Degrowth
*Economic degrowth and the abandonment of GDP as a metric is needed, for sure, but I do see the problem with framing. Degrowth should be a part of a programme for eco-socialist economics but this one word shouldn’t be the leading prong.
I think degrowth chimes well with a professional-managerial class of climate activists with excess material comfort and corresponding carbon guilt, but less so with a working class already on the breadline. If you’re already near rock bottom and the environmental movement is suggesting we all need less, that isn’t going to resonate. And given the majority of the world is the working class, we need a better rallying cry.
A positive message of equity and redistribution would be better.
Briefly put, advocates of degrowth call for an end to the fetishization of growth in contemporary society, a reduction in energy use and material throughputs in the Global North, and a globally just distribution of wealth and resources.
This is necessary, they claim, to phase out fossil fuels, regenerate the planet’s damaged ecosystems and attain a decent quality of life for all. Such a programme would require reductions in resource and energy use for many in the Global North, yet this need not lead to asceticism. Rather, its supporters argue it would enable communal luxury within ecological limits.
Though disagreements exist within the degrowth movement, most of its adherents envision a future where food production is localized, people have democratic control over issues that affect them, renewable energy infrastructure is decentralized and collectively owned, and public transportation is commonplace.
1. Criticisms
For left eco-modernists such as Huber and Leigh Phillips, this is a decidedly middle-class agenda – a ‘politics of less’ which, by calling on workers to reduce their energy and resource use, is destined to be unpopular and unattainable. For Huber, the problem is not the consumption habits of the Global North’s proletarianized groups; it is rather the activities of a capitalist class that consumes too much and profits from planet-destroying fossil fuels. As such, the antidote is class struggle, stronger unions and a parliamentary path to a Green New Deal.
From this perspective, degrowth’s inclination towards the local and the particular, and its relative silence on class struggle, create insurmountable barriers to socialist emancipation. In contrast, eco-modernists propose largescale nuclear energy projects, hydroelectric dams and industrialized agriculture, arguing that this is what it means to think and act in the Marxist tradition. Capital’s large-scale industry and exploitation of the world’s producers sets the stage for its abolition through a working-class seizure of the means of production. In Huber’s words, ‘industrial capitalism makes emancipation and freedom possible for all of society. This vision of freedom through social control over industrial abundance is key to mobilizing the masses to the socialist fight.’
2. Articles
- Economic Planning and Degrowth: How Socialism Survives the 21st Century
- Degrowth
- Through central economic planning
- Using the tech of e.g. Amazon but for managing transition and living within means
- Didn't get so much from the article. More concrete actions would have been good.
- Center for a Stateless Society » We Are All Degrowthers. We Are All Ecomodernists
3. Elsewhere
3.1. In my garden
Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).
- How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel
- All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
- Climate Change as Class War with Matthew T. Huber
- 2022-08-06
- 2022-07-04
- 2022-08-07
- GND vs Degrowth. Live Panel from Labour Conference 2021
- bolo'bolo
- The role of technology in eco-socialism
- Post-growth vs degrowth
- Weeknotes W27 2022
- Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet
- The Future is Degrowth