Man oh man, what a disappointment. Whereas there is a time and place for theory as a foundation in movement building, my takeaway is that Saitō is an amazing scholar and capable of philosophizing an ideal to death. I am always weary of a text where the author is constantly hedging their statements to their readership and anticipating blow-back, i.e., “this isn’t the usual Marxist read” and such. The protesting too much red flag, but I kept reading. A satisfying text starts with a hypothesis and an investigation and is self aware of its own contradictions and possible debunking. Saitō seems to have had a very clear landing strip, a thing he wanted to very firmly claim, and then worked his way backwards to cherry-pick the bits of Marxism that works best for him. To add to the issue, I do wonder which parts were just poor translation from his original text, which is of course not the author’s fault. Do I deeply hate capitalism? Yes. Do I remain open to hearing how degrowth communism provides a dramatic shift towards a more sustainable world? Also yes. Did this text make such ideas seem possible? Not at all. Just a disappointing experience overall.