Degrowth Remains a Slogan

 

Written by Sara Abraham and first published at Jamhoor

Though illuminating key debates, Jason Hickel’s recent case for degrowth falls short of its global objective – with not enough to offer regions like South Asia. 

The constant refrain on growth, more growth, and expansion is found globally in public and policy economic discourse and is a truism of capitalist common sense. South Asian countries are no exceptions to the obsession with growth, for one assumption is that the bottom rises with growth.

Growth benefits all, even if unequally, is the expectation. And even if there isn’t this assumption, since many at the bottom appear so obviously locked in spiralling poverty and early death, an expanding middle class sitting on the rump of growth is still considered huge progress. It equals the spread of modernity and democracy to larger numbers of people. Further, growth is “natural”, keeps up with expanding populations and allows all to enjoy more, enriches our lives with newer products, technologies and lifestyles, and allows for extra income and wealth (to be then redistributed). 

This is the hegemonic view of growth in the world and it makes ideas around “degrowth” deeply contrarian. Degrowth or any related idea, like controlling carbon emissions or stopping mining, is quickly castigated by many in South Asia as a Western import to keep developing countries poor. 

Yet the immense power of the narrative of growth begs the need for critical theory that advances new paradigms within which equitable economic development can be conceived. If degrowth is a paradigm which can offer a reduction in poverty and inequality while saving the planet, then it deserves our keen attention.

Further, the degrowth paradigm claims to envision an economy that is richer, more expansive and pro-nature than capitalism, for it puts life, not exploitation, at the centre of the economic system. For this reason, the paradigm has been cautiously praised by progressives. Michael Lowy, for instance, has argued that eco-socialism and the degrowth movement are the two most powerful currents of the ecological Left.

Jason Hickel’s new book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, therefore comes at an opportune moment. It is his ambitious attempt to make the case for why degrowth will save the world. However, I found the book theoretically muddled on multiple levels and unfortunately blind to much of the world. 

Part One of the book is a competent general statement on the scale of ecological downslide, the rapacious nature of capitalism and the core contradiction between the drive to growth and rising GDP, on the one hand, and the immediate need for ecological conservation and cutbacks in resource-use and waste, on the other. Its accessible prose makes it an excellent primer for the new reader.

Hickel links the drive to profit with the need for growth. He discusses the high scale of growth that global capitalism requires every year, and how the OECD in 1960 was mandated to follow policies that generated the highest rates of growth. He shows how neoliberal policies chasing growth basically entrapped all governments, be it in the global South or North, in “growth without development.” 

Despite quibbles with states being proxies for companies in Hickel’s characterization of the nature of geopolitical competition, and growth being an awkward proxy for profit, his statements are largely true. He then goes on to show how capitalist driven “growth” is no longer ecologically sustainable, for it has drained the earth, heated the oceans, and polluted the air. This, too, is certainly true.        

Having laid out the basic problem in empirical terms, Part Two of the book traverses, though far too briefly, across a range of contemporary radical ideas on reorganizing the economy away from capitalist imperatives and growth-ism. It suggests that the ideas of the commons, cooperation, and reduced luxury consumption are core pillars of a degrowth economy.

Public goods of sanitation and rent control are examples of urban commons and Hickel shows that such public goods, rather than “growth”, are what have led to longer lifespans and richer lives. People across the world in areas of good public health and educational infrastructure have much better lives than many deprived sectors in the core capitalist West, especially the United States. 

In a trenchant criticism of wasteful consumption, Hickel claims that a drastic cut in the disposable income of the rich (through taxation) can only have significant ecological benefits. This argument also undermines any claim about the beneficial, redistributive power of wealth. 

These distillations of older research findings challenge assumptions that aggregate growth and wealth lead to general prosperity or have any beneficial value. Yet in this discussion, Hickel does not explain the financial basis for public goods in the West or elsewhere, be it taxation (of profits generated by growth?) or the redirection of surplus (from growth?) into public programs. His larger point is that high levels of human development have occurred with low GDP per capita. Countries should not be chasing GDP. They should be reorganizing internally, redistributing wealth and building their public sectors. 

So is degrowth then a process towards equitable austerity, which requires us to cut back on consumption and live simply? Yes to the latter, but no to the fear of austerity. Rather, Hickel asserts that with the “commons” comes “abundance”. For him, degrowth is liberating precisely because it is linked to abundance, not austerity.

In fact, a core argument of his book is that it is capitalist forms of growth that have led to the imposition of austerity in major parts of the world. Degrowth (after providing for a certain minimum standard of living which need not be low) allows for flourishing through an abundance of social relationships, leisure, and culture, and a renewed relationship with nature. The go-slow wisdom of today would be an aspect of degrowth.

Undertheorized Concepts

But here one comes up against a wall. Firstly, abundance is at no point in the book explained properly, or grounded in any social or economic theory. Is it linked to material abundance primarily, or is it linked to (a non-material freedom), and if so how? Is it, as Linsey McGoey defines it, “the surfeit of goods, energy, desires, actors, interests and information that characterize modern life” – in which case, is it not partly the antithesis of degrowth? Hickel needs to elaborate with particularity how he understands “abundance” if he wants to convince readers that degrowth, and not overproduction, will lead to it.  

Clarity and penetration of vision is also so important as all readers are not located similarly. That academia has lately been entranced by the idea of abundance while there have been a surfeit of sheer death, dead time, dead rivers, violence, and so forth, doesn’t help. I wanted to know what “abundance” could mean for our present times in terms of a program to mitigate pain.

Here, one strand of economic theory seems to offer a program in relation to abundance which Hickel might have in mind. For example, as Yanis Varoufakis has advocated, of the billions of dollars handed over to banks in 2020-21, a small fraction could have been used to vaccinate the world’s population, or to clean the world’s rivers, or any number of things.

Hickel himself chooses to mention in passing that governments found the power to make debts disappear with the pandemic, thereby pointing to the speculative basis for much of financial “wealth” as well as the un-exerted power lying latently with governments. But when and where did this disappearing act happen? He offers no explanation. Was it an act of abundance, or was it a reversible reform? Hickel merely gestures. And does the occasional redistribution of wealth undermine capitalism or restore it? This question needs no recourse to the terms growth or degrowth and is not addressed in the book at all. 

Degrowth as a core concept in Hickel’s book is also heavily undertheorized. It seems little more than an unspecified consequence of decommodification, deprivatization, decapitalization, the cancellation of debt and interest, redistribution of wealth into public projects, and so forth. These concepts are older, practical and have offered programs of action and resistance which have challenged capitalism, if not blocked it. “Degrowth” does not do the work in explaining why these programs are important, and neither does “decolonization”, which Hickel comes to later in the text.

Provincializing Degrowth?

Even as Hickel marveled at governments’ unused power to make debts disappear, I asked myself, what would enable ordinary people to find their power to make imposed (even if elected) governments disappear? Posing this question to myself made me realize that this book doesn’t go there. It mostly plods on UK radical policy ground. Hickel is interested in governments implementing radical economic reforms of the types he mentions, but what balance of forces, what struggles, would be needed for governments to pursue these policies in the first place? Hickel doesn’t tell us. 

