It is not common for a work of Marxist economics to find a wide audience. Yet this is what happened in 2020, when the Japanese scholar Kohei Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene, which sold over a half a million copies in his home country. The book’s unexpected success can in part be attributed to timing. As developed nations around the world struggled to revive their economies in the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—in 2019, Japan’s GDP rose by less than 1%—Saito suggested that low economic growth was in fact welcome.
Going further, he argued that developed nations should forever give up the quest of growth, which was no longer environmentally sustainable. Instead, he urged them to adopt “degrowth communism”—an ideology based on reducing consumption and production and equitably distributing resources.
“Since capitalism is the ultimate cause of climate breakdown,” he wrote, “it is necessary to transition to a steady-state economy.”
“Since capitalism is the ultimate cause of climate breakdown, it is necessary to transition to a steady-state economy.”
Saito is perhaps the most prominent of a cohort of international economists advocating for economic degrowth—a once-fringe position that is gaining widespread attention as the climate crisis accelerates. (Others include Giorgios Kallis, Vaclav Simil, and Tim Jackson.) Still seen as heretical within the discipline of mainstream economics, their ideas have found resonance within radical social movements like Extinction Rebellion in the United Kingdom and the Sunrise Movement in the United States, which directly target, through civil disobedience, banks, governments, and other institutions that are funding fossil fuel extraction.
During her address to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) in 2018, youth climate activist Greta Thunberg denounced “the fairy tales of economic growth” spun by the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Saito is inspired by these activists and eager to support them, “to show why it is necessary to criticize capitalism and why socialism can be a more solid foundation for their movements too.”
Saito’s journey to “degrowth communism” was not straightforward. Born in 1987 in Japan, he first encountered Karl Marx as an undergraduate at the University of Tokyo—a “shocking” discovery that turned him from a right-wing libertarian into a critic of capitalism.
As a graduate student in Germany, he was drawn to Marx’s lesser-known writings, in particular the late notebooks, which grapple with geology, chemistry, and other natural sciences. In them, Saito discovered an incipient ecological critique.
“The notebooks display just how seriously and laboriously Marx studied the rich field of nineteenth-century ecological theory and integrated new insights into his own dissection of capitalist society,” Saito wrote in his first book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017). “In this process, Marx came to regard ecological crises as the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production.”
Presenting Marx as an environmentalist avant la lettre was a bold move, not least because the German philosopher has traditionally been viewed with suspicion by the environmental thinkers, who accuse him of a naïve belief in technological progress. These charges take on greater force when set against the record of most socialist nations, especially the Soviet Union, which have inflicted widespread ecological destruction in their quest for state-led development.
Saito does not shy away from this history. In Capital in the Anthropocene—published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (Astra House, 2024) and translated by Brian Bergstrom—he is at pains to distinguish his position from “old Marxist dogmas” that drove the Soviet bloc to ruin. Among the pillars of “degrowth communism” he lays out are the reduction of work hours, democratization of the production process (by giving control of firms to workers), and prioritization of care work.
“Instead of the undemocratic state socialism controlled by the state bureaucrats” he writes, “a more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable vision of a new steady-state economy proves compatible with Marx’s vision of the future society.”
As small experiments in “degrowth communism,” Saito cites the growing number of urban community gardens that are reorienting food systems in cities from Detroit to Copenhagen. Another, larger experiment came to fruition in Ecuador in 2023, when a popular referendum to stop petroleum drilling in the Yasuní National Park was upheld.
While these local initiatives are welcome, Saito sees meaningful progress towards degrowth as only possible through international cooperation, given that capitalism today is a fundamentally global system. He holds up as one model the Barcelona municipal government, which declared a climate emergency in 2020 in an effort to galvanize an international movement of cities determined to limit carbon emissions, for example through increasing public transport and limit on automobile use.
“What’s most important to note here is that the movement in Barcelona is not limited to a single city in a developed country,” Saito writes. Without “international solidarity in the fight against the dominion of capital,” he insists, we will not be able to grapple effectively with the environmental catastrophe threatening the planet.
“Instead of the undemocratic state socialism controlled by the state bureaucrats, a more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable vision of a new steady-state economy proves compatible with Marx’s vision of the future society.”
By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024