Dear Readers,

Today’s topic is radical. At THE NEW INSTITUTE, scholars and practitioners are currently exploring how capitalism can be improved. But for a group led by Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito that doesn’t go far enough—particularly in light of the climate crisis. The group wants to abolish capitalism altogether. Saito became famous for his book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, in which he reinterprets Karl Marx as a pioneer of a sustainable degrowth economy. Now, as Program Chair of the Beyond Capitalism program at THE NEW INSTITUTE, Saito and his team are exploring how a planned economy could function—not one driven by bureaucratic and centralized control, but one that puts decisions about what and how much to produce into the hands of as many people as possible.

I’m a business journalist and currently a media fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE. In a short series of newsletters, I’m trying to report on some of the ideas and projects here at the Institute in a concrete and comprehensible way. Admittedly, it wasn’t easy for me to imagine the end of capitalism but I gave it a try—and I recommend you do too. It’s worth it!

Felix Rohrbeck

P.S. We have a German version of the text available for you here.

A planned economy for the 21st century

Kohei Saito rose to fame with his book portraying Karl Marx as a pioneer of a sustainable degrowth economy. Now, at THE NEW INSTITUTE, he aims to develop a democratic planned economy.

1. What is the Problem?

For Kohei Saito, the climate crisis cannot be solved within the capitalist system. He sees it as a system solely focused on profit, one that constantly produces more goods to generate ever more money. Capitalism, Saito argues, seeks endless expansion and growth—inevitably running up against the limits of nature. He believes that all well-meaning attempts to tame capitalism through government or technological interventions and bring it in line with climate goals and planetary boundaries are doomed to fail.

In his book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Saito, who leads the Beyond Capitalism program at THE NEW INSTITUTE, cites the electric car as an example. In theory, it’s meant to make capitalism greener, decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. But in practice, massive amounts of lithium and cobalt are mined for batteries, often devastating the environment in countries such as Chile or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Working conditions are often catastrophic.

For Saito, capitalism inevitably leads to the exploitation of both people and nature.

It’s a radical critique—but it’s struck a chord. In Japan alone, Slow Down has sold more than 500,000 copies. Many people, says Saito, are disillusioned with capitalism, yet there’s little discussion about alternatives that could curb the excessive consumption of resources. Most debates focus on making capitalism a little fairer, a little greener. Replacing it with something new seems hopeless. As a statement attributed to the late philosopher and theorist Fredric Jameson succinctly puts it, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Photo by Bettina Theuerkauf

2. What is the Approach?

In 2015, Kohei Saito joined an international team that analyzed around 800 pages of handwritten notes by Karl Marx for the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), the complete works of Marx and Engels. The notes, which are difficult to decipher and written in archaic German, English, and French, stem from Marx’s later years. “Marx had pretty terrible handwriting,” Saito notes.

It’s a project that has largely escaped public notice. While Marx remains one of the most important visionaries of communism—even appearing on a Beatles album cover— since the fall of the Soviet Union, his ideas are usually considered to be outdated and as having failed. Today, hardly anyone would look to a 19th-century economist with a wild beard when seeking solutions to urgent problems like climate change.

But that’s exactly what Saito does. And in Marx’s late notes, he finds a thinker deeply engaged with ecological questions and the natural sciences, including geology, botany, and chemistry. While some of these ideas made it into Das Kapital, many were left unfinished, and Saito reconstructs a new perspective on Marx’s work. Capitalism, Marx wrote, creates an “irreparable rift” in the metabolism between humans and nature. Inspired by Justus von Liebig, Marx developed a “theory of metabolism,” which views humans as part of nature and capitalism as disrupting that equilibrium.

Marx was also interested in sustainable communities such as Russian “mir” self-governing communes and traditional Germanic land cooperatives. Saito interprets this as a vision for an egalitarian, sustainable degrowth economy—a radical break from capitalist logic. 

