Are young people poised to slam the brake on endless economic growth?


Phillip Inman and Jem Bartholomew

THE GUARDIAN
Sat, 2 December 2023

Photograph: Alamy

When Kat Butler made her first post-lockdown trip to the high street in 2021, she found herself staring, disorientated, at the aisles of clothes in the Perth branch of Mountain Warehouse. “There was just rails and rails of stuff,” she says.

Before the pandemic, Butler, 36, a freelance graphic designer, had enjoyed browsing clothes shops, touching the fabrics and inspecting garments’ construction. But when she returned after the lockdown months, she was “just overwhelmed by the amount of stuff”.

That sent Butler’s mind spinning into worries about the environmental impact of those unending hangers of garments, and led her to re-evaluate her consumption habits.


She is not the only person to have started questioning the idea of shopping as a leisure pursuit. Plenty of consumers report remonstrating with themselves and their friends about the state of the planet, and how that collides with their desire to freshen up their wardrobe with fast fashion and £5 dresses.

With the Christmas shopping season entering its peak, this soul-searching has raised several questions. Is a growing slice of western society finally falling out of love with consumption and growth as an end in itself? And if this phenomenon, described at its most extreme as “degrowth”, is taking hold, how will economies meet their spending needs? Or is it just that surging inflation and a cost of living crisis have placed a speed bump in the way of ever more consumption?
Make do and mend

Online retailers including Amazon and eBay have reported surging sales of secondhand clothes, and the arts and crafts industry, which boomed during the pandemic, is expected to carry on growing for the rest of the decade as people prefer to make stuff rather than buy it new.

In a survey by management consultancy McKinsey in 2020, two-thirds of consumers said they wanted to turn their backs on fast fashion, believing that limiting climate change was even more important following Covid. The survey was commissioned to accompany a report on the fashion industry with a focus on the UK, which is Europe’s biggest consumer of fashion.

Clothing accounts for between 3% and 10% of global carbon emissions, depending on how the industry’s output is measured. As such, it has become totemic among the growing number of experts and consumers who want the capitalist merry-go-round to slow or even stop.

More broadly, in a YouGov survey in August this year, 46% of respondents said environmental sustainability had affected their general household purchases a “fair amount,” up from 41% of those surveyed in August 2019. Among 18-24s the change was starker, rising from 38% to 46% over the same period. (However, people saying it affected spending to a “large extent” fell from 18% to 15%.)

Young people are choosing vintage or charity shops rather than retail chains. Photograph: Chris Hellier/Alamy

Young people are also less likely to drive a car, citing environmental concerns and cost. They are also more likely to have fewer or no children for the same reason, according to a survey carried out in August in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.

Meanwhile, people are still facing severe financial struggles, with 1.8m UK households – almost 3.8 million people – reporting having suffered destitution at some point in 2022, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. A KPMG survey found that two-thirds of UK consumers planned to cut discretionary spending this year.
Growth at all costs?

The terms degrowth and post-growth are used increasingly to popularise the idea that in the 21st century, capitalism is no longer the best allocator of scarce resources.

Supporters of mixed-economy capitalism – where private and state capital investments allow for higher standards of living and greater consumption – say this provides the money for everything from indoor plumbing to new railways.

However, critics argue that in rich countries, where most basic needs have already been met, it encourages us to buy all kinds of things we do not need and speeds us towards climate catastrophe.

We’re trying to convince ourselves we can kickstart growth without a debate about what needs to be done

Tim Jackson, economist

The Austrian-French social philosopher André Gorz is widely credited with having coined the term degrowth in 1972, although it did not start to take off as a movement until the early 2000s.

Prof Tim Jackson, an ecological economist, says that as western governments run out of financial lifelines, they are “stumbling into a post-growth world without having a clue how to manage it”. Jackson has run the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity since 2016. An early adopter of degrowth, he wrote a report for the last Labour government on how to retool the economy for a changing climate. This led to his 2009 book, Prosperity without Growth, which was followed in 2021 by Post Growth – Life After Capitalism.

“We are trying to convince ourselves that we can kickstart growth again without having a transparent debate about what needs to be done,” he says.

Two events last month make his point. In Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement, the UK chancellor glossed over a £20bn shortfall in spending on public services to free up £9bn for corporate tax cuts and £4.5bn of business subsidies, which officials hope will be spent on, among other things, greening the car industry.

