Slow Down?
Walter Benjamin once questioned whether ‘it is possible that revolutions are, for those of humanity who travel in that train, the act of pulling the emergency brake’. A revolution within the concept and image of revolution, this gesture of urgent arrest belongs to Benjamin’s broader critique of historical progress shared by liberals, social democrats, and Stalinized marxists alike, now re-imagined as a storm and catastrophe, one which engulfed Europe in the form of fascism and of which Benjamin was himself a victim. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this metaphor of humanity careening towards total wreckage on modernity’s runaway train has found renewed resonance in an era of climate crisis, where a seemingly implacable commitment to economic growth is undermining the very conditions of life on the planet. One recent example of an emerging intellectual and social movement that sets out to challenge the immediate identification of the good life with perpetually increasing economic productivity is Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth. Not quite the sudden lurching halt envisaged by Benjamin, Saito’s book is nonetheless a significant – and popular – intervention into the contentious debates within the left regarding climate breakdown, one which additionally proposes a novel rewriting of Marx as a theorist of, and for, the Anthropocene.
At times presented as inherently antagonistic in sensibility and temporal orientation, the dilemma of synthesizing a viable ecological politics with the abolition of class society is of central importance to contemporary Marxist thought. To put it excessively crudely, the political left is polarized between advocates of a transition to socialist abundance through green industrialization and those, like Saito, who favour ‘degrowth communism’. These differences are connected less to scholastic struggles over Marxist scripture – although they involve these too – and more to the question of what could be said to constitute individual and collective flourishing. Before getting into the weeds of marxicology, what are the vectors of climate chaos?
Forms of Living
Given the mounting body of evidence that current patterns of economic growth are incompatible with international climate pledges, why is more action not being taken to avert disaster? Why is global humanity not reaching for the emergency brake? Slow Down attributes social passivity in the overdeveloped Global North to what Saito refers to as the ‘imperial mode of living’. The imperial mode of living refers to an ensemble of uneven structural relations, whereby the lifestyles modeled and advertised as desirable in the Global North are sustained through both the extraction of resources – natural and human – from the Global South and a countervailing externalization and outsourcing of the costs of these lifestyles back to the nations of the Global South. In other words, the everyday habits, rituals, and expectations of citizens in the North are enabled and maintained through the ‘sacrifice’ of workers in the South, whose misery is rendered invisible.
What distinguishes the present era, however, is that having expanded across the entire planet, there are no longer any outsides through which capital can displace the costs of the imperial mode of living. This sense of a material and ecological limit informs Saito’s particular understanding of the Anthropocene, which can be said to correspond to a period in which the traces, residues, and dusting of human economic activity can now be detected in every part of nature – including in our own bodies, teeming as they are with microplastics. Human activity, Saito bluntly states, has ‘changed the nature of the earth in ways that are fundamental and irrevocable’. The costs of the lifestyles enjoyed by the global one percent not only no longer disappear but they are becoming stubbornly visible: as increasingly extreme weather events, ocean acidification, and food insecurity.
Now that the ecological burdens of the world’s wealthiest – which include ordinary citizens in the North – can no longer be passed on, humanity has entered a moment of historical bifurcation and divergence, one where multiple futures have opened up. Or, that is in part the gambit of Slow Down, which sets outs to shock back into vivid existence the benumbed imaginaries of those living in the global North.
For Saito, political action is blocked by the consumerist oriented trends that fashion, shape, and propel the rhythms of everyday life in the imperial cores of the world-system. Consumerism has replaced religion as the leading opiate of the people, as the pacifying form of consolation which compensates and makes bearable rapidly deteriorating social, material, and psychic conditions. Yet perhaps the most potent opiate of them all is ethical consumption, which in Saito’s view acquires the form of a catholic indulgence, assuaging our troubled consciences about the environmental impacts of our lives. Even socially progressive subjects, then, are affectively and materially attached to practices and behaviours that are actively foreclosing the very future those subjects are striving towards. But it is also for this reason that Saito, like Marx before him, leaves the effervescent sphere of circulation, with its forms of living, to enter the hidden abode of production and the material base which structures and conditions those forms of life in the first place.
False Hopes
The emphasis on relations of production distinguishes Saito’s work from other more liberally minded ecological thinkers, who typically do not go beyond consumerism and consumer choice. Without addressing the underlying economic relations which give these objects, services, and desires form, such thinkers can at best advocate (at worst moralize) for changes to personal consumption habits: buy local, stop flying, wash cold. At a macro-level, Saito finds an equivalent type of indulgence in the shape of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), an opiate avidly consumed by concerned politicians and corporations. To be clear, it is not that Saito is opposed to modifying individual habits or state-led infrastructural projects. Rather, the issue is that such initiatives fail to address the principle driver of climate meltdown: capital’s pursuit of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Such measures encourage us to adapt to a world on fire. Instead of breaking with the current trajectory, they simulate warm feelings of change, whilst all the while the train hurtles toward the abyss.
