I’m thinking a lot about something like ‘social democratic internationalism’ these days, and this thread encapsulates a lot of the key positions that have led me there.
“Short article that tries to argue for a path between degrowth & traditional socialism (cast by him as ‘ecomodernist socialism’). There are many issues with the piece but it’s good he recognizes traditional socialism was always promethean, even if he wants to move beyond that (link).
If to be promethean is to be excessive, then Marx (for whom Prometheus was the “most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar”), Engels and the entirety of the non-utopian socialist left of the 19th and 20th Centuries were excessive too (link). But a middle path between growth and degrowth violates the law of the excluded middle. It is either true or false that an economy is growing. There is no in-betweeny-ness between growth and degrowth. There can be slow growth to be sure, but that is still growth. The minute that the aggregate productive forces increase (for capitalist or socialist goals), you have growth. And we can see this confusion when Durand picks Jason Hickel—(a degrowther!)—as exemplar of that middle path between, for example the ‘growthist’ traditional Marxism/left ecomodernism of my friend @Matthuber78 and the degrowth communism of Kohei Saito.
What Hickel is arguing for here is not merely similar, but identical to what the ecomodern leftists call for in technology switching. Of course we need to reduce, indeed eliminate eg, fossil combustion and replace it with clean energy. But reducing the bad parts of production and increasing the good parts isn’t the whole of what Hickel (and degrowth movement more broadly) call for. Hickel and other degrowthers view any aggregate economic growth as the cause of environmental problems, and so even if existing technologies are cleaned up, even if socialized, the claim is that aggregate economic growth would still prompt harm to the ecosystems we depend upon. The claim of the traditional socialists/ecomodernist left meanwhile is that environmental problems are instead overwhelmingly the result of the delivery of vitally socially necessary production. We see this most clearly in the GHG inventories all nations must submit to the IPCC, where we find that the bulk of emissions come from heating, electricity, food, transport, and the building of homes, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. Things like planned obsolescence, the bounty of choice in consumer items, plastic Barbies and 70-inch flatscreen TVs, and billionaire-class megayachts may exacerbate the problem, but these are rounding errors atop emissions from vitally necessary production.
By the late 1980s, for the first time we had a sense of the scale of the threat, and by the late 2000s, we understood that we needed not just to reduce but eliminate GHGs. (BTW, this means if the 20th Century been democratically socialist, extending schools, hospitals, electricity, good homes, etc to the entirety of the planet, there would’ve been far more global warming by the 1980s than under actually existing capitalism). The trad socialist/ecomodern left has a different explanation why despite this knowledge of harm of GHGs, emissions continue to grow. This explanation is based on plain old Marxist critique of the amoral anarchy of market incentive, with no extra ‘eco-‘ prefix needed to be added.
As Michal Rozworski and I put it in our popular introduction to the economic calculation debate, People’s Republic of Walmart, ‘What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable’(link). If a good or service that we know is harmful is profitable, there’ll continue to be an incentive to produce it. Conversely, if a good or service that we know is beneficial is not profitable, or even insufficiently profitable, there is no incentive for it to be produced. So fossil fuel firms who sell their product in a market (thus incl private firms like Shell & publicly owned market actors like Norway’s Equinor) are incented to push back against policy that encourages tech-switching in the absence of a pathway for their continued profitability. They are also incentivised to employ lobbyists, engage in regulatory capture, bury uncomfortable scientific findings or other knowledge, etc etc and even, in the case of Volkswagen, engage in criminal activity (link). Likewise, if taking new clean tech or infrastructure to market is too risky or not profitable, then market actors are reluctant to invest, and so some non-market mechanism (economic planning of some description such as regulation, industrial policy, public ownership, etc). On top of this, market actors are poor at coordination across sectors in service of societal goals. That’s not their purpose. In many ways, this is similar to the ‘AI alignment problem’: Market actors as unaligned paper-clip maximisers.
We need to for eg eliminate GHGs from natural gas, spin up a replacement for NG inputs in fertilizer production, with those same replacement inputs needing to competitively service clean steel production and clean fuels for hard-to-abate heavy transport (link). Market actors here can have no grand ‘mission orientation’ to coordinate to solve these overlapping challenges, and do so fast. The democratic state, which in principle does have the ability to coordinate with such a mission orientation, must intervene (link). Market-based production inevitably delays the response to a problem once that problem is discovered. This is not just true of environmental problems, but of all problems where the solution is not immediately, sufficiently profitable.
