Saito's Bestseller Exposes Capitalism's Endless Search for Exploitation

I read “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto” a while back — this book was both a bestseller and the thing that suddenly turned Kohei Saito into a public figure — and I’m finally getting around to summarizing it now (it’s fairly long, so I’m splitting it into two parts).

This is purely for my own notes, and I’m not trying to argue anything through it. That said, I found a great deal of it genuinely useful. Anyone with even a passing interest should ideally read the book directly. I hope this summary helps with that.

Personally, I think the author’s “situation analysis” is excellent and full of useful material, but the “countermeasures” and “vision” sections feel weak.

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

【Externalization to the Global South】

Historically, capitalism has developed through “extraction” and “displacement.” The basic style of capitalism is to take something cheaply from someone, consume it, push the negative fallout onto someone else, and keep the precise “profit” for yourself.

That is “externalization.”

Externalization generally runs in the direction “Global North → Global South,” and various problems began to surface in the 1980s. There were two problems: environmental destruction and similar issues in the Global South, and the fact that exploitation in one place eventually breaks down, forcing a search for the next place to exploit.

We’ve now gone full circle and exhausted everything worth exploiting.

From my own personal experience: a certain division of a certain company was mainly running factories in Malaysia in the early 2000s, “making use of” cheap labor. But it simultaneously started running factories in China, and as wages rose in Malaysia, it shifted the role of the Malaysian plant and moved on to China. Yet within less than ten years, Chinese wages rose too, and the company went looking for the next offshore strategy — it kept repeating this search for externalization. I remember naively wondering, “Where does this end up, eventually?”

The rising CO2 emissions in Brazil and China are one face of externalization onto the Global South, and the North’s stance of pinning all the responsibility on the South is, in a sense, a continuation of extraction.

The top 10% of the world’s wealthy emit half of all CO2. The bottom half emits less than 10%, but this is the group that takes the first hit from climate change.

【The contradiction of externalization to protect the planet】

Making electric vehicles requires lithium and cobalt, and the countries holding most of the world’s reserves of these are in the Global South (Chile, Congo, and so on). To meet rising demand, mining is pushed to excess, dumping various problems — land subsidence, mine collapses, low-wage labor for local workers — onto these places.

【Marx’s self-reflection】

Marx is most famous for “Das Kapital,” but before that, in the “Communist Manifesto (1848),” he predicted that capitalism’s extraction would trigger a crisis and be overthrown by the people. After watching capitalism survive the crisis of 1857, though, he revised his thinking and wrote Das Kapital. Das Kapital itself was left unfinished, and in his later years Marx was thinking about things quite different from it.

Marx held an optimistic view that rising productivity would resolve various problems. He also held a Eurocentric outlook. But in 1862 Liebig’s “critique of plunder agriculture” struck him and changed his thinking. Metabolic theory holds that humans, too, are part of the earth’s metabolism, and that capital, by prioritizing its own growth above all else, disrupts this metabolism. In his later years Marx’s interests ranged widely across geology, mineralogy, botany, and more.

It was also in his later years that he reflected on his own Orientalism (Western supremacism). He had originally written things along the lines of “Britain’s rule of India brought about revolution, so it can be said to have ultimately played a good role,” and this drew fierce criticism. But in his later years, when the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich asked him whether Russia had to dismantle its communities and go through capitalism the way the West did in order to become a strong nation, he answered that this was not the case. He suggested, rather, that Russia might achieve communistic development ahead of the West, and he praised Russia’s agricultural communities and Asia’s village communities.

【Jevons’ Paradox】

The 19th-century economist Jevons observed that as coal refining efficiency rose and prices fell, coal came to be used in places it hadn’t been used before (such as processes previously run by human labor), and total consumption, far from falling, actually increased.

【The political economist Raworth】

Economic growth and improvement in living standards are strongly correlated at economically poor levels, but the correlation disappears once a certain degree of affluence is reached. The US, for example, has a higher GDP than Europe, but Europe, with its more robust welfare systems, is more livable. Japan lags behind US GDP but has a longer life expectancy. Examples like this are everywhere.

Other research has long shown that the correlation between annual income and happiness disappears past a certain point, which offers management wisdom about how much salary should be used as an incentive.

【Planetary boundaries】

This is Rockström’s thinking, one of the sources feeding into things like the MDGs and SDGs. He sounded the alarm that the time had come to recognize the earth’s limits and take various measures. The Green New Deal (protecting the global environment while pursuing economic growth) emerged from this idea, but Rockström himself, a decade later, admitted self-critically that it isn’t possible.

