Was Karl Marx a Degrowth Communist?

Brian Napoletano

In a recent issue of Monthly Review, Michael Löwy observed that the last few years have witnessed “a growing coming together of ecosocialism and degrowth: each side has been appropriating the arguments of the other, and the proposal of an ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ has begun to be adopted as a common ground.” The rationale behind this convergence is relatively straightforward. On the one hand, a central tenet of ecosocialism has been that any viable socialist project will need to pursue ecological sustainability and substantive equality as two interdependent parts of a dialectical unity. In the context of the twenty-first century, this entails reducing the global social metabolism’s total material and energy throughput while satisfying universal social needs. This in turn requires bringing about a convergence between different regions and social segments through reductions in the profligate waste propping up the capitalist system, redistribution of social wealth and decision-making, the free dissemination of ecological knowledge andsocially beneficial technological innovations, and operationalisation of principles of self-determination and autogestion. On the other hand, advocates of degrowth have increasingly recognised that any attempt to break with the fixation on economic growth and establish an alternate, more equitable conception of social wealth requires a decisive break with capital accumulation as the ordering principle of society, and therefore a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of social metabolic control. The resultant convergence, ecosocialist degrowth, indicates two important correctives to widespread misconceptions. On the ecosocialist side, the degrowth modifier indicates a conscious, planned project of metabolic restoration, while on the degrowth side, the ecosocialist modifier points to a transformative project rather than a simple, one-sided negation of growth.

It is in the context of this convergence that the English-language translation of Kohei Saito’s Japanese bestseller, Capital in the Anthropocene, has just been published as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. This comes more than a year after the publication of the English translation of Marx in the Anthropocene, which—confusingly—was originally published in Japanese after Capital in the Anthropocene. Marx in the Anthropocene has been described as an “academic text,” and is aimed at Marxists, whereas Slow Down targets a broader audience, selling over five hundred thousand copies in Japan alone. The two books largely overlap in their general argument for what Saito has dubbed “degrowth communism,” but aspects of his argument that are mentioned only briefly in one book sometimes receive fuller treatment in the other. For instance, Marx in the Anthropocene offers virtually no discussion of how degrowth communism might emerge from existing social struggles and movements, leaving the issue of transition virtually untouched. Slow Down, in contrast, identifies a handful of movements that prefigure or point to aspects of degrowth communism, including municipalism (his primary source of inspiration), rebellions by care workers, Buen Vivir, and food sovereignty. Citing the well-known 3.5 percent rule of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion, he argues that only a small part of the population needs to “rise up sincerely and nonviolently to bring about a major change to society.” Saito suggests that this number could easily be met by the kinds of movements he mentions together with “people sincerely concerned with climate change and passionately committed to fighting it.”


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