Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

By Kohei Saito

Translated by Brian Bergstrom

Astra House 2024

University of Tokyo philosophy professor Kohei Saito opens his award-winning bombshell Slow Down (from 2020, here translated into English with marvelous glassy readability by Brian Bergstrom) with a calm contention that seems unbelievable on its face: that Marxists have been misreading Capital all this time. Considering how obsessively studied the book has been since its appearance in 1867, this seems comical, but our author is undaunted: Marx’s famous book was polished and finished by Friedrich Engels, and the projected second and third volumes were left unfinished – and those volumes, representing as they do “the late Marx,” both accurately reflect the Master’s more considered reflections on capitalism and also provide a desperately-needed ideological lifeline for the 21st century. 

This misreading, readers are confidently told, has had major consequences. “It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say,” Kohei Saito hyperbolically says, “that this distortion of Marx’s thought resulted in the birth of the monster known as Stalinism and humanity’s ongoing inability to look at the present environmental crisis directly in its hideous face.” 

That hideous face is staring at the reader all throughout Slow Down, reflected in Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen’s idea of the Anthropocene, which Kohei Saito describes as “an era in which human economic activity has covered the surface of the Earth completely, leaving no part of it untouched.” Increasing numbers of industries and corporations have responded to the growing alarm over the Anthropocene by implementing things like Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESGs), and our author warns that these measures are quick-fixes that should be deeply distrusted, since they might tend to provoke a complacency that would hurt humanity in the long run. 

The problem is much bigger than quick fixes, Kohei Saito insists at every juncture of his book. He notes that once-in-a-century drastic weather events now happen every year. “This is actually only the beginning,” he writes. “The point of no return is approaching – the point at which a series of rapid changes will occur that will make it impossible to ever return to how things were.” Initially, all these passages about eco-catastrophe might seem out of place in a book so insistently, wonkishly concerned with Marxism and capitalism, but in this telling, the two things share a cause and an enemy: capitalism. In the world of Slow Down, capitalism and its neoliberal defenders are greasing the tracks of the runaway train that’s bearing down on all the rest of us. “If we insist on extending capitalism’s life, we’re dooming ourselves to a descent into barbarism brought about by the chaos of the climate crisis,” Kohei Saito writes. “This is why it’s imperative that we join in solidarity to put the brakes on capital and forge a future of degrowth communism together.” 

The brake here is what our author contends that “late” Marx was contemplating in those misunderstood later volumes, something Kohei Saito refers to as “degrowth communism,” which he views as an urgent grassroots movement against the policies promoted by neoliberalism, things like austerity measures, eroded social safety net, the rise of the gig economy, the privatization of utilities – “all things that have made the quality of our lives worse.” In place of such things, “degrowth communism” calls for an increase in “the commons” and an attack on the artificial scarcities produced by rampant capitalism. 

Kohei Saito has written perhaps the most well-mannered manifesto of the century, and although he’s very young, he’s annoyingly right about the stakes at play in the modern moment. At its heart, Slow Down makes a simple statement: if we don’t collectively shake off the mindless momentum of the capitalism that’s driving the world to superheated climate catastrophe, we’ll all die miserable deaths as a result. This isn’t a call for communism based on theoretical grounds; it’s a call for communism as humanity’s last chance to save itself.

Like every manifesto, Slow Down is as weak and thin as the wing of a butterfly. It has a measure of right on its side: corporations rule countries, and corporations care nothing about equity or even planetary survival, only profits. If those corporations and the voracious no-stoppers version of capitalism that animates them aren’t curtailed, the world will continue to burn. But there are only two things that can do the curtailing: an autocracy powerful enough to leash corporations, or a populist groundswell powerful enough to shatter them. The one is unappealing (and would only amount to swapping one set of masters for another), the other unlikely (the corporations have tanks) – leaving Kohei Saito’s insistent wisdom sitting by the side of the road, politely hoping somebody listens before it’s too late.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News