Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’?

Kohei Saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?”

The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.

The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.

Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.

As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.

This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regulator commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together and Saito posted it on X.

Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple pieces criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.

It’s understandable why Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.

Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good as exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.

Japan has worshipped as devoutly as anyone. After the country’s defeat in World War II, GDP replaced military might as a source of national pride. Japan’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 10 percent until the 1970s and remained strong through the 1980s as its automotive and electronics industries boomed. So when the Asian financial bubble burst and the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990s, the country faced not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning. If Japan wasn’t growing, what was it?

[Read: Does the economy really need to stop growing quite so much?]

Saito was born in 1987, just before the crash, and he grew up in a time of stagnation. As a student at a private all-boys secondary school, his politics were moderate, he says. He thought of problems like inequality and consumerism in terms of individual moral failings rather than as the consequences of policy choices. But the war in Iraq got him reading Noam Chomsky, college introduced him to Marx, and the 2008 financial crisis spurred him to question the capitalist system. Saito briefly enrolled at the University of Tokyo, but transferred to Wesleyan University, which he found insufficiently radical, on a scholarship. He graduated in 2009.

The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster at Fukushima pushed Saito to reconsider humanity’s relationship with nature. “Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”

Saito moved to Berlin and got his Ph.D. at Humboldt University, where he studied Marx’s views on ecology. In 2016, he published an academic treatise on Marx’s “ecosocialism,” the English translation of which won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for books in the Marxist tradition.

Around that time, the idea of degrowth, which had been kicking around environmentalist circles for decades, was gaining steam in Europe. Saito started reading thinkers such as Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, and Kate Raworth, all of whom argued that there are planetary boundaries we can’t exceed without causing mayhem. Thinkers since Thomas Malthus had been talking about limits to humanity’s expansion—sometimes with disturbing implications, as in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, which described with disgust a teeming Delhi slum. But degrowthers identified the pursuit of GDP as the culprit, arguing that it fails to account for all kinds of human flourishing. Greta Thunberg amplified the degrowth message further when she mocked capitalist society’s “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Japan was a ripe target for these ideas. For decades, the country had been mired in low and sometimes even negative growth. The problem was no longer new, and the government’s proposed solutions—negative interest rates; trying to boost worker productivity—were losing their appeal. “A lot of young people feel like, I don’t want to work endless overtime and give up my family life and all my hobbies just to serve a corporation until I die,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies modern Japanese history. “For what? Just to grow our GDP?”  

Saito saw an opening: to connect degrowth with the Marxist ideas that he had been studying closely for years. Degrowth on its own had bad branding, he told me between bites of Beyond Burger at Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights. The solution, he said with a grin, was to add “another very negative term: communism.”

When we met, Saito had traded his usual blazer and clean-cut look for an oversize denim jacket and a boy-band tousle. He has a disarming sense of humor: When he signs a book, he stamps it with a cartoon image of himself alongside Marx. But he’s serious about the need to embrace degrowth communism. He argues, not unreasonably, that degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, which encourages individuals to act selfishly and grow their riches. “Many people criticize neoliberalism,” Saito said. “But they don’t criticize capitalism. So that’s why we have ethical capitalism, sustainable capitalism, green capitalism.” Degrowth communism instead targets what Saito says is the root cause of our climate woes—capitalism itself—rather than just the symptoms, and prioritizes the public good over profit.

While degrowthers and Marxists have plenty of intellectual overlap, the match has always been an awkward one. Marx is generally considered pro-growth: He wanted to leverage the productive tools of capitalism to bring about a socialist future in which the fruits of that production would be fairly distributed. Saito, however, rejects that “Promethean” characterization of Marx. In Capital in the Anthropocene, he instead argues that Marx converted late in life from productivism to, yes, degrowth communism. To make his case, Saito cites some of Marx’s lesser-known writings, including a draft of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was published after Marx’s death.

