Have you heard about “degrowth communism?” Degrowth isn’t a new idea but recently a Japanese Marxist named Kohei Saito has published a book promoting his own brand of degrowth which adds the word communism to it.
Any attempt to blend degrowth with capitalism is doomed to fail,” he proclaims in “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” Capitalism doesn’t just tend toward growth, he says, but requires it. “To demand the cessation of all these things — to demand deceleration — is in fact to demand capitalism’s end.”
This idea might sound extreme, but it has found a considerable audience: “Slow Down,” which was released in the United States in January, has sold half a million copies since it was first published in Japan in 2020. In it, Saito quotes the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who denounced an older generation for only being “interested in solutions that…