He mentions the “exciting” news that fewer work hours in the global North have great ecological benefits. But Hickel does not consider at all how this idea of “less work” can be translated for the global South – that is, again, to the most of the world, where unemployment is so dire a problem.  

Despite my growing misgiving that the UK and parts of the West is really his wicket, Hickel is sure he wants the whole world to be his lab for the paradigm of degrowth. He praises certain countries for their equitable development and creation of public goods – namely, Sri Lanka, Kerala, Costa Rica, and Cuba.

This only raised again for me strong misgivings on his style of argument and limited width of canvas. Academics and lawyers are trained to marshal evidence on the side of their frequently pre-conceived arguments, and it is for the opposing side to debunk the claims. However, these are heuristics, and fail to capture the texture of social life, political contradictions or the deep penetration of capitalism into all of it. Hickel does not guide us through the mess of what is really going on in each of these countries.

The choice of naming Sri Lanka, in particular, got my attention, as surely it is better understood as an authoritarian-militarized political economy that was produced in the aftermath of a decades-long, vicious civil war. Could all this really disappear into the remote computer screen surveying its development indicators? What about the non-existent sewerage systems and entrenched patriarchy of Kerala? Could a capitalist outpost like Costa Rica be put in the same sentence as Cuba? Maybe, but the work is not done to flesh out when, why and how much revolution and struggle went into winning a better standard of living. Without that, we are left with very false equivalences. 

I also wonder why Hickel has not explicitly drawn on feminist scholarship on the uncounted value and wealth produced by women’s unwaged labour. This body of theory and politics, associated with people like Selma James and Silvia Federici, is tied closely to a critique of conventional measures of GDP and growth. Feminists sought to calculate the value of women’s work and their contribution to the GDP, which long ago began melting its ties to capitalist needs.

Ecological critique is just the latest on the block to attack capitalism and its props and measures. Why does Hickel find it superior to any earlier thrust of critique? He eventually does mention “caring” for a full paragraph, but only as an economic arena that will gain attention once degrowth is on the cards, rather than an active site of struggle for a politics of degrowth. 

But I really want to come to my own pet peeves: that, despite what the book’s title proclaims, there is no application of degrowth thinking to the large, agricultural labour-intensive economies of parts of South Asia, where a dangerous dismantling of the public distribution system and a centralization of regional and local agricultural markets is ongoing, without recourse to ideas of growth but with every interest in profit. And there is equally no reflection in the book on countries which have already witnessed large scale devastation of public infrastructure and indebtedness such as in parts of Africa. Is it sufficient to say that these trends need to be reversed? 

As this is most of the world, it is safe to say that Hickel really does not prove his case that degrowth will save the world. 

A Romance with Indigeneity?

Part 3 of the book leaves the urban and rural worlds altogether and moves to describe Indigenous conceptions of living within nature as natural beings, and in relationships of exchange. He views these forms of living as shaped by valorizations of use value over exchange value, and understandably praises these processes. An old but still important implication from his discussion is how organized religions are pillars upholding dualistic forms of thought, separating man from nature and how this must be surpassed.

Hickel wishes to surpass modernist ways of being, and he says the struggle is over our very way of being. For this transition, we need new sources of hope, new wellsprings of possibility. We need to regain real ecological intelligence, which is invested in integration rather than expansion.

Hickel shares what gives him this hope: it is the thrilling experience of seeing like a shaman who mediates between the human and the natural world. It is through animism, which does not distinguish between humans and other living beings, that one can find connection and even radical empathy. Hickel here attempts to catapult his readers into a deeper spiritual appreciation of the world around them; that only a cultural revolution at this deep level will create the ground for radical struggles against capitalism. 

Yet, on reflection, Hickel basically concedes argument to faith and fantasy. Hickel presents decontextualized snippets of Indigenous and ecological thought at face value. For instance, I found Hickel’s celebration of the fact that the Ganga river was granted legal rights quite unconvincing. How can this recognition mean absolutely anything in the current political-economic and ecological condition of India?

This old, gracious and sacred river, given legal rights which can never match the ancient spiritual role it has had in people’s lives, currently has thousands of corpses floating in it as people can no longer find the tree branches needed to build funeral pyres. Should the river assert its rights and demand that the earth absorb the bodies? What about the earth’s rights? Can a river have greater rights than the people of the land, who have next to none? The only genre for this whole discussion is satire, or, at best, science fiction, as it compresses multiple time periods into one space.

Further, why does the long history of third-world based movements against dams, overfishing, pollution, dirty mining, water privatization, the peasants’ movements and so forth find no place in this text which is concerned with asserting the commons in the face of capital? Why is that only Indigenous “ways of being” matter, but not their material struggles?  

I find Hickel’s thoughts, tweets and blogs fresh and provocative, and a good counterpoint to mainstream thinking. He is actively rethinking economic myths and can gesture to new directions. The degrowth current on the ecological Left is important, even if thus far only a placeholder for the conceptual journey that must be made. It will force greater thinking by socialists and other radicals. However, degrowth is still a slogan it seems, and not a program for development. 

Sara Abraham is a lawyer and researcher based in Chennai, India.

Degrowth: Socialism without Growth

Written by Timothée Parrique and Giorgos Kallis and first published at Brave New Europe

Notable (eco)socialists have recently criticized the idea of degrowth ¹. Here we want to argue that such criticism is misplaced. Growth is a problem over and above capitalism. A sustainable eco-socialism should reject any association with the ideology and terminology of growth. 21st century socialists should start thinking how we can plan for societies that prosper without growth. Like it not, growth is bound to come to an end, the question is how; and whether this will happen soon or too late to avert planetary disasters.

Any form of endless growth is ecologically unsustainable

The typical socialist response to degrowth is that it is capitalism, and capitalist growth, that are the problem, not economic growth. But here’s the thing: no economic growth can be sustainable. An increase in material living standards will require, well, more materials. This is independent of whether the economy at stake is capitalist, socialist, anarchist, or primitive. 

Growth in the material standard of living requires growth in the extraction of materials and the excretion of pollution (growth in the standard of living in general does not; we discuss this below). Result: as of today – and very likely tomorrow as well – economic growth strongly correlates with energy and material use, at the global level which is the only one that shows the full picture in a globalised economy.

Leading Marxist theorist David Harvey calls the idea of compound growth the madness of economic reason, and the most lethal of capitalism’s lethal contradictions (which makes us wonder why would socialists spend their time trying to salvage this madness). To see how mad it is, consider the following. 

An innocent 3% growth each year, means a doubling of the economy every 24 years, some ten times bigger by the end of the century, quickly growing to an infinite size. Substitute the economy with whatever you like (‘energy’, ‘water’, ‘bicycles’, ‘massages’). The idea of infinity is pure madness, full stop. It is the generalisation of the logic of individual capitalists who expect to pocket their 3-5% return every year, rain or shine. But it is not something that a society can sustain for long.

