‘A new way of life’
September 9, 2022 4:07 PM   Subscribe

The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller. [SL Guardian] The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.
posted by Ahmad Khani (78 comments total) 55 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have read nothing about this thesis nor a single word of the article in this post, but the content of the words in this FPP reflect entirely what I have felt for most of my now middle-aged life. I will read more and speak more if I feel necessary, but for me the response at first presentation of this is "well, fucking DUH!"
posted by hippybear at 4:11 PM on September 9, 2022 [27 favorites]


George Monbiot over at the Guardian has also written a fair bit on this
posted by piyushnz at 4:30 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


“well, fucking DUH!”

Honestly, I hope that there’s more to the book than that because “capitalism is destroying the environment”, while not wrong, definitely feels a bit played out as a critique.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:40 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


“capitalism is destroying the environment”, while not wrong, definitely feels a bit played out as a critique.

That's a weird thing to complain about. The more the idea gets spread the better.
posted by simmering octagon at 4:55 PM on September 9, 2022 [46 favorites]


There s a whole school of "steady state economics" and a subdiscipline of ecological economics, but these writings are excluded from most academic economics departments, which remain hopelessly ideological because of how they are funded
posted by eustatic at 4:58 PM on September 9, 2022 [9 favorites]


That's a weird thing to complain about. The more the idea gets spread the better.

I think it might be time to focus not so much on what, but rather how.
posted by amtho at 5:00 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]


Look at this "climate bill" the US just passed, which mainly seeks to replace one kind of consumption for another.

10 years from now, when all of the oil industry promises about hydrogen, and carbon capture and drilling fail (for the third time in three decades) I don't think it will be known as a climate bill.
posted by eustatic at 5:01 PM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]


“capitalism is destroying the environment”, while not wrong, definitely feels a bit played out as a critique.

That’s a weird thing to complain about. The more the idea gets spread the better.

“Played out” was the wrong phrase; “ubiquitous” is what I should have written.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:07 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


I think it might be time to focus not so much on what, but rather how.

Sure.

Meanwhile the author reached more than half a million people in an incredibly conservative country and informed them about degrowth and marxism. Complaining that "we've heard it before" is missing the point.
posted by simmering octagon at 5:14 PM on September 9, 2022 [43 favorites]


One of the more interesting discussions/thought experiments of how we might restructure society to address this is Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. In short, by making a new global currency (backed by the major banks), that pays people/corporations/states for leaving carbon in the earth. (Obviously a bit more complicated than that, it is a 500+ page book after all).
posted by coffeecat at 5:14 PM on September 9, 2022 [8 favorites]


Right now, being the by-far predominant economic structure in the world, capitalism's excesses must absolutely be reined in to have any hope of keeping our environment in the ranges within which humans have prospered. By simply being the widest-practiced economic system in the world, it is the biggest, most legitimate target for sweeping reform in service of our collective descendants. That said, though, capitalism has by no means a monopoly on environmental abuse and disregard.

In terms of the old-school Karl Marx idea of a post-capital era in economics, that's something that we should consider. Escrowed profits and dividends, workers' cooperatives as predominant corporate structure rather than proprietorship or most corporate shares owned by those who do not contribute to the success of the enterprise, share dilution over time for nonparticipants, concerted progress toward what a steady-state economy means, confiscation of idle wealth? Sign me up for all these.

But I'm going to give serious side-eye to anyone who seriously proposes communism per se as the solution to environmental ill wrought by capitalism, because I do remember the 20th Century. I don't have a great deal of patience for "well, those communist countries weren't really communist" apologia. Command economies only theoretically protect the environment. Even capitalism theoretically responds to incentives to protect future prosperity. Both have been captured by elites addicted to cheap fossil fuels and fall prey to entrenched, hidebound power brokers who care far more for their pet ideology far than pragmatic progress.
posted by tclark at 5:19 PM on September 9, 2022 [15 favorites]


capitalism is destroying the environment

Once capital is forced to price in the damage it does, the destruction will be kept at a level sufficient to maintain profits.

I suspect that capitalism will somehow outlast humanity, as it seems to adapt faster.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:24 PM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]


I am sort of hoping that we do not need to dismantle capitalism in order to stop climate change, because we do not have the time to work out what will replace it and also make the necessary and largely understandable changes we need to make.

(Moreover, I'm not entirely convinced that the only version of capitalism that can exist is the rapacious late capitalism that we're in. It's been restrained before; it broke free of its restraints thanks to neoliberals in the 80s, which is why we do eventually need to replace it. Restricting the free movement of money and finding better ways of delivering on the public good without either poll-driven governments or greedy corporations being in charge feel more achievable, and will take enough of the sting out of late capitalism for now.)
posted by Merus at 5:57 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]


"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first"

-Frederick Engels.

from the article: "In practical terms, that means an end to mass production and the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion"

"Let’s dwell on that last sentence for a second: One-half to three-quarters of industrial inputs returned to the environment as wastes within a year!" (ibid)

The author spoke of slowing "social production" perhaps an example would be the the vast array of toothpaste and glittery stickers to choose from.

