Episode 143 - Degrowth
Transcript
David:
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
Ellie:
The Podcast, where two philosophy professors connect to big ideas [00:01:00] to everyday life.
David:
I'm Dr. David Pena Guzman.
Ellie:
And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David:
As denizens of the global North, we are used to a lot of nice things. We want fast internet, we want potable water. We want the latest advances in science and technology at our fingertips.
Ellie:
I thought you were gonna say the latest iPhone.
David:
That is the latest advance in technology and science at our fingertips, literally.
Ellie:
Valid.
David:
And I think our society encourages us to think about all these niceties as markers of success. Not only our success as individuals who can afford these things, but also markers of success on a societal level.
We live in the kind of society that makes these a reality for its citizens. And you know, in a society we want to have clean water, we want to have nice roads, we wanna have a sustainable and impressive electrical grid, so on and so forth.
Ellie:
And at the same time, the German sociologists [00:02:00] Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen suggest that all of this comes at a high price.
Our lifestyle is based on the extraction of resources from the global south. And in order to highlight the contingency of our ways of living on that resource extraction, they call our lifestyle the imperial mode of living. And since I heard this word, David, I have not been able to get it out of my head.
I look around me all the time and I think. Imperial mode of living. Right. And I will say I think the, I think the most salient example of this for me is candles. I am a candle snob. And in the milieu in like in which I live in LA, everybody has these fancy, expensive ass candles, including myself. It's like, oh, which diptyque scent do you have?
And they smell great. They enhance a room a lot, but it's like. This is imperial [00:03:00] mode of living at its peak, maybe even more than the most recent iPhone.
David:
Come clean. How much do you pay for candles?
Ellie:
The diptyque, I think is like $70.
David:
Are you kidding?
Ellie:
No, I'm serious.
David:
Oh my God. I thought you were gonna say 20.
And I was gonna shame you for that.
Ellie:
David, I have a lot I could shame you with my friend, so I am self-disclosing as a candle snob here. I'm owning that there's an imperial mode of living at work.
David:
Oh, I deny it if you self-disclose. You lose.
Ellie:
What would you say is your most imperial mode of living trait?
David:
Honestly, without a doubt, it's my carbon footprint for travel.
Ellie:
Yeah. No, honestly, that's probably me too. It's like I can spend $70 on a candle. But yeah, it's the carbon footprint and I've been trying to do work to minimize that in certain ways. Yeah. So for instance, the last time I went to Europe, I turned down a second trip to Europe this year because I was like, oh, I really just wanna go once, and then once I go, I'll try and take the train the entire time after that.
So I flew, I went to three countries total, but I [00:04:00] flew into Germany. And then I just took the train all the way down. Yeah. But it's like, okay, I can kind of pat myself on the back for that, but at the end of the day, I'm still flying to Europe. And then I can also say, well, it's because I specialize in European philosophy, and so I'm going there for work.
And while I'm there for work, I might as well be there for play. But I think also a lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about the topic for today is that it's not simply, at least about self-flagellating in terms of our own individual choices. There's so much more than that.
David:
And the term imperial mode of living, I think does a really good job at capturing the extractivist logic that is at play here because of course, imperialism is a highly unjust and unsustainable system that enables prosperity in the global north at the expense of the global south. But in the age of climate change, it's really hard to think of imperialism only as this kind of redistribution of goods and resources northward.
It's also a force that is [00:05:00] threatening the very possibility of life on this planet, both for the global North and for the global south. Because as temperatures continue to rise, as the effects of our fossil fuel emissions become clearer and clearer, it's clear that the imperial mode of living goes to the very heart of our ability as a species to thrive and to survive on this planet.
And that means that for people, especially in the global north, whether that's the US, Europe or Japan. Our mode of life, those candles, those trips to Europe, those decisions that we make are bound up with an economic system that might be on the verge of collapse.
Ellie:
Yeah. I mean it almost certainly is.
And we cannot therefore just continue as is. And we have to think more deeply about what kind of economic and political system supports this lifestyle and why that lifestyle is unsustainable and you know what drives [00:06:00] these structures like capitalism and imperialism toward more extraction. We all enjoy having these creature comforters that we mentioned, but there are bigger forces at play, and for some scholars, this answer of what drives capitalism and imperialism towards more extraction is the imperative of growth.
Today we're talking about Degrowth.
David:
How has Capitalism's imperative of growth above all else led to global crisis?
Ellie:
What might a world based on degrowth look like?
David:
And why might calls for clean energy not go far enough?
Ellie:
For an extended version of this episode, community discussion and more. Subscribe to Overthink on Substack.
David:
Degrowth has emerged as a social movement and a school of political theory and social science as well that rejects the capitalist imperative to grow the economy at all costs and the imperial mode of living that we've been talking about, Ellie, is just [00:07:00] one expression of this core principle of capitalism, degrowth as they are known argue that we have to find a way to move beyond this obsession with growth. Of course, this raises a lot of questions about what this means. So what exactly does it mean to call for degrowth? Does that mean that we are calling for the economy to shrink?
