A Response to Timothée Parrique
Thanks to Timothée Parrique writing a response to my appearance on the Space Commune podcast. First, I should say, I didn’t have any say in the title of the episode (I think the hosts meant it as a joke/parody). I also don’t intend to ‘destroy’ any person or body of thought. I agree the kind of constructive debate initiated by Parrique is vital — and I particularly appreciate how he draws from much of my other written work in his response. I’ll organize my response like his with a series of quotes.
“Degrowth is not the opposite of growth but rather a call for sufficiency. Neither to have more, nor to have less — but to have enough.”
I want to do a thought experiment. Imagine a very common scenario in the USA: a household deep in debt due to to unforeseen medical expenses. The end of the month is approaching and they don’t have enough money in their account to cover rent and the heating bill. They’ve also received notices from their electric utility that it will be shutoff soon due to nonpayment. The household turns on the television to see a degrowth politician (maybe in Ireland?) calling for “sufficiency for all!” They pledge everyone should have “enough.” Now, on the one hand, when you don’t have enough, maybe enough sounds good. Maybe this household would support this platform. But, a more likely scenario is they would find this call for “enough” puzzling. Like millions of other struggling working class people they literally need much more to have enough. And in fact, what defines capitalism for the mass majority is deprivation — not having enough.
Other more popular political programs highlight more — raising the minimum wage and things like free health care and college education means more health care and college education for those who otherwise couldn’t afford it. In another critique of degrowth I’ve written, I try to suggest this is just basic socialist politics that articulates “more for the many and less for the few.”
Who might find the program of “enough” appealing? Well certainly there is a class of rich people who would sneer at this prospect — and who find it their inalienable human right to accumulate more and more stuff. I would argue there is a much larger fraction of society who has enough but strives for “frugality” and “less.” A class who has enough but feels bad about it. I argue this class is based in the professional class of highly educated academics, scientists, journalists, etc. This class faces a core contradiction: while aspiring for professional class status is itself a project of obtaining economic security, this can come with a “middle class” level of consumption and material comfort (only for some — this class is proletarianizing rapidly!). This regime of privatized and often wasteful consumption can be seen as embedded in larger networks of ecological destruction. For this class, we have too much and we are complicit in killing the planet. For this class, the logic of “enough” and “sufficiency” is very appealing in a context where themselves and their peers live amidst “too much crap.”
The problem is: this is not the experience of the mass of people facing material deprivation under neoliberal capitalism. While the professional class outnumber the rich, they are still by far a minority of the population (in the U.S. you just need to reflect on the fact 2/3 of adults do not have a college degree to understand this). This politics of sufficiency/enough thus has little capacity to speak to a majoritarian working class struggling for the basics of existence. They rightfully need more.
Finally, Parrique even claims this politics of “enough” means “enough profit for companies to ensure their financial sustainability.” Of course, a socialist strives to eliminate profit from the calculus of production entirely. In fact, the only way we could actually decide as a society “how much is enough for everyone?” would be to erode and eventually eliminate the class of capitalists who control the production of everything we need for profit.
This is the thing: in order to have the power to make collective decisions on society’s ecological relations (which is the ultimate goal of any degrowth program), we need to overcome the power of the capitalist class. The question is how could we possibly build such power?
This brings me to a smaller quibble: “Income-craved consumers, profit-driven capitalists, and GDP-hungry governments are three cogs of a broader logic of capital accumulation (replace with economic growth if you don’t like Marxist jargon).”
I actually don’t think “economic growth” and “capital accumulation” are interchangeable. Economic growth under capitalism — specifically its statistical expression as GDP — is an ideology (call it “growthism”) that suggests aggregate things called “economies” must grow to be healthy. Yet, capital accumulation is a concept that gets us closer to the material reality of what “economies” need — private growth in private profits for capital (Marx calls it M-C-M’). If capitalist firms are growing (read: profiting) they will invest more and hire people (which is why politicians are so desperate to “attract investment” in the name of “creating jobs” —in a world where most must work to live, capital holds the key to survival for whole populations).
The statistical construction of “growth” (GDP) is meant to be an indirect measure of whether or not private capital is growing. As such, GDP growth serves to obscure a highly unequal capitalist economy where much of the benefits of “growth” are concentrated among the ownership class (where forms of distribution allow a “professional class” to subsist off the decreasing spoils of such “growth”).
This again points to the central issue: it is capital who controls investment. If we want to shape a livable ecological future we need to wrestle power over investment from them. A tall order indeed, but we should be sober about what we are actually up against. No matter how compelling degrowth arguments are (or “increasingly popular” as Parrique suggests. To whom?), if they do not confront the strategic necessity of taking public power over investment, much of their program could not be implemented.