"in this sense, rapid climate change and revolutionary social change are analogous because they both exemplify the sudden transformation of quantity into quality." (ibid)
as "capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth." (article)

I would read the hell out of this book.
posted by clavdivs at 6:11 PM on September 9, 2022 [13 favorites]


i would just like to throw out there that the "de-growth" that needs to happen are for the super rich, and a lot of poor people actually need a lot of development.

Capitalism will never do what needs to be done though, I think we can all agree on that.

We need a democratically and socially driven use of materials to better those who are very poor, and not more super yachts.

we have plenty of material, plenty of people, and plenty of energy, its just we are spinning our wheels so much trying to make profit that we are destroying nature, our souls, and our future.

I often see people combine de-growth with de-population, and other nasty ideas. The truth is the earth could easily support all 8 billion of us, if 25% of us didn't live like the rich part of American and Europe and Asia, and 1% of didn't live like evil billionaire ghouls.

The future I want to live in is one where the democratic process is used to determine what we build, how we built it and our culture shifts to one of social abundance, not personal greed.
posted by stilgar at 6:22 PM on September 9, 2022 [14 favorites]


i would just like to throw out there that the "de-growth" that needs to happen are for the super rich

I would put out there that de-growth is not having a new iPhone every year or two and not having a new car lease every 3-5 years and buying appliances that last 20 years instead of 7 and any number of things that aren't for the super rich but are for people living normal lives in Westernized countries.

How different would the world waste problem be if we moved back to glass bottles with a deposit on them that weren't recycled but were washed and reused? That right there. But no, everything is disposable.

De-growth is something we need to plan for and educate the public about and elicit buy-in to the idea that having less means more life for the planet. But, alas, capitalism.
posted by hippybear at 6:29 PM on September 9, 2022 [38 favorites]


we have plenty of material, plenty of people, and plenty of energy

When I think about what a fair, sustainable, and climate-healing economy might look like--especially under degrowth--I remember Amitav Ghosh's chilling line: "What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being. Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process."

It's not just yachts we're going to have to get rid of. It is the basic idea of modern machine-aided life.
posted by mittens at 6:31 PM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]


“‘Hitoshinsei no Shihonron [Capital in the Anthropocene]’ by Kohei Saito reviewed by Ulv Hanssen,” Ulv Hanssen, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, 18 July 2022
posted by ob1quixote at 7:21 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]


Marx didn’t have a clue about this stuff.

Why do I have the feeling Saito's motive is more to do with revitalizing Marx and making him relevant than it's about, I don’t know — saving humanity and half the remaining vertebrates in the world from extinction?
posted by jamjam at 7:35 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


Marx didn’t have a clue about this stuff.

I'm not a Marx scholar by any stretch, but it was fascinating to me that when that giant ship wedged itself across the Suez Canal, people had Marx quotes close at hand that applied directly to the situation.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn there are Marx quotations that are exactly about "this stuff", but I wouldn't know how to find them. Perhaps I will come across them to share here.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


with revitalizing Marx and making him relevant than it's about,

I think bringing Marx in turns the whole social concept to one of science, not just theory.
posted by clavdivs at 7:52 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


If you’re interested in reading an economist who really did have a clue, you could give Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process a try.

It was big in the Carter White House, I’ve heard.
posted by jamjam at 7:53 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]


See also the excellent Less is More - How Degrowth Will Save the World by economist Jason Hickel. Solid rundown and review of it here, for those who may not want to read the whole thing.
posted by Roach at 7:58 PM on September 9, 2022 [8 favorites]


Once capital is forced to price in the damage it does, the destruction will be kept at a level sufficient to maintain profits.

You'd like to think, but I suspect that as the planet becomes unlivable the fuckers will just start selling us canisters of breathable air. It will be just like that Perri-Air gag in Spaceballs, so maybe some clever somebody will start selling the hipsters real cans of air that look like the can of air in Spaceballs.

There will always be a moon over Marin.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 9:30 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]


I also thought of Ministry for the Future. It's fiction, but whole chapters can fairly be labeled as non-fiction essays on the climate crisis. It's a great book and more people should read it.
posted by zardoz at 10:34 PM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]


Is there a carrying capacity index?
You can have 8 billion people, but they can't all have refrigerators without killing the planet.
How many people can you have if you 'de-growth' refrigerators?
If you want a world where everyone has a refrigerator without killing the planet, what's the 'de-growth' number on people?
Is there a scientific Goldilocks Number that's just right?
posted by bartleby at 12:05 AM on September 10, 2022


Why do I have the feeling Saito's motive is more to do with revitalizing Marx and making him relevant than it's about, I don’t know — saving humanity and half the remaining vertebrates in the world from extinction?

Just to point out this kind of ad hominem would not fly at all in academic circles, and for good reason. Because it's intellectually pernicious.
posted by polymodus at 12:38 AM on September 10, 2022 [20 favorites]


There have been many environmentally sustainable societies on the order of multiple centuries. They were attacked defeated, subjugated, and often genocided by the greedy dirty ruthless invaders from the west-asian subcontinent in a 5 century orgy of murder, rape and conquest joined by those who learned from and copied their imperial and industrial ways.

