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Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto Hardcover – January 9, 2024

by KOHEI SAITO (Author), Brian Bergstrom (Translator)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 38 ratings
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"[A] well-reasoned and eye-opening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes] a provocative and visionary proposal."
—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

"Saito’s clarity of thought, plethora of evidence, and conversational, gentle, yet urgent tone . . . are sure to win over open-minded readers who understand the dire nature of our global. . . . A cogently structured anti-capitalist approach to the climate crisis."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and are nevertheless unable to make ends meet, with no future prospects, while the planet is burning?

In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for “sustainable growth” and a “Green New Deal” are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist society—more: the system that caused the problem in the first place cannot be an integral part of the solution.

Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues for:

  • the end of mass production and mass consumption
  • decarbonization through shorter working hours
  • the prioritization of essential labor over corporate profits

By returning to a system of social ownership, he argues, we can restore abundance and focus on those activities that are essential for human life, effectively reversing climate change and saving the planet.
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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Astra House
  4. Publication date
    January 9, 2024
  5. Dimensions
    6.31 x 0.94 x 9.31 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1662602367
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1662602368
  8. See all details
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From the Publisher

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Slow Down by Kohei Saito

Editorial Reviews

Review

"According to Saito, the Earth is completely doomed unless we give up our obsession with G.D.P. and other forms of capitalist insanity. I find myself pretty well convinced."
—Tammy Kim, contributing writer at the New Yorker

"[Slow Down] offers more than a diagnosis of the systemic problems that brought us to this moment; it lays out, in clear and well-researched language, how those problems can be thoroughly addressed . . . Slow Down is that rare hybrid among ideological manifestos: It opens new insights into an existing ideology while uplifting something distinct of its own."
—Matthew Rosza, Salon

"If you want to get a jump on the book everyone will be talking about this winter, you should preorder Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto now."
—Jeva Lange, Heatmap News

"Saitō’s proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day."
—The Millions

"Looking to start out the year with some big ideas? Look no further."
—Tobias Carroll, InsideHook

"[A] well-reasoned and eye-opening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes] a provocative and visionary proposal."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Saito’s clarity of thought, plethora of evidence, and conversational, gentle, yet urgent tone—even when describing the most alarming aspects of the climate crisis—are sure to win over open-minded readers who understand the dire nature of our global situation and that 'green capitalism is a myth.' A cogently structured anti-capitalist approach to the climate crisis."
—Kirkus (starred review)

"Achieving degrowth communism, [Saito] believes, is less about personal choices and more about changing overarching political and economic structures. Marxism, he argues, offers a viable model for reorienting society around the maximization of public goods as opposed to the endless pursuit and concentration of wealth."
—Ben Dooley & Hisako Ueno, The New York Times

"This necessary and energizing 21st Century manifesto is a truth mirror inviting us to see ourselves and our place in the metastatic growth engine that is our current economic system. Saito is a well-read soothsayer -- one who loves this world, who has done his homework, and who is eager to share a viable way forward." 
—John Vaillant, bestselling author of Fire Weather, The Tiger and The Golden Spruce

"Kohei Saito is one of the most important scholars in the world. In Slow Down, he delivers a Karl Marx for the climate crisis and a vision of communism for the 21st century. No work could be more vital today." 
—Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of Palo Alto

"Slow Down has an almost magic ability to formulate complex thoughts in clear language, as well as to combine strict conceptual thinking with passionate personal engagement. Saito's book is not just for anyone interested in ecology or in the problems of today's global capitalism, it is simply indispensable for those of us who want to SURVIVE—in short, to all of us."
—Slavoj Žižek, author of Violence and The Sublime Object of Ideology

"Saitō unites Marxism with ecology and lights a path out of our present crisis. A powerful book from one of the most compelling young thinkers of our time."
—Jason Hickel, author of Less is More

About the Author

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in philosophy from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2016. He was awarded the 2018 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, the most prestigious academic award for Marxian studies, making Saito its youngest recipient. In 2020 the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science awarded him the highly prestigious JSPS prize, awarded to the top 25 scholars in the entire country under the age of 45. In 2021, Slow Down received the "Best Asian Books of the Year" prize from the Asia Book Awards.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Astra House (January 9, 2024)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1662602367
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1662602368
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.31 x 0.94 x 9.31 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 38 ratings

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  2. Brian Bergstrom

    Brian Bergstrom

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    Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer and translator who has lived in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. His writing and translations have appeared in publications including Granta, Aperture, Lit Hub, Mechademia, Japan Forum, positions: asia critique, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. He is the editor and principal translator of We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM Press), which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award. His translation of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi (Astra House, 2022) won the 2022 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He is currently based in Montréal, Canada.

