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.
I haven’t read the article but there was an argument that I put to a small-time content creator who is an unaligned communist that is big on degrowth when they discussed how they hadn’t seen anything from MLs on the necessity of degrowth.
My argument is as follows:
I live in a settler-colonial state that is “post”-industrial. She definitely does. You probably do too.
When the revolution comes, I see the absolute necessity of reindustrialisation of these countries because:
a) Blockades and grey zone warfare prosecuted by reactionary countries making self-reliance a material necessity
b) Even without the issue of economic warfare, a first world post-revolutionary society doesn’t just get to rest on its laurels and be like “Welp, we have socialised the means of production here…” while relying on imports and the imperialist world order to ensure that we still get our cheap treats
c) There is an immense debt that my country owes the people who it colonised. There is another immense debt that it owes to the entire world by participating in imperialism and reaping its benefits. Your country probably has this debt too.
Let’s just imagine that a so-called “service economy” could actually exist after the revolution. (I’m deeply skeptical about this but whatever.) A service economy is built upon the backbone of the worst forms of exploitation in the developing world.
What good are reparations if you’re still exploiting those who you pay reparations to?
What does it even look like - do you turn a profit that is something like hundreds or thousands of times more than what you paid for the products and then return a portion back to those farmers, miners, factory workers etc in the developing world? Is that the model that we’re fighting for? What about the colonised peoples - do we just smile at them and say “We achieved socialism - you’re welcome! 🤗” and that’s the end of it?
I’m not opposed to environmental protection efforts or anything. In fact, I think that if my country’s domestic demand was largely met by its own domestic production, this would necessitate a radical reshaping of things like repairability and the repair industry, replaceability, planned longevity displacing planned obsolescence, and consumption as a whole because when the economic field is equalised it’s simply not going to be viable for people to buy a get a new smartphone every year or two imo.
But I just don’t buy the idea that degrowth is either the answer nor that it’s a viable strategy.
Tbh I’m deeply suspicious of it because I believe that it’s liable to be co-opted by imperialist countries so they can kick away the ladder and maintain their hegemonic position over the rest of the world. It’s probably happening right now idk, I haven’t been following it closely.
Good answer. The story I usually go with involves a can of peaches from Del Monté.
You take that can and you look at it and find “grown in Greece, processed in Singapore” and it ends up all the way here into motherfucking Alaska. Those peaches have traveled the world just to end up on our shelves for a few dollars.
The reality of the resource consumption in the form of logistics of moving those damn peaches is absurd as hell and it would literally make more sense to grow the fuckers down in California or Georgia or some shit and move them around a hell of a shorter distance domestically. Apply this to all the shit that’s been outsourced over the decades within reason, and you’ll have easily millions of jobs for Americans that are less exploitative, paid better, have better working conditions, have better environmental protection standards, etc.
But doing that is unprofitable for the capitalist class because they seek to maximize their profits at the cost of everyone but themselves, therefore the workers themselves must seize the means of production itself so it can reorganize the economy into one that actually works for the workers because it is built by the workers.
there can very obviously be no such thing as a “service economy communist state”. re-industrialization would however be a) impossible, since it couldn’t be done without the exploitation of the resources of the global south b) spell ecological disaster for the planet, since even the current de-industrialized west uses up several times more resources than the earth can provide
Why would socialist reindustrialization necessitate the exploitation of the global south? You can just cut back on the egregious stuff (ooh spooky degrowth…), substitute with the next best thing (transit electrification instead of car electrification for example), develop more sustainable technology that completely replaces the previous unsustainable one (sodium batteries instead of lithium), or at worst work out a mutually beneficial deal with a foreign country (like the GDR and Vietnam with coffee).
I think you are confused about what de-industrialization means.
When we’re talking about de-industrialization/re-industrialization, we’re not just talking about the manufacturing sector, you know. Service economy is part of the industry too, as it contributes to the real sector of the economy, which is defined by the production of real goods and services.
America is de-industrialized not just because of the loss of its manufacturing jobs, but the fact that its economy has been largely eclipsed by the non-productive sector (finance, insurance, real estate, or the FIRE sector as Michael Hudson calls it). These are not service industries because they contribute nothing to the real sector of the economy. The so-called “post-industrial” service economy in the US pales in comparison to the non-productive FIRE sector. (Some of the tech companies are harder to define because their business model relies on rent extraction as well, such as paying for subscriptions for what is essentially the same content over time, just like paying rent for living on a piece of land somebody else owned)
That’s where the danger of de-industrialization lies, because it has transitioned into a rentier economy where rent extraction (unearned income) accounts for much of its economic activity (GDP). If you’re paying 30-40% of your monthly income on rent or mortgage, that money that could have been spent on real goods and services to stimulate the local economy, is now being funneled to the top 0.1% of the country.
And this is bad because the working class is being reduced to debt slaves rather than the proletariat of the 19th to early 20th century industrial capitalism, where their labor was tied to production rather than debt or land. This is also why the revolutionary potential in the Western de-industrialized countries is so low.
Now, can a fully service based economy work for a socialist country? That’s another question, but the answer is probably not, not just because you would have to rely on supply chains that you have no control over (unlike the US with its global institutions that enforce neoliberal free trade order), but because there will always be demand for consumption that drives domestic industrial production within the country if the people get to choose what they want to produce.