‘The Red and the Green’

The economist and statistician E.F. Schumacher did not know what, exactly, would cause “society’s collapse.” But, he said, “I do know that a society which seeks fulfillment only in mindless material expansion does not fit into this world for long. There simply is no place for infinite growth on a finite planet.” He delivered that grim assertion in 1974, as the postwar economic boom was giving way to stagnation. A generation of heterodox economic thinkers—including Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Dennis Meadows, and others in the informal circle known as the Club of Rome—were coming to believe that economies could not grow forever and that the goal, perhaps, should be “degrowth.”

Fifty years and around $130 trillion in global GDP growth later, intellectuals in Europe, North America, and Japan are again proposing that societies abandon economic growth as their primary aim. The crisis this time is climate change. In a March 2023 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that, within several decades, human-caused planetary heating is likely to overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, beyond which lies deadlier heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes, plummeting crop and fishery yields, and cascading ecosystem collapses that will turn forests into deserts. Avoiding that fate, according to the IPCC, “would require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”

This call to action has provoked only a tentative response from leading emitters. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most ambitious climate policy in US history, offered incentives for renewable energy development, electric vehicles, and home electrification, as well as “green protectionist” trade rules designed to keep clean tech manufacturing on American shores—measures that fell short of sweeping social change even before Trump sought to roll them back. For the thinkers arrayed behind the banner of “degrowth,” the climate crisis demands a much more radical response: nothing less than shrinking the global economy to cut emissions and bring overall resource use in line with Earth’s limits.

Among the most prominent of those thinkers is the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito. In 2020 Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene, a shinsho, or small paperback, often designed to introduce readers to a subject. Today’s ecological crises are driven by economic growth, he wrote, and growth is driven by the compulsion to profit, capitalism’s motivating force: “It’s capitalism—nothing more, nothing less—that lies at the root of climate change and the other global environmental crises that come with it.” Saito considers several proposals to rein in capitalism—taxing wealth, tightening environmental rules, nationalizing certain industries—but ultimately finds them wanting. He instead proposes “degrowth communism,” a system of common ownership—to be managed by local assemblies and worker cooperatives—in which every person has a responsibility to care for the Earth and a right to enjoy its productive capacity. For Saito, treating the Earth as a “commons” means using its resources more prudently and distributing them more equally.

The book—translated into English last year as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto—was a breakout success in Japan, selling around 400,000 copies in 2020. Academic celebrity followed. For months the face of Saito, a thirty-seven-year-old professor at the University of Tokyo, peered at Tokyo straphangers from advertisements promoting his televised lecture series on Capital.

The book’s popularity in Japan is surprising but not inexplicable. Saito suggests in Slow Down that many readers there might have been primed to look askance at their economic system after witnessing the inequalities exposed by the pandemic and getting some time off from the country’s notoriously punishing work culture. Some of them would also remember the collapse of the asset price bubble in the early 1990s, after which Japan descended into a period of economic stagnation known as the “lost decades.” Part of the government’s response was to invest in public services, including parental leave, childcare, and elder care. For anyone who weathered that recession reasonably well, degrowth might not seem like such a radical idea.¹

Outside Japan, frustration with climate inaction has created an opening for proposals like degrowth. Some of the people most concerned about the fate of the planet, Saito said in an interview this past February, “do not find convincing solutions” in existing policy proposals, “so they’re reaching for more radical ideas.” Slow Down has been translated into fourteen languages and is now a best seller in Germany. In the US, Publishers Weekly named Slow Down one of the best nonfiction books of 2024. Saito’s proposals may seem infeasible, but they are clearly influential. That is reason enough to take them seriously.

Capital is privately held wealth that grows over time. If it stops growing, its value decreases. (This is partly due to what Marx called the “coercive law” of competition, which compels owners to post profits or else get squeezed out by rivals.) The imperative to grow or die obliges capitalists to turn more and more of nature into lands for rent, raw materials for production, and sinks for waste. If they overexploit in one place—exhausting soil fertility, polluting the water, or pushing workers to strike—they will seek new resource frontiers, markets, and labor pools elsewhere. The ultimate goal? “Accumulate, accumulate!” Marx writes. “That is Moses and the prophets!”

