How can—or can’t—ideological political movements serve us in the climate crisis?
It’s a question which increasingly nags while reading Kohei Saito’s “degrowth communism” bestseller, originally published in Japanese as Capital in the Anthropocene (2020). In this new English translation, University of Tokyo Marxist philosopher Saito promises to “excavate a completely new, previously unexplored aspect of Marx’s thought” (p. 13), uncovering Marx as an early advocate of—and revolutionary guide to—climate action.
Unfortunately, Slow Down ends up more bait-and-switch than road map. A disorganized structure and disturbingly jaundiced view of human nature produce something between polemic and projected cry of despair, while Marx’s supposed climate advocacy ultimately boils down to one offhand reference in an unsent letter.
Slow Down’s troubles begin with its own fundamental confusion about which readers, precisely, it’s aimed toward. Billed as a manifesto for the casual reader, but built as an academic critique, it speeds through brief, vague examples of how capitalism and the Green New Deal fail; explains degrowth; rebuts other Marxist scholars on fairly technical points of interpretation; and finally offers a few entry-level proposals to slow global economies and climate change.
Saito gives accessible, lucid explanations of certain concepts—atmospheric composition, tipping points, the commons, and degrowth scholarship—but rarely analyzes or synthesizes any of them, instead summarizing and re-summarizing old material until his argument visibly grows thin. For general readers, it’s a minefield—especially given Slow Down’s tendency to propagandize and speak in absolutes.
Slow Down fields a lot of broad claims in its pages—but never quite enough reasoning to back them. Existing experiments like circular economies and negative emissions technologies are written off as “inadequate” by comparing them to historical colonialism—but without ever really unpacking why they’re similar. Goalposts are frequently moved: while it’s true that “recycling resources is, by itself, insufficient as a solution” (p. 76), so is any monolithic solution in a super-wicked problem, and dismissing mitigation tactics wholesale because they aren’t themselves a cure-all is alarmingly unserious.
Likewise, studies are sloppily read and then used as foundational to the book’s arguments: “Even if every country abided by the (Paris) Agreement,” Saito says, “there are signs that global temperatures would rise by 3.3 C anyway,” (p. 17) citing Reuters coverage of a Climate Action Tracker report which quite clearly names “currently implemented policies,” not the effect of Paris Agreement commitments. The original CAT report says that if planned projects and policies came into force—if policies and commitments aligned—”warming by 2100 could be limited to 3C.” A 2018 call for implementation of commitments and their efficacy—do the promised work, thanks—is recast as whistleblowers decrying the entire framework of the Paris Agreement as ineffectual and pointless (p. 17).
This looseness with logic and mischaracterized citations proves crucial. Having declared the Paris Agreement—a document with faults and positives—ineffectual, Saito ties it to economist William Nordhaus’s projections of a 3.5 C rise in temperatures and declares Nordhaus’s projections “a strategy for economists to raise their profile.” He then insinuates that because Nordhaus’s earlier numbers and the Climate Action Tracker report happen to be “close,” then of course the Paris Agreement is also cynical economist political theatre, and of course, “world governments would be inclined to privilege economic growth and put off dealing with the problem at hand” (p. 15-17). It’s conspiratorial thinking at best—misreading facts, misunderstanding causes and goals, and then patterning those distortions into conspiracies. At worst, it’s an active bad-faith attempt to destroy social trust in other solutions and corral readers into his own.
This is how Slow Down makes its case: a house built on proclamations and targeted attempts to discredit other ideas. The farther it goes, the shakier its logic starts to feel. Saito’s attempts to prevent this—classing these takedowns as “hard-to-hear” or “inconvenient truth” (p. 26, 76), and some pre-emptive social shaming—are a brittle defense.
That reflex to substitute thoughtful consideration with personal manipulativeness increasingly overtakes the book’s actual ideas. Saito takes pains to point out that he’s separating Marxist ideas from Soviet execution, and that modern Marxism comes in many flavours, but his analysis and rhetoric both seem stuck in authoritarian reflexes: foundationally assuming that realities are shaped by someone’s say-so alone; that all failures, institutional or personal, are deliberate, motivated, and luridly grotesque; and that the only way to change is by discarding bad-guy authorities and installing good-guy ones.
Saito appears convinced that anything a designated bad guy does can’t be just a wrong action but an active and deliberate betrayal. “We may well start to wonder if those calling for a Green New Deal truly believe in stopping climate change at all,” Saito exclaims, forgetting that sometimes people experiment with solutions rather than collude in full-scale social sabotage (p. 84). People buying fast fashion, he assumes, can’t be rushed, uninformed, underskilled, or any one of a constellation of factors feeding a global industry, each one a lever to reduce its harm if we’re organized and clever; they’re “consumers who want whole new wardrobes every season” to “satiate the[ir] unlimited desires” (p. 25). Every problem is the result of an enemy.
The result is a mindset which treats pointing out, discrediting, and personally caricaturing your enemies as how problem-solving works—as if large-scale social change is won by going birding for moral traitors. Slow Down can’t seem to grasp the idea of less extreme motivations: good faith in bad systems, objective or perceived limited options, or legitimate disagreements about process. It doesn’t seem to understand people.