Is that gonna potentially cost recessions? Is that gonna lead to poverty and the administration of pretty much everybody? Don't we need economic growth in order to maintain a healthy economy? And moreover, even if we agree that Degrowth is somehow a good to pursue, how do we even bring it about without crashing the economy?
Ellie:
Yeah. And these are big questions that Degrowth have to be able to answer. So for one, the Degrowth movement, I learned it was so fun to do the research for this topic 'cause I really have been wanting to learn about Degrowth for [00:08:00] a while, and this was an opportunity. So one thing I learned from the stuff that I read is that the Degrowth movement does not advocate for simply slowing or stopping growth that would create recessions and all sorts of economic problems, including exacerbating inequality. So if part of the aim of degrowth is to create more equity globally, which we'll talk about later, to just tell all economies to stop growing would exacerbate inequality because it's one thing to tell those of us living in the imperial mode in the global north to do that.
And it's another thing tto tell somebody in an economically impoverished country to stop growth altogether. Instead, degrowth advocates, they wanna fundamentally transform our economy from one that is driven by growth and profit to one that's organized around other values. Values like equality, sustainability, and justice.
So Degrowth doesn't wanna just slow down growth [00:09:00] within capitalism, but really to build a post-capitalist world.
David:
Yeah, to envision a new future.
Ellie:
Not just envision, build.
David:
Yeah, build a new future. And you really see it in the critique of the Green New Deal that is articulated by a lot of Degrowth scholars.
So, as we all know from following political debates, the Green New Deal is this network of proposals for shifting our economy, especially our energy needs away from dirty energy like oil, natural gas and coal toward green sources, right of energy, like wind, solar, so on and so forth. For Degrowthers, the problem is that this just doesn't go far enough to a large extent because it leaves capitalism itself untouched, right? It's a way of trying to greenify our economy and to grow the economy because if you listen to people who call for the Green New Deal, especially politicians on the left, quote unquote, in the US, the argument is that the Green New Deal is gonna create jobs. It's going to lead to new forms of [00:10:00] investment, the economy is going to grow. And so at the center is still this imperative that we need to grow the economy just by means of green technology.
Ellie:
Yeah. The poet and scholar Jasper Bernes sums it up nicely in saying "The problem with the Green New Deal is that it promises to change everything while keeping everything the same."
And at first glance, it might look like this criticism is similar to criticisms of greenwashing that you hear leveled at corporations. But it's essentially different. So when we talk about greenwashing, we're talking about capitalist companies trying to seem more sustainable than they are in order to maximize profits.
And those of us, you know, caught in the imperial mode of living, buying the fancy candles are definitely susceptible to the greenwashing advertisements. But this is more fundamental than that. The claim is that what we think of what presents itself as sustainability may really [00:11:00] not be. And so a key aspect of the Green New Deal that Degrowthers is criticized is the controversial idea of decoupling.
Decoupling is basically the goal of undoing the correlation between growth and emissions. So historically speaking, the more growth an economy has, the more emissions it has. When the US started to move towards train transportation with industrialization and factories, huge spike in emissions. Also huge spike in growth.
So there has been a watertight correlation between growth and emissions, historically speaking. But the Green New Deal claims that we can decouple growth from emissions. That is, we can have growth without having emissions. And in that sense, for degrowthers, this is an approach that tries to have its cake and eat it too.
Because even if we could get to growth without emissions, it would require technology that we don't currently have. So for instance, we would have to offset our [00:12:00] carbon emissions through carbon capture technologies. Those don't currently exist in a way that would actually mitigate the environmental destruction brought about by that new creation of carbon and by the emissions. And so the idea is even if we could decouple, it's very far off, but it's also really not clear that we can decouple.
David:
Yeah, that's right. Because there is this criticism of like tech solutionism at the heart of the degrowth movement, this idea that you often find that.
Hey, look, we're gonna develop brand new technologies that allow us to have all the energy that we want without worrying about the planetary consequences as long as those technologies are green rather than dirty. And so that's the move that a lot of Degrowth have a problem with. So one question we might ask here is, what is it about capitalism that makes this obsession with growth so central to, and like intrinsic to capitalism itself?
And [00:13:00] here are the work of the Degrowth scholars, Jason Hickel is very instructive because he says that growth is the iron law of capitalism. And he's drawing, of course on Marx, on his analysis of capital in the book capital. And in particular on the Marxist distinction between use value and exchange value.
Now Marx argues that when we think of capitalism in the abstract, we often think of a very simple form of commodity exchange, right? Like maybe I begin with a commodity that I've produced like a shoe. And then I sell that piece of shoe, that piece of shoe, that entire shoe. And then I sell that commodity in exchange for money, you know, like $20.
And then I use those $20.
Ellie:
Yeah. I'd wear, I'd buy a piece of shoe from you any day.
David:
It's because my marketing, my PR team is really strong. And so I begin with a commodity. I sell it. So I translate it into money. [00:14:00] And then I use that money to buy another commodity that I need because I don't know how to build it.
So maybe I buy a coat.
Ellie:
A piece of coat. I feel like Balenciaga could do a piece of coat and a piece of shoe, and it would go for 20 K and people in the imperial mode of living would buy it.