For decades debates over the social and ecological merits of capitalism have therefore turned in part on the costs and benefits of growth. In his classic 1974 study In Defence of Economic Growth—written as a response to critics like Schumacher—Wilfred Beckerman portrayed rising GDP as a thin black line between freedom and “soul-destroying toil.” Growth, he argued, creates wealth and forestalls class conflict; as long as the pie keeps growing, no one is likely to complain about their slice. More recently, the Oxford economist Max Roser, founder of the open-source “Our World in Data” project, has correlated growth—defined as “an increase in the production of goods and services”—with declining poverty rates in industrialized countries over the last two hundred years. But even if existing wealth were distributed more equally, Roser argues, substantially reducing the penury that still plagues much of the world would require the global economy to grow at least five times over.

So while Roser does not doubt growth’s social virtues, the real question, he thinks, is about the relationship between growth and the health of the planet. If “we want to achieve a future in which global poverty is substantially lower than today and in which humanity has a smaller negative impact on the environment,” he writes, we would need “to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts.” Is that possible?

Some economists believe it is. Researchers such as the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Robert Pollin and the World Bank’s Stéphane Hallegatte have argued that as economies gain access to renewable fuels and more efficient production techniques, they can grow while still reducing carbon output. This “green growth” thesis hinges on the idea that states can achieve an “absolute decoupling” of growth and CO2 emissions by improving efficiency and substituting renewables for fossil fuels in sectors like transportation, manufacturing, and electricity generation.

There is some evidence for this view: data from eighteen OECD countries suggest that, after an initial period of industrialization, CO2 emissions do not rise with GDP. Even if you count certain externalized emissions toward a nation’s total—for instance, emissions associated with their imported goods—some developed nations, such as Denmark and the UK, seem to have managed to decouple GDP and CO2 (although per capita emissions in these countries remain high). Prominent defenders of the green growth thesis—some of them associated with the Breakthrough Institute, an “ecomodernist” research center in Berkeley—argue that there is no reason every nation should not be able to achieve similar results.

But Saito believes it is a perilous delusion to imagine that capitalist growth can be decoupled from environmental degradation in general and CO2 emissions in particular. One reason is that the overall scale of production grows even as particular processes become more efficient. “Companies will always find a way to reinvest any surplus capital they produce,” he writes, “and there’s no guarantee this investment will be green.” Here he echoes an observation Marx made at the height of the Industrial Revolution: the laws of competition require firms to reinvest productivity gains back into the process of production itself. If a company churning out one hundred smartphones an hour buys a machine that allows it to make one hundred phones in half an hour, it will attempt to double production. These phones must find buyers, but demand can usually be manufactured, and when it cannot be, investors move on to more profitable ventures. In the aggregate, capitalist production requires more resources the more efficient it becomes.

Indeed several studies show that compound growth—modern economies tend to double every few decades—remains closely linked to an increase in land and materials used, as well as CO2 expelled.² And even if absolute decoupling is possible in theory, Saito argues, it is unlikely to happen fast enough to cut emissions to zero by 2050. There is still lots of capital invested in fossil fuels, and rich countries that have decoupled GDP from CO2 emissions have done so partly by off-shoring the dirty parts of their economies to the Global South.

In any case, emissions are not the whole story. Even if solar and wind replaced fossil fuels everywhere tomorrow, Saito argues, achieving compound growth would still require turning an increasing portion of the Earth’s finite materials into commodities, “shifting” capitalism’s ecological costs to different regions, industries, and generations. Building enough wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries to power a growing global economy with net-zero emissions would, for instance, require quadrupling cobalt production over twenty years. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which contains 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, would bear the ecological costs of this growth. Already water pollution from mining has decimated crop yields and been linked to high rates of miscarriage in the DRC’s mining communities—trends that show little sign of reversing.

