as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i’ll clarify that i’m talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.
an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn’t rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?
i’d really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone’s thoughts
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if you think about how much of the economy in the imperial core is bullshit degrowth becomes much easier to imagine.
Are you talking about email jobs? Because those don’t produce much carbon when done at home
scammers, speculators, rentiers, consultants, crypto, ai, marketing, propagandists, surveillance, weapons development… i feel like we could go on for an hour
ooth ‘email jobs’ just describe an environment work takes place in, some people in cubicle email jobs are involved in pro-social work, i assume.
My concern is that this kind of labor doesn’t generate huge carbon emissions (sans ML, weapons, and commutes) and the majority of jobs that need to go are industrialized or logistics jobs that are critical. I didn’t think getting rid of marketing would save much carbon.
on the contrary, liquidating marketers would net the largest decrease in hot air ever seen
emissions are half the equation tho, GDP counts these things and decoupling the idea GDP & the per capita to actual living standards is important for a degrowth conversation. no humans would hurt from the billions lost in ‘value’ in marketing
Eliminating completely useless sectors frees those people to do things that are actually beneficial to society
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Yeah so how do you deindustrialize those without too much harm? The vast majority of socialism in practice has involved mass industrialization to benefit the working class so how do you keep the benefits without the industry in countries like China?
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That’s my concern. Industry, even when electricity is clean, generates a ton of carbon.
But they also don’t produce rail, solar panels, food, housing, or clean water. They’re completely bullshit jobs that exist to keep the proletariat from having the time and energy to revolt.
You’re average marketer probably isn’t fit to start building train tracks. Most people in white collar jobs would be unwilling to do blue collar labor and construction of all of those goods is incredibly expensive and emissions producing. A very large portion of Marxist thought is about industrialization and has been applied to China and the USSR, but when deindustrialization is needed the road is less clear.
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We don’t really know what level of consumer goods and their availability is sustainable because we’ve never attempted to make it sustainable. Denser living will help immensely though, and building things to last and be repairable should go a long way. I suspect humanity can easily do it, just not when those making the decisions are incentivized to protect their own destructive monopolies.
how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?
As far as carbon capture goes, I think we’re going to end up planting a ton of trees, maybe some kind of ocean CO2 scrubbing algae or something as well, then cutting them down, and sealing the decaying wood underground. Basically the reverse process that we’ve been doing at breakneck speed for a century… And probably stratospheric atmospheric injection to slow cooling, which hopefully won’t affect anything else as drastically as the greenhouse effect.
We’re just making coal for the octpus society that will rise up and kill us all
Denser living will help immensely though, and building things to last and be repairable should go a long way. I suspect humanity can easily do it
we did just this some years ago in the soviet union, perfectly doable.
As far as carbon capture goes, I think we’re going to end up planting a ton of trees, maybe some kind of ocean CO2 scrubbing algae
Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to do that on a scale meaningful enough to make a difference. Plus it’s not really great for the rest of the ecosystem to abstract out all that biomass. There’s some slim hope that we can come up with some renewable-energy-catalyzed conversion of CO2 into a solid or liquid state that could be stored, but the problem there is preventing its use in further fossil fuel extraction or as its own source of energy. For all practical purposes it’s better to assume that all the CO2 in the atmosphere is going to stay there.
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The biggest degrowth guy is Kohei Saito. Check out his book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
He is VERY technical though, and while great, not very approachable unless you’re already very familiar with Marx.
A better first introduction to the “practical” reality of degrowth is the more pop-left “Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World” by Jason Hickel. It’s not as radical as most people here, but it’s like that on purpose, to help people get acclimated to the idea.
Also interesting to note that (imo) Jason Hickel’s more recent contributions seem like he’s become more radical. I think he’s already contributed a lot to driving us towards postcapitalism, and I think he still has tons more to offer
Definitely! I don’t know enough about the guy to say he’s radical or not, but reading the book itself I felt he is able to lay out a very well structured and solid critique of all the contradictions of capitalism and environmental issues without using rhetoric that might scare off someone who’s not an anticapitalist to begin with. I call it “pop-left” because I feel it’s the kind of book I can give to someone who feels the system should change, but isn’t sure how or why.
