth and ideas that fall short of his revolutionary trinity of overcoming capitalism, reforming democracy, and decarbonizing society. Saito’s writing (and the English translation by Brian Bergstrom) is highly accessible. He also does an excellent job defining terminology possibly unfamiliar to readers without backgrounds in economics or Marx’s philosophy.
Saito knows for many deceleration of the economy will be a hard pill to swallow, especially given the extreme competition, high levels of consumption, and general lack of trust in our present neoliberal version of capitalism. No doubt, our current habits and beliefs derived from surviving capitalism challenge the need for self-restraint with regard to consumption and the necessity for trust in fellow citizens to work collaboratively and share resources. Still, Saito remains hopeful, pointing to research that suggests only 3.5 percent of the population “must rise up sincerely and nonviolently to bring about a major change in society.” If you can imagine yourself as part of that 3.5 percent, Saito’s book is definitely for you.
