The thoughts of Mao Zedong, published in 1964 under the title Quotations, are considered the blueprint for Chinese communism and a guidebook to the Cultural Revolution. The collected soundbites from his speeches and writings have become known the world over as the Little Red Book.

But the red-covered Quotations of the former Chinese Communist Party chairman, who died in 1976, aged 82, went through many ideological iterations before the official version was settled on. The original cover was also a different colour – in fact, had some of those earlier thought experiments been declared the final draft, we could now be talking about Chairman Mao’s Little Blue Book.

For the first time, a huge collection of the various editions of Quotations has been assembled and is to be unveiled and presented for sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair next month, with a communism-busting price tag of £1m.

The collection is the work of more than two decades by Justin G Schiller, an American collector who began to visit China in the 1990s. Dr Matt Wills of London rare book dealer Peter Harrington, which is representing the sale, said: “At that time, the market for collecting the Little Red Book was only just beginning, and you could find all kinds of rare and one-off editions being discarded by institutions and private individuals if you knew where to look. Justin was in place at the perfect time to build a collection without parallel. It would be impossible to do the same today, as the majority of the rarer editions have long perished.”

The collection is some 200 items strong and includes many of the early versions as well as first editions and international printings of the book. Before the famous red vinyl cover was settled on, the prototype editions had brown, white and blue bindings.

And it wasn’t just cosmetic changes that were effected for the final printing. Many of the ideas in the book changed and evolved from 1960, when Mao’s sayings and slogans started to be compiled.

“The first widely published edition of the Little Red Book, released in May 1964, naturally opens with a quote on the vanguard role of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Wills.

“Look to prototype and trial versions and you will see that most do not open with this quote. As the Little Red Book became a ‘mass market’ publication, it became very important to put the party at the forefront on page one.

“You will also see, across editions from 1961 to 1964, that the text shrinks, and the quotes often become punchier and rhetorically impactful as compilers tried to make the ­selection as effective and user-friendly as possible.”

In fact, it seems that even 60 years ago spin doctors were at work to make the thoughts of Chairman Mao easily digestible for the masses.

Prof Christopher Marquis, Sinyi professor of Chinese management at Cambridge Judge Business School and author of the book Mao and Markets, said: “The original book was for the People’s Liberation Army so it focused a lot on Mao’s military guidance and quotes on discipline and loyalty.

“Following the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the book was transformed into much more of an element of propaganda and a more ideologically focused text to rally the populace behind Mao and his ideas.”

Wills agrees: “The final version represents a very specific way of presenting Maoism: short, punchy phrases, many of which became everyday idiomatic expressions during the Cultural Revolution, arranged in no more than three dozen easily digestible chapters produced in a cheap and durable binding.”

The Little Red Book has earned its place as an item of cultural significance – Prof Marquis points to China’s Red Guards waving the book in revolutionary fervour as an enduring image of Mao’s time and also its utilisation by 1960s leftwing movements.

The Little Red Book is more than just a piece of nostalgia though. “Many of the business entrepreneurs I have researched quote Mao and discuss his work as inspiration and in some cases a guide for their work,” said Marquis.

“And [Chinese president] Xi Jinping also quotes Mao and uses his ideas in guiding his policies.

“More broadly, I think it also shapes the general propaganda atmosphere and idea that political control through propaganda is essential to governing China. I think of the promotion of ‘Xi Jinping thought’ and literally hundreds of books Xi has ‘authored’. It reflects an attempt to create a written canon like Mao.”

Mao himself said in the Little Red Book: “It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich.” So what would he think of his work going on sale for £1m?

“I think he would have a very mixed reaction,” says Prof Marquis.

“On the one hand, selling items for the rich to buy at such astronomical prices does point to the underlying problems with capitalism, which he strongly resisted.

“However, on an intellectual level, it is a great manifestation of commodity fetishism – a key idea of Karl Marx’s – so in some ways he might have found it reinforcing of his world view being right.

