"Moins de biens, plus de liens!" ("Fewer things, more relations!") The Japanese best-selling sensation that promotes a degrowth utopia
“If economic policies have been failing for 30 years, then why don’t we invent a new way of life? The desire for that is suddenly there.”
These are the words of a publishing sensation in Japan, Kohei Saito, a 36-year-old philosophy professor whose book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold 500,000 copies so far (and is out in translation in English in 2023). In a Guardian interview, Saito goes on to explain what he’s trying to do:
We face a very difficult situation: the pandemic, poverty, climate change, the war in Ukraine, inflation … it is impossible to imagine a future in which we can grow the economy and at the same time live in a sustainable manner without fundamentally changing anything about our way of life.
…Many people lost their jobs and homes and are relying on things like food banks, even in Japan. I find that shocking. And you have essential workers who are forced to work long hours in low-paid jobs. The marginalisation of essential workers is becoming a serious issue.”
One thing that we have learned during the pandemic is that we can dramatically change our way of life overnight – look at the way we started working from home, bought fewer things, flew and ate out less. We proved that working less was friendlier to the environment and gave people a better life. But now capitalism is trying to bring us back to a ‘normal’ way of life.
In my book, I start a sentence by describing sustainable development goals [SDGs] as the new opium of the masses…Buying eco bags and bottles without changing anything about the economic system … SDGs mask the systemic problem and reduce everything to the responsibility of the individual, while obscuring the responsibility of corporations and politicians.
We are less interested in Saito’s Marxism - though it’s interesting he says he “discovered how Marx was interested in sustainability and how non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies are sustainable, because they are realising the stationary economy, they are not growth-driven.”
But we are more interested in the popular demand in Japan - and, we would suggest, way beyond - for something way beyond our current, tired and self-subverting model of production and consumption. Is Saito’s version of de-growth attractive? Here’s a piece responding to Saito from Al-Jazeera:
it is clear that reducing the excess energy and resource use of the rich and making designs more efficient within the framework of a truly circular economy have huge potential to reduce demand. For example, an estimated 57 million tonnes of electronics were thrown away in 2021. That is bigger than the Great Wall of China.
If we only designed smartphones, TVs and other appliances to last twice as long as they currently do, we could reduce this by half right away, without reducing wellbeing (but probably reducing profits).
A degrowth economy would be much more efficient in translating drastically reduced levels of energy and resource throughput into high levels of wellbeing. It could be financed through redistribution and public money, restructuring the monetary and financial system so that we no longer depend on private capital to invest in the public good.
Certainly, life would look a lot different, many people would likely possess fewer material objects – but most would have access to better services and society would be more sustainable, just, convivial, and fulfilling. In essence, degrowth aims at a society in which wellbeing is mediated less by capitalist market transactions, exchange values, or material consumption and more by collective forms of providing, shared human values, and meaningful social relationships. As one degrowth slogan states: “moins de biens, plus de liens!” (“fewer things, more relations!”).
A degrowth economy would be the inversion of austerity. For the majority, it would mean a more abundant, more convivial, more fulfilling lifestyle. For the wealthy few, it would mean the end of private abundance, excess emissions and concentrated power. For humanity, it would be our only shot at a future worth living in.