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Communism vs. Capitalism, Back on the Best Seller List
Everyone is reading Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. It’s no surprise why. The best-selling recap of tech’s early years by tech’s best-known reporter is filled with all the gossipy and slightly salacious stories about Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg readers could want. And Swisher, never one to shy away from hard work or self-promotion, just wrapped up a book tour for the ages earlier this year, with celebrity guests like Don Lemon, Mark Cuban, and Sam Altman asking her questions and pressing her to share all she’s learned from her decades observing Silicon Valley. If you missed the live shows, you can still listen to them on the myriad of podcasts hosted by Swisher & her friends. Fans of the long-running Pivot podcast, co-hosted with Scott Galloway, and On with Kara Swisher, already know many of the stories Kara’s been dining out on for years, like the time she and Walt Mossberg made Mark Zuckerberg sweat on stage. But Burn Book is still worth reading, if only for Swisher’s clear-eyed analysis of how technology has, and has not, delivered on its many promises.
In contrast, an international bestseller getting less media hype in the States right now is the Japanese philosopher and associate professor Kohe Saito’s book Slow Down: A Degrowth Manifesto. His message is that technology can’t save us from climate change because it depends on the very things causing the climate crisis -- closed/locked capitalist systems that create false scarcity and are powered by consumerism. According to Saito, our worship of Mammon is what’s destroying us. Green technologies are no more than placebos that allow us to maintain our current lifestyles without sacrifice by transferring the Global North’s environmental burdens to the Global South. According to Saito, the only solution to our problems is a reexamination of Communism.
As much a showman as Swisher, Saito embraces the “But, wait, there’s more” presentation style of a TV infomercial host, stringing his readers along with promises to elucidate the five principal concepts of Degrowth central to his economic philosophy. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. This isn’t just a gimmick to keep us reading. Saito’s logic depends on the classic Holmesian Fallacy: Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The bulk of Slow Down is dedicated to debunking the solutions to climate change proposed by other parties – everything from Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by international organizations to “Decoupling” or using new technologies “to sever the link between economic growth and increases in environmental burden.” He makes some good points, but Saito’s conclusion that we should look to the past for solutions is uninspiring and, in the most extreme cases – such as his assertion that we need to abolish the division of labor and return to a traditional artisan-based system of production – eye-rolling. Yes, these “historical” systems are arguably more sustainable and generate less waste than our current systems. Global warming could likely slow, if not stop, were we to return to them. However, I can’t help but think that such systems have never been practiced at a scale as large as our current global economy. Nor did they produce social Utopias on their first go around.
Swisher and Saito appear unlikely companions, but they share a certain amount of disillusionment with capitalism’s track record of solving big problems. Swisher, a proud Capitalist and entrepreneur, would probably dispute or, at the very least, qualify this stance. And yet the first sentence you read in Burn Book is: “And it turned out, it was capitalism after all.” In interviews, she clarifies that her issues are not with the economics but with the men who grew rich pretending they were in it to change the world. Who wanted us to believe it wasn’t about the money when, of course, it was. Saito espouses Marxism, but a new & improved version developed from Marx’s late, unpublished writings. However, when searching for interviews with Saito online, one concludes that he may not strictly practice the principles he preaches.
What are these Degrowth principles? In a nutshell, switching to a use-value economy, shorter working hours, abolishing the uniform division of labor, democratizing the production process, and prioritizing essential work. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And it turned out, it was Communism after all.
Slow Down is filled with many excellent end goals – free education, healthcare, and transportation; prioritizing and valuing essential work, including the work of caregivers; the devaluation of “knowledge worker” (of which Saito is a part, it bears mentioning) and “influencer” economies. However, the path to reaching these goals is less clear. Saito cites “fearless cities” - a grassroots municipalism movement that seeks to effect change through local government – as a guiding light forward. Barcelona, Spain, is his primary example of a Degrowth success story, but it only gets a chapter’s attention. Slow Down asks for nothing less than a radical shifting of priorities away from marketing and advertising, which currently dominate every part of our lives. To move forward, the Global North must take/use less and support the economic growth of the Global South. But it’s hard to imagine Swisher’s tech giants, who are loath even to pay taxes to support the basic infrastructures that made their rise to power possible, adopting or even allowing this worldview to gain traction. Swisher’s book provides many a cautionary tale on the perils of unregulated capitalism, but in the end, Seito fails to make a persuasive argument on the merits of switching to a “new” form of the old Communist system.
Are these our only options? I’ve been preoccupied with nostalgia lately – its stranglehold over not just individuals but societal institutions. The world is changing, and you would think that our reliance on the old economic models would change with it. Kate Raworth’s 2012 book, Doughnut Economics, appears to offer another way forward. I’m reading that next.
Books I mention (and some I do not):
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 320 pages.
Slow Down: A Degrowth Manifesto by Kohe Saito, translated by Brian Bergstrom. New York: Astra House, 2024. 288 pages.
Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018. 320 pages.
Mutual Aid: A Factor in Human Evolution by Peter Kropotkin, afterward by Ruth Kinna. New York: Warbler Classics, 2023. 230 pages. (No translator listed).