“But he might have actually been quite pleased, because aside from his ideological positions, he was an extreme narcissist and revelled in the cult of personality he created, so he might have been pleased that this book is getting such attention and is being so highly valued.”

The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read “Master Operating Station”, “Subsidiary Operating Station” and “Free Standing Display”. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date technical manual?

Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.

This copy lives now in the library of Warsaw University, but for much of the cold war it belonged to the Polish writer and dissident Teresa Bogucka. It was Teresa’s father, the art critic Janusz Bogucki, who first brought it to Poland. In 1957, during a window of liberalisation that opened after Stalin’s death, Janusz picked up the Orwell translation from a Polish bookshop in Paris, smuggled it back through the border and gave it to his daughter. Teresa was only 10 or 11 years old then, but she was a precocious reader, and recognised the ways in which communist Poland mirrored Orwell’s fictional dystopian state: “It absolutely traumatised me,” she remembered.

Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a “Flying Library”, which rarely touched the  ground.

Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.

The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.

How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.

What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program”, designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an “offensive of free, honest thinking”. Minden believed that “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.

From today’s vantage point, when disinformation threatens western liberal democracy as never before, and censorship and book bans are once again turning schools and libraries into ideological battlegrounds, the CIA literary programmes appear almost quaint. Although they had political goals, they must rank among the most highbrow of psychological warfare operations. Along with copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly and the New York Review of Books, the CIA sent works by blacklisted authors such as Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, anti-totalitarian writings by Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, literary fiction from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, writing advice from Virginia Woolf, the plays of Václav Havel and Bertolt Brecht, and the spy thrillers of John le Carré.

Later, as well as smuggling books, the CIA would fund and ship presses and printing equipment into Poland, so that the banned titles could be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in situ. Few individuals were more central to these latter operations than the dissident publisher Mirosław Chojecki, known to the CIA by the cryptonym QRGUIDE.

On a Tuesday evening in March 1980, the police came to arrest Chojecki for the 43rd time. Chojecki was 30 years old that night – a tall man, with a mane of red-brown hair. He lived with his family in a third-floor apartment in Żoliborz, a suburb of northern Warsaw, and was cooking dinner for his young son and talking to his father-in-law when they heard the door. There were three men outside, a local cop in the jackboots and grey tunic of the citizen’s militia, and two plainclothes SB agents. They flashed their badges and told him to get his coat. There was no explanation. He had just enough time to calm his crying son, grab a toothbrush and a pack of cigarettes, then they clapped handcuffs on his wrists and took him down to the police Fiat waiting on the road below.

They brought him to Mokotów jail, a house of terror to rival the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow, and put him in block III, a wing reserved for political prisoners. He had been here before, once for “vilifying the Polish People’s Republic” and again for “organising a criminal group with the aim of distributing illegal publications” – at least then he had known the reason for his detention. As the days dripped by, he and his cellmates talked politics and played chess with a set made from heavy black prison bread. He wasn’t allowed a lawyer.

At Easter, when he had been locked up for 10 days without being summoned to court or allowed to contact his family, he decided to take the path chosen by political prisoners everywhere: he would go on a hunger strike. Eight days later, when he had lost 8kg (17lb), the prison doctor announced that they would force-feed him. They inserted a hose into his mouth, pushing it in deep so that it scratched his oesophagus and made him gag, and poured in a sweet, fatty mush. Tears ran down his face, of helplessness, rage, revulsion. When the food was gone, the doctor whipped out the tube and left without a word.

Chojecki had not yet recovered when the guards returned and forced him to climb three landings to an interrogation room, where an intelligence officer was waiting. It was Lieutenant Chernyshevsky, an old sparring partner.

How was he feeling, Chernyshevsky asked?

“Bad.”

“Do you know that there is a printing house on Reymonta Street?”

Chojecki didn’t answer.

“Do you have Jan Nowak’s book Courier from Warsaw? If so, where, when and how did you come into possession of it and what is your relationship with the author?”