David:
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And so the shoes and the coat. Have what Marx calls use value, which means that they satisfy a need.
You know, it protects my feet from the elements. And the coat allows me to live in the winter without getting an illness.
Ellie:
And look cute as heck. That's also part of the need here.
David:
But in order to make the exchange to like take the shoes and translate it into a coat, I need some third term that establishes an equivalence between them.
Right. And that third term is money. Money plays the role of what Marx calls the exchange value of these items. So they might have different used values, but they have the same exchange value because they're worth the same [00:15:00] $20.
Ellie:
So we could go around trading two pairs of shoes for one coat and one coat for two pairs of shoes, or a piece of coat for a piece of shoe.
But money allows us to avoid all that hassle by having what Marx calls a universal equivalent, one commodity that can be used to represent the exchange value of all other commodities. I can produce just one commodity and use market exchange and money to receive anything else I need. And he describes this process as CMC.
We go from commodity to money to commodity. However, this is not the whole story. And that's because this view of market exchange doesn't yet account for capital, which is the key element that distinguishes capitalism from pre recapitalized economic systems. For Marx capital is not just money. It is money that is used to make more money.
Capitalists aren't engaging in the market to meet their needs. They're engaging in the market to make more money with the money that they've [00:16:00] already accumulated that is in order to grow. So instead of use value being the starting point and the end point of the process, capital begins and ends with exchange value.
Whether the commodity that is bought and sold meets and need, let alone whether it's produced humanely, is irrelevant to this process. This is the process of MCM Prime. We go from money to commodity to more money in the form of profit. And corporations don't just need to make a profit. They need to grow exponentially.
M Prime. The second money, the money that is profit becomes the start of a new cycle wherein the next M prime is even more profit than they made before.
David:
Yeah, and I mean, I like to think about this shift from A CMC to an MCM economy, just in terms of what is more important. In A CMC world, you are after the commodities and money is like a means to the end.
I want the shoes, I want the code.
Ellie:
Yeah, exactly.
David:
[00:17:00] Whereas under capitalism, like the MCM system, he commodities almost become an excuse just to make money. Like we start just producing,
Ellie:
they don't almost, they become an excuse to make money.
David:
Yeah. Yeah. Like they are completely irrelevant to the decision making process about how we move in the economic sphere.
Now, of course, when we use the example of like, you know, the rich people, the capitalists who are producing things that are not needed, it's very easy to think that they might be doing this because they're greedy or evil. I mean, maybe they're not evil, but they're definitely greedy. But I think Hickel correctly points out, and this is something that you know any Marxist will also say to focus too much on the motivations of particular economic players is to overly personify the problem, right? Capitalism is not about individuals and their decisions. It really is a structural issue. And the structural issue is a structural imperative for growth. That's what we've been alluding to, due to the pressures that are introduced by competition. You know, investors [00:18:00] always require profit without ever dropping down, and so if you stop growing, capital will be moved somewhere else, and you will be bankrupted by the other capitalists that you're competing with, if you're one of those capitalists. And so the choice for a capitalist, as Hickel sees is, is really stark when the capitalist thinks about what is possible, it's just two things.
You either grow more as a capitalist or you die
Ellie:
Hence the iron law of capitalism.
And I think this is such an important point when people are talking about an ethical capitalism or a sustainable capitalism, I think the response is just gonna be, growth is inherent in capitalism for the reasons that we've just laid out.
And growth is not possible to, it is not impossible to have infinite growth that is sustainable or ethical.
David:
It's not possible.
Ellie:
No.
David:
Yeah. Yeah. I thought you said not [00:19:00] impossible.
Ellie:
Oh my God. Did I? I'm not possible, given the finite planet that we live on.
So there is an essential problem, and I mean, I buy this point. I think capitalism is a problem.
David:
Yeah. No, in, in many ways sustainable capitalism is just a contradiction in terms, and part of the reason for that is because the pursuit of growth has, at the very least, two consequences. One is very clear which is that it leads to the impoverishment or the administration of the working class. The accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. That's just, that's not like an accident of bad capitalism. That is capitalism. So that's first and foremost.
Ellie:
That was such a remote conclusion to the process that we're not seeing at all in these times.
David:
Yeah. And so if you think about like the fact that we see like longer working hours, worsening working conditions, just like constant exploitation of the workers rise of billionaires, and possibly even trillionaires in the not [00:20:00] too distant future. Yeah. Marx says that's an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
Now we're all familiar with that consequence of capital, the exploitation of the working class. But Marx also talked about a second consequence, which is the one that you just alluded to, Ellie, and that is the disruption of nature itself. In order to produce capital, we have to destroy nature, right? It's based on mastery of nature and the exploitation of natural resources.
Think about the clearing of forests, the wasting of water, so on and so forth. And the scholar, John Bellamy Foster has a really good term for understanding this relationship between capitalism and nature. He uses the term metabolic rift to talk about how capitalism disrupts all these natural processes and natural cycles that are in place to protect nature. So for example, if you think about metabolic cycles tied to the health of the soil, nature has a [00:21:00] process inherent to it to replenish the nutrients that the soil uses to produce, like, you know, like plants and like fruits and things like that. And eventually the soil gets replenished.