To put this in terms somewhat alien to Slow Down’s conceptual vocabulary of fetishism, indulgences, and opiates, much of the mainstream environmental movement – in both its consumer activist and statist modalities – is enmeshed within a relation akin to cruel optimism. As Lauren Berlant explains, ‘a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing […] when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’. Whilst placing optimism and sentiments around climate politics in the same sentence feels like a misnomer, Berlant’s notion of an attachment that thwarts the desired objective could be said to characterize projects which hope to extend the present forms of life into the future. Whether it is reducing personal carbon footprints or subsidizing green technology, such attachments exist in a relation of cruelty if they leave the regime of capital undisturbed, if they do not contravene the self-reproduction of the value-form.
Cruel optimism might better describe the versions of green growth formulated by intellectual and political figures on the radical edges of social democracy. Here the fallout of climate instability can be mitigated by a massive mobilization of public spending on emergent carbon neutral, or negative, technologies and renewable energy sources. Green Keynesianism will not only ameliorate the effects of climate change, its generational transformation of the infrastructure of everyday life will create a surfeit of jobs, securing buy-in from the working classes of the capitalist heartlands whilst also meaningfully leveling up the lives of the planetary proletariat. In other words, as the New Deal rebuilt an egalitarian society out of the Great Depression in the United States, the Green New Deal for the planet will usher in an era of redistributive prosperity, one which promises to decouple economic growth from its environmental costs. In this scenario, the ambient lives, pleasures, and frivolities of the imperial mode of living are retained, but their enabling structures are decolonized and privileges extended to all humanity.
Saito considers Green Keynesianism a dangerous illusion, one which simultaneously disavows that critical planetary boundaries have been crossed and which accepts a certain degree of warming as inevitable. Slow Down enumerates several challenges to enacting a green transition within the framework of capital accumulation. There is the ‘growth trap’, in which as the range of economic activities grows, so to does the number of resources, inexorably increasing carbon dioxide emissions. There is the ‘productivity trap’, whereby capitalist economies need to open up new growth sectors in order to absorb workers who have been laid off due to increasing productivity. Then there’s the troubling ‘Jevon’s paradox’, which demonstrates that with improved efficiencies, the price of goods necessarily decreases spurring increased consumption as formerly luxury commodities are democratized. Alternatively, reliant on metals such as lithium and cobalt, the very hardware central to the green transition can only be incorporated through novel modes of ecological imperialism. Finally, there’s the techno-optimist wager, where faith is entrusted to the capacities of as yet undeveloped technologies to reverse engineer society out of climate calamity. As with forms of psychiatry, green growth is intended to help humanity adapt to its new existence on an overheated planet. What is abandoned is the possibility of preventing catastrophe in the first place.
Marxicology
The Marx that Slow Down hopes to reawaken is a theorist and philosopher of the commonwealth or commons. A thinker passionately committed to ecology and equality, whose economic vision is one of degrowth and whose preferred political form is the commune. This version of Marx is somewhat at odds with the ideologically motivated caricature prevalent in the west, which identifies his work with the bureaucratic communism of the Soviet Union and its unholy combination of nationalized state-owned industries and ecocide. For Saito, communism is the ‘negation of the negation’. If capitalism is the initial negation which separates workers from the means of existence and encloses the natural, social, and cultural world through private property, then communism is the abolition of these zones of exclusion. The communist horizon, however, is incompatible with the vertical hierarchies of power entrenched within the state form and can only be actualized by a free association of producers, collaboratively organized along horizontal lines.
To support this argument, Saito has to first rescue Marx from a certain conception of Marxism. In practice this means estranging Marx from ‘productivism’, on the one hand, and ‘eurocentrism’ on the other. Productivism, in this account, simply means the belief that the material conditions for socialism are prepared by increases in the productive capacity of the economy and improvements in productivity. Productivism is animated by a modernist faith in the liberating powers of technological development and industrialization, whose accelerating rhythms and dynamism will burst the fetters of capitalist social relations apart. Eurocentrism, in turn, identifies the industrially developed countries of Northern Europe as the standard to which all other nations should aspire, whose own social forms are viewed as backwards or primitive as a consequence. Taken together, productivism and eurocentrism inspire a unilinear philosophy of historical progress in which the only road – or should it be track? – to socialism, runs through the industrialized capitalist societies of nineteenth-century Europe.
