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.
If I click on this article… its not going to use the term “degrowth” correctly, right?
Like, would you even need to have a “degrowth” movement in a communist society? It wouldn’t be “growing” a sector just for the sake of its own growth or increase its production or potential revenue or anything. There wouldn’t need to be a warehouse full of lithium-ion batteries that sits unused for a decade because it was “more profitable/efficient” to run the factory at full capacity long enough to generate a warehouse full of batteries and then turn the factory off… just to have a warehouse full of batteries, not because there was an actual demand for them.
Very obviously yes? we are already using up much more of the earth than it can take even if we stopped growing today (which we obviously won’t).
sigh
Okay, everything I’ve heard/read about the Degrowth Movement is based around combating the idea of “Infinite Growth that attempts to chase Profits”. What it isn’t, is new way to say, “Malthusian thought was actually correct all along.”
So Degrowth doesn’t say “no more air planes, period” it says, “Why are empty air planes being flown? Why are there 6 or 12 or 20 airlines all providing the same service, each with their own planes and support infrastructure BUT most of the planes, most of the time, are never full of passengers as the limited number of passengers are split up between ALL the airlines?”
During the beginning of the COVID slowdown in the USA there were a few articles about crops being plowed back into the fields with the justification of “there just isn’t any demand for potatoes” or some other such bullshit. COVID didn’t immediately kill half the population of the USA, all that food COULD have just been purchased at “cost plus” and distributed to people who were temporarily furloughed from work. Instead, we get a situation where a bunch of people decided, “Well our profits aren’t going to be as high as we want this year…” and immediately decided to destroy a whole bunch of food that was perfectly good.
I worked at a grocery store a long time ago, and when I first started working there the Grocery manager would tell the buyers, “You need to order enough product to keep the shelves ‘looking full’”. This resulted in a shit ton of overbuying. I was constantly finding things that were past their “sell by date” by months and several times BY YEARS because things would just get shoved to the back of the shelves during restocking instead of being rotated properly due to time/labor constraints. Just the little yogurt cups alone, holy crap! I’d easily chunk 25 pounds of the little fuckers into the trash every two weeks and it wasn’t because nobody was buying the brands or flavors, it was because there’s an idea that customers won’t buy from shelves that look picked over. It took YEARS and a pile of spreadsheet work to convince management that, “Hey, stop scaring the buyers into buying so much shit that just gets thrown away. Its grossly wasteful in so many different ways.”