But capitalism often will encourage us, or always will encourage us to exploit nature as much as possible. And in doing so, we rob the soil of the time and the ability to replenish itself. Which is why, you know, land that was once arable is not arable anymore. And so that's the metabolic rift that we are actually.
Intervening into and disrupting natural cycles through our economic activity. When you think about what to do in those cases of metabolic rift, there are two ways to think about it that are really good for really understanding what Degrowthers are saying. So one answer to something like the destruction of soil health through capitalist large scale agriculture is to say, look, technology will solve the [00:22:00] problem.
And in fact, we do know that technology led to the discovery of fertilizers that then allowed us to like plant more things and have more agriculture, even though we were disrupting the natural cycles. Degrowthers don't like that answer. , Their position is, look, sometimes you can have quote unquote, technological solutions to this metabolic rift, but the reason that you see it as a solution is because you're not actually paying attention to the consequences of that solution.
So for example, yes, we did discover fertilizers and that allowed us to keep doing large scale agriculture. But those fertilizers also relied themselves on fossil fuel, and we know that they're polluting the environment,they're having negative health consequences for communities that live in the areas where it's being used.
And so you think you found a solution, but in fact you just displace the problem. And so the metabolic rift continues.
Ellie:
Yeah. And [00:23:00] fertilizer's huge emission source too.
Right. And so far we've described growth as a fundamental imperative of capitalism. One thing that came up in my research in particular, this really interesting book, the Future is Degrowth, A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism.
You know, I love a verso book, and this was so good is GDP. So since the mid 20th century, growth has taken a more overt form in the economic indicator of GDP or gross domestic product. And so essentially, GDP is a measure of economic activity usually measured within a specific country.
And it tallies, oh yeah, well, domestic, that's the domestic and close domestic product. It tallies all the sales and services, that is the total value that that country produces each year. And very interestingly, it is not that old. It was developed after the Great Depression when the US [00:24:00] and its economists were looking for a way to track growth as a proxy for general economic health.
But then something happens, which is that GDP goes from being a sort of proxy for economic health to being an end in itself, regardless of wellbeing. And GDP must grow each year according to this new logic. This is what Degrowth scholars call growthism, or growth ideology. And funnily enough, I read in this book that almost all leading economists in the middle of the 20th century, including the ones who invented GDP, spoke out against using it as a yardstick for the Prosperity of Nations and for international and historical comparisons.
So they were like. Do not use this as a yardstick. It's just a proxy for the overall economic wellbeing of a country. And then the countries are like, we like, it's a number. It's easy. Let's use it as a yardstick and let's try and grow it every year.
David:
In fact, this is health. Now we use the health of the population as a proxy for GDP, [00:25:00] if anything. But I think there, yeah, a number of economists have pointed out problems with GDP and the way in which we use it as this end all be all for understanding the state of a nation state. And we can identify a few problems with GDP. So for example, one of them is that GDP doesn't take into account internal inequalities in a country.
So like you can have a huge GDP, but it's all concentrated in the hands of a few. Everybody else is poor and you think that the whole country is doing well. Another problem with GDP is that it's neutral about how growth is achieved. So if a country produces a lot of things that are great for human life, like good medicines, good shoes, good pieces of coat, and that is a way to grow GDP, but another way to grow GDP is also to build guns and, highly addictive opioids. From the perspective of GDP growth is growth independently of how it is achieved. And so there is this lack of [00:26:00] ethics inside GDP growthism. Finally, I think the more relevant point about GDP is that it has, and it admits of no limits, right? Like GDP must grow always without limit. And this puts capitalism according to degrowthers in a paradox because you have to grow the economy that brings about this metabolic rift or disruption of nature. And the problem is that eventually you will run up against nature's own limits, right? Like you will run out of land, you will run out of clean air, so on and so forth.
And that's why the only way forward is not more growth, but degrowth.
Ellie:
The Degrowth movement is recent, but as I learned in my research. The concept has its roots in older ideas.
For instance, the Luddites who were railing against industrialization can be considered [00:27:00] precursors to the Degrowth movement. Same with romanticism and ideas of going back to nature, utopian communities in the 19th century, but specifically the English term, degrowth is a translation, of a term that was coined in France in the 1970s décroissance, which means degrowth. And décroissance involves a transformation to a more just sustainable, less material and energy intensive society. And an early two thousands articulation of this in particular. Coined the term décroissance soutenable, which is sustainable degrowth as an alternative to sustainable development
'cause as we've seen, there might not be such thing as a sustainable development if we're thinking about development in terms of growth.
David:
Oh my god, I love that term. décroissance, it just makes me think of croissants.
Ellie:
Yeah. Croissant croissants are [00:28:00] canceled because they're associated with growth,
David:
with growth, with sustainability.
Ellie:
The iron law of croissants.
David:
Yeah. And you know, it's easy to clarify what the negative vision of Degrowth is 'cause it's there in the name. Like we don't want growth. But it's harder to say what the positive vision is. And so how do degrowthers compete with capitalism and with its imperative for growth?