Saito is one of a number of scholars who find in Marx’s late texts an articulation of communism which radically alters our understanding of revolutionary possibilities. On the one hand, Slow Down draws attention to a profound shift in tone in Marx’s writing, which pivots from admiration for the explosive Promethean energies of industrialization to an anxious concern for the exhaustion of the natural world. Labor continues to mediate the relationship between collective humanity and nature; however, the accelerated pace of capitalist production is now presented as being fundamentally out of joint with the reproduction cycles of the natural world. The drive to continually increase productivity has opened up a ‘metabolic rift’, whose cascading consequences are undermining the fragile natural order which sustains life. Influenced by nineteenth-century ecological writers, Marx, Saito argues, no longer anticipated communism as unleashing productive capacities, but rather in the form of a steady-state economy, which harmonizes human activity with the cadences of the environment.
At the same time as ecological sustainability comes to displace increased productivity as the driver of history in Marx’s thought, his attention is also captured by forms of organizing social life that existed beyond Europe. Of particular interest was the commune in its many particular manifestations. In contrast to the political form of the state, which secures its power through hierarchies and alienation, the political form of the commune is based on the radical equality of all. The late Marx concedes that the commune itself could act as a transistor for communism without societies first having to pass through the stage of capitalist modernization. As Saito observes, this enacts a rupture with Eurocentrism and opens onto a multi-linear conception of history
Yet for Saito, to stop here is to miss the transformation or internal revolution within Marx’s conception of communism. The theoretical significance of the late texts lies in precisely their bringing into association ecological sustainability, on the one hand, and an egalitarian commitment to collective ownership, on the other. A nonlinear philosophy of history thus breaks with both Eurocentric versions of historical progress and with a vision of the economy as simply producing more stuff. The commune form not only democratizes political life but also promises to transform the very material basis of everyday life. In doing so, the emergency brake might finally be pulled.
Another way of illustrating this movement of ideas is by re-reading Marx’s canonical texts as a series of epistemological breaks. With its poetics of technological rapture, The Communist Manifesto shares in the productivist belief that human freedom is founded on the domination and mastery of nature. In Capital, Marx preserves an attachment to the development of the productive capacities of the economy, but supplements this trajectory with a new awareness of the ecological damage of unchecked industrialization. For example, there is a new appreciation of how chemical fertilizers contribute to despoiling soil fertility. Finally, in the late texts, Marx abandons the goal of balancing continued growth in commodity production with ecologically informed practices, and instead formulates a political vision driven by sustainability and equality. It this pairing which informs Saito’s project of degrowth communism.
For those of an uncharitable disposition, it might be felt that there is somewhat of an irony at work here, as this story from youth to maturity, or ignorance to enlightenment, resembles the very type of unilinear and progressive history that Slow Down ostensible sets out to critique. But it is also Saito’s journey too, whose position has moved from eco-socialism to degrowth communism: to each their own personal Marx.
Before elaborating the contours of degrowth communism, Saito dismantles another political current which seeks to bring Marx up to speed with the twenty-first century: left accelerationism. Here the object of critique is the already quaint notion of ‘fully automated luxury communism’, a project given its loudest expression by Aaron Bastani. Like socialist green growthers, the left accelerationists wager that technologies will be invented that will not only enable the de-carbonization of social life but which will also shatter the artificial scarcity imposed by capital, establishing an era of communal luxury for all. To implement these measures, it is simply a case of building a populist electoral coalition and then enacting reforms through parliament. Skipping over the techno-optimism that electrifies ‘FALC’, its fantasies of the future seem overly reliant on, and libidinally invested in, the present. In other words, the futures these thinkers hallucinate seem recycled from an imaginary stuck in the twentieth-century, a kind of derivative 1950s style suburban science fiction.
Ultimately, fully automated luxury communism is unable to dis-embed itself from a consumerist disposition. Saito’s materialist explanation attributes this dis-empowering loss of imagination to the subsumption of everyday life by capital. Capitalism not only divorces workers from the land and channels social interaction through the exchange of commodities but it also fundamentally re-organizes the production process itself. Dispossession is both material but also intellectual as workers’ are expropriated from know how or savoir-faire. A classic example of this would be the move from the skilled artisan to the mass factory worker, which consists of the fragmentation and deskilling of labor. (The fate of language-based workers might offer a contemporary version, as the individual creator of texts is transformed into the appendage of large language models). There is thus a disarticulation of conception and execution, in which proletarianization manifests itself within our depleted cognitive, communicational, and intellectual faculties. Removed from knowledge, the turn to technologies that ‘lock in’, as opposed to ‘open up’, replaces collaborative exchanges with service users, who only know how to consume. Robbed of conception, we can only engage with the world in the style of the consumer, finding contentment in the products on sale, incapable of imagining – let alone making – the world differently.