Vietnam is a country that has breached few planetary boundaries while achieving a large number of social benefits. Many developed countries take the position of “breaching a lot but also achieving a lot.” China is different.

<Will technology solve everything?>

【The Haber-Bosch process】

A groundbreaking method for producing chemical fertilizer, it led to a dramatic increase in crop yields — a capitalist breakthrough that solved the fertilizer problem and made continuous cropping possible. Some view it as the hero that solved the food problem. But it also requires fossil fuels, and its environmental burden is high.

【BECCS】

CCS is a technology (NET: Negative Emission Technology) that achieves negative emissions by burying CO2 underground or on the seabed. Combining it with bioenergy makes it possible to permanently sequester CO2 recovered from the atmosphere.

However, there are concerns about side effects: ocean acidification, massive water consumption, and the possibility of sacrificing large amounts of farmland for biomass production. Even so, it’s often built into IPCC models.

Once economic growth is taken as a given premise, piling up technologies like BECCS ends up being the only option left.

【Geoengineering】

A scientific field that intervenes in climate using human technology. This includes placing mirrors in space to block sunlight, or seeding clouds with sulfate aerosols to manipulate albedo. Most of the side effects remain unexplained.

【Left accelerationism】

Aaron Bastani’s idea of achieving communism through sustainable economic growth.

Lab-grown meat, renewable energy, space resource mining, and so on.

The view holds that all problems are solvable and that costs will eventually fall to a negligible level. This kind of eco-modernism can be seen as falling straight into Jevons’ Paradox.

<Economic growth the demon, low growth the dream>

【Progressive capitalism】

This refers to the “taming of capitalism” advocated by Nobel laureate economist Stiglitz — concretely, raising wages and increasing taxes on the wealthy. If that were possible, it would have been done long ago. But the wealthy tie themselves to political power to protect their own interests, and the true face of capitalism is this unjust method of expanding inequality while extracting from ordinary people. Which makes Stiglitz, in the end, nothing more than a dreamer.

Austerity fiscal policy is degrowth, but it rings hollow coming from the baby boomer generation, which enjoyed decades of growth and affluence. MMT is beginning to gain support as one strand of anti-austerity thought, but proponents like Sanders always pair it with the Green New Deal, which makes it unrealistic.

【The split between conception and execution: capitalists conceive, executors are enslaved】

Potters of the past used to conceive their own designs and make them themselves. This put potters in a position of advantage, which was undesirable for capitalists. So execution was divided into separate tasks, and the workers were reduced to a disorganized mass, incapable of anything on their own. In the name of capitalist efficiency, dividing labor while stripping executors of power and status turned out to be an extremely rational combination.

【Scarcity】

What’s needed to win under capitalism is to manufacture scarcity: price things above their use value to extract a surplus, and keep doing this so that market value continually outpaces use value (this is the point Marx criticized).

Water was originally something abundant and highly shared, but as long as it stayed abundant its value would never rise, so usage rights and monopoly rights were created to manufacture scarcity deliberately.

Building a brand is artificially creating a relative scarcity value. Even when a product’s use value is exactly the same, attaching a brand raises its market value. In reality nothing of value is being produced, but within capitalism this is a textbook method.

“It’s not that we’re poor because we don’t produce enough — we’re poor because capitalism keeps manufacturing scarcity.”

【Private wealth and public wealth】

In 1804 the economist Lauderdale argued that private wealth grows by diminishing public wealth. When an individual becomes richer, the public correspondingly becomes poorer. The growth of private wealth increases national wealth on paper, but actual public wealth is declining.

【Sasol】

A technology for producing synthetic oil from coal. CO2 emissions double, and Sasol alone emits more than the entire country of Portugal. South Africa’s food sovereignty movement has criticized this in coordination with social movements worldwide. Sasol has also drawn criticism for having American companies among its shareholders.

【What it means to be poor】

The fact that so many people in developed countries are actually living right on the edge should make us ask: aren’t we being deceived by the illusion of capitalism and economic growth? After all, how much more growth would it take for everyone to become affluent? No one has offered an answer, and in fact, no one knows the answer.

Even talk of “becoming poorer” really just means things like giving up flying to New York for a three-day business trip, or giving up owning two or three cars.

The old style of degrowth thinking is nothing more than a rehash or correction of capitalism.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/08/1270/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.