Fossil fuels - even marginal plays -- provide so much return on investment financially and energy wise and have such attractive military performance that they will be used until either:
A) effective global governance outlaws pollution and habitat destruction everywhere and enforces it on everyone.
or B) civilization completes its murder suicide pact with the living world and collapses (irradiating the surface and wiping itself and most animals out)

or C) a persuasive enough bumper sticker, podcast or book is crafted to peacefully change the hearts and minds of the greedy paychopaths who enjoy and profit and derive their identiy and status from watching it all burn.

D) Someone invents an AI smart enough to discover that poisonong our air water food is actually counter productive.


Build earth sheltered arks with a diversity of species and peoples, because we are on Ship # B. :(
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:39 AM on September 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


Also, Schumacker had an economic approach to the environment that was sane, for those who like Hickel and want to avoid Marx.

Like Hippybear, I'm looking forward to this read.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:40 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


It will be an interesting read, but I have no faith in simple solutions/grand theories, and specially not in the social sciences.
I believe we need thousands of smaller solutions widely distributed, and we need to tax the very rich in order to make them happen. We need regulations, innovations, changes in culture, more democracy, better options for the 90% of us, more restrictions on the 10 %. And it all means more government -- but in my view, any simple solution will be anti-democratic, and more government and less democracy is a recipe for disaster.

We need to discuss what growth can be. For instance, in the UK, millions of homes need better insulation and energy efficiency, which millions of people will learn the hard way this winter. It is frankly a scandal that it hasn't been solved decades ago. BUT: if a government set about to get this done, maybe using direct funding, or tax rebates, or whatever, it would create literally millions of jobs in the areas that need them the most. It would mean growth in welfare and standards of living in the families who would benefit from the program. The next task would then be to channel that growth into sustainable consumption: bikes rather than cars, appliances that last more than 20 years and use less energy than hand washing clothes or dishes, locally produced food and clothing that is made to last. Spend luxury money on intangibles such as concerts or theater. The initial government investment would come back because people would get proper jobs and be able to pay taxes.
All of the technology mentioned in this random example already exists in large scale. And could provide sustainable growth. And, I bet that the culture change that would come with such a program would lead to new innovation, more sustainable change.

In other countries, there are huge gains to be found in empowerment of women. Educate girls, give women their own money, teach land management or other skills, support local democracy, and sustainable growth can follow: less land erosion, better access to water, more and better food, less population growth and access to information and solar powered amenities. I'm not saying only women can achieve this, I'm saying that so far evidence suggests women are a very important part of this.
Again: these are tried and tested methods. Spread them further, and we will see them develop and improve.

Most of us in the West need to eat less meat. Our foodways have already been radically changed at least once, probably thrice in the 20th century. We can do it again. Home economy classes in schools (now for all genders, thanks), the engagement of popular food writers and bloggers, help from supermarket chains and of course some sort of tariffs of tolls on meat, that can help pay for restructuring farmlands from monocultures to more biodiverse landscapes.

And so on...

Not only can it be done, it is much easier to do than the suggested Neo-Marxist revolution. The only people for whom this would not be an improvement in quality of life are the 10%. But to make this change, we need the politicians to grow some spines. We need an FDR for the climate challenge.
posted by mumimor at 1:43 AM on September 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


Is there a carrying capacity index?

There is but it's controversial - Ecological Footprint. If you break it down by country, countries with biocapacity surplus are Brazil, Canada, Australia and Russia - countries with vast areas of forest, food producing land and fresh water. It is actually hard to envision just how much food producing land Australia has - almost all cattle is grass fed because it is cheaper to let them roam free and eat grass, while in the US most cattle is grain fed from soybeans grown out of the destruction of the Amazon forest or something. Interestingly, grass fed free range cattle don't get much fat marbling the way cattle grown in industrial feedlots do, so Australian beef doesn't even rank in US beef quality charts, we had to create our own quality chart based on taste and texture. Australia culls 3 million kangaroo per year because of overpopulation, and we eat them. It's as close to an eco-friendly, guilt free eat diet you can think of.

Countries with the worst biocapacity deficit? Singapore and Hong Kong if you look at a percentage view - there is no way in hell they are able to sustain their population with their nonexistent land. In absolute terms? China and US are the worst offenders.

But this is really kind of nonsense to begin with. Why should an Australian be granted more rights to pollute and consume because they have more land to begin with? But wait isn't that what "living within your means" is all about?

Capitalism and private ownership of land doesn't make too much sense when you examine it too closely, but this is the system we have.
posted by xdvesper at 1:49 AM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: I have read nothing about this thesis nor a single word of the article in this post, but the content of the words in this FPP reflect entirely what I have felt for most of my now middle-aged life.
posted by automatronic at 3:12 AM on September 10, 2022 [12 favorites]


> But this is really kind of nonsense to begin with. Why should an Australian be granted more rights to pollute and consume because they have more land to begin with? But wait isn't that what "living within your means" is all about?

The "doughnut economics" view is that it's a closed system and countries-as-regional-administration must collaborate, which scares some people because it echoes the "command economy" of the communist manifestos. 'Being scared but doing the right thing anyway' is a challenge for our time and needs leaders able to articulate an emotionally cogent vision of how we proceed. Let me know if you see one.
posted by k3ninho at 3:38 AM on September 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


Global trade renders a 'local' ecological footprint merely an index of interdependence.
The cumulative footprint however measures our overshoot of various sustainable and finite resources and thus the fraction of our material use that can not be sustained.