“Bike repair cafés and communal gardens “don’t solve problems for people who struggle to pay rent,” they say. Maybe, but using the same logic, housing cooperatives don’t solve problems for people who struggle to fix their bikes. Needs are diverse. What these initiatives have in common is that they satisfy needs outside of the money-obsessed capitalist sphere. Being able to fix my computer at the Repair Café protects me against the predatory practices of tech companies who profit out of planned obsolescence. As marginal as they seem today, these practices are sending a strong post-capitalist message: no one should depend on money to access the goods and services essential to the enjoyment of human rights. These fringe projects are decommodification in practice.”
Sorry this is a long passage, but I think it condenses both where I agree and fundamentally disagree with degrowth strategy. I could not agree more that no one should depend on money for survival. But where I differ is that such small-scale DIY local experiments have the capacity to really deliver “decommodification in practice” at the scale that could actually address millions of working class peoples needs for economic security (not to even mention address the global ecological crisis). Quite the contrary, I believe with others that these small scale alternatives are themselves evidence of a society in which many have given up the idea that large-scale political change is even possible.
Yet, as Adam Curtis’s recent documentary suggested, we need to recover the sense that we can change society on a large scale — and we only need to look to history before the neoliberal “TINA” period to see how. In those periods, large scale institutional attacks on capitalist class power was necessary to deliver real and large scale gains for the working class and other oppressed populations. What kinds institutions? Most notably militant trade unions and the (however circumscribed), welfare state based on high taxes and wealth redistribution (usually pushed by mass working class parties) and, for a brief period, militant, independent and sometimes socialist decolonized states. More broadly, we should acknowledge some of the achievements of revolutionary communist states — beset with all the constraints and contradictions of capitalist world hegemony — in building a kind of economy beyond the imperatives of capital. Andreas Malm’s vision of “War Communism” comes to mind as an apt analogy of the scale of action required.
As Jodi Dean famously put it, “Goldman Sachs does not care if you raise chickens.” I’d make a related claim: “The Fossil Fuel Industry doesn’t care about your solar micro-grid coop in Brooklyn.” We are dealing with a positively global crisis that requires confrontation some of the richest and most powerful corporations in world history. No matter how good or positive they feel for their participants, small scale localist alternatives are not poised to spread and expand at the speed and scale needed to actually solve the crisis. For that we need the power of mass politics (and, again, I’m very skeptical the degrowth politics of ‘trying to live with less’ and ‘enough’ is equipped to deliver this).
“We should also make sure that the appellation “the rich” be understood as affluence wherever it is found.”
For Marxists, class is mostly about ownership and control of productive resources. This does lead to “affluence”, but we should not understand class differences in terms of affluence (which ultimately is rooted in income). Too often our entire responsibility for climate change and environmental breakdown is explained as a product of “affluence” without getting to the root social relations of how “affluent lifestyles” are produced out of profit, investment and private accumulation.
“Do we need to “turn millions of people into peasants,” as the podcast suggests? I don’t know; I hope not.”
The quote Parrique takes is my description of a book with this very proposal endorsed by prominent degrowth advocates. But, the more troubling aspect is the flippant indifference to whether or not your program will or will not aim to produce millions of peasant small farmers. Parrique says we need to “find a sweet spot — a combination between the local peasant agroecology praised by degrowthers and the industrial modes of production defended by eco-socialists.” If that “sweet spot” entails enlisting millions of people needed to provision society with small-scale production, how do they propose such enlistment might occur? I’ve said it before, but if your political program entails turning millions into farmers you’re political program is a nonstarter with the masses of people (I test this with my students every semester in large lecture courses of over 200 students — not a generalizable sample I admit — never but a tiny minority want to do farm work for a living). More to the point, the historical record of such attempts of forced agricultural production is not pretty.
For me, the socialist sweet spot means fighting for current peasant-communities represented by social movements like Via Campesina to retain sovereignty and self-determination over their land and modes of subsistence (indeed many of these are themselves socialist struggles for perhaps the critical ‘means of production’ — land), but also acknowledging that the billions under capitalism that are proletarianized (or torn from the land) will rightfully demand a socialist food provision systems that retains labor-saving technology and other aspects of modern industrial food systems. The challenge for socialists would be to build such food provision systems so that they also do not “wreck the planet.” I have elsewhere called this industrial agroecology.
In sum, I do want to say I agree with a lot of the goals of degrowth (particularly the vision of “radical abundance”). The question is how to get there. A politics of less — or even more modestly: “enough” — is strategically ill-equipped for this task.