Regardless of whether the future economy is Marxist (owned by the workers) or capitalist (owned by moneyed interests), we need to consume less.
We need economic growth. Great, let’s develop the productive forces, I’m on board. But by the DPSIR model, economic growth will put pressures on natural systems. Now the quantity of pressure depends on population, amount of consumption, and the nature of technology used to feedclothhouse people. My point is, aside from the communism-capitalism debate, we need to have the high-impact-tech-vs-low-impact-tech debate.
i’d really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone’s thoughts
Jason Hickel’s stuff is good. I was surprisingly disappointed with ER Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, which was highly recommended.
Jason Hickel’s name is so close to Jackson Hinckle. I get so confused sometimes. Jason Hickel is the good one, and he’s very good.
The book Half-Earth Socialism covers this very extensively as a global resource constraint problem. The sort of “default settings” would be:
- 100% mandatory veganism
- Essentially zero jet travel
- 100% electrification of all personal heating/cooling/transportation needs
- Very little gas-powered public utility transportation/manufacturing, and only from biofuels
- 1500-2000 watts/person averaged primary energy usage; USA is currently at 12,000, see 2000 watt society
The main limiting factor is land usage. If we want to preserve half the earth’s landmass for the biosphere to do whatever the fuck it does to keep us all alive, and keep 85% of existing wild species from going extinct, we don’t have a lot of land to work with. Land reserved for human use will be split into:
- Agricultural food production. Pretty obvious. Plants are much, much more efficient in terms of calorie/acre than any animal products.
- Solar farms. These use a lot of land, but are needed to produce power for a fully electrified society.
- Biofuel production with BeCCS. This uses a lot of land relative to how much fuel is produced, but it also sequesters carbon.
- Actual human living/working/manufacturing space.
Needless to say the societal changes necessary to reach this state would make the cultural revolution look like child’s play.
why not nuclear? it’s way more space efficient, and solar panels need to be replaced every 20 years
You run out of efficiently mine-able uranium fairly quickly when trying to scale up to the electrification energy needs of an entire planet.
well yeah, I’m not saying the whole world should be powered by just nuclear. solar definitely has its own place as does wind, hydroelectric, and the like.
there is also alternative reactor types like thorium, and if research continues fusion (which will be more feasible under communism with a well resourced public research and energy sector)
Sure, I’m not really anti-nuclear generally. It is in the mix and will continue to be in the mix. However, I don’t think it will be a linchpin.
People also talk about reactors taking a long time to build but all of this stuff will take a long time to build. We will overshoot. I have accepted this. All I can hope for is we don’t double down and use solar radiation management to forever rob our children of a brilliant blue sky.
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why not nuclear?
It takes 15-20 years to build, we’ll run out of fuel in a few years if you use it as the main energy source, and other renewables are already good enough.
Nuclear was a useful stop-gap when solar/wind tech wasn’t developed. Nuclear as a main energy source is pretty much dead in the water today though.
What about floating solar and desert solar? The Saharan biosphere is mostly dead and empty and has constant sun. Same with a large portion of the Southwestern US and Australia. Also boat only travel for overseas transport of people and perishables seems impractical.
boat only travel for overseas transport of people and perishables seems impractical
Can you expand on what you mean by impractical?
Slow and needing more logistics for food for the trip. I also didn’t know if we have low carbon boat technology yet as a lot of these boats are diesel powered.
Trips will take longer although satellite internet continues to improve, so working remotely on the ship is viable for jobs where that is possible. Despite their terrible emissions ocean freight is still far, far more carbon efficient than any other form of transport, even rail.
Is satellite internet a priority? It’s very expensive and difficult to make, the supply chains are very long and launches produce millions of tons of CO2. I wonder if more efficient jet (or even propeller) travel would be better in the long run.
