Degrowth Communism: Envisioning a World Beyond Capitalism

Join Haymarket Books and Pilsen Community Books for a talk on Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, with author Kōhei Saitō. This event will take place at Haymarket House, and will also be live-streamed on our KZbin channel.
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Unavoidable evidence of the catastrophic consequences of climate change confronts us at every turn. Record high ocean temperatures. Once-a-century storms that appear every other year. And on and on. In the face of ongoing ecological disaster, international best-selling author Kōhei Saitō asks why our society continues to prioritize corporate profits (and the rapacious expansion on which they depend), and proposes a revolutionary alternative to unfettered capitalism: degrowth communism.
In Slow Down, Saitō provocatively argues that any solutions that don’t directly confront capitalism itself-from the COP agreements to the “Green New Deal”-represent dangerous compromises that may ultimately worsen the climate emergency. Because it creates artificial scarcity and endlessly produces commodities based on their value, rather than their usefulness, our economic system itself makes it impossible to reverse climate change so long as capitalism remains in place. The biggest contributor to the problem cannot be an integral part of its solution.
Instead, Saitō advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and our system of production. By returning to a system of social ownership, degrowth communism, we can restore the abundance of things that we truly need, and can focus on those activities that are essential for human life.
What would this alternative look like? How do we end mass production and mass consumption without reducing living standards? What do we need to do to redress global inequality without accelerating the rate at which the planet burns?
For this launch event Saitō will be in conversation on all of this, and more, with Science for the People editor, and Pilsen Community Books collective member, Erik Wallenberg.
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Order a copy of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto: pilsencommunitybooks.com/item...
Speakers:
Kohei Saitō is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in philosophy from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2016. He was awarded the 2018 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, the most prestigious academic award for Marxian studies, making Saito its youngest recipient. In 2020 the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science awarded him the highly prestigious JSPS prize, awarded to the top 25 scholars (only a few in humanities and social sciences) in the entire country under the age of 45. In 2021, Slow Down received the "Best Asian Books of the Year" prize from the Asia Book Awards.
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pilsen Community Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.

[@dashboardkid21]

Event starts at 28:28

[@carpediemcotidiem]

00:02 Musical Interlude 18:58 Production for need replacing production for profit 29:48 Coming together as a community for a better future. 32:07 Degrowth communism is about integrating environmental concerns with socialism and communism. 36:41 Capitalism's exploitation and ecological impact is hidden from us by cheap goods. 39:05 Economy needs to be based on use values, not profit. 43:50 Degrowth Communism promotes equality, justice, and sustainability. 46:15 Invest in sustainable essential goods and sharing is key for a world beyond capitalism. 50:46 Redefining socialism beyond Soviet-style top-down control 53:11 Democratic socialism supplemented with vision of degrowth is essential for socialist politics 58:06 Reviving the socialist ecosocialist deoss or deoss communism back to the agenda of the left wing politics 1:00:08 Degrowth is about creating a new kind of abundance, not simply reducing consumption. 1:05:18 Marx studied natural sciences and non-western pre-capitalist societies to learn about ecological contradictions and sustainable societies 1:07:44 Questioning the use of technologies in socialism 1:12:15 Decommodification is essential for liberation from capitalism. 1:14:44 Promoting decommodification and reducing working hours for societal dynamism 1:19:40 Indigenous epistemology in Degrowth Communism 1:22:08 Connecting non-western societies to modern technology for sustainable development 1:27:04 Exploring post-capitalist imaginary 1:29:34 Empowering communities to redesign systems free of exploitation 1:34:29 Community activities drive societal change 1:36:53 Highlighting a shift towards socialist and anti-capitalist ideas 1:42:05 Shortening working hours can create new abundance and improve life. Crafted by Merlin AI.

[@dinnerwithfranklin2451]

Very interesting, thank you.

[@KEITHHAYES001]

I wish we had a transcript.

[@JasonCunliffe]

Click Description Then more Scroll down to Transcript

[@artemistheod]

Thank you! It's so refreshing to see such a covid-safe event and for the left to finally take action to resist eugenics. Just curious, are masks mandated in all of your events or did Kohei request this?

[@HaymarketBooks]

All of our indoors, in-person events have a masking policy.

[@artemistheod]

@@HaymarketBooks Bravo and thank you !

[@Aeroporc]

Kōhei Saitō is my hero.

