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.
Leftists and bad slogans, name a better duo. The non primitivist degrowth people are generally pretty alright but those who take it literally are ... scary. Obviously capitalist growth will have to cease, but society needs to be fundamentally reorganized which is going to take a lot of 'growth' in the productive forces. Because people conflate capitalist growth with technological development the arguments for degrowth sound asinine and they dismiss them out of hand.
However I just realized the article is cowritten by Leigh Phillips. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Jacobin would still publish something of his now but its disappointing nonetheless.
Are they bad?
Meh. Wrote an overrated book about central planning (thesis is that central planning is possible because Walmart and Amazon do it - of course central planning is possible but not for that reason, Phillips kinda misses the point) that spends a chapter devoted to shitting on Stalin.
Well take a gander at his twitter but lets say he's a fellow traveler of LaRouche. More importantly for this though, degrowth is a bit of a bugbear for him. He complains about it constantly so I wouldn't believe he's being honest about his criticism of Saito.
ewww