There were more questions in this vein, all about the underground press. Chojecki gave the same response to each: as long as he didn’t know what the evidence was against him, they had nothing to discuss.

Realising the interrogation was pointless, Chernyshevsky brought it to an end. He offered the prisoner a cigarette, then the guards took Chojecki back to his cell.

Of course he knew all about Nowak’s outlawed text. His publishing house had just printed it. It was, he said later, one of the best books they had ever produced.

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Unlike the Nazis, who burned books as a public ritual, in the Soviet system the destruction of literature was designed to be invisible. The lists of banned titles sent round to libraries and bookstores every year were secret. Works were pulped covertly. Allusions to censorship were not allowed. A list of prohibited publications from 1951 details 2,482 items, including 238 works of “outdated” sociopolitical literature and 562 books for children. Mostly these were proscribed for ideological reasons, but some rulings made little sense even within the bizarre logic of the party: a book about growing carrots was destroyed for implying that vegetables could sprout in individuals’ gardens, as well as in those run by collectives.

Chojecki was introduced to the idea of uncensored literature by Krystyna Starczewska, a teacher at his high school. “She got me interested,” he remembered. “She got me reading.” It wasn’t hard for Chojecki to find banned books, as his parents – war heroes who fought against the Nazis – were already plugged into dissident intellectual circles. He was never allowed much time with these publications as they had to be passed on to other readers. But the fragments he read, often overnight, were enough to sow the seeds of dissent.

In 1976, when the government announced drastic increases in the state-controlled prices of food, workers went on strike, and the party responded as it always did, with violence. One victim recalled waking up from a beating with a broken nose and no teeth; another remembered seeing men beat a pregnant woman. The 1976 events turned a group of bookish young graduates into hardened opposition activists, and it didn’t take them long to realise they needed a public voice.

In spring 1977, Chojecki decided to focus on underground publishing. He wasn’t the only pioneer of illicit printing techniques, but the operation he led, the Independent Publishing House NOWa, grew to be the biggest and most successful in the underground. By Christmas they had published short runs of half a dozen books by blacklisted writers in Poland. Crucially, they also began to reprint editions of titles that were arriving from the west. The same books that were actively pushed by the CIA.

By the third week of his hunger strike, Chojecki’s body was shutting down. On 27 April 1980, the warden came to see him. This was a first: he had never heard of the head of the prison visiting an inmate in their cell before.

“How’s the starvation?” the warden asked.

“Very well.”

“Do you intend to starve for a long time?”

“Until I leave prison.”

“That’s five years.”

“Less.”

“Four and a half years?”

“A few days, Citizen Warden.”

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The warden was wrong, as it turned out. Two weeks later, on Saturday 10 May, the order came through that Chojecki was to be released. He had been arrested in the snow; now the season had turned. As he squinted out from the shadow cast by the prison wall at the sunshine blazing down, he could pick out green shoots on the branches of the trees.

He had no appetite, but he knew he needed to eat. He struggled round the corner to a cafe, where he bought a small coffee and two doughnuts, and sat at a window table. He ate very slowly, savouring the sweet pastry with absolute delight. People passed by on the other side of the glass.

“They think they are free,” he thought.

The regime might have released him, but it was still determined to prosecute Chojecki. As he prepared for his moment in the dock, it was more important than ever for the dissidents to show that underground publishing operations would not be stopped. Five days before the court date, two young NOWa printers set out on a job that would turn into a cat-and-mouse game with the secret police.

The night before leaving for work, Jan Walc went through his pockets. In this line of business, you had to assume you would be caught, searched and interrogated, and he couldn’t be found with anything that would incriminate him or his friends. Next he packed a few essentials and took a long bath, knowing it would be his last for some time.

He knew where to meet his partner, Zenek Pałka. The only extra piece of information he needed was the time, and Pałka had given him that over the phone. Without saying his name, he had announced that they should get together at 11am on Monday 9 June. Walc recognised the voice. He also knew what the wiretap sergeant listening in didn’t: namely, that he had to subtract two from everything, so the rendezvous was set for 9am on Saturday 7 June. That morning, he said goodbye to his wife and young son and walked out into a humid Warsaw day.

