Kōhei Saitō’s tsunami of confusion
One of my favorite Star Trek: TNG episodes begins somewhat inauspiciously, with the Starship Enterprise colliding with another federation vessel, causing the dramatic explosion of both ships and the loss of all lives. And yet luckily for the crew, the collision occurs at the border of a space-time anomaly, which causes the Enterprise to go back in time by approximately one day. This creates a “causality loop,” in which the crew continues to go about their daily activities, reproducing the same pattern of choices that led to the disaster, which then continues to occur again and again.
This might have gone on forever, save for the fact that members of the crew begin to experience déjà vu as they go about their activities, which grows stronger each time the loop repeats itself. Eventually, this leads them to discover that they are stuck in a causality loop. Unfortunately, just knowing this does not tell them how to get out of it, because they have no idea what they did that caused the collision.
The solution, they realize, is that they must find some way to send a message to themselves after they have learned which decision led to the disaster. For reasons that don’t make too much sense but can easily be ignored, the message they are able to send is extremely short. They succeed in doing this, and so Data sends himself a message, seconds before destruction, consisting of the number 3. He receives this the next time the loop repeats, which provides him with the information he requires to avoid the collision and save the crew.
Obviously there is a lot of sci-fi goofiness in all of this, but the episode always struck me as providing a powerful metaphor for the power of culture and the poignancy of biological life. Many complex organisms learn many things over the course of their lives, but everything they learn dies with them, creating an eternal reset. Each new generation of dogs, for example, learns essentially nothing from the previous generation; they are condemned to start from scratch. As a result, there is no progress in dog society; they remain under our eternal tutelage.
These days, however, the Star Trek causality loop has become a useful metaphor to describe what it feels like trying to teach young people. It’s discouraging to go into a classroom and find it full of students who believe, almost verbatim, every bad idea that I believed when I was their age. As I grew older, I made the mistake of thinking that it was not just me, or not just members of my cohort, who were becoming wiser, but that the culture as a whole was undergoing at least some sort of learning process. Now that the generational reset has become more apparent, it is difficult to maintain the illusion.
If only one could send them a message! But, of course, things are not that simple. It’s not enough to send a message, there also has to be someone there willing to receive it.
All of this is to explain why the young philosopher Kōhei Saitō’s most recent book, Slow Down (a massive bestseller in Japan, recently translated into English), has pushed me to the brink of despondency. Not only is it a compendium of seemingly every bad idea that has fixated the left for the past century, it reproduces, again almost verbatim, the same ecotopian fantasy that I was raised on in the 1970s. The fact that Saitō’s book has been so well received raises extremely troubling questions about the dysfunctionality of the epistemic ecosystem of the left. Why are progressives, who are supposedly in favour of progress, incapable of making any progress when it comes to the formulation of progressive ideas? Why do we insist on recycling bad ideas, rather than embracing new, better ones?
For example, why are we still babbling on about Mondragon, in exactly the same terms that people were 50 years ago? Does the fact that every attempt to reproduce the Mondragon model elsewhere in the world has failed not tell us something? Is it not possible to learn anything from historical experience?
Although I did not expect to like Saitō’s book much, I was nevertheless surprised by how bad it was, because the English-language reviews have been so deferential. An important exception to this have been the Marxists, who were clearly triggered by the one genuinely novel contribution that Saitō has made in his work. Saitō is best known among academics for his provocative suggestion that, in later, unpublished work, Marx abandoned his view that the transition to communism would be made possible by further development of the forces of production. Saitō interprets this as evidence that Marx had abandoned his belief that economic growth was a force for progress, and had instead embraced “degrowth,” making his views more palatable to the modern, ecological left. Thus Saitō claims that his own support for “degrowth communism” coincides with Marx’s considered view.
This entire set of issues seems like it should be irrelevant to anyone who does not ascribe prophetic powers to Marx. After all, Saitō bases his interpretation of Marx on the draft text of a personal letter that was never actually sent, which basically no one read for over a century, and which exercised no influence on any subsequent debates. So who cares what it says, or what Marx’s privately-held-but-never-published views were at the time of his death? It’s like the rumours of Hume’s death-bed conversion – even if true, what difference would it make?
