degrowth 2: politics without people
degrowth 2: politics without people
actual politics is different from Victoria 3
This is the second post in the doomed ideologies series. Check out the first post if you missed it. Please subscribe to good and bad ideas to follow along.
Last time, we saw that degrowth starts with some reasonable critiques of economic growth/GDP but fails to propose a serious alternative. In fact, if you take the goals of degrowth seriously you end up in one of two places:
Degrowth paradoxically needs growth, or at the very least the cause of long-run growth: productivity increases driven by technology. This is abundant degrowth, but also it’s basically a mainstream position of we should do growth, but make it green via taxes, transfers, and regulation. Degrowthers emphatically argue that they are not in favor of green growth and that the policy solutions I just mentioned are not fast enough for them. But if you read degrowth like this, it’s basically just a mainstream position dressed up with some radical words.
Degrowth would impoverish people, but degrowthers aren’t being honest with either themselves or others (or both) about it. This is poverty degrowth, and as I’ve argued before there is an element of degrowth which comes across as punitive: people have sinned via living in unsustainable ways and now the bill is coming due. Degrowthers emphatically argue that they do not want to impoverish people, but when you read about proposals like a socially managed reduction in labor productivity, it’s difficult to imagine what else is being proposed.
As a very quick recap, degrowth is a contemporary ideology that argues:
Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.
In this blog post, I’d like to talk a little bit about the politics and democracy degrowthers imagine. If you read degrowth, you will see consistent calls for democracy. To take one example,
More specifically, degrowth can be defined as the democratic transition to a society that – in order to enable global ecological justice – is based on a much smaller throughput of energy and resources, that deepens democracy and guarantees a good life and social justice for all, and that does not depend on continuous expansion
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (p. 4). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
My basic argument is that the use of the word “democracy” is illusory and relies on one of two flawed assumptions
That there will be rapid, large-scale, worldwide opinion change towards degrowth positions
That people are yearning for degrowth but their true views are suppressed by the actually-existing political system
who are these people, anyway?
If degrowthers simply said: “we want to do a command economy to reduce production,” you could disagree with that, but it would be an internally consistent argument. Countries have in fact been organized as command economies, and a command economy could theoretically prohibit entire sectors of the economy from operating.
But that is not the degrowth argument. The degrowth argument is that we should democratically agree to do things like banning the advertising industry.
[Degrowth] is – to put it in a nutshell – diverse, social-ecological, democratic and participatory, cooperative, needs-oriented, open but regionally anchored, and oriented towards overcoming the distinction between production and reproduction.
Schmelzer, Matthias; Vetter, Andrea; Vansintjan, Aaron. The Future is Degrowth (p. 215). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
So, if you want to democratically ban industries, you need to like, do democracy. As far as I can tell, specifics about doing this are entirely absent from degrowth arguments. It’s hard to prove a negative, so I’ll just refer you to the two the two books I read for my last post and note that neither of these books on how to do degrowth actually lay out anything like a political plan for doing degrowth.
But let’s try to intuit a little bit about the people degrowthers imagine. They are people who are
Eager to radically change their lives for the sake of relatively remote goals like saving a habitat in a foreign country
Geared towards participating in democracy beyond voting: in local councils and so forth
This describes only a small fraction of people! What about the people in advanced countries who would not be willing to use a communal washing machine to save a foreign habitat? We can disagree with their choice morally, but to deny such people are quite numerous seems silly to me.
Beyond this basic issue is the speed of opinion change is quite slow, so if you are starting with an unpopular position like “ban a bunch of industries,” you need to reckon with the constituencies arrayed against you, and you need to understand that when put to a vote to ban oil or advertising, you might lose. You might lose for decades. The actual voters in our actual democracies may vote to keep the oil industry around, and again degrowthers nowhere reckon with this fact.
The most rapid opinion change in recent US history has been on the issues of gay marriage and marijuana legalization, and these took decades to achieve majority support.
And even with roughly 70-30 majority support, we still have not passed a marijuana legalization bill at the Federal level in the US. Degrowthers need to take this basic fact seriously. You could spend two decades getting “ban oil” or “ban advertising” to be a 70-30 issue and still see no movement on it! Particularly if you have, like, an entire industry of people with jobs and investors with money to lose arrayed against you.
A degrowther might counter that this shows why we need real democracy, because actually existing democracy does not execute the will of the people. Well, ok, that is an intellectually reasonable position but how are you going to do it?
disconnecting and reconnecting wires
I think it’s worth meditating on this tweet from prominent degrowther Jason Hickel.
This attitude is common in the degrowth lit: that once we do degrowth, everything will be different. It’s basically the Leninist revolution repackaged for a world facing climate crisis. We will keep the good production, ban the bad production, remake people’s minds, and rewire society so everyone has a job and has their material needs met. We can think such a scenario up rationally. We can imagine a society where these things are true. But that does not mean such a society can actually exist. And it does not mean you have a plan for getting there. Saying “I have a save in Victoria 3 where this is possible” does not in fact make it possible.
This is where it’s useful to turn to Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. I think seeing like a state is exactly what the degrowthers are doing, and if you tried to “rationally” reorder society along degrowth principles you would quickly run into reality. You might cause a famine, you might cause mass unemployment which engenders a huge political backlash, people might be mad you are forcing them to use communal washing machines, and so on.
It is incumbent upon people doing public policy thinking to try to understand why our current system is the way it is. Why is it relatively stable? What does it do well? What changes could we make that are likely to strictly improve things—that is, not to make things worse in some unintended way. How do we do we make changes without engendering large political backlash?
These are hard questions, I’m not pretending to have all the answers. But I’m saying that grappling with these questions is a mark of serious public policy thinking, and this grappling is not something degrowthers are engaging in.