Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

by Kōhei Saitō

Since capitalism is the ultimate cause of climate breakdown, it is necessary to transition to a steady-state economy. All companies therefore need to become cooperatives or cease trading.

The dangers compound as the crisis worsens. Further, once the climate change time bomb goes off, it will set off a chain reaction of crises like dominoes falling. This will lead to a level of destruction unable to be stopped by human hands.

A similar accident had occurred previously at another Vale tailings dam in 2015, but this time, careless mismanagement resulted in a collapse that caused hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic slurry to engulf a nearby village in its flow.6

Our rich lifestyles would be impossible without the plundered natural resources and exploited labor power of the Global South.

Ever-increasing demand from the fashion industry has led to the widespread use of genetically modified cotton plants. As a result, farmers lose possession of their own seeds and are forced instead to borrow money to purchase genetically modified ones, along with chemical fertilizer and pesticides, every year. When crops fail due to drought or heat waves, the farmers end up accumulating more and more debt, and it’s not uncommon for this to drive them to suicide.

People living in the region used to depend on the fish in the streams for protein, and without that, they’re forced to spend more money on processed food. This has led to the people in the area sullying their hands with the illegal trade of species on the brink of extinction, such as tigers and orangutans, in order to obtain that money.

We hold on to blissful ignorance and are afraid to look directly at the truth. “I don’t know” evolves naturally into “I don’t want to know.”

The environmental improvements occurring in developed countries result not just from technological advances but from passing along most of the negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like—outward onto the periphery represented by the Global South.14

To ignore the international transfer of the burden of environmental impact and to assume that the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advances and economic growth is what is known as the Netherlands Fallacy.

So the question becomes, now that time has definitively run out for addressing climate change, what can we possibly do to stop it?

There’s a famous quotation attributed to the economist Kenneth E. Boulding that goes, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

In other words, modern agriculture replaces the original nutrients in the soil by using up another nonrenewable natural resource.

But even if such marvelous new technologies were to be discovered, it would still take a long time for them to be adopted effectively across society. This wastes precious time, as the crisis will continue to worsen as the positive feedback loop speeds up while we wait for a hypothetical new technology to spread, resulting in a much more serious environmental crisis in the meantime.

In the midst of this dire situation, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. But instead of their precious water being used for the handwashing and hygiene necessary to combat the pandemic, it was used to grow more avocados for export. This was due to the privatization of the water supply.22

The Earth will become uninhabitable for humankind before capitalism collapses. The famous American environmental activist Bill McKibben puts it this way: “The diminished availability of fossil fuel is not the only limit we face. In fact, it’s not even the most important. Even before we run out of oil, we’re running out of planet.”23 This quote still holds true if we replace the words “fossil fuel” and “oil” with the word “capitalism.” We must remember that if the planet fails, it’s game over for humanity. There is no planet B.

Areas within Global North countries will turn into the Global South.

Capitalism is always trying to raise workforce productivity in order to cut costs. Rises in workforce productivity allow the same amount of production to occur with fewer workers. When this happens, the economy’s size remains constant while unemployment rates rise. But capitalism also makes it impossible for the unemployed to live, and politicians hate high unemployment rates. For this reason, there’s a huge amount of pressure for the economy to keep expanding indefinitely so as to maintain the rate of employment. This is why a rise in productivity results in the expansion of the economy. This is the Productivity Trap.

In England at the time Jevons was writing, technological advances had greatly improved how efficiently coal could be used. But this didn’t result in a decrease in the amount of coal being consumed. Rather, the drop in the price of coal due to how little was now needed resulted in it being used in all sorts of ways it hadn’t been before, leading to an overall increase in its consumption.

The fact is, if the world’s richest 10 percent were to lower the amount of emissions they produce to that of the average European, overall emissions would decrease by a full third.40 This would likely buy sufficient time for a comprehensive transition to a sustainable social infrastructure.

But we must also keep in mind the following: almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world’s richest 20 percent, and some of those who call themselves “middle class” are actually part of the top 10 percent. In other words, it will be impossible to truly combat climate change if we all fail to participate as directly interested parties in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living.

Another necessary element for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries is cobalt. The problem here is that almost 60 percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s poorest and least politically and socially stable nations.

In the south of Congo, informal systems of child and slave labor are flourishing under the rubric of the creuseur—a French term frequently translated as “artisanal digger.” Using primitive tools like hammers and chisels, creuseurs frequently mine for cobalt with their bare hands. Some of these workers are children as young as six or seven years old—there are forty thousand children working in this industry—each making around the equivalent of a single US dollar per day.

When O’Neill examined quality of life relative to environmental damage, his research proved that the more stable a nation’s social foundation was, the greater the tendency for that nation to overshoot planetary boundaries. Almost every nation satisfied social demands by sacrificing sustainability.

This is why at this juncture, we can no longer afford to choose capitalism. Capitalism sees even the worsening of the global environmental crisis, climate change and all, as just another opportunity to make money. A rampant wildfire is an opportunity to sell wildfire insurance; a plague of locusts is an occasion to sell more fertilizer. So-called Negative Emissions Technologies, as we’ve learned, may produce side effects that ruin the planet, but even these can be seen as yet more business opportunities. This is precisely what Naomi Klein characterized as “disaster capitalism.”