Some socialists dream of a Fully Automated Luxury Communism where new technologies enable the absolute decoupling of economic output from the environment. So far, this has not happened, not even close, and there are doubts as to whether the future holds better prospects. Like it or not, economies too have to obey the laws of physics. 

For example, thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed, and that its quality moves inexorably towards a less usable or useful state. This means there is no silver-bullet technology that can make an increase in the material standard of living immaterial – economy is fundamentally embedded within ecology.

Of course, certain activities are more nature-intensive than others; and so potentially these could grow for a longer period without disrupting the biosphere. For example, fossil fuels are more disruptive than solar energy. But that does not mean solar energy opens the door to boundless growth. A better organisation of production and new technologies can increase productivity and lead to a relative decoupling with less resources used per product – e.g. more efficient solar panels. 

But if the quantity of solar panels increases at a compound rate without limit, it will, one day, start to put pressure on either resource availability or lead to ecological damage. In other words, nothing material can be infinite, regardless of whether the economy is capitalist, socialist, or anything else in between.

Furthermore, it is one thing to decarbonise with renewable energies an energy system at its current size, or one fifth of it (a reduction in energy use which studies show is feasible with existing sufficiency and efficiency measures), and another to decarbonise a system that has grown ten times bigger by the end of the century (remember 3% growth per year).

Our suggestion: democratic socialist planning would have to consider the constraining requirement of a degrowth use of energy and materials. This is not too much of a problem because, as we will soon argue, many of the activities that are heavy in energy and materials today do not need to exist under socialism. 

There is too much superfluous activity under capitalism, which serves nothing else but the need of capitalists to extract surplus value and make profits. The goal instead should be socialism without growth, a sustainable socialism – an economic system that manages to satisfy the needs of its people without clinging to capitalist ideas of constant expansion and without of course overshooting planetary limits.

Growth requires accumulation and accumulation comes with exploitation

There is another problem. In the same way that economic growth is facing ecological limits, it is also facing social ones. Capitalists make a profit exploiting  wage earners (surplus value in Marxist terms), and also exploiting the unpaid work of an array of people, especially women doing unpaid care and housework, who ensure the socio-natural reproduction of the work force for free. 

Capital also relies on ‘free gifts of nature’ (free only from its perspective), which alongside unpaid care and housework keep the price of means of production and labour power cheap, allowing capital to squeeze surplus value. In effect, economic growth under capitalism often occurs at the expense of the social fabric, as it relies on systematic exploitation and cost shifting.

By not accounting for reproduction factors, such as rest, affection, caring, security, and the providing of sustenance, production can too easily lead to their depletion. For example, working full-time leaves little time for activities that are unpaid such as those which are key for social reproduction. As production increases, it will stretch the capacity for a society to reproduce its livelihood. 

Continued unabated, this accumulation via social deterioration comes to erode factors of reproduction that are crucial for all forms of production. Like a snake biting its own tail, economic growth is limited because it is inevitably based on the unsustainable exploitation of reproductive labour and ecosystem provisioning.

If socialism means the end of exploitation, it also means the end of endless accumulation. Again: this is socialism without growth. A genuine socialist economy would not exploit the work or resources of other economies; it would share care work evenly, rotate unpleasant tasks and compensate care workers with their dues for their reproductive work. With no one – humans and non-humans – being exploited, the economy would simply produce the goods and services it needs, channelling productivity gains into more free time.

Some socialists try to square the circle here, when they argue that socialism would be able to both end exploitation, and grow the economy as much or even more than capitalism. Sorry, but this is pure fantasy. If socialist production has to pay for the true labour time of producers, and for the true time necessary for ecosystems to recover and recuperate, or if human labour time has to be expended instead of ‘free gifts of nature’ that will be left unexploited, then there will be less surplus, and less surplus can only mean less growth of output. 

A genuine socialism will also be democratic, one would like to think. True democracy slows things down (those participating in the assemblies of their local cooperatives know what we’re talking about). Again to think that all this slowing down will lead to acceleration and not deceleration of production is truly wishful thinking.

Use values do not grow

The good news is that we can have prosperity without growth. In fact, it has been shown empirically that the main indicators of living standards, including well-being, health, and education, cease to increase after a certain threshold of output is reached – some call it the Well-being Turning Point. For example, Portugal has significantly better social outcomes than the United States, with 65% less GDP per capita. This is because welfare depends on the satisfaction of actual use values, expressing human needs, and not on the endless accumulation of money.

Socialists know this well: GDP is not a measure of use values, but one of exchange values. The indicator does not distinguish between desirable and undesirable activities. On top of that, it ignores all that is non-monetary (including nature and unpaid work), neglects the value of intangible wealth, and does not account for inequality. What GDP measures is the welfare of capitalism, not people.

Of course, the provision of certain useful goods and services must increase and should increase under socialism. However, let us not talk about “growth” for improvements in things like health, mobility, or education. These are not quantitative goals but qualitative ones. Children might need a freer and more holistic, polytechnic education. This requires a finite number of school buildings, teachers, and pens. Patients may need more human contact and care by their doctors; what they need is not an infinitely increasing compound rate of care, but just enough to feel better. People who do not have bikes need one bike – not a yearly increase of 3% in the production of bikes, forever.

The point is that use values do not grow at a compound rate. Fundamental human needs like subsistence, protection, freedom, or identity can all be understood as thresholds of sufficiency: enough food to be healthy, enough living space to be happy, enough means of mobility to feel free, etc. The story of endless consumption to match endless needs is a capitalist discourse, created precisely to legitimate accumulation for the elite. 

And this is the central argument of degrowth: standards of living can improve without growth by redistributing and sharing wealth, doing away with artificial desires and the superfluous goods and appropriation of our time destined to the making of profit, and by shifting from valuing material goods to valuing relations. There is already enough for everyone to have a decent share – if the pie cannot grow, then it is time to share it more evenly.

Conclusions: Degrowth is as anti-capitalist as it gets

The ideology of growth has become the powerhouse of modern capitalism and we do not understand why some socialists are reluctant to join the battle against a phenomenon that is socially divisive and ecologically unsustainable. A socialism without growth but with well-being. Socialism and degrowth are two of the most powerful concepts we have to criticise capitalism and open-up different futures. 

As is evident by now, we do use the C-word, a lot. Certain Marxist commentators have accused degrowth of never explicitly questioning capitalism. Phillips (2015) depicts degrowth as a “small-scale steady-state capitalism.” The degrowth project some would think resembles the film Downsizing (2017), where exuberant consumerism is made environmentally possible by shrinking people down to a few centimetres.

So, let us be clear: degrowth is not miniature capitalism with tiny corporations, tiny speculative financial instruments, and tiny free trade agreements. It is not austerity within capitalism. It is an alternative system of provision altogether – not just smaller and slower, but different.