A week earlier the German constitutional court had overruled the government’s plan to use special “off-balance-sheet” vehicles to circumvent strict rules constraining the annual budget. As a result, billions of euros’ worth of green projects are expected to be cancelled.
Local not national

Jackson says the momentum behind climate activism suffered a knock during the pandemic, but is recovering. More recently, a lively debate about whether the standard measure of an economy’s health – gross domestic product (GDP) – needs replacing has surprised him.

“The critique of GDP has had more traction than I would have expected,” he says. “You can see how people have come to understand that the gains from GDP growth don’t trickle down.”

Like most post-growth theorists, Jackson says the levels of inequality tolerated in rich countries and the consumption habits of the better-off must be questioned as part of an overhaul of 21st-century capitalism.

Degrowth theories take a socialistic view, stating that people want to contribute to the betterment of human society and will be better able to do that if governments offer access to a job, a basic income and universal healthcare.

Doughnut economics create a space for a conversation beyond party politics

Leonora Grcheva

Urban planner Leonora Grcheva is one of a small group of experts working for the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Now adopted by towns and cities across Europe, doughnut economics involves calculating the impact of all policies on the social and physical environment. Aspects of life from income to housing and energy are displayed as sections on a doughnut shape, with its inner and outer edges representing a social minimum and an ecological ceiling. Finding a balance between the two is vital to ensuring wellbeing for both people and the planet.

Britain is a laggard on doughnut policies compared with many European countries, but Grcheva says a growing number of local authorities are using a dashboard – or in Cornwall council’s case, a doughnut-like decision wheel – to judge the impact of what they do.

She says the main barrier to action in the UK is the highly centralised state, which can overrule almost all local plans. Nevertheless, several community groups have joined the project to discuss investments they can make to improve the local environment.

“One of the beautiful things about doughnut economics is that it creates the space for a conversation beyond party politics,” says Grcheva.

This was the experience of the citizen assemblies commissioned in 2020 by the IPPR thinktank, and established in four corners of the UK. Tees Valley, which is overseen by Tory mayor Ben Houchen, was a participant, as were Thurrock – a Tory heartland in Essex – and the more left-leaning south Wales valleys and Aberdeen. The assemblies came to very similar conclusions about the need for more community-led development.

The Netherlands, however, is far more advanced. In spring 2020, officials in Amsterdam began to apply doughnut economics to housebuilding for a post-Covid world. Marieke van Doorninck, then the city’s deputy mayor, said the city would pass regulations obliging builders to use recycled and bio-based materials, such as wood.
Back to the stone age?

Proponents of post-growth policies say they are not a recipe for inaction, or a return to a horse-and-cart, pre-industrial age; rather they are a means of redirecting resources into investments that result in people living happier, more sustainable lives.

But pro-growth economists argue that carbon emissions can be brought down even while satisfying consumer demands for greater air travel, fancier homes and new cars.

Paul Krugman, the US Nobel prize-winning economist, is in this camp, telling degrowthers this summer that their arguments are “all wrong”. “There is no necessary relationship between economic growth and the burden we place on the environment,” Krugman wrote in the New York Times. “It’s true that the Industrial Revolution greatly increased pollution of all kinds, and countries like India that are still in the early phases of their own economic development are by and large paying a large environmental price.

“But at higher levels of development, delinking growth from environmental impact isn’t just possible in principle but something that happens a lot in practice.”

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also prioritises economic growth, focusing on green jobs and lower emissions, but putting little emphasis on curbing voters’ consumption habits. Rishi Sunak listed growing the economy as one of his five priorities in January.

But Jason Hickel, whose 2020 book, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, has received many plaudits, says there is an observable shift in the academic community towards theories of a post-growth world.

Academics in favour of degrowth argue that we need to tackle excessive consumption at its root rather than attempting to reduce its environmental impact. They dispute plans put forward by the UK Labour party, Germany’s SPD and the Democrats in the US that growth can be green.

A survey of 789 climate policy researchers by Nature magazine revealed widespread scepticism in high-income countries about the idea that as national income rises, “environmental goals prevail over economic growth”. A majority believed green growth amounted to greenwashing. However, in a separate survey, scientists in medium- and low-income countries saw green growth as a way out of poverty.

Surveys in Germany and the US have shown citizens questioning the relentless pursuit of material wealth. Earlier this year the German environment agency found 88% agreed with the statement “we must find ways of living well regardless of economic growth”, with 77% agreeing that “there are natural limits to growth and we went beyond them”. Most tellingly, 73% agreed that “we should be ready to reduce our living standards”.