Saito’s book is a mishmash of political polemic, cultural criticism, and obscure Marxist exegesis. He calls individual actions like using a thermos instead of plastic water bottles “meaningless,” and mocks the UN Sustainable Development Goals, dismissing them and other market-friendly solutions as “the opiate of the masses.” Instead of relying on technology alone to save humanity, he argues, wealthy countries need to give up their consumerist lifestyles and redistribute their resources to poor countries to help them navigate the transition to a slower global economy. He advocates transitioning away from capitalism toward a “sharing economy,” and offers a mix of solutions both modest and bold. Workers should own their businesses. Citizens should control local energy production. Also: “What if Uber were publicly owned, turning its platform into a commons?” Saito argues that this arrangement would produce not scarcity but “radical abundance” as we freed ourselves from the obligation to generate ever-higher profits: “There will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening, and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read … Compared to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day, this is clearly a richer lifestyle.”

On a superficial level, Saito put a fresh young face on old environmentalist ideas. Well spoken and self-deprecating, he didn’t have the off-putting self-seriousness of many ideologues. After years of ineffective stimulus and grind culture, Saito’s ideas may have intrigued Japanese audiences looking for “the opposite of the status quo,” Nick Kapur told me. Saito’s analysis also offered a kind of tonic for Japan’s national neurosis around slow growth: What if this is good, actually?

On a recent Saturday, Saito sat onstage at the People’s Forum, a community center in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, along with three other panelists: a historian, a geographer, and a journalist from The New Republic. It was a friendly crowd, but each of the panelists cast gentle doubt on Saito’s pitch. The historian said he’d like to see more modeling of the impact of degrowth policies; the geographer wondered how a degrowth agenda would ever expand beyond small, local experiments; and the journalist, Kate Aronoff, suggested that degrowth had a branding problem.

Saito had just begun his U.S. tour, and he was already encountering more resistance than he’d expected. “One thing surprising about American culture is they’re really anti-degrowth,” Saito told me after the event, as we walked along a chaotic stretch of 9th Avenue. When an American writer recently laced into him online, Saito’s European friends came to his defense. But here he was more isolated.

The simplest case against degrowth is that it’s not necessary. The prospect of boosting GDP while reducing emissions—known as “decoupling”—used to look like a moon shot. But now it’s happening. In more than 30 countries, including the United States and much of Europe, emissions are declining while GDP climbs, even when you factor in the “consumption-based emissions” generated in places that manufacture goods for rich countries. Solar and wind are cheaper in the U.S. than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles, for all their struggles, will make up half of global car sales by 2035, according to one recent estimate. Decoupling still isn’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but green-growthers argue that we can speed up the process with enough investment. “It’s easy to say we need a socialist revolution to solve the climate crisis, but that’s not going to happen in the timescale,” says Robert Pollin, a progressive economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky on the Green New Deal.

Other detractors say that degrowth would be actively harmful. It’s one thing to ask billionaires to cut back, but what about everyone else? Are they supposed to abandon hope of raising their standard of living? Saito includes working-class Americans in his indictment of the “imperial mode of living” that he blames for carbon emissions. This was too much for Matt Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, and the left-leaning climate journalist Leigh Phillips, who co-wrote an article for Jacobin accusing Saito of doing “capital’s work” by “dividing the international working class against itself.”

Perhaps the most vicious reads of Saito target his interpretation of Marx. In the eyes of his critics, his reliance on a handful of passages in order to prove that Marx embraced degrowth communism amounts to a kind of fan fiction. One otherwise-sympathetic scholar wrote in a Marxist journal that the evidence Saito marshals is “simply not very convincing.” Huber and Leigh describe various claims about Marx’s views made by Saito as “wild,” “remarkable,” and “unsubstantiated.” Even John Bellamy Foster, the University of Oregon sociology professor who pioneered Marxist ecological studies in the 1990s and published Saito’s first book, told an interviewer that “no concrete evidence could be found of Marx actually advocating what could reasonably be called degrowth” and called Saito’s analysis “profoundly ahistorical.” (Saito responded in an email that Huber and Phillips “never read Marx’s notebooks that I investigate. Thus, they are not in a position to judge whether my claims are unsubstantiated because I am rereading Marx’s texts based on new materials.” As for Foster’s criticism, Saito wrote: “​​Marx never used the terms like degrowth, sustainability, and ecology. It is an attempt to push beyond Marx’s thought because there is no necessity to dogmatize Marx and he did not complete his work.”)