Degrowth Communism
But if the imperial mode of living secures consent through an overstimulation of the appetites, does this make degrowth communism analogous to detoxing, to an ascetic cult of abstinence and self-restraint? For its critics, the idea and mythology around degrowth can only appeal to the fashionably modish, to hipster lefties, to Parisian bobos. Whilst Saito acknowledges any effort to achieve degrowth will necessarily involve some form of self-sacrifice on the part of citizens in the overdeveloped North, he is also adamant that we need to radically reconfigure our perceptions and ideas of what constitutes abundance. Indeed, Slow Down interrupts the myth of growth tied to metrics like GDP by arguing that capitalism itself is the strongest enforcer of austerity. Capitalist social relations produce and reproduce conditions of scarcity and it is only degrowth communism that can establish a realm of freedom.
Capitalism, then, produces both absolute and relative scarcity. One quotidian illustration of this situation would be the value of properties in major cities, which are bought and sold as speculative assets rather than meeting the human need for shelter. Through processes of dispossession and enclosure, capitalism separates populations from the commons, the resources of which are, in turn, transformed into commodities. Resources that where once held in common are now privatized and access to the materials necessary for life are made conditional on the ability to pay. Relative scarcity, on the other hand, is consolidated through techniques such as advertising, branding, and marketing, perceptual strategies which aim to differentiate and distinguish commodities and services. In order to maintain the status and prestige of certain luxury goods and experiences, their numbers must be artificially restricted – with instances of fashion houses engaging in the destruction of overstock, rather than let the label depreciate through contact with plebian encounters.
There is an opposition here between ‘private riches’ and ‘public wealth’. For the owners of resources, land, and intellectual property, sustained enrichment is achieved by limiting access, by dividing people into those who can afford to pay for the good or service and those who cannot. (Which also contributes to the desirability of the commodity, of the feeling of exclusiveness I experience). Saito proposes rewriting this opposition between riches and wealth in terms of the difference between use and exchange value. Use value ‘indicates the quality in something […] that satisfies a human need’, whereas exchange value us measured by money and imposes a form of containment. The ‘tragedy of the commodity’ under capitalism is that use value is sacrificed and simply becomes a means to increasing exchange value, regardless of whether human needs are satisfied in the process.
Another way of approaching the scarcity that is established and compounded ever more intensely under capitalism, is through the question of time. In a world saturated with mass-produced goods and ever more commodified services, we are increasingly time-poor. Under the dominion of the commodity form, we work longer hours for less pay, commute further because rents are unaffordable, acquiesce to worse employment conditions as the social democratic settlement is unpicked in the name of enterprise. Far from the expansion of free time we are constantly promised, the contemporary capitalist subject is pressed for time. Here is Saito’s portrait of the worker of today:
Compared to our current lifestyles of cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work non-stop for hours and hours every day […] we would no longer have to shop online or drink ourselves into oblivion just to rid ourselves of the stress of simply surviving.
Breaking with the imperative to continually improve productivity and increase outputs, degrowth would also allow citizens to find time again, to work on passion projects, to socialise with friends, to experiment with different hobbies and practices.
Prioritising human needs, degrowth communism promises to actualise the material conditions that finally enable human freedom. Abundance would no longer be simply measured and quantified by economic metrics but by the qualitative and existential experience of our finite time together. Degrowth communism would entail democratically deciding the production process to ensure needs are met, shortening working hours, abolishing the uniform division of labor, and privileging essential work – such as care and education, over bullshit jobs and the enshittification of everyday encounters and interactions. With such measures in place, subjects will both have more time for themselves but their relationship between their bodies and minds and their environment will also be repaired, healing the metabolic rift that otherwise threatens to consume life on the planet.
As someone who is sympathetic to politics from below and utopian experimentation with different forms of life, there is much I admire about Slow Down. Whether you need the late Marx is justify the persuasiveness of degrowth remains moot – let the scholars haggle over scripture – but the need to enact a powerful break with the presents seems as compelling as ever. One slight misgiving I have, is that running through the text there seems to be an implicit assumption that degrowth is the only rational response to climate breakdown and that activists and intellectual simply need to present the case. Such a position perhaps overlooks the extent to which our desires and beliefs are channeled in certain directions through myths, which script and condition our attitudes, behaviours and comportments, what we imagine to be possible. To get everyone moving in the direction towards the emergency break, the degrowth left needs not just empirical, fact driven arguments, but an imaginary of who we should be.
Thomas Travers 