Leaving the building, Walc discreetly scanned the street. As a rule the secret police liked to watch your apartment or place of work and follow you from there, so if you didn’t pick up a tail right away, the prospects of avoiding one were good. All the same, he kept checking until he reached the cafe. Soon Pałka, a giant of a man with frizzy red hair, was settling into the seat next to him.

“Is the place far away?” Walc asked. Pałka took a paper serviette and wrote down an address before burning through the words with his cigarette. Then he passed on a few more details. Water came from a well, but they would need a week’s worth of food, since they couldn’t risk leaving the job to go shopping. The printing machine was a mimeograph made by AB Dick of Chicago. It had already been delivered to the house, along with a tonne and a half of paper, six full carloads. The job was to print several thousand copies of the civil society newsletter Information Bulletin, plus some pages for NOWa’s literary journal Pulse. They would need to buy 10 bottles of turpentine to run and clean the press.

By the time they’d packed all the food, they had no room for the solvent, so they stopped by at a friend’s place to borrow an extra bag. They didn’t realise he was under surveillance, and when they left his building they spotted a boxy grey Fiat saloon with three men inside which shadowed them as they walked along the road.

Reaching a tram stop, they saw the Fiat pull into a side road and park illegally, a sure sign it was the secret police, and when the tram arrived and the printers boarded, two plainclothes agents jumped out of the car and ran across the street, climbing up behind them. All four men now sat in the same streetcar as it rattled towards Zawisza Square. The Fiat kept pace alongside.

How to get rid of them? As they reached a stop, the printers saw the Fiat was boxed in at the traffic lights, and they took their chance, leaving the tram at the last minute. When the lights changed and the unmarked car had to pull away, Walc and Pałka were hurrying in a different direction, towards the railway station. A part of their tail was lost, but the other two agents had been alert and were keeping pace behind them as they ran down the station platform.

The agents were close as they boarded a train for Warsaw Central. Walc made a show of placing his bags on the luggage rack, but as the doors closed Pałka jammed his leg between them and slipped out. Walc now had the two remaining agents to himself. His job was to drag them around long enough for Pałka to prepare the next move. The men were behind him as he left the train at Warsaw Central and ducked into the warren of passages beneath the station. He knew police radios wouldn’t work down here. He ordered a Coke at a bar, bought some cigarettes, browsed the shops. When 20 minutes had passed, he emerged and headed for the taxi rank. He could see one of the men talking into his lapel as he climbed into a cab.

Warsaw’s Poniatowski Bbridge is as much a viaduct as a river crossing, the roadway linked to the streets below by a series of stone staircases. Speeding east, Walc gave the driver his instructions. Midway along the viaduct, the taxi came to a sudden halt, and the printer dived out and ran down the steps to the street below.

The chasing agents pulled up behind and raced down in pursuit, but as they reached the lower level Walc was already climbing into another cab, where Pałka was waiting. The policemen watched as their quarry pulled away. Knowing they would now be radioing in the cab’s licence plate, a few hundred yards up the road the printers swapped into another taxi. They transferred their bags, left a generous tip and gave the new driver an address on the far side of the city.

Around 3pm, they caught the train to Rembertów The place looked ideal. It was set back from the street, at the far end of a large, overgrown garden. The printing machine and the paper were hidden in an outhouse, 500 reams stacked almost to the roof. The paper was damp, which was far from ideal, but they would make it work somehow.

By evening their small room was filled with the fumes of cigarettes and turpentine, and the sound of the duplicating machine beating out its regular, soporific rhythm, bad-dum bad-dum bad-dum bad-dum. Underground printing was filthy, exhausting work. The duplicators were old and the paper was poor. Bibula, the Polish word for uncensored publications, means “blotting paper”, which reflected the stock they had to work with, which had to be hand-fed into the machine, three pages a second, hour upon hour. This meant they worked round the clock, in shifts, for days, until the job was done.

