About halfway through Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito discusses the Markgenossenschaften or cooperative associations that characterized “Germanic tribal societies Tacitus wrote about during the reign of the Caesars in Rome.” He runs into trouble:

…[Karl Nikolaus] Fraas praises especially the Markgenossenschaft (“Mark-associations” [sic]) of ancient Germanic peoples for their sustainable farming practices. While these Germanic tribes are usually thought of as “barbarians,” from the point of view of sustainability, they seem to have been quite advanced. Markgenossenschaft is a broad term for the Germanic tribal societies Tacitus wrote about during the reign of the Caesars in Rome. This period saw a shift from tribal communities focused on hunting and military matters to sedentary agricultural communities.

These Germanic peoples owned land communally and had strong rules regulating production methods. It was unthinkable within the Markgenossenschaft to sell land to anyone outside the community. Other products like pork, timber, wine, and the like were also forbidden to be bought and sold outside the community.

This sort of strong communal regulation supported the renewal of the soil and enabled sustainable farming practices. It even brought about long term improvements in soil fertility. It was a very different arrangement from those of ancient civilizations that had weakened these sorts of communal bonds….

Marx’s strong interest in Fraas’s discussion of Markgenossenschaft can also be seen in his careful reading of the papers on these communities written by German legal historian Georg Ludwig von Maurer. It was Maurer’s work that formed the underpinning for Fraas’s work on Markgenossenschaft….

According to [Maurer], Markgenossenschaft involved not only communal landownership that allowed everyone to cultivate the land equally. Members of the commune also regularly exchanged plots of land to work, each allotment being decided by lottery. Maurer draws attention to how this allowed them to avoid a situation in which the most fertile land belonged to only part of the population, thus preventing unequal wealth distribution.

This arrangement provided a stark contrast to the landifundia [sic] of ancient Rome, vast estates presided over by nobles who managed them using slave labor. What Maurer, a conservative thinker, unearthed in his historical study was a form of egalitarianism practiced by the very same Germanic barbarians who struck fear in the hearts of even the socialists of Marx’s time. (pp. 110-12, emphasis mine)

Let’s dispense with the obvious. I don’t know how the Latin word “latifundia” became the barbarism “landifundia”: it might be Saito’s own mistake, or an error introduced by his translator; and while I don’t want to make too much of it, I’m surprised an editor didn’t flag it. Take it as a sign that the passage should have been reviewed more closely than it was.

The larger problem has to do with Saito’s uncritical acceptance of Fraas and Maurer’s reading of ancient sources, which are supposed to have shaped Marx’s own views on sustainability and ideas about degrowth. The picture of the past Marx took from these authors looks a little distorted. Nineteenth-century readers, and Fraas and Maurer are no exception, tended to take ancient “moralizing” descriptions of the Germani at face value, as J.B. Rives explains in his notes on Germania 26; they drew on “traditional accounts of nomadic peoples, in which the absence of regularly cultivated fields is a commonplace.” The archaeological record, on the other hand, shows “fields with fixed boundaries” – ditches, mostly – and “no indication that the Germani regularly changed their farmland in a semi-nomadic fashion, and little reason to think that it was not privately owned.”

That’s not the full extent of the trouble here. The ancient sources themselves present a number of other difficulties that Saito does not address, and that should, at the very least, warrant circumspection. The idea that the Germani “regularly exchanged plots of land to work” can be teased out of Tacitus, but it makes a hash of the Latin grammar; it’s more likely another rendering of the idea found in earlier writers that the Germani lead a semi-nomadic life, and that “different stretches of land are cultivated in turn” or “one after another” (that’s how Rives renders Tactius’ in vices).

The whole passage in the Germania seems to have been developed from these earlier sources, not direct observation or contemporary report. Tacitus, as Rives notes, was “not too careful” about squaring the stuff he’d lifted with the rest of his text.