You may ask why focus on growth and not just capitalism? Well, try to compare the occurrence of “economic growth” versus “capital accumulation” in the news. As Gareth Dale has forcefully argued, economic growth is the ideology that has turned the specific interest of capital to grow (for returns, and for keeping social peace) into a generalized social objective assimilated by the population. 

This is not an ideology that will go away by refusing to confront it or beautifying it with nice adjectives. The fact that this ideology survived even the end of capitalism (or at least of a certain type of capitalism) in ex-socialist regimes should give pause for thought. Socialists who defend growth must also think twice whether they are redwashing capital, redressing the dreams that capitalism sells as socialist dreams.

Growth is the child of capitalism, but the child grew up and took over the head of the family. Capitalism’s interest in accumulation is promoted and legitimised through – and in the name of – “growth.” The critique of growth is the most fundamental critique of capitalism – one that criticises not only the means capitalism uses but the very ends it sells. This makes degrowth and (eco)socialism natural allies, not adversaries.

1 Most recently, “Ecosocialism and/or Degrowth?” by Michael Löwy (Oct. 2020), the “IMT theses on the climate crisis” published on the website In Defence of Marxism (Jun. 2020), and the lecture in “Degrowth and neo-Malthusianism: A socialist response” (Oct. 2020) by Olivia Rickson. And ‘How much stuff is just enough’ by Leigh Phillips at the Monde Diplomatique (https://mondediplo.com/2021/02/11degrowth).

Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics, political ecology, and water policy. He teaches political ecology and ecological economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and recently co-edited the book “The Case for Degrowth”

Timothée Parrique holds a PhD in economics from the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Développement (University of Clermont Auvergne, France) and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Ecosocialism - A Vital Synthesis

Written by Michael Löwy and first published at The Great Transition Initiative

Abstract: The capitalist system, driven at its core by the maximization of profit, regardless of social and ecological costs, is incompatible with a just and sustainable future. Ecosocialism offers a radical alternative that puts social and ecological well-being first. Attuned to the links between the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of the environment, ecosocialism stands against both reformist “market ecology” and “productivist socialism.” 

By embracing a new model of robustly democratic planning, society can take control of the means of production and its own destiny. Shorter work hours and a focus on authentic needs over consumerism can facilitate the elevation of “being” over “having,” and the achievement of a deeper sense of freedom for all. To realize this vision, however, environmentalists and socialists will need to recognize their common struggle and how that connects with the broader “movement of movements” seeking a Great Transition. 

Introduction 

Contemporary capitalist civilization is in crisis. The unlimited accumulation of capital, commodification of everything, ruthless exploitation of labor and nature, and attendant brutal competition undermine the bases of a sustainable future, thereby putting the very survival of the human species at risk. The deep, systemic threat we face demands a deep, systemic change: a Great Transition. 

In synthesizing the basic tenets of ecology and the Marxist critique of political economy, ecosocialism offers a radical alternative to an unsustainable status quo. Rejecting a capitalist definition of “progress” based on market growth and quantitative expansion (which, as Marx shows, is a destructive progress), it advocates policies founded on non-monetary criteria, such as social needs, individual well-being, and ecological equilibrium. Ecosocialism proffers a critique of both mainstream “market ecology,” which does not challenge the capitalist system, and “productivist socialism,” which ignores natural limits. 

As people increasingly realize how the economic and ecological crises intertwine, ecosocialism has been gaining adherents. Ecosocialism, as a movement, is relatively new, but some of its basic arguments date back to the writings of Marx and Engels. Now, intellectuals and activists are recovering this legacy and seeking a radical restructuring of the economy according to the principles of democratic ecological planning, putting human and planetary needs first and foremost. 

The “actually existing socialisms” of the twentieth century, with their often environmentally oblivious bureaucracies, do not offer an attractive model for today’s ecosocialists. Rather, we must chart a new path forward, one that links with the myriad movements around the globe that share the conviction that a better world is not only possible, but also necessary. 

Democratic Ecological Planning 

The core of ecosocialism is the concept of democratic ecological planning, wherein the population itself, not “the market” or a Politburo, make the main decisions about the economy. Early in the Great Transition to this new way of life, with its new mode of production and consumption, some sectors of the economy must be suppressed (e.g., the extraction of fossil fuels implicated in the climate crisis) or restructured, while new sectors are developed. Economic transformation must be accompanied by active pursuit of full employment with equal conditions of work and wages. This egalitarian vision is essential both for building a just society and for engaging the support of the working class for the structural transformation of the productive forces. 

Ultimately, such a vision is irreconcilable with private control of the means of production and of the planning process. In particular, for investments and technological innovation to serve the common good, decision-making must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises that currently dominate, and put in the public domain. Then, society itself, and neither a small oligarchy of property owners nor an elite of techno-bureaucrats, will democratically decide which productive lines are to be privileged, and how resources are to be invested in education, health, or culture. Major decisions on investment priorities—such as terminating all coal-fired facilities or directing agricultural subsidies to organic production—would be taken by direct popular vote. Other, less important decisions would be taken by elected bodies, on the relevant national, regional, or local scale.   

Although conservatives fearmonger about “central planning,” democratic ecological planning ultimately supports more freedom, not less, for several reasons. First, it offers liberation from the reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system that shackle individuals in what Max Weber called an “iron cage.” Prices of goods would not be left to the “laws of supply and demand,” but would, instead, reflect social and political priorities, with the use of taxes and subsidies to incentivize social goods and disincentivize social ills. Ideally, as the ecosocialist transition moves forward, more products and services critical for meeting fundamental human needs would be freely distributed, according to the will of the citizens. 

Second, ecosocialism heralds a substantial increase in free time. Planning and the reduction of labor time are the two decisive steps towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom.” A significant increase of free time is, in fact, a condition for the participation of working people in the democratic discussion and management of economy and of society. 

Last, democratic ecological planning represents a whole society’s exercise of its freedom to control the decisions that affect its destiny. If the democratic ideal would not grant political decision-making power to a small elite, why should the same principle not apply to economic decisions? Under capitalism, use-value—the worth of a product or service to well-being—exists only in the service of exchange-value, or value on the market. Thus, many products in contemporary society are socially useless, or designed for rapid turnover (“planned obsolescence”). By contrast, in a planned ecosocialist economy, use-value would be the only criteria for the production of goods and services, with far-reaching economic, social, and ecological consequences.[1] 

Planning would focus on large-scale economic decisions, not the small-scale ones that might affect local restaurants, groceries, small shops, or artisan enterprises. Importantly, such planning is consistent with workers’ self-management of their productive units. The decision, for example, to transform a plant from producing automobiles to producing buses and trams would be taken by society as a whole, but the internal organization and functioning of the enterprise would be democratically managed by its workers. 

There has been much discussion about the “centralized” or “decentralized” character of planning, but most important is democratic control at all levels—local, regional, national, continental, or international. For example, planetary ecological issues such as global warming must be dealt with on a global scale, and thereby require some form of global democratic planning. This nested, democratic decision-making is quite the opposite of what is usually described, often dismissively, as “central planning,” since decisions are not taken by any “center,” but democratically decided by the affected population at the appropriate scale. 