Pałka had brought along a transistor. They tuned it to Radio Free Europe, which maintained a regular commentary on Chojecki’s upcoming trial. American printers and British lawyers were protesting at what they called a show trial. Amnesty International was sending a legal representative. “A great day is coming,” Walc thought, “and we are stuck in a printing shop!” If they hurried the job, they might still be able to get to court.

Early on Thursday morning they had 20 reams left to print. By 8pm, Pałka was finishing the last stencil and Walc was burning misprints in the garden. Before leaving they had to strip down the machine, wash all the parts and lubricate them.

At last, carrying 50 copies of the Bulletin, they found a taxi and gave the driver the address of the apartment where they had been told to collect their pay. They arrived around 11pm. It was crowded with people, including half the Bulletin’s editors. Walc asked about the trial. He was astonished to hear it was already over. The sentence had been read an hour ago. One of the editors had just come back from the court, where they saw Chojecki deliver an excoriating indictment of the communist system. He told the court that his flat had been searched 17 times in the past four years, on a litany of pretexts: they were looking for a murderer, they had said, or a poisoner or a thief, but all they ever took away for evidence were books, typewriters and manuscripts.

“Why are such accusations levelled against people who fight against the pillaging of our culture?Officially, half of our recent history is erased from textbooks, studies, encyclopedias,” said Chojecki. It was the same in literature, where the state gave itself a “monopoly of thought” and a “monopoly of the word”. The lists of banned authors contained some of world’s best writers, he said. That was why he and his colleagues had set up NOWa, to fill the silences and correct the falsification.

Reaching a rousing finale, Chojecki announced that the trial was not about the accused at all, but about “free speech and thought, about Polish culture, about the dignity of society”.

Of course, none of this would change the verdict. The court duly convicted Chojecki and his co-defendants of theft of state property. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended for three years. But to everyone gathered in the editors’ apartment, this was a tremendous victory and Chojecki was a hero.

“Everybody around us rejoices,” Walc wrote in his account of that week’s events, which would be published in the following month’s Bulletin.

Someone pressed a cold beer into his hand. It was midnight.

Chojecki’s parents had fought for Polish independence with guns and bullets. He continued the struggle through literature and publishing. At times, his father, Jerzy was sceptical of his son’s tactics. “Do you think, Mirek, that you’ll be able to bring down the communist system with your little books?” he would ask. “Do you think your little words will make a difference?”

In fact, the impact of the CIA-sponsored literary tide was huge. By the mid-1980s the so-called “second circulation” of illicit literature in Poland grew so large that the system of communist censorship began to break down. Poland was the most crucial of eastern bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall. As the leading Polish dissident Adam Michnik put it: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. We should build a monument to books … they allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

Teresa Bogucka didn’t know for sure who was paying for the literature she received from the west, but she was aware that the Polish regime claimed that American intelligence supported émigré publishers, and the idea didn’t concern her at all.

“I thought, wow, a secret service supporting books,” she said. “That’s fantastic.”

There are things you see, walking through the big cities of South Korea, that remind you of the recent but worlds-apart past. Venders of live cuttlefish and quilted hemp linens in the traditional market. An elderly woman on the sidewalk selling small, homegrown quantities of millet and barley. Their customers are few; everyone shops at malls and supermarkets now. I write from Cheonan, where my dad grew up, but the city of his youth has just a few square kilometres and a name in common with this one—a metropolis of nearly seven hundred thousand. There are undeniably good things about the new Cheonan: people are not starving; there are cars and extensive public transit. Who, though, is patronizing all these seafood restaurants and takeout cafés, indoor golf ranges, dermatology clinics, boutiques, and luxury department stores? So much neon and noise, plastic and profligacy—is this what growth looks like?