Right? It's really hard to convince people to sign on board for your movement when the opposing side has things like candles and, you know, bananas flown in from Guatemala. And the latest washing machine. So what exactly is the vision for a Degrowth society?
Ellie:
Yeah, so it is not shrinking or stagnation. Degrowth is very explicitly against a conflation of the concept with those types of terms.
One of the positive aspects of the vision of Degrowth is equality. And so the book, the [00:29:00] Future is Degrowth. The Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan book that I quoted a little bit ago has a really beautiful vision of life under Degrowth, and it basically starts by saying, look, even those of us living in the imperial mode of living experience austerity in certain ways, and austerity increases inequality. So there's the thrashing of public services, there's the benefiting of the rich, right? Whereas Degrowth policies focus on democratizing production, curbing the wealth and over consumption of the rich. You and I are both on record, David is saying no billionaires, so that's an aspect of it here.
David:
I'm on record saying eat the billionaires.
Ellie:
You actually are. And I was like, I dunno about eat. Okay. Expanding public services and increasing equality within and between societies, and this is a really beautiful part of it I think.
Under degrowth, public services would flourish rather than see cuts. Degrowth is about private sufficiency and public abundance. It aims at a society in which wellbeing is [00:30:00] mediated less by capitalist market transactions, exchange values and consumption, and more by collective forms of provisioning, use values, and fulfilling, meaningful, and convivial relationships.
So there's a degrowth slogan, for instance, that states, moins de biens, plus de liens.
So fewer transactions, more relations, more links.
David:
Oh, that's great. And yeah, I think at the heart of Degrowth, especially as it's articulated by some of these people, is this desire to de commodify essential goods and services. Right? So things like education should not be a commodity. It's not something that we should pay for, and that should be accessible only to the wealthy.
Neither should be healthcare. And for example, Kohei Saito.
Ellie:
In the book, Slow Down, which we both read parts of.
David:
He talks about the decommodification also of public transportation is essential, right? Like the state should make public transportation not only cheap, but as cheap as possible.
In order [00:31:00] to provide this basic good to society. So a lot of things that we associate with the growth that have to do with shrinking, actually should be reconceptualized as not going from big to small, but rather going from private to public.
Ellie:
Yeah. But even in the private domain too, I think if Saito wants to hold onto the private public distinction, which as a Marxist, I'm not sure he does, there would still be benefits.
And so one of the things that he really lays out in his book is that Degrowth envisions abundance. So we've got equality and we've also got abundance. And he talks about the abundance in pretty personal terms as well. He says there'll be more opportunities to do sports, lucky for you, David. Go hiking, take up gardening, play guitar, paint pictures, and read.
Oh my God. More time for reading. Sign me up. And he compares that to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day.
David:
Yeah, because of the grind culture. Yeah. Although I think it's important [00:32:00] also to clarify that some things would have to disappear for a degrowth society to emerge. So Saito gives the example of fast fashion. That's gotta go. He also gives the example of luxury airplanes, like private jets, you know, that are only accessible to the mega wealthy. Those are things that are not social goods.
They're highly destructive for the environment. And the only reason they exist is because they produce capital, right? Like money that multiplies itself without any link to meaningful human life. And so it's not just about making things equally accessible, so not everybody gets their private jet, you know?
Sorry for those who were looking forward to that. It really is about imagining a communal future that is in sync with the needs of the planet and nature.
Ellie:
Yeah. And that will mean some pretty significant sacrifices for those of us who have come to enjoy the imperial mode of living and the appliances that make our lives relatively [00:33:00] frictionless.
I do think maybe this is a good time to talk about Saito's pillars of Degrowth communism, because he lays that out in this book, and we won't have time to get into all five pillars, but one I think is relevant to stuff we were discussing earlier is his claim that one such pillar is the transition to a use value-based economy.
This means moving away from the capitalist mode of accumulation that we see through the MCM structure, and that involves the end of mass production, whether it's fashion, as you mentioned earlier, David, or really any form of mass production and consumption. We have huge amounts of overproduction and over consumption, and I am absolutely a part of this problem here.
Listeners to our fashion episode will know that I love fashion and something I found myself doing is being like, oh, well, you know, I have perfectly good boots, but I need the cute boots that are in this season and maybe I need them in two colors. And [00:34:00] there is a lot of emotional investment, a lot of libidinal investment that we endow those things with, or that are bound up in our desires for those things. And so it's not simply a matter of just being like, I'll settle for less. But there are a lot of online communities that emphasize the importance of less consumption or there are no buy groups that can help provide community support for decathecting from over consumption.
David:
Yeah. And it, you know, thinking about the pillars, that's a really important one. The transition to a used value, eco used value. I used value economy, what we described earlier in Marxist terms as CMC rather than MCM. Another pillar that he talks about that for me is absolutely essential and arguably one of the most radical ones is the democratization of the production process. Because he says, look, we can focus on consumption a lot, right? Like, oh no, I shouldn't consume the plastic, or no, I should not buy the candles. [00:35:00] That's fine, but there is a limit to how far you will go in changing the material organization of society.