Nevertheless, it is unsurprising that Marxists were triggered by Saitō’s reading. What makes Saitō’s work in this area so provocative is that he violates one of the most basic principles of textual interpretation. It is often the case, when reading an author, that one comes across a passage that seems odd, perhaps inconsistent with views that the person has defended elsewhere. The standard response in such cases is to interpret the aberrant passage in a way that minimizes the conflict, in order to make the whole as coherent as possible. This is what it means to engage in charitable interpretation. The problem with Saitō’s interpretation of Marx is that it is aggressively uncharitable. He takes a few superficially aberrant passages in the Nachlass and reads them as a complete repudiation of historical materialism, as though Marx in his later years had abandoned his commitment to all of the ideas that are associated with his name (his account of historical progress, his theory of revolution, his model of base-superstructure relations, etc.) So it’s not entirely surprising that conventional Marxists freaked out.
For the rest of us, however, who lack this cultic fixation on Marx’s final thoughts, what does Saitō’s book have to offer? More specifically, why did it attract such a large audience? Obviously I am not in a good position to judge, but I have noticed many reviews mentioning the contrast between the radicalness of Saitō’s stance and his unaffected personal manner, along with the almost childlike charm of his suggestions. This may offer some clue to his appeal.
Anyone familiar with the degrowth literature will know that there is often a bit of a shell game going on in these arguments. Very few proponents of degrowth are willing to come out and say “suck it up, you’re going to have to live like a medieval peasant.” So instead they engage in wordplay. The best example of this is Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth. Jackson argues that decoupling growth from environmental damage is impossible and so we must end economic growth. But that’s okay, he says, because instead of growth we can have “prosperity,” which looks and sounds a lot like growth, but differs in that it involves activities that are not mediated through the price system, and so for some reason will not damage the environment.
Saitō is playing a similar game, threatening degrowth, but then turning around and promising “radical abundance” in its stead. What exactly is radical abundance? Basically, lots of free stuff for everyone. An example that Saitō provides is the city of Copenhagen’s decision to plant fruit trees throughout the city “that citizens are allowed to pick fruit from for free”(185). This sends him off into the realm of utopian speculation. What if one could transform an entire urban area into an “edible city”? “Cultivating fruits and vegetables in the streets not only helps combat hunger by making food freely available but also fosters awareness of the dynamics of farming and nature”(186). What if the entire food supply in cities was produced and consumed locally?
One could read this, I suppose, as exhibiting a sort of winsome naïveté. After all, who wouldn’t want to stroll though an orchard on the way to work, picking a ripe fruit from a nearby tree for one’s breakfast? And yet Saitō asks these sorts of questions as though they were entirely speculative, as though they didn’t have answers. Unfortunately, they do have answers, and anyone who stops to think for a minute will know what they are. It’s not difficult to calculate the amount of agricultural land that is required to support the population of a large urban area (such as Tokyo, where Saitō lives). All of the farms in Japan combined produce only enough food to sustain 38% of the Japanese population. This is all so obvious that it feels stupid even to be pointing it out.
More striking, in some ways, is the intense feeling of déjà vu that I experienced reading Saitō’s proposals. Consider this passage from Ecotopia, published 50 years ago. (For those not familiar, this is a utopian novel, written in the form of a travelogue, from a journalist sent to report on life in the breakaway states of the American Pacific Northwest. It’s basically Looking Backward for hippies.)
The bucolic atmosphere of the new San Francisco can perhaps best be seen in the fact that, down Market Street and some other streets, creeks now run. These had earlier, at great expense, been put into huge culverts underground, as is usual in cities. The Ecotopians spent even more to bring them up to ground level again. So now on this major boulevard you may see a charming series of little falls, with water gurgling and splashing, and channels lined with rocks, trees, bamboos, ferns. There even seem to be minnows in the water...(13)
This is all, one is inclined to say, garden-variety ecological fantasy. But what about the communism part? Whenever someone promises to abolish capitalism, it naturally leads one to wonder what they would suggest as an alternative. The big question is how they expect to organize production and exchange, if not through markets. In many cases, once you push through all the radical posturing, the answer is actually “through markets.” For example, the people who pin their hopes on worker cooperatives as an alternative to corporations are, in at least one important sense, not actually planning to get rid of capitalism, since they expect these cooperatives to be still buying and selling goods from one another. Furthermore, cooperatives are profit-maximizing enterprises, so the whole thing is not really all that different from capitalism, it’s more of a rebrand.