Democratic and pluralist debate would occur at all levels. Through parties, platforms, or other political movements, varied propositions would be submitted to the people, and delegates would be elected accordingly. However, representative democracy must be complemented—and corrected—by Internet-enabled direct democracy, through which people choose—at the local, national, and, later, global level—among major social and ecological options. Should public transportation be free? Should the owners of private cars pay special taxes to subsidize public transportation? Should solar energy be subsidized in order to compete with fossil energy? Should the work week be reduced to 30 hours, 25, or less, with the attendant reduction of production? 

Such democratic planning needs expert input, but its role is educational, to present informed views on alternative outcomes for consideration by popular decision-making processes. What guarantee is there that the people will make ecologically sound decisions? None. Ecosocialism wagers that democratic decisions will become increasingly reasoned and enlightened as culture changes and the grip of commodity fetishism is broken. One cannot imagine such a new society without the population achieving through struggle, self-education, and social experience, a high level of socialist and ecological consciousness. In any case, are not the alternatives—the blind market or an ecological dictatorship of “experts”—much more dangerous? 

The Great Transition from capitalist destructive progress to ecosocialism is a historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture, and mindsets. Enacting this transition leads not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless and/or harmful to the environment.  

Such a transformative process depends on the active support of the vast majority of the population for an ecosocialist program. The decisive factor in development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is the collective experience of struggle, from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of global society as a whole. 

The Growth Question 

The issue of economic growth has divided socialists and environmentalists. Ecosocialism, however, rejects the dualistic frame of growth versus degrowth, development versus anti-development, because both positions share a purely quantitative conception of productive forces. A third position resonates more with the task ahead: the qualitative transformation of development. 

A new development paradigm means putting an end to the egregious waste of resources under capitalism, driven by large-scale production of useless and harmful products. The arms industry is, of course, a dramatic example, but, more generally, the primary purpose of many of the “goods” produced—with their planned obsolescence—is to generate profit for large corporations. The issue is not excessive consumption in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on massive waste and the conspicuous and compulsive pursuit of novelties promoted by “fashion.” A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, including water, food, clothing, housing, and such basic services as health, education, transport, and culture. 

Obviously, the countries of the Global South, where these needs are very far from being satisfied, must pursue greater classical “development”—railroads, hospitals, sewage systems, and other infrastructure. Still, rather than emulate how affluent countries built their productive systems, these countries can pursue development in far more environmentally friendly ways, including the rapid introduction of renewable energy. While many poorer countries will need to expand agricultural production to nourish hungry, growing populations, the ecosocialist solution is to promote agroecology methods rooted in family units, cooperatives, or larger-scale collective farms—not the destructive industrialized agribusiness methods involving intensive inputs of pesticides, chemicals, and GMOs.[2] 

At the same time, the ecosocialist transformation would end the heinous debt system the Global South now confronts the exploitations of its resources by advanced industrial countries as well as rapidly developing countries like China. Instead, we can envision a strong flow of technical and economic assistance from North to South rooted in a robust sense of solidarity and the recognition that planetary problems require planetary solutions. This need not entail that people in affluent countries “reduce their standard of living”—only that they shun the obsessive consumption, induced by the capitalist system, of useless commodities that do not meet real needs or contribute to human well-being and flourishing. 

But how do we distinguish authentic from artificial and counterproductive needs? To a considerable degree, the latter are stimulated by the mental manipulation of advertising. In contemporary capitalist societies, the advertising industry has invaded all spheres of life, shaping everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to sports, culture, religion, and politics. Promotional advertising has become ubiquitous, insidiously infesting our streets, landscapes, and traditional and digital media, molding habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. 

Moreover, the ad industry itself is a source of considerable waste of natural resources and labor time, ultimately paid by the consumer, for a branch of “production” that lies in direct contradiction with real social-ecological needs. While indispensable to the capitalist market economy, the advertising industry would have no place in a society in transition to ecosocialism; it would be replaced by consumer associations that vet and disseminate information on goods and services. 

While these changes are already happening to some extent, old habits would likely persist for some years, and nobody has the right to dictate peoples’ desires. Altering patterns of consumption is an ongoing educational challenge within a historical process of cultural change. 

A fundamental premise of ecosocialism is that in a society without sharp class divisions and capitalist alienation, “being” will take precedence over “having.” Instead of seeking endless goods, people pursue greater free time, and the personal achievements and meaning it can bring through cultural, athletic, playful, scientific, erotic, artistic, and political activities. There is no evidence that compulsive acquisitiveness stems from intrinsic “human nature,” as conservative rhetoric suggests. 

Rather, it is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising. Ernest Mandel summarizes this critical point well: “The continual accumulation of more and more goods […] is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behavior. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations […] become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied.” [3] 

Of course, even a classless society faces conflict and contradiction. The transition to ecosocialism would confront tensions between the requirements of protecting the environment and meeting social needs; between ecological imperatives and the development of basic infrastructure; between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources; between communitarian and cosmopolitan impulses. Struggles among competing desiderata are inevitable. 

Hence, weighing and balancing such interests must become the task of a democratic planning process, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to come up with solutions through transparent, plural, and open public discourse. Such participatory democracy at all levels does not mean that there will not be mistakes, but it allows for the self-correction by the members of the social collectivity of its own mistakes. 

Intellectual Roots 

Although ecosocialism is a fairly recent phenomenon, its intellectual roots can be traced back to Marx and Engels. Because environmental issues were not as salient in the nineteenth century as in our era of incipient ecological catastrophe, these concerns did not play a central role in Marx and Engels’s works. Nevertheless, their writings use arguments and concepts vital to the connection between capitalist dynamics and the destruction of the natural environment, and to the development of a socialist and ecological alternative to the prevailing system. 

Some passages in Marx and Engels (and certainly in the dominant Marxist currents that followed) do embrace an uncritical stance toward the productive forces created by capital, treating the “development of productive forces” as the main factor in human progress. However, Marx was radically opposed to what we now call “productivism”— the capitalist logic by which the accumulation of capital, wealth, and commodities becomes an end in itself. 

The fundamental idea of a socialist economy—in contrast to the bureaucratic caricatures that prevailed in the “socialist” experiments of the twentieth century—is to produce use-values, goods that are necessary for the satisfaction of human needs, well-being, and fulfillment. 