Large pharmaceutical firms largely got out of the business of developing new classes of antibiotic due to their insufficient profitability (because once a course of antibiotics is taken, the infection goes away) compared to drugs for chronic diseases. And so, absent a background of antimicrobial protection—necessary for everything from surgery to inserting a catheter, we confront the grave threat of a return to Victorian-era medicine. My essay on the market failure of antibiotic resistance here (link). Again, the solution here is some sort of intervention in markets at a minimum to de-risk antibiotic production, or at a maximum complete decommodification (global public ownership of the pharmaceutical sector). (One should add here that regulation, industrial policy, public ownership etc are only necessary, not sufficient conditions to enable such technology switching to occur. Bad regulations, poorly informed industrial policy, corrupt bureaucrats, democratic deficits, ‘Deloitte-ification’ of the state, and insufficient state capacity remain obstacles that need to be overcome).
And this will always be true, of all problems we face. There will never be a utopia where humanity has zero problems. What happens instead is that we solve problems and in solving them, we create new, unexpected problems. So we solve those problems, creating yet more (hopefully better) problems, so we solve them, and so on, ad infinitum. This, in passing, is also part of the socialist planner’s critique of market socialism and social democracy, regardless of the feasibility of planning at scale: So long as there are any market actors, there will continue to be incentives to delay problem solving in that infinitude of future, as yet-unknown sectors where problems have been solved only to throw up new problems. If it turns out that the feasibility of planning is extremely restricted, uncalculatable, and we’ve no choice but to continue to allow large portions of production to be allocated on the basis of the price signal, then there will forever be this in-built problem-delay mechanism.
But that’s a tangent from the main traditional socialist/ecomodern left argument against degrowthers: Which is… So long as such democratic interventions to speed up technology switching can enable absolute decoupling (not merely relative decoupling) of resource inputs from production, there is no reason why economic growth cannot continue indefinitely on and beyond this planet. Durand’s piece struggles with this key question of technology. The above trad socialist/ecomodern left critique of markets is dismissed as accelerationist prometheanism as it assumes a ‘reckless act of faith’ of wisdom on the part of socialist leaders to handle capitalist tech. Instead, Durand says we can only use technologies developed under capitalism if they are democratized. But that’s precisely what Huber, myself and other critics of degrowth argue for: to liberate technology from the fetters of markets via democratic planning. Why would anyone think that socialist development of the productive forces or use of those forces wouldn’t be subject to democratic control? Where productive forces are not democratically controlled, it’s not socialism.
There’s certainly a debate between market socialists & socialist planners about how far democratic planning can be extended (my friend @BenBurgis goes into this below), but that’s not the debate between traditional socialists & the degrowthers (link). And if one must have reckless faith in the wisdom of socialist leaders to be able to democratically plan use of technologies developed under capitalism this, then Durand also suffers from that same reckless faith. Even if contradicting himself, Durand does at least think that capitalist technologies—say, antibiotics—can continue to exist under socialism, unlike Saito. Saito argues that we cannot simply put capitalist technologies to use under socialism, for those technologies ‘are created in order to subjugate and control workers.’ Leave aside precisely how the development of antibiotics came about in order to subjugate and control workers rather than, say, to eliminate infectious disease, this means degrowth requires that we give up, for eg, antibiotics.
So we have 2 mutually exclusive visions: the trad socialist one says capitalism fetters production by limiting development of antibiotics & so we must liberate production to have more antibiotics; & the degrowth one whose logical conclusion says we must give up antibiotics. The socialist one says we can have clean aviation & lift the whole world to a standard of living to enjoy the marvel of human flight—but to do so will need much more economic planning; & the degrowth one that says we must abandon this wonder, no matter the amount of planning. Although Saito too is confused, for in the NYT, he says his vision is not a primitivist one and we can continue to enjoy modern comforts.
But which is it, then, Kohei? Do we have to abandon all capitalist tech because it’s developed ‘to subjugate workers’ or do we not? Saito’s vision of a world where everyone has much more leisure time to pursue their own interests is a great one (although I think what he imagines farming to be like is… unrealistic)… but to deliver that while still having homes, schools, hospitals, and the musical instruments, climbing equipment, hobby farming tools etc with which to pursue those interests and have a three-day weekend, will require so much more economic growth.
Max Roser at Oxford’s Our World in Data roughly calculated it would take a 5-fold increase in the global economy to deliver the standard of living of a middle-class Dane to everyone on Earth (link). Denmark, like the other Scando-Australo-Canadian league-table winners, has a decent-ish level of prosperity from a broadly social-democratic society (that nevertheless has suffered extensive neoliberal cuts for decades). But even Denmark does not yet have a four-day work week! Imagine the productivity increases and global economic growth needed to deliver everyone in the world the standard of living of Kohei Saito enjoying his chicken-bothering hobby farm PLUS an extra day off.
It’s all just so unserious. Manifestly arrant nonsense. It’s such a shame that so many have been taken in by it, and socialists of all people! Engels was battling neo-malthusianism a century ago (*more than), comrades! Defence of economic growth really should be ABCs for the left.”