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
38 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mit-TSUBOI
5.0 out of 5 stars Bestseller 2020 in Japan
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2024
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Not only myself, but also many Japanese experienced an eye-opening reading about climate change & degrowth under corvid conditions around 2020. Some of the readers have already changed their lifestyles and attitudes towards the existing economic system. The number of such people seems to be growing slowly but surely.
Can Japan change from a society that continues to seek growth by working around the clock, taking tonics and stimulants, while facing an ageing population, to a mature society that has switched to a steady-state economy?
The fact that the book is still selling over 500,000 copies may suggest a change.
4 people found this helpful
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Paulo A. Reimann
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Reading...No Solution Given Though
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2024
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Loved the book. Perfectly done. The causes are superbly identified. It fails when it comes to tro main issues : how to feed 7Bi people which somewhat 1Bi starves. How to satisfy repressed demand based on desires by the excluded people. As soon exclusion fades a bit a tremendous demand shows up. Anyway, loved the reading and it's pace.
4 people found this helpful
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Autonomeus
4.0 out of 5 stars Important argument for scrapping capitalism to prevent climate catastrophe
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2024
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Kohei Saito is a young Japanese philosopher and Marx scholar. "Slow Down," published in Japan in 2020, is aimed at a non-academic audience (unlike his 2023 "Marx in the Anthropocene," a work of Marxology).

OUTLINE
Here is the basic outline of the argument:
1) The climate catastrophe is underway, and while mainly caused by the rich countries, the poor countries are suffering, and will suffer, the most.
2) Capitalism depends on voracious growth. It is the cause of the crisis and cannot be the solution. This includes "Green Keynesian" capitalism and "Green New Deals."
3) Communism -- not Soviet-style "communism" but Marx's "degrowth communism" -- can be a solution.

DEGROWTH COMMUNISM
Saito's research on Marx has revealed that in his final years Marx broke with productivism and moved to a goal of communism that would be ecologically sustainable. Saito calls this "degrowth communism," in line with the current popularity of the term "degrowth," and lays out its five components:

1) transition to a use-value-based society
2) shorten work hours
3) overcome the division between mental and manual labor
4) democratize the production process
5) prioritize essential work

"Degrowth communism" is presented as a possible future that will end the exploitation of humans by capitalism, and will also end the economic growth caused by capitalism which is destroying the climate and the biosphere (or ecosystem, the term I prefer). Saito makes the case for capitalism being based on scarcity while communism is based on the abundance of sharing the commons.

HOW TO ACHIEVE IT
Saito proposes Barcelona and the "Fearless Cities" movement as a model for action toward "degrowth communism," an international process of cooperative municipalism. He sees it as a way to develop worker co-ops, a decentralized alternative to top-down, undemocratic state action. Workers cooperatively running the means of production is certainly Marx's vision.

I have been active on the left since the late Seventies. This is a nice vision which is however quite unrealistic. Of course it's unrealistic in that it may never happen at all, that goes without saying, but it is also unrealistic in failing to take into account the fierce resistance and repression it would face from the capitalists and their militaries if it ever did start to happen. For more realistic scenarios of mass movements that abolish capitalism and save the ecosystem I recommend three recent novels (see my reviews of all three):

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson/2020)
The Great Transition (Nick Fuller Googins/2023)
Everything For Everyone (O'Brien & Abdelhadi/2022)

DEGROWTH OR STEADY-STATE ECONOMY?
Before there was "degrowth" there was "Limits to Growth" (1972) and Herman Daly, one of the founders of ecological economics, who developed a theory of steady-state economics. Anyone interested in "degrowth" needs to read Daly. Saito uses degrowth as an adjective (degrowth communism), but it is a verb. Growth indicates growing, while degrowth indicates the opposite of growing. But what is the goal of the degrowth? A steady-state economy! The steady-state economy that is no longer capitalist and is no longer growing might be communist, or it might be something else -- it might even be fascist. "Degrowth" is a fuzzy term that, as it has come to be used, confuses the process with the end goal.

