Book post: I read Slow Down so you don’t have to

I did not enjoy the book Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, I found it hard to read, and I don’t think its ideas are actionable. One might wonder why I bothered to finish reading it, and there are at least two reasons. One is that it was given to me through a subscription service at a local bookstore which had chosen several good fiction books for me, so I wanted to give the book a chance. The second is that once I realized the book was going to be bad, I wanted to finish it so that I could write a post about how bad it was, and here we are. My primary issue with this book is that it says the same things over and over again in aesthetically different ways that don’t actually add a new justification to the claim¹. This book is too much about vibes and not enough about models. On that note, have a warning: I do thend to think in terms of models, so I’ve tried to construct a relatively coherent model out of the contents of Saitō’s book, and I’m worried that my writeup will make this book seem more bearable than it was because I build it into the best argument that I could with what I had and because I’m not repeating each argument twenty times. Sorry about that.

I would recommend anyone who wants to read this book for some reason to just start in the seventh chapter, Degrowth Communism Will Save the World, and read to the end of the book. In the first half of this chapter, Saitō calls back to previous chapters enough to give as much of an idea of his previous arguments as you need. In my opinion, the previous chapters hardly do anything to justify his statements that just reading this 15 page recap and the conclusion won’t do. Among the things he summarizes here is his model of four types of societies which could theoretically respond to climate change categorized by how democratic they are and how equal people are. Climate Maoism is a society which abandons democracy and enforces climate sustainability and equality from above. Climate Fascism enforces sustainability from above but not equality. Saitō’s undemocratic and unequal quadrant is barbarism, in which civilization collapses in the face of climate catastrophe, and he seems to think that this is the inevitable end-state of capitalism without dictatorship. His final quadrant is degrowth communism, which is his ideal system of both democracy and equality. In the last half of the chapter, he outlines five “pillars” of degrowth communism which he claims contain what we need to do to bring about a better world, but I would categorize them as goals and values that Saitō would like to see reflected in a plan for a better world without the actual plan. He says “we must do [thing],” but he doesn’t say how people would enforce or incentivize doing that thing. I’m just going to list the five pillars, because I want to spare you Saitō’s repetitive pontificating:

• Stop producing luxury goods and status symbols: He uses the term “use-value” here, which I explain later
• Shorten work hours: Since you don’t need to waste time producing useless stuff
• Abolish division of labor: This seems like standard Marxist opposition to alienation.
• Democratize production: I guess someone has to decide which stuff isn’t useless, and Saitō prefers democracy for that purpose
• Prioritize essential work: Saitō makes an interesting argument that labor-intensive work like nursing will occupy people who would have otherwise made useless stuff with useful work

Saitō claims that these ideals will lead to a society which has lower production but prioritizes life well lived. Then he moves on to the eighth chapter, The Lever of Climate Justice, in which he gives many examples of grassroots movements which are living up to his ideals. He actually demands action here! Sort of. He praises the city of Barcelona for releasing a plan of action (which includes things like restricting transportation and “greening urban spaces”) but mostly for explicitly challenging the “current economic model” and for having citizens involved in the drafting process. He wants people to form organizations which lead local governments to explicitly call for lowering production and to act in accordance with “climate justice” principles. (Basically, these principles say don’t allow rich nations to solve their climate issues by putting things poorer nations don’t want in those poorer nations.) He encourages these organizations to network with each other to learn from successful groups, and he particularly wants people to communicate with and to emulate groups in the “Global South” focused on issues of growing food locally under democratic control. I find these chapters totally insufficient for a book which claims to advocate for the end of capitalism, but they contain the only explicit action that Saitō actually calls for. I think you can’t solve climate change by saying things; you have to do things. Saitō has all the praise for people saying they’ll do things, but I wish he had written more about the explicit actions he thinks people should say they’re going to do. The book finishes with a short Conclusion which briefly says “capitalism bad; degrowth communism good” and encourages people to advocate for it.

That’s basically it! Those last two chapters are the only ones which have anything like a call to action in them, and I don’t think it’s worth bothering with the rest. For the rest of this post, I’ll touch on a few major arguments central to the earlier chapters.

