Five Theses on Degrowth and Ecosocialism*

*This is the text of remarks given at the Ecosocialism 2023 Conference in London on December 2, 2023 (it lacks links/references and probably could use more editing!)

Before I get into my critique though, I’d like to say I think there actually is common ground that a traditional socialist and working class perspective on environment shares with the degrowth agenda: namely we all want to take democratic control over the economy and guide toward the production of use values over profits; we all want an economy geared toward meeting human needs and ecological sustainability. The question we need to grapple with is how to actually win the scale of transformation we all agree is necessary.

That said, our movements are weak so I take Marx and Engels’s instruction here: “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies; and in maintaining this our position we gladly forego cheap democratic popularity.”

I’d like to organize my thoughts today as a series of theses or logical arguments (that hopefully connect to one another).

Thesis 1: The critical thing we need to address the ecological crisis is social power over the socioecological metabolism.

The ecological crisis is a problem of power. Capitalists have all the power to control the social relation to nature — and will destroy it in the interest of profits. So we need a kind of counter-power — a social force that’s able to wrestle control over production and investment, to guide society toward a sustainable production system. This is a class struggle over power.

Thesis 2: The degrowth movement lacks power because it’s principles and program are only embraced by a tiny minority of society.

In my book, I argue the degrowth movement is purely a movement of a highly educated professional class. Since publication I’ve realized it’s even narrower than that. It’s a program embraced almost entirely by people with PhDs or on their way to getting PhDs (there are of course some exceptions). In the United States at least (not sure about the UK), this is something like 2% of society (and degrowth is certainly not embraced by anything like a majority of that 2% I would guess!)

Now, let me be clear: this does not mean there are not elements of the degrowth program that huge portions of the population embrace: the notion of shorter working hours, and universal basic services has to be at the core of a socialist working class agenda (and it actually always has been). But the majorities that might embrace shorter working hours, would probably be confused as to why it should be part of a larger agenda called “degrowth” which, like it or not, has connotations of what I call a “politics of less.” After all, even its programmatic definitions feature words like “downscaling” and “reduction.”

Thesis 3: Degrowth misdiagnoses the key ecological problem with a capitalist economy: it’s not about growth per se, but control and power over resources and investment.

I’ve actually discovered some common ground with degrowthers: everyone agrees we actually want to degrow some things (Like for example, the military or the fossil fuel industry), and grow lots of other things like clean energy, public transport and public housing.

So degrowthers like some kind of “growth.” Jason Hickel actually takes it further in Less is More: “None of this is to say that growth is bad in and of itself. That’s not my argument. It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for the sake of capital accumulation, rather than to meet concrete human needs and social objectives.”

But as he suggests, the reason we live under “growthism” is because production and investment is controlled by capital. Capital does not even “choose” to pursue growth or accumulation — it is a compulsion of competition (as Marx said “Accumulate! Like Moses to the prophets!”). Growthism is just a weird word for capitalism (and buys into the ways in which growth ideology and GDP in particular obfuscate that we live in class society — with huge divisions of power and control over resources and production). There is no government that makes ‘growth’ an official policy; it’s just an acknowledgement that we live in a society held hostage by capital. Either they invest and create jobs, or no one works, and people starve.

In fact, I would suggest we need to go even further: it’s not even that we need to degrow some things and grow other things; we need a class struggle view that sees it is capital/capitalists who must degrow so the working class can see growth in all sorts of registers (and not just material stuff, but time, relationships, etc).

But even Hickel acknowledges, once we control production — we might want to… grow. So, comrades, what I want to suggest is you really don’t want “degrowth” you want a core principle of socialism: you want planning. What we want as socialists is to take social control over production so we can decide collectively and democratically what society needs and how to organize production so as to not destroy the ecological conditions for all.

So given there needs to be a reason to call degrowth degrowth, when you push advocates they do say ecological limits require us to degrow in some aggregate way (even if we’re growing some things we want). Some call for a global reduction in aggregate material throughput; others like Jason Hickel try to make the call for degrowth more explicitly targeted to the Global North — specifically he says Global North countries must reduce their energy consumption in particular. But this raises some questions of democracy.

Thesis 4: Democratic control of production might not lead to degrowth in any aggregate sense.

One other befuddling definition of degrowth Hickel once gave is a “democratic planned reduction of less necessary production”. My reaction was if it’s democratic how do we know there will be a reduction? How do we know what is necessary?

Let’s be clear: 800 million or so people around the world lack access to electricity. More than that lack access to basic water and sanitation services. The global north is also not the orgy of excess some describe (particularly those who subscribe to the concept of “the imperial mode of living.”). In fact, many in my country struggle to meet their basic needs and basic infrastructure is falling apart.