According to Žižek, there are four types of commons: the commons of culture, the commons of external nature, the commons of internal nature, and the commons of humanity itself. Global capitalism advances by the “enclosure” of these commons as antagonisms dividing the populace. He states, “It is this reference to ‘commons’ which allows the resuscitation of the notion of communism.”

In other words, social security originated as part of a series of efforts people made to provide each other with things necessary to live good lives without relying on the market. What happened in the twentieth century was the systematization of these efforts by the welfare state.

In Europe, most of the key institutions of what later became the welfare state—everything from social insurance and pensions to public libraries and public health clinics—were not originally created by governments at all, but by trade unions, neighborhood associations, cooperatives, and working-class parties and organizations of one kind or another. Many of these were engaged in a self-conscious revolutionary project of “building a new society in the shell of the old,” of gradually creating Socialist institutions from below.76

Hmmm

The nation-state form is completely unable to adequately address the present global environmental crisis. Furthermore, the vertical nationalized management style characteristic of a welfare state is incompatible with the horizontal nature of the commons. In other words, the commons must be made sustainable at a global level, not turned into something to enrich the lifestyles of some. To this end, they must be reappropriated from their commodification by capital. There must be another way to address the problem; a larger vision is necessary. Only an unprecedented form of Marxist analysis can answer the demands of the era of environmental crisis known as the Anthropocene.

This misunderstanding has had major consequences; it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that this distortion of Marx’s thought resulted in the birth of the monster known as Stalinism and humanity’s ongoing inability to look at the present environmental crisis directly in its hideous face. We must correct this misunderstanding before it’s too late.

Idealogic purity / fidelity

Markgenossenschaft. These communes all shared the same types of traditions related to production. In short, they had cyclical, steady-state economies that weren’t designed to grow.

In short, Marx, having discarded a progressive view of history, incorporated the principles of sustainability and steady-state economics from communal societies into his revolutionary thought.

THIS NEW WEAPON CALLED DEGROWTH COMMUNISM

What has become clear at this point is that the only thing that can adequately address the present age of climate crisis is communism.

But there exists another view, one that calls for bringing about communism via the further acceleration of economic growth. This is what is known as “left-accelerationism,” and it has gathered increasing support in recent years.

Underpinning the appeal of this vision are the unprecedented levels of powerlessness experienced by those of us living in the Global North. We feel, unconsciously, that we have no say and that we cannot exist without capitalism. This leads to an impoverishment in the imagination of the Left, which should be thinking up solutions to this conundrum.

Land prices are created artificially. A drop in price does not affect the land’s use-value at all. Yet people are willing to work themselves to the bone just to barely afford access to this land. The use-value becomes the entire recompense for the price—the tiniest morsel of “abundance.”

DIVIDING THE COMMONS MADE CAPITALISM TAKE FLIGHT During our previous discussion of the archaic Markgenossenschaft of the Germanic peoples and the mir of Russia, we saw how precapitalist communal societies lived and worked while managing their land cooperatively. Even after these communes were broken up by war and the advance of market-based societies, communal land practices persisted in the form of commons and public farmland.

Does this historicl view lend us practical lessons for today?

This is the typical Malthusian mode of explanation. But as we’ve seen, hydropower already naturally exists in abundance and is a perfectly sustainable and cheap source of energy. To borrow Gorz’s term, it’s an open technology, one that can be managed as a form of commons. So why the shift from free, abundant hydropower to costly, scarce coal? The typical Malthusian explanation fails to convince in this case.

One thing that’s important to remember is that before the emergence of primitive accumulation, the commons of land and water were plentiful and abundant. Any member of the communal societies organized around them could freely take what they needed and use it.

Okay but how does this square with population growth?

The private property system that followed the enclosure of the commons, by contrast, destroyed this sustainable relationship between humans and nature founded on abundance.

Marx is pointing out that the artificial creation of scarcity by dividing the commons is what lies at the very heart of primitive accumulation. The development of capitalism is the extension, continuation, and expansion of this fundamental process of primitive accumulation.

Marx frequently referred to the conditions of labor under capitalism as slavery.129 Workers are like slaves in the sense that they must work and work without breaks, irrespective of their will. Modern workers are infinitely replaceable under capitalism. Once fired, workers face starvation and even death if they cannot find new jobs. Marx called this form of precariousness “absolute poverty.”130

Shouldering debt in this way locks workers into obedience, forcing them to become capitalism’s pawns.

Consumer dreams can never come true. Even our desires and feelings have been subsumed by capital, twisted into unattainable shapes.

Between 20 percent and 40 percent of the price of commodities is their packaging, it’s said, while in the case of cosmetics, the price of the packaging can rise to as much as three times that of the product itself. Of course, the alluring packaging uses a tremendous amount of plastic that ends up simply being thrown away.132

Need the source for the packging cost - amazing

This doesn’t mean it should be nationalized.

Wow!

The nationalization of electricity does nothing to prevent the adoption of locking technologies like nuclear energy that sacrifice safety for utility.

I would imagine nuclear as a key source of energy - pending the disposal element which I can imagine as problematic.

An alternative way to attain the goal of treating electricity as a form of commons is citizen management. This is a practice by which sustainable energy can be easily handled at the citizen level.