For carbon emissions, every space launch ever done in history completely pales in comparison to the 10s of thousands of aircraft crossing the globe every moment of every day. It is just not anywhere near the same order of magnitude. A single cross country flight for a single person emits more carbon emissions than citizens of many countries do in an entire year.
Your average CO2-Footprint-Calculator is spitting out half the national average if you forego (most) car useage, eat vegan and then don’t consume so much “bullshit” like fashion or other trends or whatever. Kind of depressing to think about how easy it would be.
An end to trying to invent new markets for shit people don’t want or need. Also an end to making 3+ different tiers of commodity. No more planned obsolescence, built-in defects to get people to buy replacements, or otherwise making what should be durable goods disposable.
The elimination of finance, insurance, marketing, rentierism, and other such vampiric market sectors. Obviously, the absence of capitalism and the profit motive would do away with these things, anyway.
Depopulating and rewilding the suburbs will be important for preventing complete biosphere collapse.
I think the growth vs. degrowth framing is really poorly defined, there’s not a clear distinction between capitalist growth (basically GDP) and development of the productive forces and any discussion of the topic easily devolves into people talking past each other because they’re using different definitions for the same terms.
A lot of GDP growth today is in things that manipulate the market and can be gotten rid of entirely like advertising, which is nearly 20% of US GDP by itself. This makes it relatively easy to get rid of but is a double edged sword. This focus on financial growth over the ‘actual’ economy over the past ~50 years has left it neglected and so the (re)development of the productive forces of North America (not just the US since the economy is already quite integrated) will require massive investment and thus ‘growth’. It will obviously be a different sort of growth than has been done before (yes, even than the Soviets) so it is hard to say how exactly it will look but it won’t happen unless the economy is under the control of the mass of people who make it up.
Fossil fuel extraction will continue probably for a very long time (we use it for nearly everything) but at a greatly reduced scale as alternatives are developed. Modern agriculture is actually fairly space (and thus calorie per hectare) inefficient because it’s easier to automate and thus reduce labor costs. Likely there will be many more people who work in agriculture but still on the order of single digit percentages of the population (just more than the ~2% it is now). Enhanced weathering has the potential to be a sort of Hail Mary for CO2 sequestration, it can also be used on cropfields as fertilizer though it probably can’t replace all nitrogen fertilizer but I don’t know enough about it to really say either way. I think other forms of CO2 sequestration are mostly in the realm of fantasy so hopefully enhanced weathering doesn’t have too many detrimental side-effects.
As for resource extraction more generally, it will also have to continue for a long time in all likelihood. Perhaps deep sea mining of those naturally occurring polymetallic nodules will be less impactful than traditional mining, perhaps not. Asteroid mining could genuinely be revolutionary in this aspect but the investment involved to get it a necessary scale would probably take too long for it to be a viable short-term solution even if there was a revolution tomorrow. Things can be done to make traditional mining less impactful that aren’t currently because they aren’t profitable, but it will likely be the worst thing that continues in any transition. Rewilding other areas to compensate will ease the damage.
It will be a difficult transition. Go too slow and you risk the environment degrading to the point of the collapse of production entirely. Go too fast and you risk the same by not having the inputs necessary to sustain it. The market is too slow and passive to handle the situation and so it will only be overcome if the (real) economy can be steered by society as a whole.
Mass public transit
No crypto
No bullshit jobs
No leaving the heat on in your summer home
No summer home anyway
No more planned obsolesence
No private jets
No yatchs
More vegan
No more useless plastic crap
More touching grass
No fast fashion
More democratic decision making how to allocate energy resources
Etc
Jason Hickel has written about degrowth
Veganism?
it looks like all capitalists simultaneously
shrinkingdegrowing into corn cobs while screaming “I’m not (degr)owned I’m not (degr)owned”
rule 2 violation
degrowth? it’s inflamed and about as big as de top of a cholula bottle
Rule 2 violation
“Degrowth” is when the “chill beats to relax to” compilation has Aria and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou scenes as the background footage