As for Caesar, Rives calls his account of the Germani “highly tendentious” and even “ideological” (because describing the nomadic, warlike people beyond the Rhine served his claim that he had conquered all of Gaul); and Saito’s reading of the text (or the reading of Gallic War 6.22 he takes from Maurer) does nothing to check that. The supposed “egalitarianism” of the Markgenossenschaft, for example, is not exactly front and center in Caesar’s account. Tacitus writes that the lands of the Germani are apportioned “secundum dignationem,” according to honor or social rank; Caesar, that “the magistrates and the leading men each year apportion to the tribes and families, who have united together, as much land as, and in the place in which, they think proper, and the year after compel them to remove elsewhere (transire cogunt).”

This system of allotment and forced movement comes close to the coercive control by powerful leaders (or state power, “invasive state intervention”) that Saito deplores throughout his book. But Caesar pretty clearly understands its benefits. It is not to “avoid unequal wealth distribution” – as Saito puts it, or to promote “self-governance and mutual aid.” It is, instead, necessary to enforce moral discipline among the plebes and “keep the common people in a contented state of mind, when each sees his own means placed on an equality with [those of] the most powerful.”

So there are some serious discrepancies here. To be fair, Saito is not writing about these ancient texts or even ancient historical reality. He’s trying instead to trace the evolution of Marx’s thought after he completed Capital volume 1. Still, it strikes me as odd that Saito doesn’t concern himself with the question whether Marx’s “careful reading” of Fraas and Maurer reproduced their fantasies and flawed interpretations, or that Marx’s view of ancient communal life might itself be impaired by their misreadings. Shouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it help to explore things from this angle if the project is to understand Marx historically? Or would situating Marx firmly in the nineteenth century create difficulties for the argument here? What would it mean if these ancient Germanic tribes were not actually the models “of sustainability and steady-state economics from communal societies” that Marx took them to be and incorporated “into his revolutionary thought,” but a nineteenth-century idealization? Isn’t it worth trying to understand the roots and branches of views that are questionable or even downright wrongheaded?

To put it another way, what real bearing does all this have on Saito’s argument in Slow Down? First, Saito holds up these ancient Germanic people as one important model of “how precapitalist communal societies lived and worked while managing their land cooperatively.” (The indigenous people of the global south offer another model.) He argues that degrowth economics should learn from and emulate “the steady-state economy enforced by the traditions of precapitalist communal societies”; “the stability of a communal society detached from economic growth would foster a metabolic relationship between humans and nature that would be both sustainable and equal.” So we might be cutting pretty close to the bone here.

This brings me to a second point. For Saito, genossenschaften or cooperatives are an essential part of the economic remedy to our growth-driven climate crisis. (I can agree with him on this score; I just can’t follow the path he takes to get there.) But is it really an economic remedy he’s proposing? Sometimes, and sometimes it looks as if Saito wants to make another kind of argument: a moral argument. As I read Slow Down, I noted several places where this unmade, or not fully-fledged, moral argument began to surface. “The present crisis should be spurring us to reflect upon our behavior”; we have surrendered agency; “we must change our mode of living” (the word “must” keeps a steady beat throughout the book); “we must break ourselves out of our addiction to our present consumption practices and shift the emphasis of production to those things necessary for us to thrive while also practicing self-restraint.”

Could transitioning to degrowth economics help in this regard? Perhaps, but it’s not entirely clear how, or how Saito imagines the transition will be accomplished despite the addictions and excesses of our present mode of life. There’s plenty of loose talk about transitioning, overcoming, toppling, as one might expect, but I was still confused on this point by the book’s end. I guess it’s a long-term undertaking, and all we can do is make good faith efforts to build alternatives to the current failing system. At times, however, Saito almost seems to be demanding (“must”!) something else: some kind of moral revolution, a great awakening that would make future people conduct themselves with the moral rectitude and restraint of the ancient Germani, or at least the Germani of the nineteenth-century imagination.