How that excess is distributed and when it faulters how that austerity is distributed is a political exercise. The wealthy intend to sacrifice 10,000 indigenious and poor each to preserve their 'right' to private jets. The 10,000 modest folks would be hard pressed to accomplish the assasination of even one billionaire.... in between and adjacent to those extremes we have a thread about the morality and PR consequences of deflating a handful of SUV tyres in Manhattan and London. Apparently quite a controversial act of ecoterrorism.

Que sera.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 3:40 AM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


Marx didn’t have a clue about this stuff.

Tell me you haven't read Marx without telling me you haven't read Marx.

I mean, Marx's critique of capitalism wasn't exactly un-nuanced. The overlap between Marx and Adam Smith is pretty hefty, in fact. Marx's main point is this: when the abstract idea of "capital" becomes the thing we measure status and success by, and when capital and ownership are essentially one and the same, you wind up with:
  1. People setting out to possess gluttonously unhealthy portions of society

  2. People abusing their ownership of property to acquire more property

  3. People pushed, in general, to consume and acquire and own, to the extent that marketplaces focus more on "create new ways to consume" than on utility of any sort

  4. The treatment of workers as serfs, because once labor is divorced from ownership, there's no reason not to treat employees like just another resource to be consumed and snuffed out
All of this is directly relevant to the processes that agitate climate change. In fact, I've been reading a book about soil health by a North Dakotan farmer who I somewhat doubt is well-versed in his Marx, and his description of industrial soil destruction and its impact on soil's ability to retain carbon leads him to say this:
Our conventional approach to crop production is akin to delivering steel, rubber, and plastic to a factory and hoping lots of good automobiles come out of the factory, without knowing anything about the workers or what they need to do their job. If we remain unaware of the process of building cars, what might come out of the factory would be left mostly to luck. So, if the soil is the factory of the farm, we need to understand who works there and what those workers need to be productive. Most of us would have to admit we don't know much about the workings of the soil factory.
I was struck by how incredibly, accidentally Marxist this is: the devaluing of workers going hand-in-hand with a focus on "production" that doesn't ultimately understand what it's producing, and the idea that our only way out of this is to get back to (literal) roots, emphasizing the relationship between labor and achievement more than the relationship between property and capital.

I haven't read the book in this article, but then, neither have any of the folks shitting on it here. I'll be very curious whether it catches on in translation, and I'm curious how it frames the things it has to say!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:58 AM on September 10, 2022 [37 favorites]


I think even center-right economics acknowledge that Marx' analysis was mostly correct (of course not the far right, but their understanding of economy has been solidly taken down). And I've even heard one say that The Communist Manifesto was relevant in it's time, 1848, an age that was maybe even worse that ours in terms of exploitation and destruction of human and natural ressources. If we had continued on the trajectory that was set out in 1848, we would be far beyond the tipping point now, if we had even been here. Certainly not *here* typing on a computer. There have been som big pushbacks against unhinged capitalism since 1848. But capitalism fights back, and now we are again at a stage where robber barons are threatening humanity itself.

The question is then what to do with that analysis, and the vision of revolution and socialism. When Marx lived, democracy was a new-fangled thing that had not really proven its worth, specially not in Europe. Now we are in a different place.
posted by mumimor at 4:41 AM on September 10, 2022 [7 favorites]


So, I can’t select text from Metafilter in my phone, but upthread I noticed a fellow commenter expressing a misunderstanding about the defining feature of communism that I was also taught growing up. As part of Cold War propaganda, many of us were taught that capitalism = markets and communism = central planning. There were indeed differences in level or type of economic planning between West and East that could be pointed to up until the mid to late 80s (though of course there was a lot more planning involved in Western economies than the story goes, and more markets in Soviet or Chinese economies, it just looked very different in both cases on either side of the wall). The actual distinctions or defining features are around control/ownership of capita and distribution of resources. So, for example, you can also have anarcho-communist economies (larger scale versions have tended to be short-lived due to being actively attacked, but many smaller scale communes have been effectively operating such economies for decades). Meanwhile, anarcho-syndicalism (very roughly: all production owned and democratically managed by worker cooperatives or sole producers/artisans) may also fall under the broad category of economic systems consistent with Marxist theories (modulo specific organizational details). On the other hand, it’s quite opaque of course but from the bit I’ve read, North Korea’s economy seems to be pretty much fully centrally planned, but very much not aligned with Marx (much closer to Amazon, really, in the hierarchy and treatment of the majority of workers).
posted by eviemath at 5:35 AM on September 10, 2022 [6 favorites]


(Capital, not capita, of course. Missed the edit window.)
posted by eviemath at 5:42 AM on September 10, 2022


Jumping off eviemath's comment, it seems clear that an enormous amount of the economy would have to come under some form of central-ish planning if the human race is to survive. And fortunately, an enormous amount of it already is...it's just the planning is done by Amazon, Walmart, Maersk, what have you. The key then is to socialize the existing planning infrastructure. All of which is my excuse to insert Leigh Phillips' and Michal Rozworski's The People's Republic of Walmart into the conversation. Phillips, interestingly, is vociferously anti-degrowth, to the point I had to stop following him because he made me so mad, haha. But the book is really solid and a lot of fun.
posted by mittens at 5:50 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


It is not at all clear to me that more central planning is necessary to solve our environmental crises. The source of our crises is too much centralization in economic (and political) power enabling short-term and selfish decision-making and externalizing harms from those making the decisions. Possibly having different people with a similar level of power in economic decision-making might solve things, but I suspect the same temptations of power would come into play.

