I haven’t read Saito’s books, or looked too deeply into degrowth as a movement. I just read this article and thought it made some good arguments against what it claims are Saito’s understandings of Marx. I’m not sure I agree with everything, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
Saito absolutely a GOAT (for an academic. I’ll put my issues with saito at the end of this post). Shitstain who wrote this article has barely read Saito’s work, because if he did he would 1. realise that actually Saito does directly address modern fertiliser and several other things the article brings up 2. Saito’s proofs for Marx’s changes are far more conclusive than a letter and some excerpts. It actually hinge more on Saito’s discussion of the differences between all the different manuscript varients of Capital, and his reading of the critique of the gotha programme.
Thing that pisses me off the most is actually the complete distortion of marxism the fool writing the article (others have given his name in other comments; i am genuinely too spiteful to remember it. Leigh-something i think). Firstly and most infuriatingly, the fucker editorialises critique of the gotha programme to make it agree with his machine fetishist nonsense. Article-writer cites the conditions for ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ as simply “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” The full list of preconditions is as follows:
I.e. the distinction between physical and mental labour needs to be abolished, labour needs to be the thing people want to do. Anyone who’s read ch15 of capital knows machine work is not something people want to do. In Capital, Marx is actually very critical of complete automation of everything. Marx’s solution to the drudgery of machinework is to distribute it more equally and reduce the amount of work (in the sense of alienated, uninteresting labour) done altogether, not to make more shit using more machines. If the author of the article had even read the editorialised quotation they published, they’d notice Marx demands not just the increase of productive forces, but also the “all-around development of the individual” which Marx repeatedly asserts is incompatible with division of labour in the workshop or the mindnumbing repitition of machine labour for someones entire life.
All this said, while I think Saito has a better grasp on Marx’s analysis of capitalist production than the article-writer will ever have, Saito’s more practical politics are horribly academic-radlib. I don’t trust the article-writer to represent Saito’s most recent book accurately, as he fails to do so regarding either of Saito’s earlier works, but the sorta urban solarpunk imperial core stuff described wouldn’t shock me much from him, and it is true that Saito does the ritualistic academic-radlib ‘marxist’ denunciation of Stalin.
Thank you for that. I’d heard so much good stuff about Saito before this article, which is why I was so hesitant to trust that the author of this article was actually being genuine about Saito’s work. And since reading the article and posting it here, I’ve gotten a lot of comments informing me of the article-writer’s general opinions/tendencies, which make me distrust him even more.
But I think you’re the first person to actually critique the article itself, probably since you’ve actually read Saito! With this, I think now there is no part of this article that can be salvaged or defended. The author is trash, his general criticism of degrowth is trash, and his specific criticism of Saito is trash.