[@obrotherwhereartliam]

I have to say with my limited knowledge of Marx, doesn't he state that state control of the means of production will require an authoritarian control, especially over the managers of production (business)? Also, communism operationalized still requires growth and resource extraction on a mass industrial scale- it's simply another economic model like imperialism or capitalism. I think Saito's most interesting argument is the idea that we should essentially halt technological innovations, and there is some good empirics to back that argument such as the Jevon's paradox. However, looking at past communist regimes, I don't perceive them as complementary to degrowth, unless his understanding of communism is an abstract centralized world order who's party members are all endowed with a vague sense of community and whose desires are curbed to the point of non-existence. What will their desires be aimed towards in this new world after the desire to change it has been quenched?

[@blahdelablah]

"doesn't he state that state control of the means of production will require an authoritarian control" That's not a requirement, in fact quite the opposite. Marx intended for the development of stateless societies. In the book "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific", written by Karl Marx's friend and political ally Frederick Engels to popularise the work of Marx, he wrote the following... "When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society - this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand." You may be wondering why you associate Marxism with state control. Marx had the idea of "dictatorship of the proletariat", a means by which, in the initial phase of a revolution, the working class of a country took control of the state. It was intended that this was a temporary phase, a means to change the balance of power in a country before the emergence of the stateless ideal that I just alluded to. The problem is, for the countries that tried to implement communism, they never moved beyond this state-focused phase, and these states then became corrupted over time. I would personally say this is a flaw in the implementation design of communism, but to be absolutely clear, this does not mean the end goals of a stateless egalitarian society are not desirable.

[@sankarchaya]

Jevon's paradox is peculiar to a capitalist mindset. Note Marx's citation of Aristotle and the statues of Daedalus, and his contrast with this and the modern capitalist treatment of efficiency. For the ancients, efficiency meant more free time. For the market society, efficiency means expansion. Though, it's still more complex than that - the main driver is competition and avarice, as the ancients made efficiency exploitative where competition with other tribes, kingdoms, and cities reared its head. but capitalism in particular mandates avarice through the priority of competition as the central economic mechanism.

[@obrotherwhereartliam]

@@sankarchaya regardless if efficiency creates more free time, Jevon's paradox is concerned with efficiency and increased energy use. If people have more free time, that's fine, it's with what they are doing that is of concern. Ancient people had more free time, more "money" and as we see with the wealthy today- increased use of energy compared to their peers. Market society expands this problem yes, but communist societies seem to have trouble addressing this issue as well.

[@obrotherwhereartliam]

@@blahdelablah yes, the implementation design is a recurrent phase in communist societies, but how many times does it need to happen for it to be shown that it may be more than a mere quirk in the "transition". Marx's stages sometimes appears to me as a teleological quasi-religious narrative from his infection by Hegel- "the stateless society" is a utopian ideal. Some philosophers like Zizek throw the whole idea out the window and embrace a hybrid Leninism and Stalinism. So, if it came down to a revolution, I wonder which camp will manage to kill the other first this time.

[@sankarchaya]

@@obrotherwhereartliam Jevon's paradox wouldn't apply if increased efficiency was used for the ends of saving time instead of creating more in the same amount of time. As Marx shows in Capital, it is capitalist competition which forces firms to behave in a way which produces this paradox. The USSR was attempting a transition to socialism and eventually communism but never went beyond economic competition with the capitalist west for various reasons

[@ProbablyCancelledPod]

Communism is about growth

[@sankarchaya]

Saito's argument is at least interesting and novel inasmuch as he attributes a similar position to Marx but I think he overstates his case in his book on Marx. Marx is clearly concerned with ecological limits but taking that into account doesn't lead to "degrowth". I think Marx wanted to get beyond the whole duality of growth vs degrowth.

[@henfencey5751]

The whole point of Marxism is that societies rise and fall fepending on whether they're able to provide for people, and that's done through class struggle. Masses of people are not going to accept "degrowth". It has to give them more while also requiring less, which is totally possible when you think of how inefficient capitalism is.

[@codenameicarus]

“Our way of life is easy in the Global North”??? My dude, how cut off from ordinary working people can you get? Life is the opposite of easy for most workers. You have to be a member of the Brahmin Left to believe that Western workers have it easy. Some 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

[@user-tk3rc7lq3s]

Profit is a human motivation, not necessarily a corporate one. It is not politically viable to anthropomorphize corporations. It is not scientific to use economics, whether marxian or neoliberal, to make excuses for business. The neoliberal excuse is that supply is impotent against demand. The marxian excuse is that ownership is control. Both of those excuses are backwards. In fact, corporations control ownership and demand. The only way to control corporations is for voters to scapegoat irresponsible ones. You are welcome to anthropomorphize the responsible ones as less profitable, but no one, or any thing, will care. All that matters is that the survival instinct of corporations make them more responsible. Communism does not make corporations responsible; the delicense of an oil major certainly would make them more responsible. The role of unions is to agitate for better unemployment benefits. The unemployed may well form communes, but the irresponsible ones should be suppressed by voters that would leave the responsible ones alone.