Rather, balanced and sustainable societies within the natural world tend to be organized on emergent principles. Here’s a nice quick read from Scientific American that doesn’t mention emergent behavior/systems by name, but gives a nice snippet of a historical predecessor in the development of such modern ideas.
posted by eviemath at 6:03 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


Marx didn’t have a clue about this stuff.

it’s true that nobody in the 19th century had a clue yet about climate change, and yet marx already had diagnosed the cause: competition leads to falling profits which in turn push capital to constantly seek out new and larger markets, which means constant, unending and ever growing production of goods for sale. To remain profitable in a competitive market you have no choice but to grow the scale of your business because your competition tries to beat you by lowering prices. but competitive advantages only last so long before the competition catches up, and so either prices have to fall again or you have to acquire the competition and its share of the market . accordingly the principle of the capitalist company is to grow, to produce more and more for cheaper than before, and without end. But the capitalist is like the sorcerer’s apprentice, once the spell is cast it feeds upon itself, the more that is produced, the cheaper the goods are on the market, the more that must be produced to maintain profitability. until eventually you’ve clogged the ocean with plastic and filled the skies with smog.
posted by dis_integration at 7:10 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


Marx didn’t have a clue about this stuff.

I'm not a Marxist scholar but didn't Marx write that the capitalist class was making their money not just from exploiting the laborers, but also from exploiting the "free gifts of nature" and that this was an unsustainable spiral noose that would only tighten over time?

Sometimes you can see the issues most clearly when they are new, Marx and Engels were writing at the beginning of industrialization when the environmental effects of putting coal factories in the English countryside would been clearest.
posted by subdee at 8:53 AM on September 10, 2022 [5 favorites]


Why do I have the feeling Saito's motive is more to do with revitalizing Marx and making him relevant than it's about, I don’t know — saving humanity and half the remaining vertebrates in the world from extinction?

I haven't the slightest idea. Why do you have the feeling?
posted by dusty potato at 9:29 AM on September 10, 2022 [7 favorites]


Saito has several reviews and essays available here. Marx is undergoing renewed popularity on reading lists as anti-capitalism, and unpublished notebooks from Marx are now being offered in the mix.
posted by Brian B. at 10:02 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


I know of entire groups of 20-somethings who are doing reading groups of Marx and other communist thought. It's a thing happening amongst the young these days.
posted by hippybear at 10:08 AM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


If we're talking Marx, a book I like is Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason by David Harvey. I think I first saw the recommendation for it here on metafilter.
posted by subdee at 10:47 AM on September 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


All the blather about capitalism and growth means nothing if we don't address the limits to sustainable human population. And that discussion uncorks a whole lot of uncomfortable issues.
posted by SPrintF at 11:01 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


"capitalism is destroying the environment”, while not wrong, definitely feels a bit played out

To be fair to the author, this sentiment might be popular now, but remember that while the article is new, as is the English language translation, "the book ... was published in September 2020." And how many years before that was he writing it?
posted by doctornemo at 11:06 AM on September 10, 2022


In this short article, the author (of the book, not the article) mentions being accused of wanting to take society (at least Japan's) back to the Edo period. I'd really like to hear his response.
posted by doctornemo at 11:13 AM on September 10, 2022


the limits to sustainable human population

I don't know if the book adresses this, since I can't read Japanese, but I addressed this above: empower women, through education, access to funding and political empowerment, and population will be regulated in a safe, democratic and non-offensive manner.
Strangely, this simple solution never appears in bro-futurism.
posted by mumimor at 11:29 AM on September 10, 2022 [10 favorites]


I know of entire groups of 20-somethings who are doing reading groups of Marx and other communist thought. It's a thing happening amongst the young these days.

De-growth seems to be the new catch-phrase, long cited in ecology and green new deals and random solutions to growth generally. The strange part is de-growth is more Malthusian and Ricardian and arguably has least to do with Marxism and communism, though the latter are anti-capitalist. But Saito is a Marxist and I suppose if de-growth was suddenly the latest rage, then they will take that opportunity. For those who find theoretical abstractions from the nineteenth century to be too mystery-meaty, consider the pragmatism of Veblen. Marx basically invented the theory of capitalism in order to destroy it on paper, and one could argue that communism was the predicted method to actually destroy capitalism in the real world, but it didn't work out that way. So maybe we just need a sociology of moderation.
posted by Brian B. at 12:59 PM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


For me the most interesting parts of Ministry for the Future, and I think this could be an important evolution from/leap beyond Marxism, is exploring how different social structures (and beliefs and ideologies) have the capacity to create different physical structures, different organizations of society. That is to say, Marxism is usually strictly materialist, but it should also be obvious that ideas drive action and therefore drive the material world that humans create.

Demonstrative example: Is Western architecture making India’s heatwave worse? That's just the first one that popped up from a reputable source - I've seen a bunch of different pieces along these lines.

