I haven't read Saito's books, or looked too deeply into degrowth as a movement. I just read this article and thought it made some good arguments against what it claims are Saito's understandings of Marx. I'm not sure I agree with everything, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
Yeah, I don't agree with all the points. And, as I said, I haven't read the literature on "degrowth" (I do have Saito's books, haven't gotten around to it). I was specifically interested in what the writers claimed were Saito's wrongful reinterpretations of Marx on things like historical materialism, and a new break in his thinking similar to the young and old Marx, etc etc. It's always so fascinating to me, how Marxists (and other leftists ofc) build such competing and conflicting theories arising from the same foundation, often using the same works.
This is pedantic maybe, but I wanna mention there are actually Marx-works available today that weren't 20 years ago, and 20 years ago there were works available that weren't 40 years ago etc. Marx wrote a lot, and its still not all transcribed into print, much less translated from Marx-language into German.