Slow Down
I was rather enjoying Slow Down until I reached Chapter 4: Marx and the Anthropocene. And while I understand that Saito is an academic Marxist, and that his bread is buttered by keeping Marx relevant in this day and age. I don't really care what Marx wrote in some unpublished notes 150 years ago. Particularly, when Marx was already receiving criticism by contemporary anarchists about these very things. But in the last century: the dialog has gone on. Ecology is now a distinct science and it's application to leftist thinking has already been explored persuasively and in depth by actual ecologists like Bookchin... not to mention the wealth of increasing number of indigenous thinkers in these areas.
We don't need Marx. Unless Saito can somehow show that Marx's writing are relevant now, today, to today's thinkers and to where the dialog has progressed... but Saito never does. He never addresses any of the developments in ecological thought. And so it remains something that would only be of interest to academic Marxists or people who are really really into Marx and not at all relevant to our contemporary times.
Not to mention the simple erasure of anarchism from the entire text. At one point Saito draws out one of those political alignment charts and labels each quadrant: eco-Maosism, eco-Fascim, Barbarism, and X. X is Anarchy! We have defanged the word "socialist" but still cannot stand to just say that what we are describing is council socialism. Saito quotes Graeber, so I can only assume that they are willfully just ignoring anarchism and trying derive anarchism from Marxism so they don't taint Marx with the notion that anyone else matters.
Marx is not the messiah.
External References
- Saito, Kohei. Slow Down. Astra House, 2024.