Yesterday we learned how climate scientists feel about the looming existential threat of global climate change. They’re terrified. It’s obvious to them and it should be to us that the only rational option is to change course, quickly and decisively.
So, are we ready now to face some hard questions about what level of degrowth is actually necessary? To examine what that might look like, and how different it would be to live in a truly ecologically sustainable society?
Today I will devote an extended series of posts to the best description I’ve found yet about how severe our present situation is, and what we can and should do in the face of such daunting challenges. I’m going to excerpt heavily from a recent long article by Ted Trainer, an Australian academic, author, and advocate for degrowth. Trainer is a retired lecturer from the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales. He has written numerous books and articles on sustainability and is developing Pigface Point, an alternative lifestyle educational site near Sydney.
In the linked article, Trainer criticizes and debunks inadequate proposals such as the Green New Deal, along with the whole idea of ‘green growth’. He argues, however, that we must not only reject capitalism but also must recognize the inability of Marxism or even state-centered eco-socialism to make all the necessary changes that could avert societal collapse and global catastrophe.
This is a brief introduction. Eight separate posts will follow soon…
ARTICLE TITLE: A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement
SUBTITLE: Sufficient degrowth cannot be achieved without enormous and radical transition to some kind of simpler way.
THEME: The recent spread of degrowth is encouraging — however, the movement is founded on a number of confusions and mistaken initiatives. This is understandable given its early stage, and can be regarded as a healthy exploring of possibilities. The literature welcomes pluralism, but we should try to find unifying directions.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
The basic element of the required sustainable social form will be most people living in small, highly self-sufficient, self-governing cooperative local communities, willingly embracing far simpler lifestyles and systems. Features would include:
🟢 Extensive development of commons providing many free goods, especially “edible landscapes”
🟢 Building using earth, enabling all people to have very low-cost modest housing
🟢 Many committees, e.g., for agriculture, care of aged, youth affairs, entertainment, leisure and cultural activities
🟢 Production of most basic goods by many small local firms and farms (some cooperatives, some privately owned) within and close to settlements
🟢 Much use of intermediate and low technologies, especially craft and hand-tool production, mainly for their quality of life benefits
🟢 Few paid officials
🟢 Large cashless free goods and gifting sectors
🟢 Little need for transport, enabling bicycle access to work and conversion of most suburban roads to commons
🟢 The need to work for monetary income only one or two days a week, at a relaxed pace — thus enabling much involvement in arts and crafts and community activities
🟢 Town-owned banks
🟢 Local currencies that do not involve interest
🟢 Relatively little dependence on corporations, professionals, bureaucrats and high-tech ways
🟢 No unemployment because communities organize to use all productive labour and to ensure everyone has a livelihood
Most people must live in settlements of this general kind, but there could still be (small) cities, industrial centres, universities, high-tech hospitals, etc. When unnecessary production is eliminated, there could be more socially useful R&D than there is now.
This simpler way is classical Anarchism. It is about thoroughly participatory democracy, enabling communities of equals to cooperatively take control of their functioning and fate. It cannot involve centralized control or top-down authority; all must be involved citizens who come together to collectively govern themselves.
Sufficient degrowth cannot be achieved without enormous and radical transition to some kind of simpler way.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Degrowth literature does not recognize the stunning enormity of the task. We are confronted by a daunting ‘degrowth conundrum’. Degrowth of the magnitude described above means phasing out, writing off, and scrapping most of the present amount of factories, corporations, transport, trade, industry, investment, financing, and profit-making.
It requires ceasing most of the producing and consuming going on. And this in an economy, a society, and a culture that is fiercely and blindly committed to constant and limitless increases in production and consumption and ‘living standards’. It is also an economy structured in such a way that it must have growth or it implodes.
Degrowth means reducing production, jobs, incomes, investments, profits, and living standards. But even a slowing of growth in the current economy creates bankruptcies and unemployment and discontent with government. It is an unavoidable ‘grow or die’ trap.
The most obvious consequence is that capitalism cannot possibly move in the degrowth direction. Capitalism is a growth system. Its fundamental nature is about investing capital to accumulate more capital to invest in additional productive ventures. If growth even slows, the system sickens. The few who own most of the capital constantly look for investment outlets for their ever-increasing volumes of capital. They have no choice about this. If a capitalist doesn’t try to take or generate more sales opportunities, then his rivals will do so and drive him bankrupt. Capitalists are trapped in capitalism like everybody else.