[@bdmajuqwana4050]

Can you show me a corporation that has a survival instinct independent of the state? Or, to put it different, is this corporate instinct for survival independent of the state or its political institutions?

[@mytearsricochvt]

first of all thats a horrible summary of marxism or neoliberalism both. secondly profit is NOT a human motivation, and any straw man analogies of trying to explain "human nature" to justify politics is scientifically inaccurate. Thirdly, it is not possible to make corporations "responsible" under capitalism because capitalism exists out of exploitation and maximizing on labor and raw materials to over supply. with degrowth economics not only do you lessen over supply, you also point out the contradictions of capitalism itself. only under communism can you equate supply and demands because its a proper "free market"

[@user-tk3rc7lq3s]

​@@bdmajuqwana4050 I'm just spitballing, but I suspect business has had the upper hand over government ever since businesses caused the collapse of royalty. My idea is for government to destroy a business for the first time in history. It couldn't hurt.

[@user-tk3rc7lq3s]

@@mytearsricochvt I think profit, compassion, selfishness, generosity, and the rest of them are human emotions. I'm not the one using human nature metaphysics; that's economics, and marxism is an economics. Employees would certainly brainstorm over the water cooler to make their company responsible if one of their competitors was destroyed for being irresponsible. With degrowth, you degrow renewables as well as fossil fuel. If communism equates supply and demand, then it is just as metaphysical as economics, because demand is not measurable.

[@dallaskenn]

Is this some sort of psy-op joke?

[@debbiedavid4725]

please explain?

[@blahdelablah]

What's funny about it? Are you scared of the word "communism"?

[@dallaskenn]

@@blahdelablah Degrowth is not Socialism. Saito looks and sounds like a Langley contractor..

[@blahdelablah]

@dallaskenn If you watched the video you'd know that the argument is that we need a combination of socialism and degrowth. In other words, they're not claiming they're the same thing, they're saying that they're complimentary.

[@dallaskenn]

@@blahdelablah They are not.

[@harrypoderskis]

Get that word out of your mouth and never mention it in any positive context. Sincerely, a Lithuanian.

[@Shawn_A937]

Maybe you should try watching the video instead of reacting based on one word in the title.

[@carlosmoreira8835]

Things have changed a lot since then and capitalism, even though it has brought a lot of good (for only a part of the world and to the expense of the other) is obviously showing it's limitations and bringing about a lot of very big issues that are starting to seem unsurmountable. Using the word communism certainly is quite head turning but in the end whatever comes after capitalism will certainly need to be something that helps reduce inequality and allows humanity to live sustainably and in certain harmony with the rest of species. But I really value the opinion of anybody that has lived through communism and is able to poke holes into this guy's thesis so I encourage you to watch the video and give a critique of the things you think are not correct or would be right in its implementation.

[@harrypoderskis]

@@carlosmoreira8835 Saito argues that capitalism's relentless pursuit of profit and growth is the root cause of inequality and climate change. He criticizes the popular notion of "sustainable growth" and "Green New Deal" as dangerous compromises, asserting that capitalism, by its very nature, creates artificial scarcity and prioritizes perpetual growth over everything else. Saito proposes that reversing climate change within a capitalist society is impossible, as the system that created the problem cannot be part of the solution. He advocates for a return to social ownership, where abundance can be restored, and society can focus on activities essential for human life. This shift, he argues, can effectively reverse climate change and save the planet. My assessment in a nutshell is that social ownership is, as proven countless times with dire consequences, is a road to self-destruction. Better the enemy you know rather than the one you don’t. The processes to transition to his unique form of communism are theorycrafting and larping at best, and when broken down into its key assumptions, is exactly the same as communism, and is subject to the exact same critical faults. While I do agree of the flaws of Capitalism’s perpetual growth, this also means the growth of technology and sustainable practices, as capitalism serves to satisfy the needs and wants of the free market. The needs and wants of the market are aligned with the biological needs of humans to thrive in a clean environment, free of disease, full of beauty and natural resources. To discard this system, which is the only system we have successfully implemented by the way, with some theory that is almost fully based on communism… learn from history, stop attempting to larp your way into communism.

[@juanadrianarquinegogomez3610]

go spread the word of liberalism to subsaharian african countries then.

[@thundercheeks1989]

You mean "capitalism?" Agreed.