The question of whether Marx was a degrowther is academic—and so is degrowth itself, unless it can find a viable political path. Right now, that path is murky at best. The next politician to win reelection by urging voters to accept a lower standard of living will be the first. In the U.S., policies like a carbon tax and a national cap-and-trade program are dead on arrival. Even in Europe, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they say erode their livelihoods. In today’s politics, proposing sacrifice seems like an obvious form of political suicide that would only empower politicians who don’t care about climate change.

Saito nonetheless insists that degrowth is politically possible. It starts small, he says, with workers’ cooperatives and citizens’ assemblies, and then spreads from city to city. Europe is already taking the lead, he says: Amsterdam recently banned building new hotels, while Paris restricted parking for SUVs. (One could fairly ask whether these are degrowth policies or just traditional forms of regulation.) The Spanish government has piloted a four-day workweek, Barcelona has introduced car-free “superblocks,” and the Spanish city of Girona has begun to explore how to implement “post-growth policies.” Saito says success is simply a matter of convincing a critical mass of citizens to push for degrowth. He cites the statistic popularized by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that it only takes 3.5 percent of the population protesting to enact change.

Isn’t expecting rich countries to act against their own interests a little optimistic? “Oh, yeah,” Saito said. “But the capitalist alternative is much more optimistic.” For Saito, the long-term alternative to degrowth communism is not green growth but “climate fascism,” in which countries lock down, hoard their resources, and disregard the collective good. Faced with that prospect, humanity will make the right choice. “As a philosopher,” he said, “I want to believe in the universality of reason.”

Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”

Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”

Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.

Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.

“At bottom it’s not actually an evidence-based agenda,” Ted Nordhaus, the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and self-described “eco-modernist,” told me. “It’s sort of a worldview and a vibe.”

And yet, for many, the vibe hits. Degrowth captures a core truth of the fight against climate change: What we’re doing is not enough and might even be making things worse. Degrowth might fail too, but in the eyes of its supporters, at least it’s directionally correct. It’s the protest vote of climate activism.

While in D.C., Saito co-headlined a workshop with a few dozen students at Georgetown, where they discussed degrowth. The group was mostly in favor, according to two students who attended. Fiona Naughton, a rising sophomore who studies international labor policy, told me she and many of her peers find Saito’s ideas inspiring. “A lot of us have felt such immense climate anxiety and considered whether or not we should have children,” she said. “Degrowth gives us hope for a future that we haven’t felt in a long, long time.”

I also followed up with Tianle Zhang, the protester who’d taken a selfie with Saito at the Columbia rally, and asked him about how he’d discovered Saito’s work. Zhang said that as a kid in Indiana, he’d watched the news in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. In college, he’d sensed a gap between the immensity of the problem of climate change and the attempts to address it. Saito was one of the few scholars he found who was trying to connect thinking about the environment with a broader theoretical critique of capitalism and society.

Zhang said he was also deeply influenced by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who descends so far into climate despair that he considers committing an act of terrorism. “For me, it was showing the failures of conventional morality to handle the issue of climate,” Zhang said.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why the age of American progress ended]

Degrowth’s appeal might be similar: not political, not even economic, but moral. In the climactic final scene of First Reformed, Hawke’s character wraps himself in barbed wire as he prepares to possibly do something horrifying and futile. This seems like a fitting metaphor for not only Saito’s proposals—Saito acknowledges that degrowth would require pain—but also their psychological appeal. We have been bad, and we must atone.

Beyond its stark moral claims, the very fact of degrowth’s unreasonableness gives it weight. Degrowth advocates have called it a “missile word,” designed to provoke. There’s a reason we’re talking about degrowth and not the “steady-state economy,” which environmentalists have been pushing for decades. As the prominent degrowth thinker Jason Hickel has written, the term itself upends conventional wisdom: “It is only negative if we start from the assumption that more growth is good and desirable.” To this way of thinking, the inconceivability of degrowth only highlights how trapped we are in the growth-fetishist mindset.

At the end of our dinner, Saito told me he’s working on his next book, about the role of government when it comes to implementing degrowth. “The state has to intervene, but how can we make a democratic transition?” he asked rhetorically. I asked if he had an answer. He said, “Not yet.”