The achievement of a degrowth future requires system change not green new deals

When I was just coming into adulthood (1972), the – Club of Rome – published its famous – The Limits to Growth – which focused on the consequences of “exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources”. It was a very influential research document generally, but also very important in shaping the way I would think about the world. The critics were many and the fossil fuel industry lobbying powerful and while the ideas did move policy makers somewhat and motivated new movements or gave impetus to existing bodies, such as the – Zero population growth – organisation, the vital message was largely ignored. Even the more recent green-oriented activism has not seen fit to focus on population growth as the primary problem that has to be addressed, if all the other problems of excessive energy use are to be dealt with effectively. Marxists were also very critical of the Club of Rome report for reasons that always escaped me. They criticised the Club’s focus on overpopulation, claiming it distracted us from the real problem = which was the voracious logic of the Capitalism system of production and accumulation. I always thought those attacks were unhelpful and allowed the progressive (Left) response to climate change to be fractured and, hence, weakened.

At present, I am working on several projects, one being outlining a blueprint for a degrowth strategy.

The issue that I keep coming back to though as I work on this topic is the logic of Capitalism.

The Green movement and many governments are caught up in a sort of denial of this logic.

They seem to think that the introduction of ‘green technology’ will provide the pathway to more efficient use of resources and energy, which will reduce carbon emissions and save the day.

To some extent, that is happening.

But long ago, British economist – William Stanley Jevons – outlined the phenomena that has become known as the – Jevons paradox – where:

… technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if demand is highly price elastic, this results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.

Put simply, lowering production and user costs with, for example, clean energy will not lead to lower growth rates, but more likely the opposite.

Current editor of progressive US journal Monthly Review – John Bellamy Foster – captured this problem well in his 2011 article – Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem

In the June 1989 issue of the – Monthly Review – American economist – Paul Sweezy – published an article – Capitalism and the Environment – which represented a major Marxist statement on the issue that is now discussed daily in our media and our lives generally.

John Kenneth Galbraith – called Paul Sweezy “the most noted American Marxist scholar” on his era.

His work was certainly captivating and I personally have taken a lot from it over the course of my career.

In the cited article, Paul Sweezy noted that:

… it is by no means certain that the essential conditions for the survival and development of civilized society as we know it today will continue to exist.

He argued that up until the modern era (remember he was writing more than three decades ago), the environmental “destruction by human agency: has been “small compared to the size of the environment as a whole”.

But that has now changed.

First, we saw the devastation that the atomic bomb can cause (circa the mass war crimes inflicted by the US on the Japanese on August 6 and August 9, 1945).

Paul Sweezy saw these events as marking a shift in our awareness of existential insecurity and said that:

Once you know for certain that human agency can render the planet unfit for human habitation, you can hardly help asking whether nuclear weapons are the only possible source of such a catastrophe.

And the byproducts of what we call “progress”, which for decades were largely ignored, unless the negative impacts were felt by the rich, are now front and centre of the debate and providing a major counterweight to the growth narrative.

As Paul Sweezy was writing (1989), there was a strong lobby encouraging us to ignore the Club of Rome and ensuing warnings.

Many high profile commentators claimed that the warnings of a climate-induced ‘Armageddon’ were gross exaggerations.

Even today that line is run by conservatives – who are not really conserving anything other than their political positions and the interests of the fossil fuel lobby they serve.

For example, over the past week, the conservative coalition (in opposition) in Australia has voted to abandon any emissions targets and are set to start providing state subsidies to companies that are still relying on coal to generate electricity.

One critic said of the decision by the main opposition parties: “To fight against net zero is fighting against gravity” (Source).

When they were in government last (2013-2022), the conservatives undermined any attempts to address climate change, which has held back Australia from making a transition to smooth renewables and made the costs of such a shift much higher.

These deniers have always been around though as Paul Sweezy noted.

But the evidence is overwhelmingly against such views.

Even when Paul Sweezy was writing the article he said that – “There is a vast literature on this subject, much of it of high quality” that points to the urgency of the problem of environmental overload and deterioration.

Importantly, the literature suggested that:

… by far the largest part of the problem has its origin in the functioning of the world’s economy as it has developed in the last three or four centuries. This of course has been the period of the emergence of capitalism and of the bourgeois and industrial revolutions, of coal and steam and railroads, of steel and electricity and chemicals, of petroleum and the automobile, of mechanized and chemicalized agriculture—and of the rapid expansion and urbanization of the world’s population in response to the massive growth of the forces of production at the disposal of humankind.

The question then is whether we can disentangle the impacts from the technological and industrial changes from the mode of production itself.

To some extent the industrial history of the Soviet system suggests that large-scale industrialisation feeding mass consumption will create environmental deterioration no matter how the surplus is distributed (Soviet socialism or Capitalism).