The central feature of technical progress for Marx was not the indefinite growth of products (“having”) but the reduction of socially necessary labor and concomitant increase of free time (“being”).[4]  Marx’s emphasis on communist self-development, on free time for artistic, erotic, or intellectual activities—in contrast to the capitalist obsession with the consumption of more and more material goods—implies a decisive reduction of pressure on the natural environment.[5] 

Beyond the presumed benefit for the environment, a key Marxian contribution to socialist ecological thinking is attributing to capitalism a metabolic rift—i.e., a disruption of the material exchange between human societies and the natural environment. The issue is discussed, inter alia, in a well-known passage of Capital:

Capitalist production […] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural conditions for the lasting fertility of the soil. […] All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil […]. The more a country […] develops itself on the basis of great industry, the more this process of destruction takes place quickly. Capitalist production […] only develops […] by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker. ^[6] 

This important passage clarifies Marx’s dialectical vision of the contradictions of “progress” and its destructive consequences for nature under capitalist conditions. The example, of course, is limited to the loss of fertility by the soil. But on this basis, Marx draws the broad insight that capitalist production embodies a tendency to undermine the “eternal natural conditions.” From a similar vantage, Marx reiterates his more familiar argument that the same predatory logic of capitalism exploits and debases workers.

While most contemporary ecosocialists are inspired by Marx’s insights, ecology has become far more central to their analysis and action. During the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and the US, an ecological socialism began to take shape. Manuel Sacristan, a Spanish dissident-Communist philosopher, founded the ecosocialist and feminist journal Mientras Tanto in 1979, introducing the dialectical concept of “destructive-productive forces.” Raymond Williams, a British socialist and founder of modern cultural studies, became one of the first in Europe to call for an “ecologically conscious socialism” and is often credited with coining the term “ecosocialism” itself. 

André Gorz, a French philosopher and journalist, argued that political ecology must contain a critique of economic thought and called for an ecological and humanist transformation of work. Barry Commoner, an American biologist, argued that the capitalist system and its technology—and not population growth—was responsible for the destruction of the environment, which led him to the conclusion that “some sort of socialism” was the realistic alternative.[7] 

In the 1980s, James O’Connor founded the influential journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. The journal was inspired by O’Connor’s idea of the “second contradiction of capitalism.” In this formulation, the first contradiction is the Marxist one between the forces and relations of production; the second contradiction lies between the mode of production and the “conditions of production,” especially, the state of the environment. 

A new generation of eco-Marxists appeared in the 2000s, including John Bellamy Foster and others around the journal Monthly Review, who further developed the Marxian concept of metabolic rift between human societies and the environment. In 2001, Joel Kovel and the present author issued “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” which was further developed by the same authors, together with Ian Angus, in the 2008 Belem Ecosocialist Manifesto, which was signed by hundreds of people from forty countries and distributed at the World Social Forum in 2009. It has since become an important reference for ecosocialists around the world.[8] 

Why Environmentalists Need to Be Socialists 

As these and other authors have shown, capitalism is incompatible with a sustainable future. The capitalist system, an economic growth machine propelled by fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, is a primary culprit in climate change and the wider ecological crisis on Earth. Its irrational logic of endless expansion and accumulation, waste of resources, ostentatious consumption, planned obsolescence, and pursuit of profit at any cost is driving the planet to the brink of the abyss. 

Does “green capitalism”—the strategy of reducing environmental impact while maintaining dominant economic institutions—offer a solution? The implausibility of such a Policy Reform scenario is seen most vividly in the failure of a quarter-century of international conferences to effectively address climate change.[9] The political forces committed to the capitalist “market economy” that have created the problem cannot be the source of the solution. 

For example, at the 2015 Paris climate conference, many countries resolved to make serious efforts to keep average global temperature increases below 2^o C (ideally, they agreed, below 1.5^o C). Correspondingly, they volunteered to implement measures to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

However, they put no enforcement mechanisms in place nor consequences for noncompliance, hence no guarantee that any country will keep its word. The US, the world’s second-highest emitter of carbon emissions, is now run by a climate denier who pulled the US out of the agreement. Even if all countries did meet their commitments, the global temperature would rise by 3^o C or more, with great risk of dire, irreversible climate change.[10] 

Ultimately, the fatal flaw of green capitalism lies in the conflict between the micro-rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-sighted calculation of profit and loss, and the macro-rationality of collective action for the common good. The blind logic of the market resists a rapid energy transformation away from fossil fuel dependence in intrinsic contradiction of ecological rationality. 

The point is not to indict “bad” ecocidal capitalists, as opposed to “good” green capitalists; the fault lies in a system rooted in ruthless competition and a race for short-term profit that destroys nature’s balance. The environmental challenge—to build an alternative system that reflects the common good in its institutional DNA—becomes inextricably linked to the socialist challenge. 

That challenge requires building what E. P. Thompson termed a “moral economy” founded on non-monetary and extra-economic, social-ecological principles and governed through democratic decision-making processes.[11] 

Far more than incremental reform, what is needed is the emergence of a social and ecological civilization that brings forth a new energy structure and post-consumerist set of values and way of life. Realizing this vision will not be possible without public planning and control over the “means of production,” the physical inputs used to produce economic value, such as facilities, machinery, and infrastructure. 

An ecological politics that works within prevailing institutions and rules of the “market economy” will fall short of meeting the profound environmental challenges before us. Environmentalists who do not recognize how “productivism” flows from the logic of profit are destined to fail—or, worse, to become absorbed by the system. Examples abound. The lack of a coherent anti-capitalist posture led most of the European Green parties—notably, in France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium—to become mere “eco-reformist” partners in the social-liberal management of capitalism by center-left governments. 

Of course, nature did not fare any better under Soviet-style “socialism” than under capitalism. Indeed, that is one of the reasons ecosocialism carries a very different program and vision from the so-called “actually existing socialism” of the past. Since the roots of the ecological problem are systemic, environmentalism needs to challenge the prevailing capitalist system, and that means taking seriously the twenty-first-century synthesis of ecology and socialism—ecosocialism. 

Why Socialists Need to Be Environmentalists 

The survival of civilized society, and perhaps much of life on Planet Earth, is at stake. A socialist theory, or movement, that does not integrate ecology as a central element in its program and strategy is anachronistic and irrelevant. 

Climate change represents the most threatening expression of the planetary ecological crisis, posing a challenge without historical precedent. If global temperatures are allowed to exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 2° C, scientists project increasingly dire consequences, such as a rise in the sea level so large that it would risk submerging most maritime towns, from Dacca in Bangladesh to Amsterdam, Venice or New York. 

Large-scale desertification, disturbance of the hydrological cycle and agricultural output, more frequent and extreme weather events, and species loss all loom. We’re already at 1° C. At what temperature increase—5, 6, or 7° C—will we reach a tipping point beyond which the planet cannot support civilized life or even becomes uninhabitable? 

Particularly worrisome is the fact that the impacts of climate change are accumulating at a much faster pace than predicted by climate scientists, who—like almost all scientists—tend to be highly cautious. The ink no sooner dries on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report when increasing climate impacts make it seem too optimistic. Where once the emphasis was on what will happen in the distant future, attention has turned increasingly to what we face now and in the coming years. 

Some socialists acknowledge the need to incorporate ecology, but object to the term “ecosocialism,” arguing that socialism already includes ecology, feminism, antiracism, and other progressive fronts. However, the term ecosocialism, by suggesting a decisive change in socialist ideas, carries important political significance. 