To put it in a religious way: We're not just living in God's creation under natural laws. As human beings, we also make lots and lots of additional laws, and additional creations (from houses to iphone apps) and God doesn't particularly seem to stop us. Maybe God seems happy to have us as co-authors.

So in Ministry for the Future, one character floats the idea of making a new religion in order to motivate new (or old) kinds of behavior. And .... I grew up pretty anti-religious and I've got no tolerance for religion as coercion. But I think this angle is a pretty good idea and I've been trying to explore it. (Given as religion is a group affair, if anyone knows anyone else exploring it, please hit me up.)
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 1:06 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Is Western architecture making India’s heatwave worse?

Why, yes, yes. There is no reason to doubt this.
posted by mumimor at 1:12 PM on September 10, 2022


I'm not sure that solution to hard limits on carrying capacity and resource usage for a population based on a sustainable permaculture really works?

Japanese Ministry for Agricultural Sustainability: We did it! We've come up with a plan to supply 100 million Japanese people with the staple foods of fish, rice, and vegetables.
Without the risk of overfishing, or soil depletion, or needing outside inputs. For the next hundred years, if not forever!
Japan: Great! But why are you making that face?
Sustainability: ....
Japan: Well?
Sustainability: We can feed a population of 100 million, indefinitely!
Japan: Wait a minute. Our current population is 140 million. What are we supposed to do with the other 40 million people alive right now?
Sustainability: Umm...Empower Women?
posted by bartleby at 1:59 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Looks like they’d be okay by 2058, then. Add some years for overshoot getting there, subtract some if the next epidemic hits Japan harder. Was 100 million a real number? Because if it is Japan has pretty good odds, imo.
posted by clew at 2:40 PM on September 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


100 million was made up. I was doing a country-feeding-itself bit, based on a half-remembered news story from the 90's, about Japan needing to import rice for the first time, and it being as emotionally devastating as I dunno, Germans needing to import beer.

And 2058? It seemed like people were working off a much tighter 'we need to change the entire world's economic, social, and spiritual and material systems right now! schedule. Full Commie by Tuesday or we're all doomed!'

If we've got 35 years to let vast populations gradually die off (edit: de-grow), then that's a different story.
posted by bartleby at 3:13 PM on September 10, 2022


Every year we live destructively loses another species, another volume of topsoil, another slice off the margin between how we live now and the unknown boundary of the tipping point that destroys civilization. Everything we can improve now helps.

No one knows how to frighten people-in-general enough to get us to make this massive change without frightening us into despair and resignation and greed. Try the Vernon cartoon in the thread above.
posted by clew at 3:36 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


You're talking like "empower women" is some hand-wavey feel-good thing that won't really change anything but I've read it in serious reports about climate change. IIRC there was a report a while back that assessed the impacts of various strategies on combating global warming, empowering women and expanding access to family planning/birth control was assessed as having the second biggest impact, after curbing carbon emissions.
posted by subdee at 5:05 PM on September 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


You first
posted by 517 at 5:21 PM on September 10, 2022


Also in Japan, people of childbearing age chafing under traditional gender expectations is a thing that's actively contributing to lower rates of marriage and procreation.
posted by Selena777 at 5:22 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


Japan is a really bad example, because they are de-growing, at a pace that is causing structural problems. Most developed countries are de-growing. (Which is why all the anti-immigration people in the West are idiots, but that is an other story). And lots of developing countries are slowing down, too, as women get more education and freedom to choose when to have children and how many to have.
And we can feed everyone on the globe, even when we get to peak humanity, which is projected to be 10.9 million at the end of this century. It might end up being a lower number sooner. We can even feed everyone in a sustainable manner. It's just that we choose not to.
I don't know why there is always this morbid fascination with curtailing the human population (By other means than empowering women). Eventually, human population will drop, and there will be different challenges. Till then, we need to get better at sharing the globe with other species, and protecting them and ourselves.
posted by mumimor at 10:54 PM on September 10, 2022 [3 favorites]


The frustrating thing is that decreasing birth rates are treated worldwide as some kind of existential disaster, with countries trying all kinds of things to make women have more kids (ranging from reducing abortion access in some countries, to improving child and parental support in others).

I asked a question here back in 2008 (!) looking for reading material about national approaches to population decline that treat it as something to accept and work with rather than as something to fight. If anyone has any sources, academic or otherwise, about national practices of that kind I'd be interested.