But that is only part of the story.

The Soviet system, for example, was really a form of Capitalism, in the sense that economic growth and accumulation was a motivating dynamic that the system was designed to produce.

The problem is in Paul Sweezy’s words that:

Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries.

So what does that mean?

Obviously a reduction in the material demands engendered by economic activity on the environmental resources.

The classic 1971 work of – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen – The Entropy Law and the Economic Process – began by noting that:

The whole truth is that economics, in the way this discipline is now ‘generally professed, is mechanistic in the same strong sense in which we generally believe only Classical mechanics to be.

That still holds today and means that the economists cannot “account for the existence of enduring qualitative changes in nature nor accept this existence as an independent fact.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work laid the foundation for the emergence of ecological economics.

But while recognition of the problem may lead to policies that accelerate the use of less damaging technologies etc, and humans might reduce their own consumption propensities, the problem still remains, degrowth runs counter to the intrinsic logic of Capitalism.

That is the essence of Paul Sweezy’s 1989 contribution.

On Capitalism, he wrote:

Despite all the dramatic changes, however, the system remains in essence what it was at its birth, a juggernaut driven by the concentrated energy of individuals and small groups single-mindedly pursuing their own interests, checked only by their mutual competition, and controlled in the short run by the impersonal forces of the market and in the longer run, when the market fails, by devastating crises. Implicit in the very concept of this system are interlocked and enormously powerful drives to both creation and destruction. On the plus side, the creative drive relates to what humankind can get out of nature for its own uses; on the negative side, the destructive drive bears most heavily on nature’s capacity to respond to the demands placed on it.

He conjectures that “sooner or later … these two drives are contradictory and incompatible”.

The problem is that there is no inherent stabilising forces that “could curb its destructive drive and at the same time transform its creative drive into a benign environmental force”.

It defies the logic of Capitalism to think that we will achieve degrowth within its institutions.

Capitalism is more than a system for “satisfying human needs” – many different forms of economic organisation could achieve that end.

But Capitalism goes beyond that purpose – because it is not really its intrinsic purpose anyway.

The intrinsic purpose is its “obsession with capital accumulation” – to enrich the small elites and that purpose is never ending and always under challenge – so it “never stands still”.

Marx and Engels recognised this uneasy state even in the C19th as capital penetrated new countries and turned more and more human activity into surplus-generating labour processes.

And the “natural environment … is not as something to be cherished and enjoyed but as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.”

Paul Sweezy calls this Capitalism’s “inner nature”.

John Bellamy Foster’s article (cited above) examines that conflict.

He considers that the early degrowth literature published by French economist – Serge Latouche – and considered to be seminal to the emergence of the degrowth movement – failed to articulate a coherent position on this issue.

Serge Latouche thinks that “a society based on economic contraction cannot exist under capitalism” but abandoning capitalism would “plunge society into chaos”.

Instead, he wanted to “find another way out of development … and growth” that does not end capitalism.

This early view that “eco-compatible capitalism is conceivable” has influenced and guided many more recent degrowth researchers and commentators and led to the belief that a “Keynesian” state could regulate a social democracy to deliver such a compatibility.

Effectively, even mainstream economists think that if we price “pollution” properly into products then the market will see an environmentally preferred solution.

But this view fails, just like much of the mainstream ecological economics fails because it considers the natural environment (a biosphere) to be like any resource that can be used more or less depending on the dictates of the market price system.

The folly of this mainstream view is the biosystems can die – and economists have no idea of when we reach the point when such death occurs.

There is no infinite trade-off in this context and so the market will fail is the most destructive and catastrophic way imaginable.

The Latouche-type thinking also integrates with the ‘basis income’ movement such that it is considered a legitimate progressive strategy to introduce green technology that displaces millions of workers from their jobs and provide income security through the government handout.

Meanwhile capitalist accumulation can continue along it ‘green’ path because the system has rendered millions of workers surplus to the accumulation process except by ensuring they remain ‘consumption’ units eking out a material existence of the pittance called a basic income.

The problem that Marxists like Paul Sweezy and John Bellamy Foster correctly point out is that these ‘green’ initiatives do not challenge the Capitalist drive for accumulation and as long as capital is dominant and can manipulate political processes, we will not get very far.

Capital will turn these green initiatives into just alternative accumulation devices.

As I see it the degrowth camp (of which I am in) has three challenges:

1. Reducing energy consumption – this is a technology challenge.

2. Reducing mass consumption while ensuring poverty is reduced – this is a social challenge.

3. Destroying the logic of capital accumulation – this is the system ending challenge.

Most green growth activists focus on 1 and 2.

But making progress on those fronts can never deliver functional degrowth even if they reduce our claims on the biosphere somewhat.

Only pursuing and achieving 3 will deliver the ends we desire.