I don't know what made me decide to buy and read this book, but I found it an interesting read, if ultimately unsatisfying. I expected a Japanese philosopher to offer a fresh, unusual look at the ecological crisis threatening the world today, but he ended up sounding disappointingly like a Western marxist intellectual.
Saito claims that even the most "radical" and ambitious plans for combatting climate change, such as the Green New Deal, are doomed to fail. The reason, he claims, is that those plans are trying to preserve the capitalist illusion of unlimited growth, which by its very nature will exhaust the earth's resources. For example, even if we would all switch to electric cars, we'd soon deplete the earth's rare earth metals that those cars' batteries need.
Next, Saito takes a detour to discuss the intricacies of Marxism. He first explains that the Marx that most marxists know and recognize is an advocate for growth, just as much as capitalism is; it's just that in Marx' vision, the workers, as the adage goes, have seized the means of production. Saito then spends many paragraphs explaining that this is a misconception, and that Karl actually had a change of heart in his later years, and turned into an eco-warrior. That fact is not very well known, Saito argues, because marxists don't spend enough time reading Marx' lesser-known writings. All this seems like one marxist trying desperately to convince other marxists, which strikes me as not only typical for the discipline, but also uninteresting to me, who doesn't find something more worthwhile just because Marx thought it.
What's also typical for marxists is this: when confronted with a big, intractable problem, they tend to offer an even bigger, even more intractable, non-solution. Saito keeps hammering on the fact that dismantling capitalism itself, not to mention reinventing democracy as a side project, is the only way to combat climate change. It never seems to occur to him that those goals form an even bigger challenge than climate change itself.
And this to me is the core problem of the book. It's not a book about how to stop climate change; it's a book about how climate change is the kind of crisis that communism has been looking for all this time as the ultimate opportunity to get rid of capitalism. Saito suffers from the Golden Hammer delusion: if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Is capitalism, and the capitalist mindset, at the heart of the climate crisis? Absolutely. Would abolishing capitalism stop climate change in its tracks? Probably. Is abolishing capitalism feasible? Definitely not. In short, Saito offers a destination, but no real directions showing how to reach it. He does talk admiringly about small-scale cooperative initiatives that exist here and there, for example in Barcelona, that to him are hopeful signs of a rejection of capitalism in pursuit of what he calls "degrowth." But it's hardly a real solution.
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