Other inequalities would persist as well. A study published in Nature Communications last year suggests that workers in the Global South “contribute 90 percent of the labor that powers the world economy” but “receive only 21 percent of global income,” resulting in the net transfer of $19.2 trillion worth of labor time from South to North in 2021 alone.³ Within the US, wealth inequality increased dramatically from 1980 to 2021 even as per capita GDP multiplied sixfold; by 2021 the top 1 percent of Americans owned 31 percent of the country’s wealth, while wages for all but the highest earners have remained basically flat. For most people, Saito argues, growth “ceaselessly produces scarcity.” Degrowth, in his vision, would involve an aggressive redistribution in the other direction: turning all property over to common ownership, to be managed by workers’ cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and local people’s assemblies.

This has, naturally, been a controversial proposal—and not only among economists committed to reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. Some of Saito’s fellow critics of capitalism, too, have balked at the suggestion that we need to abandon growth as such: a postcapitalist society, they insist, could and should use its “productive forces” to grow in a more egalitarian and ecologically sustainable fashion.

It is hard, of course, to imagine any path to a postcapitalist society, degrowth or otherwise, that would not involve violent upheaval. Capitalism is deeply entrenched and widely supported, and its beneficiaries will hardly give up without a fight. Arguing about what should lie on the other side might therefore seem premature—but it is nonetheless worth examining how other scholars have received Saito’s proposal. There is value to debating what kind of world we ought to live in; the paralyzing realism of contemporary politics would have us dismiss even modest proposals for social reform as infeasible. And it is impossible to understand Saito’s work without considering the intellectual tradition from which it comes—which means clarifying its relationship to Marxism.

Saito’s synthesis of Marxism and degrowth might seem intuitive, since they both critique capitalism. But the two theories have historically clashed; as Saito puts it, there has been “a long-standing antagonism between the Red and the Green.” Some proponents of degrowth take the Soviet Union’s environmental record as proof that Marxism abets ecocide. For others the orthodox Marxist theory of history—which sees capitalism as a necessary step on the path to communism—affirms ecological destruction in the present as a condition of collective abundance in the future. Readers of The Communist Manifesto will find Marx marveling at “the Subjection of Nature’s forces to man” achieved by British industry; elsewhere he describes British colonialism as “the unconscious tool of history,” “regenerating” stagnant Asian societies. For critics, such views commit Marxism to an ecologically ruinous “Prometheanism” that aspires to dominate the nonhuman world, as well as a Eurocentric “productivism” that equates human progress with industrial development.

Plenty of Marxists are no less suspicious of degrowth theories, which the geographer Matthew T. Huber has panned as “mish-mash ecologism.” Critics like Huber see degrowth as a Luddite fantasy, motivated by middle-class consumer guilt, that rejects modern technology without thinking seriously about how to feed the four billion people who lack independent means of subsistence, much less guarantee them sufficient resources to live well. Degrowth for these thinkers is at worst a recipe for painful contraction and at best what one of its founders, the French economist Serge Latouche, reportedly called a “slogan in search of a program.”

Huber has emerged as one of degrowth’s most acerbic critics. Contra Saito’s calls to “slow down,” his Climate Change as Class War proposes bringing back a more audacious, class-focused, and technophilic vision of socialism. For Huber the technologies that power capitalist growth contain the potential both to produce abundance without hard labor and to forestall planetary disaster, but only if an organized working class can seize control of them and other means of production: land, factories, intellectual property. “The goal of all socialists and working-class movements should not be to return to a pre-industrial agrarian communalism,” Huber writes, “but rather to take social control over what are already socialized production systems.”

This vision is also ecologically sustainable, Huber argues, because socialism permits more deliberate, long-term, and socially oriented planning than is possible in an economy dominated by private interests. Socialist planners need not “degrow” to mitigate ecological crisis. They could instead use the most efficient modern production techniques developed under capitalism to produce more things people need and fewer things they don’t, while investing in large-scale climate solutions that capital has not found especially profitable, including “nuclear fission, green hydrogen, scaled geothermal and carbon removal.”