Mostly because it was the only chapter I enjoyed, I want to take a moment to talk about the fourth chapter, Marx in the Anthropocene, in which Saitō argues that research into Marx’s correspondence and notes shows that Marx became very interested in ecology late in life. Having studied this writing, Saitō argues that Marx became disenchanted with the “productivism” (more production good) which pervaded his early writing on socialism, and he became enamored with traditional communal land management. Whatever you think of communism, Marx is a hugely influential figure in world history, and this window into the sort of research people do to figure out what Marx thought held my interest. The chapter is still full of Saitō’s signature repetition, but he actually has evidence to back up his statements, and the chapter seems like a well-structured piece of Marxist theory. This chapter feeds into what I think Saitō implicitly wants from this book, which is to reframe communism as an environmental movement. Here he calls back to Marx, still held up as a giant of communist thought, and he claims that Marx (inevitably) found that making more stuff could not be the ultimate result of the communist revolution because the Earth can’t sustain that. Saitō also defends Marx from criticisms from modern communists that Marx was too Eurocentric in his thinking by presenting evidence of his later writing respecting specific examples of land management practices outside of Europe. The chapter doesn’t really make any societal arguments except “Marx agrees with me so you should too,” but I enjoyed the sample of academic Marxism.

On to more central points of the book. Saitō talks a lot about the radical abundance of the commons. He lionizes an ideal world (which he argues has some precedent in various societies throughout world history) where people grow their own food on communally managed lands while doing meaningful liesure activities or work all the time. He argues that things have “value” and “use-value,” where “value” is a thing’s price and “use-value” is a property which things have when you need them to live. One example he comes back to is that there exist many largely-agrarian countries with widespread hunger issues. Their capital-controlled farms grow luxury foods for export to wealthy nations because the luxury foods have a lot of value. They do not grow food crops for locals with a lot of use-value. He seems to think that if people did the production of things which provide use-value and none of the things which provide mere value without use-value, then you could get production down to a level that is in equilibrium with nature, and people would have a bunch of extra time to do things they enjoy. He calls this radical abundance and I don’t buy it. Who is Saitō to claim that things which people will pay a lot of money for have low use-value? He’s acting as if it’s obvious what things have use-value, but he doesn’t give any explicit guidance for how those decisions get made other than to say that the decision must be made democratically. From the context of the rest of the book, I’m guessing that he imagines people democratically deciding on a smaller subset of things they actually need and meeting those needs with worker-managed co-ops, but in a vibes-based book, I can’t be sure that he’s thought this out.

The book actually argues pretty well that, historically, climate change is a downstream effect of capitalism, but I think it fails in its goal of arguing that capitalism must always cause climate change. The argument is basically that capitalism demands infinite growth, so capitalists are highly disincentivized to leave free energy on the table when it could be burnt for money. The book goes on to argue that climate change cannot be fixed within capitalism, and the way Saitō argued this point infuriated me. It’s basically the point above that capitalists can’t leave money on the table, but the man goes so far as to complain that climate change will be used as an excuse to exploit people more by forcing them to buy things which alleviate the symptoms of climate change. YES! THAT IS HOW CAPITALISM WORKS! If capitalism could fix climate change, it would be through some person coming up with solutions and making people pay for them. This is an example of a general problem I had with Saitō’s book, which is that he seems to have decided that capitalism is bad, and will seemingly make any argument for capitalism being bad that has a vaguely communist vibe even if it conflicts with his other arguments for capitalism being bad. I wish this man had studied economics enough to understand the system he is criticizing, because reading obviously-wrong critiques of capitalism is tedious².

One of the less-tedious points that Saitō comes back to again and again is how capitalism depends on what he calls the “imperial mode of living” where wealthy people are able to live well by pushing all of the dirty things that need to be done for them to live that way out to the periphery where live the people who aren’t wealthy. He talks about manufacturing and waste disposal being moved to the “Global South” in order to support the consumerism of the “Global North”. I think this is a decent historical analysis of one of the effects of the industrial revolution, but Saitō goes on to argue that the solutions of capitalism to make a technically-carbon-neutral lifestyle domestically would just continue this trend by forcing the carbon-positive processes which maintain consumerism to poorer countries. There is no endpoint where every country develops to the point of carbon-neutrality because there needs to be a trashy heat sink somewhere to drive the engine of capitalism. This would be obviously true if it were true that capitalism can’t get rid of dirty processes. I could even be convinced that this is the default path that we are on without interference from government, but I am not convinced of the universal validity of the trashy-heat-sink model of the engine of capitalism which is assumed by this book³. I admit that this model is a brilliant rhetorical tool for winning arguments about how bad capitalism is. It sounds reasonable, and it is rooted in a history of oppression that resonates with people. Saitō fails to show that money-based markets and the principle of investment which are the foundation of what capitalism actually is necessarily must work this way (that would require a model of capitalism built on more than just vibes). One could make the argument that he presents a counterfactual history that ran on something better than capitalism and had better results when he talks about communal land management and the relative lack of alienation in pre-capitalist agrarian life, but he doesn’t present a cost-benefit analysis of capitalism that takes into account things like childhood mortality, worldwide levels of starvation, and resilience to famine. I feel like you could theoretically have imperialism without capitalism and capitalism without imperialism. I’m vaguely aware of the existence of arguments against that, but I doubt I would agree with them.