If you only focus on the consumption side of the economic formula, you have to intervene also in the production side. Now, the question is, how do you do that? Because the average citizen does not make decisions about production, right? It's the stakeholders. It's the bosses and the businesses who are deciding what gets produced primarily based on what they project will create capital.
That's why democratizing the production process is essential, and that means for Saito, giving workers decision making power over what they are producing in the places where they work. So for example, let's say that I work at a coffee shop. I as a worker should have decision making power over whether we're gonna use paper cups or plastic cups, right?
Like the workers should be making those decisions. The workers should also be making decisions about whether they're gonna get their coffee from [00:36:00] a local roaster or whether they're gonna fly it in from some unsustainable place abroad. And so it really is about shifting the locus of power away from the capitalist and back to the workers.
And, the problem is that right now all of those decisions are only made by the shareholders. And he points to research that shows that average citizens like you and I, Ellie, if we were put in a position of on making decisions about what gets produced, we make more communal, humane, and environmentally friendly decisions because we're random people who care about the world that we inhabit rather than these rabbid capitalists who only see one thing, and that's capital.
Ellie:
Oh, it's reminding me of our oligarchy episode.
One other thing I wanna throw in here is Saito's claim, I love this, that Degrowth communism would involve essential [00:37:00] work and the elimination of bullshit jobs, this famous term, popularized by David Grabber, he thinks that a lot of the jobs that people have in our current economy would simply go away because they're bullshit jobs. So like, you don't need your email job anymore. Let's focus on essential work. He says the highest paying jobs in particular are often bullshit jobs.
They're in industries like marketing, advertising, consulting, finance, and insurance. And that makes these industries seem very important, despite, I love this, being almost entirely inessential to the reproduction of society. We don't need any of those industries.
David:
Yeah, no. I think the example of insurance is really good because, I mean, what is insurance?
It's making profit off of risk, right? Like you're betting on living and dying and coming up with all these calculations just to turn a profit that adds no value to human life. And he [00:38:00] also, you know, the references to Grabber, who also uses the example of lobbyists as bullshit jobs.
What's a lobbyist? A lobbyist is somebody whose sole function, whose sole reason for existing is to try to influence government so that the companies that they're working for the lobbyists get a kickback or a tax break or some deregulation. And so I like the clarification that bullshit jobs are not just exploitative jobs, low paying jobs, they're jobs that are not good for society.
Ellie:
Yeah. Do we have bullshit jobs?
David:
No, education is not a bullshit job.
Ellie:
I know. As professors, we definitely don't have bullshit jobs, as podcasters hopefully we don't. Our educator and podcaster hats are intertwined. There are a lot of podcasters who have bullshit jobs though.
David:
Yeah. Well, and actually in connection, the same point stated otherwise is that it's not just the elimination of bullshit jobs, it's also the revaluation of essential jobs. You know, he talks about the [00:39:00] care economy, he talks about nurses and doctors and teachers, and if we lived in a degrowth society, we would not automate those as we currently are.
We would not exploit those, maybe doctors is an exception here. You know, they get paid a lot of money often. But nurses and like caretakers, et cetera, we would come to see those as providing a very high value service to the socially necessary reproduction of the social body.
Ellie:
And I mentioned that one of his examples of the bullshit job industry is advertising.
David:
Jason Hickel also identifies advertising as something that we should eliminate as we move into a post-capitalist degrowth economy. He thinks that eliminating advertising is a relatively easy objective, at least like easier, let's say, than democratizing the process of production.
And you know, it's currently out of reach, but it is [00:40:00] still conceivable. Eliminating advertising would cease to produce our libidinal investments in consumption, those ones that I talked about, like why do I want the latest boots? Because advertisers are telling me that I should want them, even that I need them.
And in addition to targeting advertising, Hickel suggests that another thing that we should try and bring to bear in this like transitional phase is ending planned obsolescence.
Ellie:
Oh my God. Preach to the choir.
Right? So a lot of goods are made with planned obsolescence already, well already planned into them with obsolescence planned into them.
Let me just restate the definition of planned obsolescence. So this thing will break. This thing has a certain shelf life, and so on and so forth.
David:
Well, and I think this speaks to something that many of us have noticed in the last like couple of decades, which is the general inshitification of things. Like clothes are shitty. Appliances are [00:41:00] shitty. Shittier than they used to be. And so a mark of progress counterintuitively seems to be that things are getting worse. And you know, Hickel does talk about those things like the end of planned obsolescence and the end of advertising that I immediately can get behind.
Ellie:
Well, can we stay with planned obsolescence for a second though?
David:
Sure.
Ellie:
Because I just wanted to jump in that I've been experiencing this recently because having moved recently, I've been buying furniture and I've really been trying to prioritize Facebook marketplace.