Putting it somewhat glibly, Huber advocates “restructuring industrial systems to keep the labor saving aspects but discard the ecologically destructive aspects” and distributing the products fairly. He shares Saito’s commitment to economic democracy: the essential condition for averting planetary catastrophe is taking decisions out of the hands of mercenary capitalists. Huber, however, sees ecological crisis as a consequence neither of growth nor of capitalist technology but of how and for whom the modern economy’s productive powers have been put to work. Taking that power out of the hands of private owners will ultimately require a social revolution led by workers, Huber argues, although he shares with most American Marxists a sober sense that such a revolution is unlikely in the near term. In the short run, he advocates measures to augment workers’ power: Green New Deal–type programs to alleviate their health care, housing, and energy costs, as well as labor organizing to restore the union movement to fighting strength.

Huber’s commitment to labor is perhaps what most distinguishes his program from Saito’s. For Huber, the working class—broadly defined as everyone who depends on wages for survival—is the only social force capable of overcoming capitalism. And most workers want and deserve more rather than less: degrowth’s “politics of sufficiency…has little capacity to speak to a majoritarian working class struggling for the basics of existence.”

Saito never cites Huber in his most recent book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, but he spends the bulk of it making a case against any Marxism that treats growth as the basis for collective prosperity. Drawing on the earlier work of the Japanese Marxist Sadao Ohno, among others, he warns against acting as if “the productive forces developed under capitalism” are “neutral forces that can be taken over by the proletariat and utilized for establishing a socialist society.” As anyone who has read about concentrated animal feeding operations or Amazon warehouses knows, capitalism hardly organizes production in neutral ways: the profit imperative encourages the development of “productive forces” that cannot necessarily satisfy social needs in an ecologically rational fashion. For instance, using colossal amounts of insecticides to produce ever-increasing quantities of genetically identical bananas may be good business, but today’s banana plantations could not simply be seized by workers and made to serve an ecologically conscious socialism. What’s needed is a totally different way of producing bananas—and probably far fewer of them.

What did Marx himself have to say on the subject? In The Communist Manifesto he and Engels sound not unlike Huber when they argue that the task—and perhaps the fate—of the revolutionary working class is to release capitalism’s productive forces from the “fetters” of private property relations and enable their full, humane potential. This strikes Saito as a naive and “hopelessly outdated” theory of social development, but he also wants to show that it is not what Marx ultimately believed. By the end of his life, Saito argues, Marx had realized “that the availability of natural wealth is inevitably limited” and come to understand communism as a matter of collectively managing finite resources.

Marx recognized capitalism’s tendency to cannibalize itself early in his career, Saito observes. “Capitalist production,” Marx wrote in volume 1 of Capital, “only develops…by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth: the soil and the worker.” Marx increasingly came to see such “robbery” of society’s sustaining conditions as intrinsic to capitalist production. Starting in the 1860s he studied precapitalist societies in Germany and Russia, as well as the work of natural scientists who were observing declines in soil productivity caused by concentrated farming to feed booming factory towns. Saito points to Marx’s notes on overgrazing in Ireland, collected in the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, as an example: “It will not be long before the Irish farmer experiences that this system will end in the total exhaustion of the land.”

During the same period, Saito suggests, Marx revised his view of premodern agrarian communes. He no longer saw them as feudal remnants that would have to be replaced, first by bourgeois private property and then by a communist state, but as models of healthy relations between people and nature. In his late notebooks and in draft letters to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, Marx suggested that communism might look not like capitalist technology plus a dictatorship of the proletariat but like a scaled-up version of the traditional Russian mir, which seemed capable of supporting a sustainable relationship between people and their environments.

“If the revolution…concentrates all its forces to ensure the unfettered rise of the rural commune, the latter will soon develop as a regenerating element of Russian society and an element of superiority over the countries enslaved by the capitalist regime,” he wrote. This would mean advancing toward what, in the first draft of an 1881 letter to Zasulich, Marx called a “higher form of an ‘archaic type’ of collective ownership and production.” For Saito, all this makes Marx, in effect, a degrowth communist.