OTHER PROBLEMS
1) Saito modifies the typology created by political geographers Mann & Wainwright in their "Climate Leviathan" (2018 -- see my review). In doing so he loses the most important of its categories, which is the current international capitalist order of climate treaties and the IPCC.

2) He asserts that those of us in the Global North, the rich part of the world, enjoy our way of life based on the exploitation of the Global South, the poor part of the world. The terms used in world-system theory are core and periphery -- the core exploits the periphery. But he presents no evidence for this, and so is bound to leave many readers unconvinced. Beyond the obvious history of conquest and colonization, there are statistical measures available. The best can be found in Kunibert Raffer's 1987 "Unequal Exchange and the Evolution of the World System."

3) The book focuses exclusively on the destruction of the climate by economic growth and CO2 emissions. It does not include the larger issue of ecological degradation caused by capitalist growth. The need for a steady-state economy was developed in response to the ecological crisis before the climate crisis emerged as the main ecological issue, and that larger crisis needs to be recognized and emphasized.

*** *** ***
Despite some flaws, this is an important contribution to the debate and to the movement to stop the climate catastrophe.

Everyone should read it!
19 people found this helpful
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Brian Lewis
3.0 out of 5 stars Eat the Rich
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2024
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This may be the most ambitious book ever written. Its goals include overcoming capitalism, reforming democracy and decarbonizing society. Big ideas, all to be achieved under a banner inscribed with a slogan guaranteed to turn most people off - "degrowth communism."

Truthfully, the author seems more concerned with rehabilitating Karl Marx's reputation than saving the planet from climate change, which he says make his ideas necessary. His defense of Marx makes up the bulk of the book and will no doubt lose a lot of readers, not just those on the right. Much of his case is based on the late writings of Marx, including unpublished works and letters that author Kohei Saito insists indicate what Marx truly believed. It is tough enough to follow a book where you have not read the author's original work, (which I haven't,) and Saito relies on obscure writings from Marx.

Saito also takes a scorched earth approach to opposing views. If you have endured a college course with professor who has to define both sides of the argument, you will recognize the condescending style and tone. He makes a statement or quotes from Marx, then explains why people get the statement wrong, then tells you what it truly means, usually without specifics.

Here is a test - if you can follow this sentence, maybe you are the right reader for this book. "It's when the hegemony of capital completes the process of subsumption that the true danger of Bastani-style accelerationism becomes clear."

I did hang in there to the end on this book, and to be fair came in contact with some provocative ideas. Certainly Saito's critique of capitalism has merit. The idea of the commons, wealth that should be managed and shared by everyone, like water, electricity, shelters, healthcare and education is an appealing one. His suggestion that advertising, marketing and packaging should be banned since they stimulate demand for stuff we don't need, is not irrational until you ask how.

But it was such a slog to get there. You might want to try Rebecca Solnit instead, especially A Paradise Built in Hell, which makes the point that we do seem to find ways to work together when disaster strikes.
3 people found this helpful
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Ivar Zeile
5.0 out of 5 stars There is nothing within this comprehensive assessment of reality that doesn't make complete sense
Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2024
It's hard to imagine many people, particularly Americans, accepting the idea that Marx and communism can or should be reconsidered in light of a failing world at the end of capitalism. But that's precisely why this book is timely and important. Anyone with any degree of intelligence and ability to see the world for what it is now, and always has been, should easily be able to embrace the dialogue and arguments set forth within, and at least recognize the potential of their merits. There is simply nothing presented that doesn't make complete, absolute sense. It is all well presented and quite easy to comprehend, which is even more important in attempting to make an impact on people in a world that seem unable to see or think straight, let alone for humanity.
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Amazon カスタマー
4.0 out of 5 stars どうやら『人新生の資本論』の英訳でした。
Reviewed in Japan on February 3, 2024
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新著かと思っていましたが、『人新生の資本論』の英訳のようです。どれくらい加筆修正されているのでしょうか。気づかず買ってしまいました。外国語著作の邦訳書と同じように著者（斎藤氏）の横に、（英語への）翻訳者も記してくれればわかりやすかったのにと思いました。
One person found this helpful
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