Not only because it's cheaper, but also because the quality of stuff that you can find is in general so much better than the stuff that you find in these fast furniture companies. Of course, even the relatively expensive ones, and in particular, some of the stuff I don't need to buy because my family already has, and so like we have a couple of chairs that are pretty comfy, but the fabrics are somewhat damaged, like they're stained, they've got tears in them. And so I'm just like, oh, let me reupholstery these perfectly good chairs otherwise, but [00:42:00] reupholstery costs more than getting a new shitty chair. And so there's this incentive to just buy a new thing rather than to repair the old thing. And I mean, we could also say that maybe if I didn't have a Libidinal investment in like a certain aesthetic, then I wouldn't even need to recover the chair because even though the covering is a little bit torn and ripped, like it's essentially fine, but let's focus on Reupholstery for a second. It's like, okay, if I do really wanna do that, then it shouldn't cost more than getting a new chair. And that's not because the reupholster are charging more than they should, it's because we have this weird kind of economy where we can get really cheaply made goods, namely furniture for cheap prices. And so Hickel suggests that in contrast with planned obsolescence, there should be a right to repair. And we should codify that into policy.
David:
Yeah. And that should be a right, that is subsidized by the state as a common good. Right? Like there would be like a state run shop for the, like for reupholstering things, [00:43:00] for sewing buttons back on coats for putting shoe laces back on shoes.
Not that you need a shop for the shoelaces back on shoes. And so like these are, I agree with him that these are manageable goals, but what I also like about Hickel is that he goes a little further than that because he says we might also need to target and scale down industries. And he gives the example of course, of the way we eat like a beef, but also the obvious nemesis here, which is fossil fuels.
And so it's not just about bringing an end to these, like things that have a connection to individual life on a day-to-day basis, although food does have that, but we need to have an open and democratic discussion about which industries maybe don't need to exist, even if they currently seem very central to our lives.
And he also adds that we need to have a discussion about how to achieve degrowth in the context of Neocolonialism. [00:44:00] Because to scale down consumption and production in the global north cannot translate into a demand that also people in the global south don't develop their economies when development has been so asymmetrical.
And so that's going to be a difficult discussion, but it's one that we need to have, keeping in mind the history of colonialism and imperialism.
Ellie:
Yeah. And Saito is super clear about that as well. And so these are all great objectives that are in theory possible, and Hickel is right, that a post-capitalist economy doesn't need to be scary.
The imperative for growth makes our lives worse. It's scary, and we can find ways to make it better, only producing things we actually use, living collectively and so forth. But why then hasn't this happened? Like why has every attempt to limit the fossil fuel industry failed? And you know, it's like, I guess to some extent that answer that question is rhetorical.
But Hickel identifies a couple of key elements [00:45:00] here. One is that we don't live in a very good democracy. Our current administration is an intensification of this trend, of course, but it's been a trend since, well before this. Western democracies have been captured by corporate interests, and corporations themselves aren't governed democratically by workers.
They're governed by oligarchic boards, and their main incentive is to maximize value for shareholders, which is like the epitome of growthism. And then on the international stage, institutions like the IMF and the UN are dominated by rich countries. So at every level, bourgeois democracies fail to allow for the kind of radical collective decision making that would be required for this transition to happen.
David:
Yeah. And for the transition, I think it's important to clarify that hickle does not want, a nd also Saito does not want, they both are very explicit about this. They do not want top down state control that is evocative of the disaster of the Soviet Union, right? So what they want is something that is democratic with [00:46:00] the people making decisions by democratic means in democratic ways about the kind of economic system that they live under, right?
So making decisions about what is consumed, but also what is produced. And when you shift the focus of power from the capitalist to, in this case, the people or the working class, whatever term we wanna use, you really are boasting a challenge not only to corporations that are not democratically organized, but to the very interest of the capitalist class as a whole.
And I think that's where the more radical power of degrowth as a movement really comes from.
By now we've articulated a few reasons why Degrowth might be appealing. But Degrowth has also been subject to a number of criticisms in intellectual circles, in Marxist circles, and so it's time for us to talk about some of those critiques, even if one agrees that Degrowth might be necessary to achieve a [00:47:00] sustainable, livable future.
What might be the limitations of a Degrowth framework?
Ellie:
Okay. Yeah. So these are criticisms that are coming from the left, which might, you know, suggest that degrowth is necessary, but yeah, might question the feasibility of it.
Some critics imply that a lot of the mainstream Degrowth scholarship is just not as radical as it presents itself to be.
Others will not just imply that, but explicitly state it. So for instance, the Marxist geographer, Matthew Huber, argues that Degrowth, is not Marxist enough. It focuses too much on what individuals can do to reduce growth. The focus in Degrowth movements according to Huber is on how individuals living in the rich countries of the global North can personally enact a lifestyle that's less dependent on growth or even what some call revolutionary austerity.
And for Huber, this is just a reformulated version of Green Capitalism's politics of Austerity. And the idea that individual behavioral change, like [00:48:00] stopping using plastic straws is what's gonna save the world. And when we do that, we shift the target from, so like in the mainstream approach in green capitalism, the idea is like reducing emissions.
So reducing emissions is the target, and according to Huber, in Degrowth, we've simply moved the target to reducing growth. And that doesn't change the fact that this ignores significant class dynamics at play.
Right? It makes a political problem and a communal problem in individual problem.
