De-Growth as Class War?

Planetary Boundaries (Graphic by Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre)

Researchers at the University of Washington have begun testing a geoengineering solution to global warming called marine cloud brightening. It's a process by which sea water is collected and sprayed in a fine mist over the ocean on the theory that its microparticles will seed marine based clouds and increase the albedo of cloud cover and thus help to mitigate the effects of global warming, particularly over the ocean .  It's a long term proposition, but after initial skepticism on its proposal in 1990 by John Latham, a British physicist,  its time has come and it is now among the few and most promising attempts at engineering a global warming solution.

Meanwhile on the left front in the climate change battle, a fierce debate is underway between Green New Deal advocates and a theory propounded by the philosopher in ecology and political economy Kohei Saito and described in Capital in the Anthropocene, Saito's surprise 2020 bestseller in Japan that's recently been translated and published in the US as Slow Down,  that he dubs De-growth Communism.  The debate between the major players has been playing out in the left press, in articles in Jacobin and The Nation.

The antipathy that Green New Dealers and De-growthers have for each other's approaches is palpable.  In a recent conversation with his guest Matt Huber on the Left Reckoning podcast, David Griscom said of de-growth Marxism that it was kind of like "the 2010s all over again but with a bad slogan." By the 2010s Griscom is referring to failed post-Marxist politics à la the Podemos Party in Spain (i.e., leftist politics without labor; after a meteoric start among online leftists mid-decade, Podemos had fizzled out among voters by last summer's elections).  As for the bad slogan ("De-growth!"), Griscom has got a point.  For his part, Saito in his Nation article called the Green New Deal "the Opiate of the Masses"-- popular with politicians and the masses, but in its continued pursuit of growth in a rapidly depleting planet a dangerous distraction from the realities that we are facing.

In 2021's Climate Change as Class War, Matt Huber advocates for a multi-pronged approach to fighting climate change that entails implementation of the Green New Deal.  Huber is decidedly against degrowth as a strategy on the basis that in requiring a reduction in the  manner of living of an already beleaguered class it is austerity in sheep's clothing and for this reason a hard sell for working people.  Huber uses Marxist theory to promote an alternative.  Capitalism is seen as a necessary evil-- the origination of much of the technology that will ultimately be its own undoing at the point at which the working class seizes the means of production.  In the meantime, since capitalism has demonstrably missed every chance to save us from the climate crisis it has engendered, Huber sees labor as the historic force for change that can be organized and activated to force the current owning class to develop and adopt carbon reducing technologies particularly in the fueling of the economy.  Additionally, Huber sees a varied approach involving labor, alternate clean power sources such as wind, solar, hydro and nuclear.  In essence, after Marx, Huber sees capitalism as still having a role in combatting climate change (particularly being impelled by class self-interest through the eventual profitability of publicly seeded advances in clean technology for instance, and through coercion form the working class in the form of strikes and other actions to force capitalists to adopt clean technology) without requiring a reduction in the life style of the working class.

Saito on the other hand believes that for those enjoying what he calls an Imperial Mode of Living in the Global North-- i.e., one of comfort that is dependent on exploitation and deprivations of the Global South-- de-growth is not just morally desirable but a necessity if we are to meet the carbon reduction requirements determined by the projections of climate scientists.  To bolster his argument, Saito's own study of late Marxist writings draws the conclusion that contrary to the impression put forth by Marx's collaborator and posthumous editor, Friedrich Engels (a factory owner's son, Saito is eager to remind us) Marx, inspired by Russian peasant organizations and third-world agriculture had rejected historical and technological determinism in favor of a more de-growth friendly communism.  The conclusion is controversial, but as Saito describes it, in the transition to a society more amenable to a carbonless future, any losses experienced in the reduction in personal automobiles and the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed in the Global North, would be more than made up for by revisions of the capitalist lifestyle,  as in a shorter working week with no commute, and an increase in such "commons" as free access to healthcare, plentiful and free transportation, and a guaranteed basic income.  With production localized, scaled down and centered not on profit and growth and more and more things, but on people's needs, our lives according to Saito would naturally become more meaningful and more in tune with and  less punishing on the planet that nurtures us.

While Saito's work is based on a science of natural limits, Huber suggests (descriptively, not prescriptively) that the history of technology and resource management has shown time and again that limits while real are meant to be broken, either through the engineering of efficiencies, discovery of new resources (he suggests for instance that in this age, it's not unreasonable to think space might prove to be a frontier for the discovery of additional or alternative resources for those that that are dwindling on earth) or technologies for extracting earth bound resources (e.g., fracking).*  Marine cloud brightening could well be the latest example of the type of innovation and undertaking that capitalism is capable of enabling, albeit given the uncertainty of the connection of mitigation of anthropogenic climate change to a profit motive, it is rare.  It is therefore incumbent on workers to organize in order to influence the course that growth takes-- and specifically to mobilize for cleaner energy sources and regulation that protects workers and the environment while ensuring that the abundance made possible by labor and technology are equitably shared by those of the Global North with the Global South.

To Saito, this sort of thinking is "greenwashing"-- substituting a palatable political solution for the hard work that must be done to undo the impact of 300 years of Industrial Capitalism.  In Slow Down, Saito writes: 

Giving up on the wishful thinking of green economic growth entails making a series of hard choices. How serious are we about reducing carbon dioxide emissions? Who will shoulder the cost? What sort of reparations are we willing to make to the Global South for everything taken from it by the Imperial Mode of Living? What are we prepared to do about the additional environmental destruction caused by the very process of transitioning to a sustainable economy?

As I read this sort of entreaty though, I can't help but ask myself, "Who is we?"  To whom does de-growth appeal outside of a small group of earnest academics and concerned leftists comfortable enough to withstand some affliction in the name of saving the planet.  How does it happen if it must be left up to a thin band of powerless, albeit decent enough electric car owners and avid recyclers of the professional managerial class?  The strength of the Green New Deal is its appeal to the power in numbers of the working class, to a theory of history and to the romanticism of a populist notion of change.  If only it could be married to the upheaval of a system whose engine is growth for growth's sake and replacement of it with a return to a cosmopolitanized 21st century commons centered around the simple fulfillment of needs across the globe.

How about a better slogan?

From The Green New Deal Is the Opiate of the Masses, Kohei Saito, The Nation.  According to Saito, thanks to our "Imperial Mode of Living" we in the Global North-- wealthy or not--  are in the top 20% above.

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 * Techno-optimism without the optimism?