By the Marx Memorial Library ( London)
August 12, 2024
Most currently popular arguments for degrowth describe a real problem without recognizing its true cause: capitalism’s insatiable need to accumulate, argues the Marx Memorial Library.
“Degrowth” refers to arguments advocating a reduction in human production and consumption. Proponents of degrowth argue that the current focus on economic growth as an indicator of social prosperity leads to the depletion of living and mineral resources, to pollution of air, land sea, loss of species and the degradation of ecosystems as well as to gross social inequality.
The concept challenges the prevailing idea of continuous economic growth as a primary objective: it questions the sustainability of perpetual expansion on a finite planet.
It is as relevant today as ever given the Labour government’s threadbare Partnership with Business for Growth manifesto, abandonment of its earlier commitments to a “green transformation” and repeated declarations that “growth” is the only way of funding even its limited proposals for sustaining or improving public services.
It’s interesting that most of the books advocating degrowth (also called post-growth) come from what is now called the “global North” — from countries (and individuals) that have experienced the benefits as well as disbenefits of (economic) growth. That of course doesn’t mean that they have nothing to say. But it does mean looking critically at the “solutions” proposed.
Arguments against “growth” are not new. Fifty years ago the Club of Rome (an “invisible college” of notable scientists, economists, business executives, high-level civil servants and former heads of state from around the [mainly capitalist] world) declared that “growth” (of all types) was unsustainable.
It funded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce a computer model to “prove” it. The Limits to Growth published in 1972 concluded: “If the present trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”
Two million copies of the book were sold worldwide, and it received wide media attention. Reactions from the right and left were mixed, varying from cocky optimism
(that capitalism — or socialism — would “automatically” solve the problems) to despair.
There were also some more critical analyses. A team at Sussex University’s science policy research unit (SPRU) under its director, the Marxist economist Chris Freeman, analysed the models in depth. Making the point that all computer output depends essentially on the quality of the input — on the data and assumptions on which the computer model is based, they declared “Computer models cannot replace theory.” The team concluded: “The Growth versus No Growth debate has become a rather sterile one of the Tweedledum/ Tweedledee variety because it tends to ignore the really important issues of the composition of growth in output and of the distribution of the fruits of growth.
“Some types of growth are consistent not merely with the conservation of the environment but with its enhancement. The problem in our view is a socio-political one of stimulating this type of growth, and of more equitable distribution, both within countries and between them.”
Others at SPRU drew a connection between the Limits study (funded by a consortium of second-rank multinationals) and a new stage in the crisis of capitalism, in particular the end of the post-1945 “long boom.”
A half-century later, computers have become infinitely more powerful and computer modelling more complex. “World models” have continued but most add little to the conclusions of the 1972 study and are subject to the same constraints and criticisms.
At the same time, environmental concerns have shifted. Human demography is now recognised to be much more than a question of numbers: as an earlier Full Marx Q&A emphasised, population dynamics are intimately related to economics, politics and history.
Tumbling fertility rates (the mean number of children born per woman) mean that three out of four countries may have a shrinking (and ageing) population by mid-century.
Starvation and malnutrition are caused by the inability of the poor to purchase what is produced; there has never yet been a year when global per capita food production has fallen below subsistence levels. The depletion of mineral resources has been successively met by technical fixes (although how long this can continue is debatable).
Increasingly, attention has shifted in particular to biogeochemical cycles and the ability of the planet to absorb pollution, most specifically in relation to climate change: the depletion of fossil fuels is recognised as a secondary issue to their impact on the carbon cycle.
And most recently a succession of reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have analysed the physical science basis for the climate crisis; its consequences (including implications for agriculture, ecosystems and human wellbeing) and the potential for mitigation. All show that “business as usual” is a recipe for disaster.
It’s no accident that as big business has itself appropriated much environmental rhetoric as a greenwash to hide its continuing destruction of our Earth, it has become fashionable in the “global North” to focus on individual lifestyle changes as a solution to the environmental crisis.
That approach includes some sections of the left. A recent book (reviewed in the journal Theory and Struggle) asserts that “the meaning of revolution today” is to “change the world without taking power” through “an immediate exit from capitalism effected through experimenting with practical alternatives and alternative counter-ideas.”
This is to be secured “through a new cultural hegemony around convivial and freely chosen degrowth. Neither economic nor political force works.” Capitalism, for the authors, is merely part of a “growth imaginary.” There’s no recognition, let alone analysis of its dynamics or why (apart from that “imaginary”) it should be so destructive — not a difficult thing to do (Marx and Engels started the debate over a century and a half ago). Nor is there any clear perception of how it can be challenged.
Capitalism, of course, is delighted to have its role in the crisis masked by a rhetoric that places the responsibility for solving it on individuals. And at a policy level, its remedy, “green capitalism” (carbon credits, emissions trading, offsetting, new technologies of carbon capture, all part of the ongoing financialisation of nature and contributing to that illusory metric of “growth”) offers little more than a new greenwashed regime of capital accumulation.
Keir Starmer declared in his election manifesto that Labour would “kick-start economic growth,” a promise reflected in the King’s Speech that “securing economic growth will be a fundamental mission” involving “a new partnership with both business and working people.”
That’s worse than waffle, of course. It’s dishonest, dangerous, destructive waffle. Starmer has no policies to prevent the closure of the Grangemouth refinery (one of the few remaining in Britain) or to protect steel making jobs in Port Talbot; nor had he anything to say about the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill which would have allowed the petroleum giants to further expand profits producing more oil, most of which will be traded on the world markets contributing to the ongoing disaster of climate change.
What the “degrowth” movement has done is to stimulate more critical thinking among Marxists and socialists about the nature of production and consumption under capitalism and how the struggle to protect jobs and living standards including the “social wage” need not be in conflict with protecting the environment. Rather, the two go hand in hand they form an essential element in the struggle to build a better society.We’ll develop this further in the second part of this answer.
- Morning Star, Full Marx Feature. Part 2 will appear at our next posting
-This is Full Marx Q&A number 119. Past answers can be downloaded from the Marx Memorial Library’s website at www.tinyurl.com/FullMarx and links to these and to versions in the Morning Star can be found at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/.