Again, the existence and magnitude of this conundrum receive almost no recognition in the degrowth literature. There is no discussion of what to do with those workers who used to produce goods to sell but will no longer do so. Most accounts calmly state vast and highly problematic utopian proposals (such as debt cancellation) without any sign of trepidation in the face of the overwhelming difficulties. The implicit reassuring assumption is usually the one common in Green New Deal literature, that at worst only slight reductions will be needed, existing institutions will be capable of making them, and more efficient technology will cut waste, etc.
The literature shows little or no sign of shock or despair at the magnitude of the task we are confronted with, and it offers no ideas as to what is to be done with the displaced workers or the capitalist class. This is a stunning failure to join the dots; degrowth means, among many other hugely difficult things, scrapping capitalism. Anyone within the movement who is reluctant to face up to this is seriously confused.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
Given the situation we are in, the amount of degrowth needed is enormous, and this means the goal has to involve huge and radical reductions and simplifications in lifestyles and systems. This, in turn, means transitioning to radically different economic, political, settlement, and cultural arrangements.
So what does that mean for strategy?
Most degrowth pronouncements explicitly or implicitly assume that strategy must focus on getting the state to implement desired policies. It is about pleading with government to implement degrowth, or demanding that it do so, either soon or in the future. This assumes that the state is capable of implementing degrowth policies (which, I argue, it is not).
This focus on the state as savior is most evident within the Marxist/socialist strand of the degrowth movement. Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its contradictions, dynamics, and fate are of great importance, but his ideas on the revolutionary goal and the transition process are seriously mistaken, due primarily to the advent of the limits to growth. A satisfactory post-capitalist society must contradict the dominant socialist vision deriving from Marx. It cannot be capitalist, but nor can it be highly industrialized, or state-centred, or affluent, or have a high or growing GDP.
Degrowth is essentially a cultural problem, not primarily an economic or redistributive or power problem. It has to involve largely dismantling the existing industrial, trade, agricultural, financial, etc. systems and replacing them with smaller and radically different systems driven by citizens committed to new ideas and values.
This cannot be done by force; it can only be achieved by people who understand and willingly accept simpler lifestyles and systems. The state cannot give or enforce the worldview, values, or dispositions — without which such structural changes cannot be made. No amount of subsidies or information or secret police can make villagers cooperate enthusiastically and happily to plan and develop and run their thriving local economies.
Excerpts from an article titled “A (Friendly) Critique of the Degrowth Movement”…
We are a very long way from the ideological conditions that must prevail before significant movement towards degrowth can possibly take place. We cannot get anywhere unless and until some kind of simpler way has come to be widely understood and willingly accepted. Thus, strategy must concentrate on how to bring about that huge cultural change.
The eco-socialist is strongly inclined to counter that if we had state power, we could facilitate that change in consciousness, help people to see the need for localism, etc. But there is a major logical confusion here. No government with the required policy platform — one focused on transition to simpler systems and lifestyles and cutting the GDP — could get elected unless people in general had long before adopted that extremely new and radical worldview.
So the main task would be to work on the development of that change in grassroots consciousness, and if that succeeded to the point where the right sort of party was elected, the revolution would have already been won. The essence of this revolution is in the cultural change, and if that is achieved then the taking of state power and the structural changes thereby enabled will be consequences of the revolution. Focusing on taking state power here and now would not contribute much, if at all, to cultural change.
A major tactical implication is: ‘Do not fight to eliminate capitalism’. This contradicts the socialist’s fundamental assumption that we must get rid of the old before the new can be built. But the historically unique situation we are now in presents us with the need for a non-confrontational strategy, one that involves turning away and ‘ignoring capitalism to death’. (This does not deny the need to confront over specific threats, such as logging a forest.)
Again, getting rid of capitalism and installing a socialist government would be of no value unless the newly installed government held a radically different, much simpler perspective — and it would not do so unless it had been elected by a public committed to that perspective. The task therefore is to create that kind of public. But then it would not be the state that had built the simpler way; it would have been done by people taking control of their local communities.
Rare Footage of Extremely Deep-Sea Squid ( www.infoterkiniviral.com )
Nearly 1 km below the surface of the ocean, cameras catch a scary deep-sea squid.