I'd also be interested in research on possible economic benefits of population decline. You hear a lot about how having fewer young people means having fewer people paying into welfare systems; on the other hand, how does it affect things like housing crises caused by insufficient housing stock? What effect does it have on the overall economy when people reach old age with more wealth, and end up paying for support services rather than getting them as unpaid labor from their families?
posted by trig at 2:13 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'm just paraphrasing a radio show I heard yesterday, so may not be completely accurate in the details, but: the problem is not so much diminishing populations, though it is a challenge (but let that be), the problem is the longevity of the older people. 30 years ago, economists and planners were not very concerned about falling birthrates because the life-expectancy was about 70 in developed countries, very close to the retirement age. Now, as people live closer to 90 years, but are still retiring at between 60 and 70 and they need more healthcare during those last 20-30 years, it becomes a problem that there are not enough younger people to keep the economy running and pay taxes, but also not enough people to care for the elder generations.
That is a problem with a fairly long tail, though it will obviously end at some point (exactly when is one of those details I forgot, but I think the last year of the baby boom is 1964, so they turn 60 in two years, and from then on the demographics begin to even out, albeit slowly.
The main issue in the radio show was that although governments are trying to get old people to stay longer on the job market, it isn't going to happen, at least not here, where most people have savings, even among the lowest incomes, because of laws mandating them, dating back to the 80s. Automatization can do a lot, even in the care sector, as we can see in Japan, where they have been dealing with this before other developed countries. It is even a good thing, if there are strong unions who can make sure that workers get a fair part of the gains from automatization. But there is a limit to that.
The only real solution is to allow more immigration, from places that are still struggling with overpopulation, but the same 60+ people who need the care are those who are scared of immigration and vote for anti-immigrant politicians.
Also, there are more and more countries where the population growth is slowing down, luckily.
posted by mumimor at 2:56 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]


Mr. Maguire: I want to say one word to you, Benjamin. Just one word.
Benjamin Braddock: Yes, sir.
Mr. Maguire: Are you listening?
Benjamin Braddock: Yes, I am.
Mr. Maguire: Plastics.

I mean, look at the ocean.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:52 AM on September 11, 2022


You first

Already done. I got sterilized in 1993 specifically to rule out the chance that I'd create a tree of descendants, reasoning that this was the single most effective thing I could possibly do on a personal level to minimize the resource consumption I was personally responsible for while still choosing to remain alive.

Your turn.
posted by flabdablet at 11:22 AM on September 11, 2022 [4 favorites]


> All the blather about capitalism and growth means nothing if we don't address the limits to sustainable human population. And that discussion uncorks a whole lot of uncomfortable issues.

I disagree.

I have some faith that education, health and womens rights will continue to reduce birth rates globally. And if we don't preemptively exterminate each other, there will be progress made towards efficiency and sustainability. In some fashion.

Now whether we truly get to universal sharing, or we end up (or remain?) serfs and nobles...
posted by Artful Codger at 12:38 PM on September 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


... and as for unproductive seniors... We just retired this year . We volunteer at some stuff; isn't that productive? And I'm contemplating approaching a couple places for one or two days a week of work over the winter. Not because we need the money, just cos I like it and want to keep my hand in.

Many seniors are willing to continue to participate in the work force, but there have to be jobs that are suited to our abilities and our preferences, especially hours. We have knowledge, experience and talent to contribute. But no I'm not willing to again take on the stress and wear of 40+ hours a week.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:47 PM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


Most of the people who are retiring now have been productive for more than fifty years, they have built the society we have today. Its deeply unfair to say they have to keep on working for five or ten more years, specially since the vast majority have been doing hard labor and have worn down their bodies. I'm not yet at retiring age, but as an example, I had my first real job at 16, after working after school since I was 13. I don't think I'm unusual for the 50+ generation. I went to university, so stopped doing manual labor, but only 10% of my age group did that in this country. Some others went to trade school and eventually earned plenty of money, but they still deal with bad backs, hips, knees from physical work or overweight from too much sitting in front of typewriters and then screens or as cashiers. They are not taking five more years.

It's great if someone wants to contribute after formally retiring. After my dad retired from the military, he found jobs first as an attendant at a museum, and then as a research assistent at the national library. He had his pension, so it wasn't for the money, and neither job was full time. So good. But one shouldn't fell obligated to work, and certainly not to work as a trucker or a cleaner or nurse. And those are the jobs were there is a labor shortage. No one is looking for museum attendants these days.
posted by mumimor at 1:21 PM on September 11, 2022 [2 favorites]


Japan is a really bad example, because they are de-growing, at a pace that is causing structural problems. Most developed countries are de-growing.

Degrowth is not about population size. It's not helpful to take a term of art that makes up the primary subject of the OP and repurpose it to some other colloquial use without being clear about that.
posted by dusty potato at 7:32 AM on September 12, 2022 [3 favorites]


> Most of the people who are retiring now have been productive for more than fifty years, they have built the society we have today. Its deeply unfair to say they have to keep on working for five or ten more years, specially since the vast majority have been doing hard labor and have worn down their bodies.

Entirely fair and important point. Especially occupations that really wear down the body. So I'd hate to see an increase in the statutory retirement age.

The problem that we face, though, is that now people are living for far longer than 60 or 65. How do we pay for the additional income-free years, and the likely extra medical bills? And also, many of us still feel capable and interested in some employment, but just not at the same pace or intensity of our younger years. Meaningful employment within our areas of expertise, not just flipping burgers or behind a concierge desk.

We have to come up with some notion of "senior" employment that involves fewer hours and less physical demands. Currently, it seems that only the younger worker who can be coerced into overtime is favoured.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:36 AM on September 12, 2022 [1 favorite]


Or… and hear me out here… we could follow the arguments that the FPP is about and ditch capitalism.
posted by eviemath at 9:55 AM on September 12, 2022 [5 favorites]


The main problem that we face, I would argue, is that “capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet.” It is easy to find many other problems, as there are many other problems, but I think that description neatly describes the main issue.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:43 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]


Thing is, it's not even capitalism per se that demands unlimited profits. It's more specific than that. The specific people making that specific demand are a small coterie of power-addled fucknuckles who can find nothing better to do with their lives than compete with each other to have the biggest meaningless number next to their names.