David:
Yeah, and I think part of the reason why it's not Marxist enough for Huber is also because it positions the global north and like the upper middle class that is restricting itself from doing all these things as like the source of historical change. Like, oh my God, we overcame capitalism because of the rich people not like buying their candles. And so he says, if you read works of Degrowth, like the ones that we've been referring to, there really isn't much there about the working class as an agent of a historical revolutionary mission, there is nothing about revolution, right? Like they're [00:49:00] not, the working class is not taking up arms to like appropriate the means of production necessarily. And so it's not Marxist in that sense either. But his criticism also goes a little bit further than this because he worries about the kind of class analysis that Degrowth scholars are using in their public writings. For example, Kohei Saito talks a lot about the global north versus the global south, right? Like rich countries versus poor countries. And that's the framework that is used. It's about nation states. The problem is that that's not a nuanced class analysis because it makes it seem as if everybody in the global north benefits from capitalism in the same way and everybody in the global south suffers the effect of capitalism in the same way, and that's not the case, right? There is an administrated working class in the global north and there are elites in the global south, and so what we need is a more nuanced analysis of how class works, [00:50:00] both within a country but also across national boundaries, because otherwise you just end up with a simplification of rich countries bad, poor countries good. And that's going to be quite limiting.
Ellie:
And according to Huber, Degrowth is a politics of less. Whereas a traditionally Marxist form of class politics would be confrontational towards capital. Some need to lose. It's not just like a politics of less. It's a politics of winning and losing.
The capitalists need to lose. The workers need to gain. And Huber gives an interesting argument for why Degrowth doesn't appeal to this more traditional kind of class analysis. Although Degrowth originated in activist circles as a school of social science, it remains largely within the professional class circles of the university.
And so these are academics who, although technically wage earners rather than capitalists generally have access to the high consumption lifestyle of the [00:51:00] imperial mode of living AKA us. So they, we feel guilty about our lifestyle and thus this politics of reducing growth appeals to us in a way that it wouldn't to the working class, the ones that can't afford to buy the $70 candles.
And so he thinks that degrowth is simply bad strategy.
David:
Well, and not just that, it's like the effect of guilt on the part of like these professors who want to be radical, but in fact are just like part of the professional managerial class. We want to like say, we're gonna save the world by cutting down some of our expenses, which is similar to what we were just talking about a minute ago.
Beyond that, I think we also need to think about the role of the state here, because a number of people have criticized Degrowthers for having an unclear relationship to the state. In a degrowth society, is there a big state that is organizing the economy or not? As, as we pointed out, some degrowth explicitly worry about that top down management.
And so there seems to [00:52:00] be a tendency, sometimes it seems accidental, sometimes it seems intentional in the writings of degrowthers toward localism, right? A Degrowth society would be like a small community where people consume what they produce and people engage in democratic politics in connection to local issues.
But there doesn't seem to be here any room for large bureaucracies that, you know, crossover, large swats of land or geopolitical space. And so that might be one question that we ask. Is there a state here or is there not? I'm thinking about this here in connection to the fact that some of the challenges that we might face due to climate change, for example, might require a state. Like you can't challenge global warming with local communities. You can't address the next global pandemic like COVID without large state actors. You know, like doing the kind of tracking or coordinating of action to solve [00:53:00] these environmental problems.
Yeah, and I'm thinking here about the fact that. Kohei Saito when he gets close to giving concrete examples of what Degrowth looks like, he does give examples of localism, like he has a whole section in one of the chapters about Detroit. You know, after Detroit, you know, experienced this collapse, he says you saw the seeds of a new way of living with people in Detroit, like establishing communal gardens and establishing bike lanes and consuming locally.
But it's unclear whether that scales up. Yeah. And so there is just a question mark, where is the state here?
Ellie:
Yeah, I mean, I think Saito maybe addresses this and now I'm forgetting, but there could be a transitional role and I mean, I think that has similarities with Marxist claim about Marx and Engels claim about crude communism being a precursor to Communism communism.
But I think even if there are states. How would we get them to coordinate and enforce [00:54:00] Degrowth principles? Whether the states are transitional or not. Jasper Bernes, who we mentioned earlier, suggests that there's no way that bourgeois democracy will give us the changes that we need, like the Green New Deal is politically impossible, and he thinks we need a more revolutionary approach.
He admits that maybe just maybe legislative reforms will make the difference between unthinkably bad climate outcomes and merely unbearable outcomes. But his last line of the essay in which he describes this, I think, really hits home. He says, let's not lie to each other. Right, and so we can extend this logic, I think, to the various pathways and plans that Degrowth has put forward.
We can accept that the iron law of capitalism has to be stopped without limiting our political project by the will of capitalist states.
He is like, let's just get real about this.
David:
No, and I think this connects to what I was just saying that there, at least to me, it's unclear whether the [00:55:00] path forward or rather, what is the path forward?
Is it states enacting degrowth legislation? Is it the rich in rich countries enacting the self-directed austerity? Or is it the working classes bringing forth a spontaneous revolution? And you know, I admit that really charting out a clear path toward a future is impossibly difficult. It's difficult for anybody on the left.
It's difficult for degrowth, communist, and non degrowth communists. But I do wish there was more clarity about the kind of transitional period in a lot of these writers.
Ellie:
It's me stoping buying [00:56:00] candles.
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