This story was originally published byGrist.
Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week.
Thats the radical vision proposed by philosophy professor and Marxist scholar Kohei Saito.
Image: Grist / Erika Shimamoto / Ben Denzer / Astra House
No one, not even Saito, could have predicted the response.
Yet Saitos book has found readers across the world who want to listen.
Developing countries also need to grow their economies to raise standards of living.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Why do you think were seeing a growing interest in critiquing capitalism, and degrowth in general?
Looking at previous decades, neoliberal reforms really destabilized our society all over the world.
But these measures are not properly working, and the climate crisis has been accelerating.
People are suffering from precarious jobs, low wages, and a lot of competition.
And people are indeed unhappy.
Degrowth and the idea of post-capitalism are of course in some sense utopian at the moment.
Q. I want to dig into your critiques of capitalism as laid out in Slow Down.
Could you talk about why you think capitalism drives global inequality and climate change?
And Marx also said that in such a system where people are exploited, nature is also exploited.
Capitalism has subsumed the entire planet now because of globalization.
That means we externalized all the costs.
In your view, why are these measures insufficient for tackling the climate crisis?
First of all, Im not against technology.
We need renewable energy.
We need electric vehicles and so on.
Im for inventing new technologies and investing more in developing cheaper, sustainable energy.
Im not an advocate of going back to nature.
The problem is that when we venture to grow, we sell more products and bigger products.
The most representative case is SUVs.
I think whats necessary is: Invest in those green technologies.
Maybe we should ban private jets.
Maybe we should ban domestic short-distance flights because we can take trains.
These things must be also prioritized.
Thats not something capitalism can do.
In response, youre promoting an alternative economic vision of degrowth communism.
How could this better achieve global climate goals?
A. Degrowth is about abandoning GDP [gross domestic product] as the single measure of our progress.
Degrowth is also about reducing what is unnecessary.
GDP can be increased by producing what is unnecessary, like private jets.
So why dont we spend money and energy on something that is more sustainable and that everyone needs?
For example, free internet, free public transportation, free education, free medical care.
These things that are mostly commodified, especially in the U.S., must be de-commodified.
But in this process of making the economy bigger, we produce so many unnecessary things.
Once we make a transition to a degrowth society, the pie of the economy wont grow bigger anymore.
That means that we need to share existing wealth.
Of course, there are things we cannot share, like private property.
We will not have a new iPhone every two years.
We will not have fast fashion.
We will not have industrial meat production.
We might not have something like McDonalds, but we will have more healthy meals.
We will have more sustainable clothing that you’re able to wear for many years.
Some people have raised concerns that slowing economic growth would hurt countries that are still developing.
What would degrowth mean for the Global South?
A. Im not saying that the Global South should immediately accept the principles of degrowth.
We need to build more roads, buildings, schools, and hospitals.
We also need to make more power plants and solar panels.
We need different models of development in the Global South.
Their development necessarily involves more consumption of energy and resources.
That creates some pressure on planetary boundaries.
Could you talk about a few examples you see today that represent a step toward degrowth?
A. France has banned short-distance domestic flights that is one important step.
Some European societies are now experimenting with shorter working hours, like a four-day workweek.
Free education and free medical care are other examples.
These are some of the basic countermeasures that we can introduce within capitalism.
What would it take to achieve such a widespread shift in priorities on a political level?
Is pursuing degrowth realistic?
A. I think its in some sense utopian.
So its naive to think that our way of life will somehow continue.
I think more people, especially among the younger generation, are demanding a more radical change.
The reevaluation of values can take place actually quite rapidly.
What Im trying to do is present new values and principles of a more democratic and sustainable society.
And I think this accumulation of change can have a very significant impact over time.
This article originally appeared inGristathttps://grist.org/economics/slow-down-do-less-a-qa-with-the-author-who-introduced-degrowth-to-a-mass-audience/.
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