Capitalism operates within a framework of agreements about how trade is going to work, and what underpins that framework is a roughly harmonized international set of norms around national laws that protect private property. There is absolutely no reason why capitalism couldn't continue to function just fine under a modified set of norms that put a hard cap on the maximum amount of private property protected by the law, such that any entity accruing more property than that would find all of the extra treated as a commons.

A progressive income tax with a marginal rate beyond 100% in income brackets above some scheduled maximum would be one fairly minimalist way to get this done, and would be no impediment at all to the ability of any person on this planet to make an honest living. It would also make mammoth amounts of funds available to spend on projects that support the common good.

A worldwide tax treaty, including an agreement to treat tax havens as a breach of human rights, strikes me as achievable far faster than the worldwide wholesale dismantling of capitalism and likely to offer at least as much ecological, economic and social benefit.

Because again, it's not really capitalism per se that's at fault here; it's the current cancerous form of it dedicated to unlimited growth. There is no in-principle reason why there could not exist a version of capitalism that serves regeneration of the body politic rather than its growth. Capitalism needs a course of chemo to stop it vascularizing so effectively around tumours like Musk and Bezos.
posted by flabdablet at 1:17 PM on September 12, 2022 [4 favorites]


flabdablet, I agree that changing the things you describe would go a long way! An economic system that changed the relationship to capital ownership would be a different economic system than capitalism. Eg. what you describe in your second paragraph sounds more like mercantilism, at least if the “commons” was owned by national governments. Various flavours of socialism would have that commons held and managed in a more distributed democratic fashion, and the level of private control over capital that would be allowed is what one individual can use as a sole proprietor or artisan or contractor. (I note that you used “private property” rather than “capital”, and those are two distinct things. But generally there is a structural limit to the amount of non-capital private property one can accumulate without ownership of capital.)

Summary: your comment can be paraphrased as “we need to change the aspect of our current economic system that are the defining features of capitalism in a way that would instead make our economic system a form of either mercantilism or socialism”. Modulo the mercantilism bit, I totally agree!
posted by eviemath at 1:45 PM on September 12, 2022 [3 favorites]


Hush! Don't mention the S word!
posted by flabdablet at 10:02 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]


A progressive income tax with a marginal rate beyond 100% in income brackets above some scheduled maximum would be one fairly minimalist way to get this done, and would be no impediment at all to the ability of any person on this planet to make an honest living. It would also make mammoth amounts of funds available to spend on projects that support the common good.

That was Sweden when I was younger. I didn't understand it then, but now I do. And the more people understand how rich the filthy rich are, there might grow a new support for it. I know that many Americans believe Sweden is socialist, but I'm pretty sure Swedes believe they live in a capitalist society. Sweden has quite a collection of filthy rich.

I think the reason Sweden stopped taxing people at over 100% was the rich moved their money to tax havens, so yes, it needs to be a global treaty. And that will be difficult to enforce. Lets just say that I suspect that even some countries that have all the institutions and laws required might not be completely free of corruption.
posted by mumimor at 3:56 AM on September 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


At some point I'll read Kohei Saito or summary works, but it's still "about to be translated" now so..

It's true capitalism became the worst offender for environmental destruction, and degrowth shall likely be far more communal, but..

Afaik all deployed human economic systems are growthist aka productivist, including all tried communism, socialism, etc. We'd wind up with massive suffering and possible human extinction under communism just as surely as under capitalism, just a few years later.

All post-growth ideas should imho sell themselves as something completely new. We cannot run refractive solar cement or iron making during the nighttime, so the capital investment becomes more expensive. It's kinda wonderful if workers have no night shifts though!

I do think some limited market-like schemes look viable post-growth, but they're far more adversarial because our economy becomes mostly zero-sum. International trade and travel otoh looks impossible post-growth, except in tightly limited ways.

I dislike degrowthers pushing the communism analogy, when they should really critique communism's growth drive, and push the the something completely new narrative.

In particular, we've this lefty attraction towards world government, perhaps rooted in Marx. In reality, Joe Tainter argues no human society ever gave up an energy source voluntarily, so world government would then also choose the economy over human survival, and so shall voters.

We could however achieve post-growth societies if nations credibly threaten one another, for which Tainter admits anthropological precedent exists, so some MAD variant but restricted to CO2 & methane emissions, and maybe other planetary limits. We could live happier lives due to being exploited less, but if we discover our neighbor raising cows for meat then we'll stop them because we know someone else would notice their methane in satellite photos, and do much worse..

A Darwinian Left by Peter Singer captures this spirit without the ecology: We cannot trust communist hopium but instead must model society around what humans actually do.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:02 AM on September 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


I dislike degrowthers pushing the communism analogy,

Agreed, and Saito, in one of his brief essays in English, proposed Marx was an environmentalist for simply regretting that cows were raised in pens, something every nostalgic cowboy would agree with. I get the sense he is not deep enough from the veneration alone, pushing Marx as a departmental specialty of his in a bewildering landscape of authors with no recognition. Thanks for the Joe Tainter link.
posted by Brian B. at 8:43 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


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