I don’t think Saitō did a good job of debunking the idea that democratically-imposed capitalist limitations on carbon emissions like carbon taxes could allow capitalism to continue without destroying the planet, although he claims this over and over again with variations of the arguments above. My impression is that capitalists do not want to destroy the planet in the long run, so they will tolerate limitations that allow the system to continue just like they tolerated the 40-hour workweek and limitations on child labor (eventually, after violent repression of the labor movements which advocated for these limitations). Capitalism is flexible. I’m not defending the people who imposed terrible working conditions on people in the nineteenth century (or now for that matter), but I’m saying that it’s apparently possible to make capital act in the interest of workers while keeping capitalism basically intact. I think the same might be true of carbon emissions. Saitō would probably say that he thoroughly debunked this hope in the second chapter, but I wasn’t satisfied by his arguments. He does things like say “technology can’t save us” and gives an example of electric cars which are generate a lot of emissions in production. He doesn’t prove that production of electric cars has to be that way, and then he generalizes the example to everything and says “therefore technology can’t save us!” a few more times a little louder throughout the rest of the book.

I’m trying to figure out what this book was for. I don’t think it does the thing Saitō says it is for, which is to be “a thorough critique of capital illuminating the path to a bright future to come.” At best, it describes some amenities one might find along the path to a bright future. The only step on the path he gives explicitly is to join up with people and say how much you like the idea of communism. A lot of people live in large capitalist cities in places where there’s not enough nearby farmland to support them. Currently, those people are fed because they pay to ship in food from elsewhere at the expense of a lot of carbon emission. How does mere democracy feed them? Are they going to move somewhere else for some reason? Will they democratically start hydroponic greenhouses which feed the whole city? Where will they get the building materials for that? Is there still money under degrowth communism? There’s a lot of missing details in this supposedly illuminated path. Say what you want about Marx, the Communist Manifesto had a list of ten explicit measures which they suggested that socialists take in most advanced countries. I think this book is best taken as an attempt to reorient communist activism along environmentalist grounds. Saitō wants anyone worried about climate change to think that capitalism is inherently the cause and communism is the only solution that they’ll have any say in. I’m not convinced. Also the book is too long and doesn’t say anything. Read something else.

1. If I need to read the same thing over and over again to understand, I would have preferred Saitō to make a dense, complete argument that only takes two pages to write and leave a note which says I may have to read those pages several times before I understand it. Yes, I majored in math; what’s your point? ↩

2. As an example of Saitō’s misunderstanding of capitalism, he says that some hope that running out of easily accessible oil will raise oil prices enough that relatively inexpensive renewable energy leads oil companies to not bother with oil. He says that, no, the high price means that the oil companies will be more incentivized to find even more-difficult-to-extract oil and sell it for huge profits. His statement that oil’s high price will lead to more costly extraction is correct, but he fails to take demand into account. Oil companies will only dig up expensive oil if there’s someone to buy it. If there’s cheaper ways to move around or produce things, then those greedy companies won’t buy expensive oil just because it’s there, and if nobody is buying oil, then oil companies will stop wasting money digging it out until they sell what they have. And probably lower the price of oil so that people will buy it again. This misunderstanding of prices is his most annoying error. He acts like prices are fixed numbers that are inherently attached to things, so companies produce the expensive things to get more money. The price of a thing is better understood as a function of how easy it is to make (or find) the thing relative to the number of people who want the thing. ↩

3. I can’t help poetically comparing this model of capitalism to a heat engine. In a heat engine, an expanding gas does work while it transfers heat from a hot bath to a cold bath. In my facetious model of capitalism, Capital moves ruin from wealthy countries to poor countries to extract joy or something. It’s a bad metaphor. Ruin doesn’t expand in the presence of poverty, although I suppose inflation can cause poverty. ↩