Degrowth hardly stands or falls on Marx’s proleptic endorsement, but returning to Marx gives Saito a chance to underscore perhaps his most important claim: It is possible to devise systems of small-scale, collective resource management that expand social wealth and personal freedom while lessening our demands on the earth. This will be a difficult position for even the most sympathetic readers to fully endorse. Our world is so urbanized, globalized, and developed—the vast majority of people in the US and Japan live in cities and depend on transoceanic supply chains for basic necessities—that it is difficult to picture the transformations Saito proposes without some apocalyptic event.

Indeed, Slow Down’s principal weakness, shared with many degrowth proposals, is that it spends too little time spelling out what such a radically different system would look like, how it would work, and what it would take to move from today’s deeply entrenched global capitalism to something like its opposite. Where he does offer specifics, Saito suggests a range of more modest reforms: policies to rein in polluting industries, such as banning short-haul flights, as France has done, and to decommodify basic goods, such as making low-emission public transit free for all residents, as Boston has proposed as part of its municipal Green New Deal. He praises workers’ coops in Spain’s Basque region and Jackson, Mississippi, and points to La Via Campesina—a global network of peasant movements defending locally controlled, nonindustrial agriculture—as evidence that treating farmland as a “commons” is not only ecologically sustainable but feasible.

Saito’s poster child, though, is Barcelona’s “solidarity economy.” Cooperatively owned businesses from restaurants to tech companies employ 8 percent of Barcelona’s residents, and dozens of collectively owned enterprises, credit unions, and cooperative schools allow people to share resources and labor. The idea is to unlink the provision of goods and services from profit: for instance, Barcelona’s housing coops guarantee members a “use right” to their homes that they can bequeath but not sell, preventing the speculation that plagues housing markets.

Partly due to the political strength of these cooperatives, residents have pushed the city to “decarbonize and decommodify” a range of municipal services, including by establishing a public energy company that provides renewable energy to residents as a “basic right.” Expanded public services have come with restrictions on private property: to ease its tourism-fueled housing crisis, Barcelona will prohibit Airbnb starting in 2028, and at the national level Spain’s socialist government recently levied an unprecedented wealth tax on the superrich.

Scaling up the Barcelona model would require redistribution on a global scale as well as a dramatic reduction in economic output. This would demand abstemiousness from the global middle classes. They may need to sacrifice such luxuries as frequent air travel, next-day delivery, out-of-season produce, and F-150s, as well as shoulder some of the work of building houses, growing food, and caring for the elderly. Like almost all degrowth proponents, Saito insists that such sacrifices would, under conditions of greater social equality, open more avenues for self-fulfillment. The hollow pleasures of private consumption would be traded for greater “public affluence” in the form of mass transit, efficient urban neighborhoods, and common parks, theaters, and gyms.

Here Saito envisions a profound cultural shift. Degrowth, he suggests, would require redefining what it means to live well—valuing sufficiency, generosity, and care over quantity, convenience, and speed. “The only way to realize happiness for all in a just and sustainable way is through the exercise of voluntary ‘self-limitation,’” he writes. Only such sacrifice “will allow the realm of freedom to expand.”

Certainly some aspects of the present seem conducive to this kind of collective slowing down—not least the mounting recognition that fossil fuel combustion cannot continue if we wish to live on a habitable planet. As Saito points out, in cities like Barcelona many people have already managed to achieve more communal, ecologically rational ways of life. But the political barriers to achieving anything like degrowth communism on a global scale are formidable, to say the least—and Saito’s proposal for social transformation would be more persuasive if he explained what forces could challenge a political and economic system defended by some of the richest people in the history of the world.

In Slow Down, Saito encourages readers to start small: launch “a workers’ co-op, a school strike, an organic farm—it doesn’t matter the form it takes.” These all seem like worthwhile projects that might improve the lives of participants and build support for more sweeping reforms. But for now degrowth communism is a destination without a map. You won’t leave Saito’s books with a clear sense of how to revolutionize an alienating and destructive society. What he offers instead is a challenge. “We cannot solve a problem triggered by capitalism while still preserving capitalism,” he writes. Readers who buy this claim will have to decide what to do with it.