Also: restructuring an economy 80% powered by fossil fuels is not some simple one to one switch to renewables, but rather connotes a massive green industrial revolution — building an entirely new energy system, transport system and housing stock. It will require immense growth.

Another wrench in the plan of degrowth: the global population is expected to grow deep into this century. We need growth just to keep up with a growing population (I once brought this up and was called Malthusian, but if our central goal is to meet human needs, and human numbers are increasing, the idea that we might need to grow production seems like simple math).

Some have called what we need a “Last Stimulus” — a huge burst of growth and investment to address the eco-crisis before we reach some kind of steady state economy. I’m open to that possibility, but again it’s not up to us. It’s up to democratic deliberation once we take power over production and investment.

I’m also not trying to downplay biophysical limits or what some call planetary boundaries, but it’s not at all clear that dealing with specific limits requires degrowth. If we decarbonize energy, we don’t need necessarily to decrease energy use. And again decarbonization will require more growth not less.

Hickel also often talks about another thorny concept when it comes to democracy: that of “unnecessary” production: here we usually hear a common laundry list of assumed-to-be-frivolous consumer items like fast fashion, SUVs, cheap plastic toys, and the like. But, again, this is where I think a kind of moralistic authoritarian impulse sneaks in: degrowthers say ahead of time what is unnecessary and what is not. But that is up to democratic deliberation. My 8 year daughter loves these things called OMG dolls. I think she’d like to live in a society in which we collectively determined whether those dolls are necessary or not. We can’t decide ahead of time.

Thesis 5: If solving the ecological crisis requires eroding the power of capital, history shows no force in society with this potential other than the working class.

In my view, Marxism is based on a simple premise: capitalism creates its own gravediggers in a global proletariat. By tearing the vast majority of people from the ecological conditions of existence — the land — it creates a majoritarian class force that has the potential seize global production and direct it toward human needs and sustainability.

But, I want to connect to my original argument about power. The working class is a force that can build the kind of power we need over production and investment. How?

First, the working class is not 2% of PhDs pontificating about degrowth, and is the vast majority of society. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner recently estimated the percent of the USA reliant on wages and came up with 79%. I’m partial to Michael Zweig’s estimate of 63%, which even takes out the professionals and managers, some of which surely count as working class to many Marxists.

And it’s not just that they’re the majority: because the majority under capitalism is precarious. As Vivek Chibber says, in Confronting Capitalism, capitalism, “systematically deprives people of the basic ingredients for a decent life such as material security, personal autonomy, and the resources for self-determination.” It means the working class has a material interest in change and social transformation.

So why is the majority power? This broad swathe of society at least contains at least the potential to form an majoritarian electoral coalition to win state power. As Andreas Malm, Christian Parenti and many others argue, given the timeline of the climate crisis, it is hard to imagine how we’ll stave off the crisis without state power. We need the state for two reasons: a collective force of investment — public works, infrastructure building and all the rest (2) As a source of social power able to discipline and indeed phase out fossil capital. There is some historical precedence for this. It was the states of Mexico and Iran that expropriated and nationalized their oil industries in the 20th Century (for anti-colonial reasons). It is states led by leftwing governments in Chile and Mexico that have recently floated nationalizing their lithium supplies. Also, look to Brazil. Whereas most of the traditional working class parties in the West in Europe and the United States have moved to the right and center and abandoned labor, the Brazilian Workers Party (the PT) lead by a inspiring trade union activist Lula Da Silva has been able to wield state power toward massively popular social investment and wealth redistribution. And, since he took over for the ecocidal reactionary Bolsonaro, there’s been evidence of significant environmental improvements under his leadership as well.

My basic argument is decarbonization in particular is about working class material needs: it’s about energy, transport, food, housing and more. We need a working class program that gives working class people more secure access to these needs while decarbonizing theses sectors at the same time. This could help stitch together a more popular working class coalition.

Secondly, and most important, the working class has power quite simply because they do the work — and they possess the capacity to withdraw their labor and create a crisis that forces those in power to answer to a set of demands. The West Virginia Teachers strikes show the power workers have: by shutting down the state’s school systems and creating a crisis of social reproduction, they won their demands in about two weeks in a right wing state. That’s power. Merely the threat of a nationwide rail workers strike this past year forced Joe Biden and other powerful people to pull all-nighters simply trying to find a way to stop them…in the end they used a reactionary legal system to break the strike via Congressional fiat.

We just saw the power of strikes with the UAW — and this power has shown itself to be a power over investment. Part of the agreement won required unionization for electric vehicle production (while auto capital prefers to set up nonunioin shops). The UAW even forced the industry to reopen a closed plant and give back jobs to their members. This is real power.

And that comrades is what we need reals social power to direct social resources and investment. I continue to not believe the degrowth movement has the social base to achieve this scale of power — and time is running short for us to shift strategy.