3. What Can We Learn from Old Marx?

“Of course, Marx didn’t know anything about climate change,” Saito says. “So, he can’t tell us exactly what to do today.” But if we stop dismissing him as the ideologue of a failed Eastern bloc socialism and instead allow ourselves to follow his late thinking, we might learn something valuable.

According to Saito, Marx first leads us to recognize that capitalism is the fundamental problem and therefore must be overcome. In a second step, Marx also hints at ways that we now need to think today. For instance, when he writes that in future communism, individual production will be replaced by “cooperative” wealth, he’s referring to what we now call commons—resources collectively used and managed by a community. This could be land or water, or even a neighborhood-run grocery store.

The beauty of the commons is that they already exist—as small communist islands within the capitalist system. Therefore, Saito argues that a realistic transition from capitalism to communism consists of systematically expanding these islands until they have gradually replaced capitalism.

Photo of Marx/Saito stamp in the book

4. What’s the Project at the Institute?

Saito’s book Slow Down was a huge success. But has it actually changed anything? His own verdict is sober: “Nothing has really changed. I’ve just become famous, appearing on stages and TV. You could say that capitalism has consumed me.”

Marx argued that it’s not a person’s consciousness that changes their being, but their being that changes their consciousness. From this, Saito derives what he calls “radical hope”. He believes the climate crisis can’t be solved within capitalism—but that this presents an opportunity.

“The worse it gets, the more willing we are to think differently and radically change course.”

If we want to avoid destroying the planet, he says, we must gear up for a kind of war economy—one where the state, not the free market, determines what is produced and with which resources. Only then can we ensure our survival. But that would require a lot of planning—in other words, a planned economy. Historically, such systems (e.g., the Soviet Union) led to bureaucratic and centralized control, ending in totalitarian regimes.

So how could a planned economy—one based on democratic principles—work in the 21st century? That’s the central question Saito and a seven-member team at THE NEW INSTITUTE are working on. The team includes Aaron Benanav, Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University; economic historian and degrowth expert Matthias Schmelzer, from the University of Flensburg; and journalist Tatjana Söding, who also works with the Zetkin Collective. Together the team is essentially trying to chart a third path in which neither the market nor an authoritarian central regime dictate production. Instead, decisions should be placed in the hands of as many people as possible. This follows the idea of a “degrowth communism,” blending Marxist theory with the concept of a shrinking economy—one that produces and consumes less, not more.

How would that work in practice? The technology, Saito says, already exists. Major corporations like Amazon use AI to plan what and how much to stock in their warehouses. Right now, these decisions are made solely on a basis to generate profit. The goal, then, is to use democratic principles to develop platforms that allow production to be planned in line with the common good and environmental sustainability.

This raises many questions: Where do we start? How can we test such models on a small scale? Who gets a say? How many people would even want to participate? These are the questions Saito and his team are currently grappling with. As long as the answers remain unclear, it’s easy to dismiss the whole idea as unrealistic. But then again, even capitalism’s defenders struggle to convincingly explain how to effectively tackle climate crisis within our current economic system. THE NEW INSTITUTE is meant to be a space where radical alternatives can be explored in detail. How else are we supposed to imagine alternatives let alone debate them?

Within THE NEW INSTITUTE, Saito’s ideas have already sparked productive controversy across other, less radical programs. And they’re having an impact beyond the Institute too. Through public events—like a sold-out talk at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater—and numerous interviews (most recently in GEO magazine), Saito has brought these ideas into the wider debate. At the same time, he’s working on his next book, which will elaborate on them further. He’s convinced that “we must find a democratic path to planning production that doesn’t destroy our planet.”

Photo of Kohei Saito

5. What Does this Mean for Capitalism?

Given the worsening climate crisis, Saito believes that we have no choice but to abolish capitalism. He envisions capitalism being squeezed from both ends: from above, as governments implement strict measures and adopt war economies, and from below, as new projects of democratic planning emerge to prevent excessive centralization.