2025 has consistently exceeded expectations- in all the wrong categories. Trump is back in office, turning the global stage into reality TV. His promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours (didn’t happen) nor his promise to bring peace back to the Middle East. Instead, we received leaked chats about bombing Yemen—complete with emojis and freedom vibes—and a very unsettling AI video where Gaza gets turned into a beachfront resort, that the president posted on his media platform Truthsocial in late February.
Then came his plan for the economy. Trump rolled out his signature move: chaos with confidence. We saw an explosion of tariffs that sent the markets into a temporary nosedive. People panicked, well perhaps not panic, but it felt like there was a stiff atmosphere, and some people were clearly more irritated than others. At the same time on the internet, memes exploded, and in the news words like “historical downturn” were freely thrown around, while investors were watering their flowers with their tears. However, he walked most of it back. Now the stock market is beginning to recover, with the S&P 500 and DOW getting back close to the levels before these events unfolded. On top of this he continued the same pattern of pulling out of international organizations and agreements as he did in his first term, stepping away from tackling the climate change issue.
It is interesting that we have built a system where your retirement fund, your savings, your rent, are all basically chips on a casino table. And somehow, we have convinced ourselves that is okay. That it is okay for someone like Trump to have this much power over everyone’s future. This made me think of a book that I read last year by the Japanese Philosopher Kohei Saito, by the name Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and Marx in the Anthropocene.
Kohei Saito and Degrowth
Degrowth can be understood as a movement or way of thinking that criticizes the objective of endless growth as our society’s most important social objective. With a tone to abandon it as a whole. While this did sound gloomy to me before, and still under certain circumstances does so today, it appears as a constant way of thinking that poses the question: What if progress is not always good? What if working less, consuming less, and living slower (this does not mean stop progressing, or stopping the “growth”) is not failure, but freedom? What if the way “success” is measured completely upside down?
Saito digs deep into Marx’s later writings—not just class struggle theories everyone remembers from highschool, but the parts where Marx starts realizing that our economical model is not just unfair to workers, it is hostile to nature. It destroys the soil, the air, the communal bonds that keep people alive. And Saito knows Marx was not correct on all accounts. He had blind spots. But Marx, in his later years, was rethinking some of his eurocentric assumptions. Looking at Indigenous systems, communal land use, non-Western ways of organizing life. He died before he could explore this part. Saito, in a way, is trying to convey what Marx possibly did desire for the world, not in the way that it was presented by Engels. This might be for some people, just a direct write off since he is essentially a marxist, or what he likes to call himself a degrowth communist. But, it is not for his marxist ideas that I think he is entirely worth the reading. But the way he talked about our own imagination being limited in many ways due to societal structures we are living in today.
The capturing of our imagination
GDP growth is the number one factor to measure the success of our society, which trickles down into our society as well as our imagination. Many of us do not measure the work we want to do based on our spirit and desire entirely. Instead, we measure it on the status and salary, which are usually tied to the importance of GDP growth. In one way this also connects to our sense of self and our self identification. In this vein we start structuring our lives, our relationships, our time and aspirations to fit into something we feel that we can be proud of, but which is also connected to what our society is telling us that we should be proud of. And with the constant shift in trends on social media and society, of who we should be, how we should look, how much we should earn, and what we should have, we will never feel enough and always in need of bettering ourselves to fit in; while the ecology, the environment, the people and our planet suffer the consequences.
Saito is not trying to force his ideas on us or handing us a guidebook, telling us what we should do. But instead, he is handing the pen and paper back to us. He is not saying “here’s the path,” he is saying “why are we still walking this one?” Why do we accept that endless growth is the only way? Why do we think we can solve climate collapse and social injustice with better branding and electric SUVs? We are free to still walk this path, but we should think more about the consequences and understand the choices we are making when we are accepting this system, and also how the system is limiting our own imagination. Even our “solutions” to the environmental crisis are just new versions of the same game. Green growth? While it feels good, and it is a step towards change in some cases, to Saito it is just the same machine as before but painted with biodegradable ink. For him the SDGs are just the new opium for the masses.
Clean energy? Cool, but it still needs lithium, cobalt, and rare earths—ripped from the Global South, often by people working in horrific conditions, often including child labor. To Saito our current lifestyles will require social injustice in order to keep it cheap so we can keep on growing the GDP number.
Saito does not tell us what to build. He just asks why we have stopped imagining, or perhaps why we are only imagining along the path that technologies, commercial and branding presented by the big companies are encouraging. In this sense maybe degrowth is not the end goal—it is the refusal to keep pretending. It is the point to say: this system is not working, and the fact that we cannot picture anything else is part of the problem.
This is a short and introductory picture to the discussions in the books of Saito. But I believe it is a worthwhile read for everyone. It helps to imagine again, in your own political way. Saitos’ writings do not point out specific politicians, such as Trump, to be the issue, rather he points towards the fault in the system where sleazy politicians are merely reactions that the system spits out when it is already broken.
Recommended reading: Slow Down first and Marx in the Anthropocene
