The Reactionary Nature of Degrowth
According to the degrowth movement the term itself can be traced back to 1972. It rests on a core idea that the earth has a finite carrying capacity. This idea however did not birth itself in 1972. This idea was first brought to popularity in 1789 by one Thomas Robert Malthus via his work An Essay on the Principle of Population.
Malthus proposed that food production would never be able to catch up to human population growth patterns and that harsh measures were required to curb our growth, removing healthcare, medicine, resources away from the common person and letting people die of anything they couldn't prevent themselves. His reactionary ideas were fairly overt in their goals, a decrease in what he saw as the surplus population.
In 2020 we of course know his ideas were ultimately proven wrong due to the invention of modern agriculture. Modern agricultures productivity has risen above and beyond the human population, and according to the united nations there is a natural limit to the human birth rate due to the nature of development and its unlikely that the 12 billionth person will ever be born.
Which means that human beings due to being society building creatures have a natural limit on growth due to demographic transitions. No intervention is needed, natural forces will work on their own.
Degrowthers have however sought to create another panic about human civilization. Resources other than food being at the center of this. There's only so much oil. So much metals. So much other minerals etc.
While its true that there are a finite level of material resources on the planet they miss the mark just like Malthus did. Development is what allowed us to produce more food using less land per capita. They will cite convincing sounding numbers saying were exceeding the earths carrying capacity while ignoring the very real march of technological progress that increases that capacity every single day. In fact their whole movement rests on the idea that our carrying capacity will not be increased by technological advancement. A mind boggling idea due to the simple fact that our carrying capacity has dramatically increased over time and continues to do so. To believe that further capacity increases are not possible while we actually create those increases daily is incoherent at best.
We find more and more ways to do more with less as time goes on. We have methods to generate electricity outside of fossil fuels. Modern nuclear energy is statistically the safest, most reliable and least resource intensive form of energy we can currently use with enough nuclear fuel to last us thousands and thousands of years.
And that's before we even talk about breeder reactors.
Degrowthers will also cite a very misleading concept of a rebound effect in terms of increasing energy production using more environmentally friendly methods. While its true that increasing efficiency does sometimes lead to an increase of use they fail to take into account that like human population growth, the growth of needs has natural limitations. Most people when they have enough to not worry about not having enough plus a little extra to play with find maximum life satisfaction and will likely plateau in consumption once this point is reached. Due to the fact that most people in the world are nowhere close to this point of course opening up more energy to use will cause it to be used. We need it, and if consumption does go beyond that point it can be addressed with simple eco taxes. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater when a minor policy adjustment will fix it. A lot of degrowth is like this.
They will say also, the people who advocate for degrowth, that the developed world has to reduce the quality of our lives so that developing nations can have the resources to catch up. While I'm all for helping developing nations increase the quality of their lives I don't think sacrificing the vulnerable in our populations is the way to do it. Reducing overall quality of life in developed nations would have this effect and we can see that happening in the US already as infrastructure degrades and is not replaced. We wind up having to use more resources than we should to continue to function in a degrading system. Plus a lot of people needlessly die in the process.
Efficiency comes from development, not from ignoring development. You must go forward if you want a better world, not backwards. The world of the past was nastier, more brutish and shorter. We must not forget this.
Another point they make is that they want to replace cars with walking and biking and returning to a local only existence. The effects of this would of course be the deaths of many people as we live in an interconnected global world. This would not help the development of nations who need it, if anything it would halt any such development and reverse what gains they have made already. A local only existence means the destruction of global trade routes and with it a drastic drop in quality of life for everyone. This doesn't even get into the effects it would have on the mobility of the disabled, who often rely on transportation systems to function and survive.
Historically we have seen what happens when global trade networks collapse during the late bronze age collapse. A lot of people died of starvation due to vital food imports being cut off.
Instead of advocating for things like electric rail to transport goods , light electric rail to transport people on land and nuclear powered cargo ships run by a nationalized (or internationalized) logistics system they want to just throw the whole thing out and hope for the best. Go back to the past where we had less global trade.
The whole concept of degrowth seems to rest on the idea of a return to a mythical past where things were simpler and that return to the past ideals is the heart of any reactionary ideology. Make no mistake degrowth is a movement of reaction dressed up as leftism. Its a poison and must be rejected as such.
Goods moving around the world help people get resources they cannot get locally that they might need. Additionally, global trade reduces the probability of wars. If you have intertwined trade agreements with a nation you are very unlikely to start a war with them as you need their trade goods more than whatever you could gain from a war. This is international politics 101.
War is bad and trade helps to prevent it. I'm anti war, and so is most of the left. So if you are serious about being anti war you should be pro trade. Sure we can criticize unfair trade deals and we should. We should absolutely push for fairness in global trade as leftists. But we cannot nor should we eliminate it.
One of the reasons why a war with China is so improbable is because we made so many trade deals with them and why Trump trying to start a trade war with them was so dangerous. Trade wars can often lead to real wars where the only real winners are the war profiteers.
All of this of course is not to say that our current capitalist system is just fine, that the climate crisis is not real and we can just keep doing what we always have been. No, that's an absurd claim. Capitalism is an exploitative, evil system that is the root cause of resource inequality, a root cause of choosing profits over a livable planet, a root cause of many of the ills of the world.
Our agriculture system does have problems that should be addressed. It has deep rooted issues caused by a history of colonization and exploitation.
However degrowth is not the answer. It never has been and its always been a smokescreen to sneak neo-malthusian ideals into the left that left unchecked will turn into a full blown reactionary eco-fascist movement. Reactionary ideas left on their own only become more reactionary over time. We must as leftists snuff out this budding nucleus of reaction while its small, crush it with full force and fury so that it never blooms into the genocidal movement I know it will become.