I enjoyed reading Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito. His work has already been a surprise hit in Japan, being widely read and causing much excitement. I hope Slow Down will likewise be widely discussed in English-speaking spaces.

In his earlier work Saito examined Marx’s turn towards focusing on how capitalism was increasingly causing “metabolic rifts” that disrupted the natural cycles and processes of the ecosystem. In his new work, Saito goes further. The basic move he makes in Slow Down is re-reading Marx through notes and letters written in his final years. He shows that Marx came to reject the Eurocentrism and productivism critics have pointed out in his earlier work. Instead, for Saito, Marx began to develop an ideal of ‘degrowth’ communism, fatally missed in interpretations from previous Marxist scholars, not to mention revolutionaries and political parties who have attempted to build societies based on Marxian thought.

Drawing on his updated Marxian approach, Saito hits out both at those who claim capitalism is compatible with ecological sustainability, and at socialists who either rely on techno-optimism or accelerationist principles to imagine that productivist socialism will somehow become ecologically friendly. Both are what Saito refers to as ‘wishful thinking’. Instead, Saito argues, we need degrowth communism – we need to slow down – based on a new vision of Marxism.

The book is complex and covers much ground, including emphasising how Saito’s vision fits with making demands for increased access to electricity and other needs across the Global South, even while slowing down production overall. I don’t mean to cover all of these argument here. What I’m interested in is how his proposal may be important not just for eco-socialism, but also when it comes to disability and mental health.

As I argued in Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, capitalist productivism and the rise of clock time, along with increased technologies of measurement and control, have led to a situation where the norms of mental and bodily functioning are not just continually restricting. It is also that this has already gotten to a point where none of us can thrive for long. After all, on the one hand, more and more of us find ourselves discriminated against with disabilities such as autism or ADHD, while depression and anxiety are rife. And even the most able-bodied and minded only adhere to the norms of capitalist productivism temporarily, before the pressure leads to burnout, bodily deterioration, and so on. At this point the system abandons us and replaces us with someone else.

A related concern of mine regards the rise of long COVID, that is, the post-viral disability associated with brain fog, fatigue, shortness of breath, and so on, that so many of us are currently experiencing. While as a neurodivergent and Mad person I’ve always struggled with productivism, developing long COVID made keeping up just that much harder. I have less time, and I cannot ‘make’ more time (as people often say) because time is determined by the political economy, not my individual capacity. Like so many others, I’ve already slowed down, despite still being compelled to work by the ‘mute compulsion’ to keep working. Being constantly caught between these two contradictory pressures – one from my body and the other from the world – brings further problems, including instances of anxiety and depression.

When I started reading Saito’s book I make a joke about ‘sloth communism’, which I thought was a more amusing name than ‘degrowth communism’. On a serious note, though, I’ve come to like the concept. In contrast to the concept of ‘degrowth communism’, the concept of ‘sloth communism’ draws attention not just to the overall (un)productive orientation of the system Saito proposes. It also draws attention to how we might live in such a system. This is not to say that we’d all be sloths in the sense of sitting around in trees, doing nothing. It is more about how we might experience the world, normativity, and even time itself. This would be a world where we could just sit around in trees more often – where the compulsion to always work would be absent – even though I expect most people wouldn’t want do that all the time anyway.

When it comes to the workplace, Saito’s proposal relies heavily on the possibility of a mass shift towards worker-owned cooperatives. While this will surely not be sufficient for establishing sloth communism, I do think it is important, including for our well-being and when it comes to neurodivergent disablement. After all, as I cover in Empire of Normality, lessening worker control under neoliberalism has precisely led to higher rates of mental health problems alongside an increase in sensory, affective, and attentive pressures that increasingly disabled more and more or us. Changing interpersonal economic relations in this way and radically democratising the workplace – especially if done on a mass scale – could precisely help us challenge capitalist productivism and thus neuronormativity itself, putting the needs of the many over the profits of the few.

I don’t mean to clarify sloth communism or how to get there in any detail at this point. I mainly mean to help show how the fight for disability liberation and the building of Marxian eco-socialism may complement each other. This to me seems particularly urgent. For our current situation is one in which it is not just our planetary ecosystem that is unwell. It is also one in which individual and communal health is, despite great advances in medicine, in many ways increasingly hard to come by. Sloth communism may turn out to be the way out of this.