First, it reflects a new understanding of capitalism as a system based not only on exploitation but also on destruction—the massive destruction of the conditions for life on the planet. Second, ecosocialism extends the meaning of socialist transformation beyond a change in ownership to a civilizational transformation of the productive apparatus, the patterns of consumption, and the whole way of life. Third, the new term underscores the critical view it embraces of the twentieth-century experiments in the name of socialism. 

Twentieth-century socialism, in its dominant tendencies (social democracy and Soviet-style communism), was, at best, inattentive to the human impact on the environment and, at worst, outright dismissive. Governments adopted and adapted the Western capitalist productive apparatus in a headlong effort to “develop,” while largely oblivious of the profound negative costs in the form of environmental degradation. 

The Soviet Union is a perfect example. The first years after the October Revolution saw an ecological current develop, and a number of measures to protect the environment were, in fact, enacted. But by the late 1920s, with the process of Stalinist bureaucratization underway, an environmentally heedless productivism was being imposed in industry and agriculture by totalitarian methods, while ecologists were marginalized or eliminated. The 1986 Chernobyl accident stands as a dramatic emblem of the disastrous long-term consequences. 

Changing who owns property without changing how that property is managed is a dead-end. Socialism must place democratic management and reorganization of the productive system at the heart of the transformation, along with a firm commitment to ecological stewardship. Not socialism or ecology alone, but ecosocialism. 

Ecosocialism and a Great Transition  

The struggle for green socialism in the long term requires fighting for concrete and urgent reforms in the near term. Without illusions about the prospects for a “clean capitalism,” the movement for deep change must try to reduce the risks to people and planet, while buying time to build support for a more fundamental shift. In particular, the battle to force the powers that be to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions remains a key front, along with local efforts to shift toward agroecological methods, cooperative solar energy, and community management of resources. 

Such concrete, immediate struggles are important in and of themselves because partial victories are vital for combatting environmental deterioration and despair about the future. For the longer term, these campaigns can help raise ecological and socialist consciousness and promote activism from below. Both awareness and self-organization are decisive preconditions and foundations for radically transforming the world system. The amplification of thousands of local and partial efforts into an overarching systemic global movement forges the path to a Great Transition: a new society and mode of life. 

This vision infuses the popular idea of a “movement of movements,” which arose out of the global justice movement and the World Social Forums and which for many years has fostered the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle. Ecosocialism is but one current within this larger stream, with no pretense that it is “more important” or “more revolutionary” than others. Such a competitive claim counterproductively breeds polarization when what is needed is unity. 

Rather, ecosocialism aims to contribute to a shared ethos embraced by the various movements for a Great Transition. Ecosocialism sees itself as part of an international movement: since global ecological, economic, and social crises know no borders, the struggle against the systemic forces driving these crises must also be globalized. Many significant intersections are surfacing between ecosocialism and other movements, including efforts to link eco-feminism and ecosocialism as convergent and complementary.[12] 

The climate justice movement brings antiracism and ecosocialism together in the struggle against the destruction of the living conditions of communities suffering discrimination. In indigenous movements, some leaders are ecosocialists, while, in turn, many ecosocialists sees the indigenous way of life, grounded in communitarian solidarity and respect for Mother Nature, as an inspiration for the ecosocialist perspective. Similarly, ecosocialism finds voice within peasant, trade-union, degrowth, and other movements. 

The gathering movement of movements seeks system change, convinced that another world is possible beyond commodification, environmental destruction, exploitation, and oppression. The power of entrenched ruling elites is undeniable, and the forces of radical opposition remain weak. But they are growing, and stand as our hope for halting the catastrophic course of capitalist “growth.” Ecosocialism contributes an important perspective for nurturing understanding and strategy for this movement for a Great Transition. 

Walter Benjamin defined revolutions not as the locomotive of history, à la Marx, but as humanity’s reaching for the emergency brake before the train falls into the abyss. Never have we needed more to reach as one for that lever and lay new track to a different destination. The idea and practice of ecosocialism can help guide this world-historic project.

Notes 

[1] Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York, Zed Books, 2002), 215.

[2] Via Campesina, a worldwide network of peasant movements, has long argued for this type of agricultural transformation. See https://viacampesina.org/en/.

[3] Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy (London, Verso, 1992), 206.

[4] The opposition between “having” and “being” is often discussed in the Manuscripts of 1844. On free time as the foundation of the socialist “Kingdom of Freedom,” see Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume III, Marx-Engels-Werke series, vol. 25 (1884; Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berline, 1981), 828.

[5] Paul Burkett, Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2009), 329.

[6] Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Marx-Engels-Werke series, vol. 23 (1867; Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1981), 528-530.

[7] See, for example, Manuel Sacristan, Pacifismo, Ecología y Política Alternativa (Barcelona: Icaria, 1987); Raymond Williams, Socialism and Ecology (London: Socialist Environment and Resources Association, 1982); André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston, South End Press, 1979); Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology (New York: Random House, 1971).

[8] “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” 2001, http://environment-ecology.com/political-ecology/436-an-ecosocialist-manifesto.html; “Belem Ecosocialist Declaration,” December 16, 2008, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/12/16/belem-ecosocialist-declaration-a-call-for-signatures/.

[9] See https://www.greattransition.org/explore/scenarios for an overview of the Policy Reform scenario and other global scenarios.

[10] United Nations Environment Programme, The Emissions Gap Report 2017 (Nairobi: UNEP, 2017). For an overview of the report, see https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/10/569672-un-sees-worrying-gap-between-paris-climate-pledges-and-emissions-cuts-needed.

[11] E. P. Thompson  “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,”

Past & Present,  no. 50 (February 1971): 76-136

[12] See Ariel Salleh’s Ecofeminism as Politics (New York: Zed Books, 1997), or the recent issue of Capitalism, Nature and Socialism (29, no. 1: 2018) on “Ecofeminism against Capitalism,” with essays by Terisa Turner, Ana Isla, and others.

Ecosocialism and/or Degrowth?

 

Written by Michael Löwy and first published at Rise 

Ecosocialism and the de-growth movement are among the most important currents of the ecological left. Ecosocialists agree that a significant measure of de-growth in production and consumption is necessary in order to avoid ecological collapse. But they have a critical assessment of the de-growth theories because: a) the concept of “de-growth” is insufficient to define an alternative programme; b) it does not make clear if de-growth can be achieved in the framework of capitalism or not; c) it does not distinguish between activities that need to be reduced and those that need to be developed. 

It is important to take into account that the de-growth current, which is particularly influential in France, is not homogeneous: inspired by critics of the  consumer society, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and of the “technical system”, Jacques Ellul, it contains different political outlooks. There are at least two poles which are quite distant, if not opposed: on one side, critics of Western culture tempted by cultural relativism (Serge Latouche), on the other side, universalist left ecologists (Vincent Cheynet, Paul Ariés).  