South Korea, one of the Asian Tigers, is a star of developmental economics. The nation was, as recently as my own childhood, considered a third-world country that first-world countries relied on for labor and raw materials. Now it’s a global leader in tech and pop culture and a regional metropole that draws workers from Africa and the rest of Asia. It also offshores toxic waste and employs thousands of people in factories abroad, including the United States. In a short time, the average South Korean’s life style has become indistinguishable from that of the average North American—what the researchers Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen call the “imperial mode of living.” The phrase is apt in the case of South Korea, whose industrial mentor was also its colonizer: Japan.

In the East, Japan was the forerunner of Western industrialization, but many Japanese now want less of that and more out of life. The 2008 financial crisis made Marxism trendy there; the 2011 disaster at a nuclear plant in Fukushima led to mass introspection over energy use and food supply chains. The imperial mode of living, an advanced-capitalist monoculture, is no longer viable. “Economic growth itself is what is destroying the very basis of what humans need to thrive,” Kohei Saito writes, in his new book, “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” translated by Brian Bergstrom (and first published in Japanese, in 2020, as “Capital in the Anthropocene”).

Saito has made a career of teasing out an eco-theory from the late, unpublished writings of Karl Marx. He earned his doctorate at Humboldt University, in Berlin, and now teaches philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His first book was an English version of his dissertation, titled “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” (2017), which tracked Marx’s study of the physical world and communal agricultural practices. (Saito is fluent in Japanese, German, and English.) In a second academic book, “Marx in the Anthropocene” (2022), Saito drew on an expanded repertoire of Marx’s unpublished notebooks to argue for a theory of “degrowth communism.” He gained a following, not only in philosophical circles but among a Japanese public facing the contradictions of tsunamis, billionaires, and same-day shipping. “Slow Down” has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and launched Saito into a rare academic celebrity. He appears regularly on Japanese television and aspires to the public-intellectual status of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who had a surprise hit in his 2013 doorstop, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.”

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South.

If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must abandon capitalism, with its insatiable appetites. We must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

The Japanese version of “Slow Down” features a head shot of Saito on the cover, looking quizzical in a gray sweatshirt. Behind him is a frightening future image of the Earth as seen from space: fire-red continents and pitch-black oceans. The book is identifiable as a shinsho (new book), a pocket paperback designed to explain difficult topics to a general audience. At times it reads like the transcript of a lecture or debate, mired in signposting and repetition. The title “Slow Down” is a command; the “manifesto” of the subtitle underscores the book’s crusading tone. It begins with a declamatory overture—“Ecology Is the Opiate of the Masses!”—followed by several chapters of elaboration. Counter-arguments are tackled and disposed of; examples of degrowth are plucked from Quito and Barcelona.

In Saito’s heterodox reading, there are two Marxes, only one of whom is correct. The first and better-known Marx—of “The Communist Manifesto” and “Capital: Volume I”—focussed on growth. He believed that capitalism, despite its exploitative tendencies, would “bring about innovations through competition that would raise productivity,” Saito explains. The first Marx inspired socialists to commit to industry, on the logic that “a rise in productivity would prepare the conditions for everyone in the future society to enjoy a rich, free lifestyle.” Marxists in Europe felt entitled to become rich and free by stripping their far-off colonies (which was why Edward Said described Marxism as Orientalist). Though early Marx wrote perceptively of the toll of capitalism on (some) human laborers, he neglected the harm involved in extracting coal and minerals, and the damage done to trees, air, and water.

But in Marx’s later years, Saito writes, something changed. Between “Capital: Volume I” and his death, Marx “was engaged the entire time in an intense study of the natural sciences.” The year 1868 was the turning point. Marx became ravenous for research on nature and communal forms of organization. He read Justus von Liebig, who described single-crop, quick-till farming as a “robbery system”—robbery of the soil. Marx learned about mirs, agricultural communes in Russia, and believed that they could be developed into socialism, without passing through capitalism. He also read about “cyclical, steady-state economies” among Indigenous peoples in the Americas, India, and Algeria, and apparently snapped out of his Eurocentrism. “Marx ends up asserting that it’s precisely the steady state of the commune’s economy that allows it not only to resist colonial domination but also to hold within it the possibility of toppling the power of capitalism and achieving communism,” Saito writes. “There is clearly a huge shift here.” This second Marx recognizes capitalism’s limits and nature’s finitude.

