I haven’t read Saito’s books, or looked too deeply into degrowth as a movement. I just read this article and thought it made some good arguments against what it claims are Saito’s understandings of Marx. I’m not sure I agree with everything, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
To me this has some huge logical jumps and oversights, and some pretty naive assumptions about what degrowth communism actually means. The authors suggestion that degrowth is actually Malthusian is bizarre, since Saito isn’t talking about degrowing the population. Also, saying on the one hand that the global North isn’t relying on the global south, while also talking about how technology is the solution to world equity (as if the materials for technological development aren’t pulled out of mines by exploited South workers) is a big blind spot of the authors.
Good read though thanks for sharing
Yeah, I don’t agree with all the points. And, as I said, I haven’t read the literature on “degrowth” (I do have Saito’s books, haven’t gotten around to it). I was specifically interested in what the writers claimed were Saito’s wrongful reinterpretations of Marx on things like historical materialism, and a new break in his thinking similar to the young and old Marx, etc etc. It’s always so fascinating to me, how Marxists (and other leftists ofc) build such competing and conflicting theories arising from the same foundation, often using the same works.
This is pedantic maybe, but I wanna mention there are actually Marx-works available today that weren’t 20 years ago, and 20 years ago there were works available that weren’t 40 years ago etc. Marx wrote a lot, and its still not all transcribed into print, much less translated from Marx-language into German.