I’ve written for UnHerd about the international bestseller Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought. The book was a huge success in his home country Japan, selling over half a million copies, and has now just been published in English.
Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the planet, and the only way to pull civilisation back from the brink of extinction is for “the entire world, without exception, to become a part of a sustainable, just society”. In other words, to embrace degrowth communism — a radical reorganisation of society based on the elimination of mass production and consumption, the prioritisation of use-value (social utility) over commodity value, and the total decarbonisation of the economy.
My argument is that Saito’s theory is riddled with flaws — first and foremost its inherent Eurocentrism, or Western-centrism, i.e., the idea that every country in the world should simply conform to the worldview of Western middle-class environmentalists — but nonetheless tells us a lot about the growing desperation of young Westerners.
Thomas Fazi 