Serge Latouche, who is well known worldwide, is one of the most controversial French de-growth theoreticians. For sure, some of his arguments are legitimate: demystification of “sustainable development”, critique of the religion of growth and “progress”, call for a cultural revolution. But his wholesale rejection of Western humanism, of the Enlightenment and of representative democracy, as well as his cultural relativism (no universal values) and his immoderate celebration of the Stone Age are very much open to criticism. 

But there is worse. His critique of ecosocialist development proposals for countries of the Global South – more clean water, schools and hospitals – as “ethnocentric”, “Westernizing” and “destructive of local ways of life”, is quite unbearable. Last but not least, his argument that there is no need to talk about capitalism, since this critique “has already been done, and done well, by Marx” is not serious: it is as if one would say that there is no need to denounce the productivist destruction of the planet because this has already been done, “and done well”, by André Gorz (or Rachel Carson). 

Nearer to the Left is the universalist current, represented in France by the journal La Décroissance (“The De-Growth”), even if one can criticize the French “republicanism” of some of its theoreticians (Vincent Cheynet, Paul Ariès). Unlike the first, this second pole of the de-growth movement has many points of convergence – despite occasional polemics – with the Global Justice movements (ATTAC), the ecosocialists and the radical left parties: extension of gratuity [goods, services, or amenities that are offered for free], predominance of use-value over exchange-value, reduction of labour time, struggle against social inequalities, development of “non-market” activities, reorganisation of production according to social needs and the protection of the environment.  

Many de-growth theoreticians seem to believe that the only alternative to productivism is to stop growth altogether, or to replace it by negative growth, i.e. to drastically reduce the excessively high level of consumption of the population by cutting by half the expenditure of energy, by renouncing individual houses, central heating, washing machines etc. Since these and similar measures of draconian austerity risk being quite unpopular, some of them – including such an important author as Hans Jonas, in his Principle Responsibility – play with the idea of a sort of “ecological dictatorship”. 

Against such pessimistic views, socialist optimists believe that technical progress and the use of renewable sources of energy will permit an unlimited growth and abundance, so that each can receive “according to his needs”. 

It seems to me that these two schools share a purely quantitative conception of – positive or negative – “growth”, or of the development of productive forces. There is a third position, which seems to me more appropriate: a qualitative transformation of development. This means putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on the production, on a large scale, of useless and/or harmful products: the armaments industry is a good example, but a great part of the “goods” produced in capitalism, with their inbuilt obsolescence, have no other usefulness but to generate profit for the big corporations. 

The issue is not “excessive consumption” in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on conspicuous acquisition, massive waste, mercantile alienation, obsessive accumulation of goods, and the compulsive purchase of pseudo-novelties imposed by “fashion”. A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, beginning with those which could be described as “biblical” – water, food, clothing, housing – but including also the basic services: health, education, transport, culture. 

How to distinguish the authentic from the artificial, factitious (artificially created) and makeshift needs? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation, i.e. advertisement. The advertising system has invaded all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies: not only food and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens, newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. 

Moreover, it wastes an astronomical amount of oil, electricity, labour time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials – all paid by the consumers – in a branch of “production” which is not only useless, from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs. While advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer associations. 

The criteria for distinguishing an authentic from an artificial need, is its persistence after the suppression of advertisement (Coca Cola!). Of course, during some years, old habits of consumption would persist, and nobody has the right to tell the people what their needs are. The change in the patterns of consumption is a historical process, as well as an educational challenge.

Some commodities, such as the individual car, raise more complex problems. Private cars are a public nuisance, killing and maiming hundreds of thousand people yearly on a world scale, polluting the air in the great towns, with dire consequences for the health of children and older people, and significantly contributing to climate change. However, they correspond to a real need, by transporting people to their work, home or leisure. 

Local experiences in some European towns with ecologically minded administrations show that it is possible, and approved by the majority of the population, to progressively limit the part of the individual car in circulation, to the advantage of buses and trams.  

In a process of transition to ecosocialism, where public transportation, above or underground, would be vastly extended and free of charge for the users, and where pedestrians and cyclists will have protected lanes, the private car would have a much smaller role than in bourgeois society, where it has become a fetishised commodity, promoted by insistent and aggressive advertisement, a prestige symbol, a sign of identity. In the US, a driving license is the recognized ID – and the centre of personal, social or erotic life. 

It will be much easier, in the transition to a new society, to drastically reduce the transportation of goods by trucks – responsible for terrible accidents, and high levels of pollution – replacing it by the train, or by what the French call ferroutage (trucks transported in trains from one town to the other): only the absurd logic of capitalist “competitivity” explains the dangerous growth of the truck-system.   

Yes, will answer the pessimists, but individuals are moved by infinite aspirations and desires, that have to be controlled, checked, contained and if necessary repressed, and this may need some limitations on democracy. Now, ecosocialism is based on a wager, which was already Marx’s: the predominance, in a society without classes and liberated of capitalist alienation, of “being” over “having”, i.e. of free time for the personal accomplishment by cultural, sportive, playful, scientific, erotic, artistic and political activities, rather than the desire for an infinite possession of products. 

Compulsive acquisitiveness is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology and by advertisement: nothing proves that it is part of an “eternal human nature”, as the reactionary discourse wants us to believe. As Ernest Mandel emphasized: “The continual accumulation of more and more goods (with declining “marginal utility”) is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behaviour. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations … all these become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied”.  

This does not mean that there will not arise conflicts, particularly during the transitional process, between the requirements of environmental protection and social needs, between ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures, particularly in the poor countries, between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources. 

Such contradictions are inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning, in an ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them, by a pluralist and open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a grassroots and participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors, but to permit self-correction, of its own mistakes, by society collectively. 

What could be the relations between ecosocialists and the de-growth movement? In spite of the disagreements, can there be an active alliance around common objectives? In a book published some years ago, La décroissance est –elle souhaitable? (“Is de-growth a desirable aim?”), French ecologist Stéphane Lavignotte proposes such an alliance. He acknowledges that there are many controversial issues between both viewpoints. 

Should one emphasize the social class relations and the struggle against inequalities or the denunciation of the unlimited growth of the productive forces? What is more important, individual initiatives, local experiences, voluntary simplicity, or changing the productive apparatus and the capitalist “mega-machine”?  

Lavignotte refuses to choose, and proposes to associate these two complementary practices. The challenge is, he argues, to combine the struggle for the ecological class interest of the majority, i.e. the non-owners of capital, and the politics of active minorities for a radical cultural transformation. In other words, to achieve, without hiding the inevitable disagreements, a “political composition” of all those who have understood that the survival of life on the planet and of humanity in particular are contradictory to capitalism and productivism, and therefore look for the way out of this destructive and inhumane system.  

As an ecosocialist, and as a member of the Fourth International, I share this viewpoint. The coming together of all varieties of anti-capitalist ecology is an important step towards the urgent and necessary task of stopping the suicidal course of the present civilisation – before it is too late… 

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazillian Marxist professor, author and activist. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). He co-authored the ‘International Ecosocialist Manifesto’ with Joel Kovel