That a clunky shinsho about Marx’s late writings would become a best-seller is a sign of our hot, grim times. But there is much in the particulars of Japanese experience that makes Saito’s argument locally resonant. In the nineteen-eighties, Japan’s economy was expanding, its G.D.P. seemingly poised to shoot beyond that of the United States. But, in 1995, Japan’s bubble economy crashed, and never recovered its earlier, fantastical rates of increase. The G.D.P., that pesky index, settled into a modest zigzag. Economists called the ensuing years “the lost decade,” and then “the lost decades.” Starting in 2012, Shinzo Abe, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, paired promises of deregulatory growth (“Abenomics”) with aggressive nationalism. As a result of his special economic zones and tax cuts, or just pure chance, the G.D.P. had a couple strong years, then dropped off again. Still, Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy.

For politicians, anything short of constant growth is an affliction. But, as Saito observes, traditional indicators such as G.D.P. fail to accurately measure well-being. Life for many Japanese—and others in the Global North—is too busy, materially excessive, and ecologically untenable. We would all be happier, he argues, by cutting back on work and consumption, and devoting more hours to leisure, family, and sleep.

No sincere reader of a degrowth manifesto believes that neoliberal expansion is the right policy for our times. Yet Saito also wants to dismantle the seemingly virtuous model of green growth. “Slow Down” attacks its public-facing platform: the Green New Deal, which Saito sees as unable to take on climate change.

He means not only the Green New Deal as conceived by progressive Democrats in the U.S. but also a general type of policy. (The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is another example.) Green new deals are in vogue among many liberal and left formations around the world, and tend to be built of similar stuff: money for climate tech and jobs in new energy, solar panels, wind turbines, public transit, and electric cars and school buses. These platforms promise to enlist economic growth in service of the planet, decoupling increased G.D.P. from increased fossil-fuel use. Rather than use less energy, green new dealers propose to replace coal and natural gas with renewables.

Saito argues that it’s impossible to prevent lethal warming without more radical change. “Even if every country abided by the [Paris Agreement],” he writes, global temperatures may still “result in catastrophic damage, especially in the Global South.” The only way out is to abandon the goal of economic growth altogether. Saito’s communist alternative focusses on reordering labor. Less expansion would mean less regimented work. We could shorten our hours and try other kinds of jobs—elder care and child care, for instance—to fit society’s needs. Ownership would be flattened: no more sea-steading C.E.O.s or private jets; in their place, more co-ops and localized forms of exchange. G.D.P. would be discarded as a measure of happiness.

Saito is not the first theorist to propose degrowth as a solution to ecological scarcity. The New Left intellectual André Gorz first used the term in 1972, in a debate over a report by the Club of Rome, which called for “zero growth” amid anxiety over pollution and natural resources. More recently, the economist Tim Jackson and the anthropologist Jason Hickel have considered “post-capitalist” degrowth. The economist Ying Chen has explored the concept’s application to the Global South, to guard against what Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemns as “green neocolonialism.”

Alas, none of this is politically attractive. As Matt Huber, a geography professor at Syracuse University and an advocate for the U.S. Green New Deal, has written, “In a capitalist system defined by deprivation, who will support a program centering reduction?” My colleagues John Cassidy and Bill McKibben have similarly observed that degrowth lacks the soothing pragmatism of green growth. On its face, and by the sound of it, degrowth is subtractive, which seems bad. The imperial mode of living has wired us to associate smaller numbers and negative slopes with decay.

But some aspects of degrowth are easier to imagine than others. During the worst of the pandemic, many people in the U.S. and other wealthy nations received something of a universal basic income. (Municipal pilot programs were already in place.) Care work was subsidized in the form of a generous child tax credit, unemployment insurance was extended to all kinds of workers, and eviction moratoriums prevented mass homelessness. These policies were hugely popular.