In the degrowth debate there are a number of misconceptions and fallacies that I believe need to be cleared up. Recently, I was reading Comrade Martin Rose’s essay “Eco-Leninism: A Much Needed Corrective” and I believe that, while there is some insight in it, there were also some fundamental errors and mistaken assumptions. What’s more, these errors are common in degrowth analysis. These errors roughly fall into three types:
- Assuming that human labor time is directly connected to material throughput
- Assuming that a reduction in material throughput necessarily means a decline in economic activity and vise versa
- Relatedly, that reducing capitalist consumption will necessarily reduce economic activity
- Assumption that a transformation of relations of production is only a matter of political will
Let’s go through these one by one.
Human labor time vs Material Throughput
There are also systemic drivers of increased throughput: for capital’s sake, workers are forced to work the same or more hours despite increases in labor productivity; workers need to be provided more jobs in order to keep technologically-driven unemployment in check, and to sell all the commodities produced by the growing economy…
It is true that workers have not seen any decrease in working hours with increases in productivity the past 50 years, and that workers have essentially been transformed into a great mass of servants, through the expansion of the service industries. But that’s also exactly the problem, people were transformed into servants because they still needed access to income in order to buy the basket of commodities to reproduce themselves and those in their care. Decreasing hours worked in the service industry would do little to increase material throughput assuming that these people are still reproducing their labor power.
If we want to decrease material throughput, only one thing will do, which is actually decreasing material throughput. But that also means changing people’s consumption bundles they use to reproduce themselves. Decreasing this by, for example, sharply limiting fossil fuel output without any other change has had very destructive results, as we can see in central Europe immediately after the start of the Ukraine war, and in China when new ecological standards briefly disrupted coal production. In both cases, human needs were prioritized in terms of ordinary households getting access to electricity, but the disruptions to industry led to wild fluctuations of prices in many key markets. It is clear that if reliance on fossil fuels is to end, investment in new energy technologies will be required, or radical changes in household economic organization, or both, will have to occur. All of these scenarios will require large scale investment and economic activity.
Economic Activity vs. Material Throughput
Despite Huber’s claims to the contrary, this level of resource extraction is not necessary. He argues we need massive levels of investment in order to create enough renewable energy to meet society’s needs, but in the paper he cites for this claim, the needs modeled are not human needs, but those of an economy predicated on economic growth! Huber’s evidence for the necessity of a growing economy comes from a paper whose data are not applicable to the question he attempts to answer.
Degrowth exists precisely to avoid the scenario that Huber sees as necessary. And it can be avoided: research suggests that, contrary to Huber’s claim, it is possible to thoroughly meet human needs with much less energy than we currently use (for developed countries, this is measured to be 95% less than current consumption). Huber is simply not familiar enough with the ecological-economic literature to be a reliable source regarding the necessity of growth.
The study Rose cites for this directly contradicts this claim. As the authors of the study say, they assume massive investments have taken place to infrastructure and housing such that only the state-of-the-art in energy efficiency is installed.
How we incorporate long-term infrastructure requires clarification. Our assumption of state-of-the-art technologies raises the question of how to account for currently built infrastructures that have lifetimes extending beyond 2050, and when such infrastructures should be replaced prematurely by more efficient ones. Housing is a salient example. Much current housing has a lifetime beyond 2050, so retrofitting is more likely than replacement with advanced new buildings, despite the latter having lower direct-energy requirements. However, estimating what fraction of housing in each country would be more appropriate to retrofit than rebuild would be an enormous task; this would require estimating the remaining lifetimes of buildings and applying a time-threshold to this to determine when, from a full lifecycle perspective, retrofitting is most appropriate, and forecasting all of this for 2050. We thus assume the global housing stock is fully replaced via a worldwide deployment of advanced new buildings with very low heating and cooling energy requirements – and we make the same assumption for other buildings (educational, healthcare and commercial). This implies that a significant amount of infrastructure is replaced prematurely, which could be considered unrealistic. However, we account for all the energy embodied in these new infrastructures, distributing it over buildings’ lifetimes (note also that we account for energy relating to lighting and appliances separately). And we show below that had we assumed advanced retrofits instead the results would change only negligibly. Our results thus offer a steady-state picture of future energy-consumption for 2050 in a world where advanced technologies are fully deployed and replaced when necessary.