Unfortunately, the worst of this blindness intersects with race. While it consistently acknowledges that the Global South faces harder climate impacts, Slow Down can’t seem to treat that vast, diverse region as more than the hapless class victim of the collective Global North, who must now be shamed into rescuing their victims. Solutions or climate initiatives from the Global South—of which plenty exist—are ignored beyond brief final-chapter namechecks, and Saito credits certain phenomena—the organizing strategies of agricultural communes, for example—to Marx instead of generations of campesino organizers.
While it’s true that the “periphery”—Saito’s term for the Global South—has taken disproportionate and generational environmental burdens from extractivism and colonialism, it’s still full of creative, capable people who use agency, strategize their lives, and make their own mistakes. Slow Down talks about listening, but occupies itself with abusing the enemies responsible for exploiting the Global South rather than citing or platforming those injured parties. It’s an ugly kind of objectification, and it leaves an aftertaste.
When we finally reach Saito’s proposed solutions, they’re mostly familiar to anyone who reads the news. He proposes curbing supply chain speculation, shortening workweeks, encouraging social ownership of public infrastructure, and prioritizing essential workers. After all that buildup, the pulpit rhetoric deflates into encouraging readers to sign petitions, participate in school strikes, and support organic farming. Saito’s “fresh” read of Marxism turns out to be the last casualty of Slow Down’s inability to see people in context. In a draft letter, Marx casually references a medieval German commune which designed economies against growth. Projecting his own rigid read of human motivations, Saito presumes that this society was deliberately Kohei Saito’s own personal, modern ideology, and that Marx’s mention of it is a coded sign of Marx having converted to degrowth.
And that’s it. Slow Down’s entire case for degrowth is that, according to one unsent letter blown up into a whole universe by Kohei Saito, it’s “Marx’s last wish.” I couldn’t stop imagining someone building a whole worldview off some of the letters I’ve never sent. When I picture that, my hands start to shake.
Something extremely queasy dwells in Slow Down’s rigid blindness to the fluidity of human motivations—Marx’s included. It’s the heart of the trouble in this book: its core beliefs about authority, solution, change, and choice. It can’t seem to shake an authoritarian conviction that we’re all helpless before the whims of monsters, or that positive change means holding a nightstick to someone else’s throat. It’s a relationship with authority and social trust that bluntly scares the shit out of me.
What’s sad is that I found so many of Saito’s more pragmatic statements sensible and obvious: we must use less; we must share social resources both locally and globally; mutual aid and restoring the commons are good, and disaster capitalism is abhorrent; a detransactionalized, more open-source society would be a better one. We agree on a great deal of what might work. But when I asked myself if I’d want to build that society with anyone who came to those conclusions through this book, I hesitated.
We are reading, speaking, and working on climate questions in a season when many climate seminars and activities begin with a grounding exercise. A baseline level of perpetual trauma is almost assumed. The crackling cognitive load of grief, fear, and precarity in these spaces is already intense.
As someone organizing locally on climate, I can’t help but read any call to arms as prefiguring the relations it’ll produce in the people who answer. How would Slow Down’s converts act once they enter climate work? Propaganda can lead people to your point of view, yes, but it affects what state they arrive in, what they track in with them, and how often you’ll have to sweep the proverbial floor.
It’s difficult to imagine this text’s projection, paranoia, incuriosity, casual objectification, and brittle analyses of both the world and the infinite human heart not rubbing off on how those people would work. When you berate people into virtue, mostly you’ve convinced a bunch of people that berating others is an actual day of work. As abolitionist scholar Danielle Sered writes, “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it”, and recruiting people with violence is a great way to reproduce it.
But almost worse is the impression that Slow Down fears you’ll do the right things for the wrong reasons. Tangled in the jealous one-upmanship of small ideological games for even tinier prizes, it seems terrified that even if you care about climate, you might care wrong: your worship feeding the wrong god. With wildfire smoke on the move and rivers flooding weekly this past summer here in Toronto, this is pettiness I can’t entertain.
Ultimately, Slow Down’s approach to force-grown epiphanies has led me to a more uncomfortable question: in what circumstances is this ideology-first approach actually useful in the climate project? This book has sold over 500,000 copies in Japan; it obviously appeals to somebody. But if Slow Down aims to mobilize an army, which part of this problem is shaped like a war? Is there a generative route to climate action here?
I didn’t walk away with an answer; I should very much like one. As noted at the beginning, I cannot find the reader: the person for whom this is the right book at the right time. Or more specifically, I can’t find the reader who, if they’re lost, would be made better by this approach. There are things of value in Saito’s desire to re-regulate our relationships with ecology. But how Saito gets there, how he insistently degrades and coerces his readers in the process, and what it means to come into a movement that is supposed to uplift and preserve life through a door made of panic, degradation, mistrust, and despair—all these make Slow Down a title I can’t in good faith recommend.
Slow Down and I are not having a disagreement about ideologies or institutions. We’re having a disagreement about people: their fundamental nature and worth, whether pain creates or destroys them, if and how authority owns them, and how we should come into relationship together to build a just world. It’s a disagreement I fear is irretrievable. Do I want more colleagues in creating a sustainable and just future? Hell yes. But I left Slow Down thinking I should prefer to meet them willing and whole.