Saitō, to his credit, is not soft-pedaling some kind of market socialism. He actually wants to get rid of capitalism, which means that he wants to abolish both private property and market exchange. This naturally invites the objection that the modern economy is a very complex system of reciprocity, which is difficult to organize without such affordances. This is not a problem for Saitō, however, because he also wants to abolish the division of labour (194). This is certainly one way to solve the socialist calculation problem! Unfortunately, it sounds more like a recipe for radical poverty than for radical abundance. And yet Saitō talks as though life would go on pretty much as before – people will still have access to modern health care, clean energy technology, bicycles, computers, and so on. But where will all this stuff come from? Won’t it require some sort of specialization in production, some kind of exchange system? And how will all that be organized?
Again, it feels stupid to have to point this out. And yet Saitō has literally nothing to say on this question. Or more specifically, he does not see it as a problem that requires any sort of solution. The reason he does not see it as a problem is that he suffers from a rather severe case of zero-sum thinking. In his view, the capitalist system has not really produced any wealth. In fact, by enclosing that which was previously held in common, transforming it into private property, what the system has actually done is to produce scarcity (161). The economic calculation problem only arises, in Saitō’s view, because of the artificial scarcity created by capitalism. Abolish private property and the natural abundance of the commons will become available to all.
Saitō’s environmentalism is basically motivated by the same worldview. The economic growth of the past two centuries, he thinks, is an illusion. In order for something to have gone up, something else must have gone down. And so in order for someone to have earned a profit, someone else must have been exploited. In order for one country to have become richer, some other country must have become poorer (11). In order for private wealth to have increased, public wealth must have decreased (152). In order for the economy to have grown, nature must have been destroyed. Everything always adds up to zero – people simply fail to notice this because they are looking at only one side of the balance.
The upshot is that, in Saitō’s worldview, you can’t actually make humanity better off – the whole story about progress over the past two centuries is false. But the flip-side is that you can’t really make humanity worse off either. This allows us to abolish capitalism with the confidence that something else will just show up to take its place. Get rid of private property and the commons will flourish. After all, it’s not as though humanity has ever suffered from collective action problems when it comes to managing common-pool resources (and if we have, that is almost certainly the fault of capitalism).
From the standpoint of a critic, it is difficult to know even where to start with this, other than to observe that it is less of a political philosophy than a metaphysical worldview, one that is so radically counterfactual that it must at some level be unfalsifiable. Unfortunately, it is a worldview that, when expressed in abstract terms, can easily be mistaken for wisdom, especially among people with a certain religious sensibility. This may go some way toward explaining the curiously uncritical reception that Saitō’s work has received in the American press. Indeed, many of the reviews that I have read seem to be entirely vibes-based. Consider the following, from E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker:
Here’s my interpretation of Saitō, the theorist, in practice: Live in a small apartment rather than a big, drafty house. Take the bus; don’t buy a car. Fly rarely. Stop ordering random stuff online (what Saitō calls “fundamentally useless things”). Work less. In the process, get to know your neighbors and get some exercise, too. Multiply these actions by block and city, then notch them up to the levels of industry and state. Tax the rich. Provide a basic income to all. Steer capital toward home care and nursing homes, not arms manufacturing. Give subsidies and water to local farms, not Big Ag. Make neighborhoods dense and walkable and dependent on public transit. Destroy the G.D.P. and the World Trade Organization, which has stifled climate-change action plans based on the argument that they violate free trade.
This is, quite simply, not what the book says. (Not even the last sentence, which if you read it carefully, is insane.) The positive overall tone of the review seems to me attributable to Kim’s inability to believe that Saitō was actually being serious, when he wrote the things that he wrote (after all, he seems like such a nice young man). And so she simply substituted what a reasonable person might say for what Saitō actually said.
I, on the other hand, being a professional philosopher, am accustomed to the habits of my tribe, which include following the implications of one’s view to their logical conclusion, no matter how crazy. So when I read Saitō, I evaluate his view based on what he actually wrote in the book. And what he wrote in the book is that we should abandon our efforts to create a sustainable, carbon-neutral market economy, and instead plump for a hazily sketched out ecological utopia, where people just magically cooperate with one another, and we get to keep all of the good parts of the modern economy without having to endure any of the bad parts.
Okay, sure, whatever. But here’s the part that troubles me: I’ve heard all this before. Do we really have to have the same debates, about the same self-evidently unworkable ideas, again and again? Maybe I am just revealing weakness of character, but I’m having trouble summoning the requisite amor fati in the face of this latest recurrence.
This post is dedicated to all of my readers at econ101.jp, to mark the publication of the Japanese edition of Ethics for Capitalists.