In other words, reducing energy consumption without this new investment to 95% current levels would not actually be sufficient to meet basic human needs. Any future we can imagine that would meet human needs without our current energy consumption would require large scale investment and human economic activity. This is true even if we decrease material throughput. Replacing single use plastic with implements made of wood, or metal or glass, might reduce income to the plastics industry, but 1) these new industries and products would require investment and maintenance, and 2) the income not spent on plastics might go elsewhere. Changing household production and management will also require investment and labor, the infrastructure for communal kitchens, etc., and remuneration for the labor which reproduces the labor of communal institutions.
We don’t know ex-ante what the cost of maintaining all this new infrastructure might be. It could be lower than current wasteful industries, or it might be more. It could, for example, require much more labor.
Reducing capitalist consumption has the same sort of logic. All the labor that went to reproducing the capitalist class could just be made free time, but that might be irresponsible and irrational when faced with the demands of preventing ecological catastrophe. Maybe that labor needs to be redirected towards new infrastructure that makes ecologically sustainable life possible. Capitalist consumption makes up roughly 20% of the US economy. At its lowest point, in 1980, it made up roughly 13%. While a large fraction of this is excessive, it may not be possible to re-allocate all of this to investment, as it is still used to reproduce, physically, a group of people. In the US especially there is a large section of petite bourgeois who live a relatively modest life from profit type income. They will need to see an ordinary worker’s income, growing that amount of worker income, even as capitalist income goes away. Let us say that roughly 5% of US income would be required for such purposes, that leaves another 15% of world changing investment.
When talking about real growth, we’re also talking about the quality of the items we receive, this is explicit for bourgeois economists but there’s generally great difficulty in measuring the depreciation rate of many common household consumption goods, even setting aside issues of other qualitative changes. By suggesting that we replace high material throughput with goods that have lower depreciation rates, what Rose and other degrowthers are suggesting is not degrowth at all, but rather a great increase in real growth through rapid deflation. Of all the proposals listed, only decreasing the working day is something which can actually decrease growth, and even that is controversial given that it could unlock much higher labor productivity given how much time is wasted on the job as a result of being forced to work longer than necessary. And, as mentioned earlier, much of the labor which has been made superfluous to meeting human needs by capitalism is also the labor most unrelated to material throughput.
The Relations of Production and Political Will
Lastly, Rose, extrapolating from the errors of Stalinism, suggests that revolutionizing the relations of production has nothing to do with technological development, and is merely a matter of exerting political will. This is untrue, as the Chinese experience can quickly show us. During the collective period there was immense political will to move away from capitalist relations of production, and indeed there were new corporate forms of social organization that emerged. But fundamentally, they were less effective at meeting human needs than either the relations of production in the USSR or most of the capitalist world. What the Chinese lacked was not political will, but a set of techniques for economic coordination that could match that will.
Theoretically, cybernetic socialism can provide us with these types of techniques, and we have much work ahead to perfect new methods of economic coordination. Without a set of techniques which can be more efficient at economic coordination than capitalism, the political will to revolutionize the relations of production will be quickly sapped. The capitalist class is a fetter on the investment required to revolutionize both the forces of production and relations of production. Their reproduction as a class is directly opposed to further investment in the infrastructure required, as well as the depreciation of assets which are actively destroying the world ecologically. In principle, state capitalism alone can overcome that obstacle, and indeed, the Chinese are the closest to doing just that. But going further, and fundamentally reshaping worker consumption bundles and methods of reproduction will mean creating a system that works, and works better than capitalism.
What does a feasible degrowth economy look like? After a period of intense investment and depreciation, it looks like an ever decreasing nominal GDP, as goods become a higher quality and are sold less often, working hours decrease, and money is phased out as a means of economic coordination.
-Nicolas Villarreal