The SUV, a totem of rampant consumerism, grabbed more than 50% of new car sales in Europe in the first half of 2023. Photograph: William Barton/Alamy

Hickel says the term degrowth has negative connotations, so should only be used in academic circles. He suggests focusing on the benefits of community decision making, and the benefits for human health and wellbeing. His answer would be more citizens’ assemblies, which he trusts to arrive at commonly agreed solutions to local issues. On the climate, as was found with the IPPR experiment, most such groups end up agreeing solutions to local energy, education and health needs that minimise private sector involvement.
Storage boom

Young people say they’re cutting car use, but are still keen on flying. Photograph: Tim Ockenden/PA

Yet for all the signs that the consumer bubble may be deflating, other indicators suggest people are as keen as ever on accumulating stuff. Take the self-storage industry, which has grown into a £1bn turnover business after growing by more than 7% a year since 2010.

Or there’s that totem of rampant consumerism the SUV, which grabbed more than 50% of new car sales in Europe in the first half of 2023, according to Dataforce. Yet they are heavier, less aerodynamic and thirstier than the saloons and hatchbacks they replaced. And though young people say they want to cut car use, they are much less willing to reduce their flying.Interactive

There is also a concern that degrowth suits the times and that things will change if the economic climate improves. In Perth, Butler thinks the change is permanent. She now shops on secondhand sites such as Vinted and eBay, or in charity shops, which is more exciting, she said. “It’s like an Aladdin’s cave: I don’t know what I’m going to find there.”

She has switched away from products that come in plastic, opting to buy greener soap, toothpaste and hair and facial care products. Her only new items now are underwear.

Butler has also taken to upcycling, building a house for her cat, Gaia, from cardboard boxes, with rooftop cat-scratchers designed to look like solar panels. “You don’t need to buy all these pet toys and beds and stuff from China that are just made from acrylic,” she says.

Study examines role of urban agriculture in food-energy-water nexus policies

by The City University of New York

Violin plots showing the range of responses (n=15) for each awareness-increasing policy. Median and interquartile ranges are shown with box plots within each violin plot. Credit: Landscape and Urban Planning (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104848

A new paper in Landscape and Urban Planning examines policies to advance urban agriculture that address the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, the complex relationships among the flows of food, energy and water in cities.

As urban agriculture becomes more prevalent, policies have been established to regulate and support the practice. In this study, a research team including Associate Professor Nevin Cohen and Adjunct Assistant Professor Rositsa T. Ilieva characterize existing FEW nexus policies based on policy data from five case study cities in Europe and the U.S. to analyze their relationships to urban agriculture and to identify policy types that support resource-efficient practices.

The researchers found that despite extensive evidence of the importance of the interconnections among resources, urban policies have seldom considered food, energy and water together, largely due to siloed decision-making bodies that lead to compartmentalized policies.

An analysis of policy data from Dortmund, Gorz´ow Wielkopolski, London, Nantes, and New York City found that the number, type and degree of support for nexus policies vary among the cities. Most urban agriculture policies are implemented at the local scale, and few incorporated all elements of the nexus.

However, many nexus policies indirectly include urban agriculture, such as policy in New York City requiring new buildings, or those undergoing major renovations, to have roofs covered by either solar panels or a green roof system. This regulation simultaneously addresses stormwater management, energy conservation and opportunities for rooftop food production where suitable.

"The study shows that urban policymakers ought to consider the FEW nexus to promote resource efficiency and sustainability as they try to support and expand urban farms and community gardens," says Dr. Cohen.

"Our paper highlights the importance of comparative cross-country research given the global nature of climate-related challenges affecting local communities," Dr. Ilieva emphasizes. "By highlighting pioneering urban agriculture strategies within municipal food-energy-water policies worldwide, we can help policymakers leverage the power of new and existing public policies to address these interconnected issues in tandem."

More information: Runrid Fox-Kämper et al, The role of urban agriculture in food-energy-water nexus policies: Insights from Europe and the U.S, Landscape and Urban Planning (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104848

Provided by The City University of New York Gauging the environmental impact of urban farms and gardens

Four-day work week: Reformist or revolutionary?

Transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society will mean moving away from the capitalist growth imperative

Nick Gottlieb / April 9, 2023 / 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Office workers in the early 1980s. Photo courtesy the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Flickr.


The British Columbia Green Party is the closest thing to a left-wing political party (at least, with any seats) we’ve got in Canada. So I did a double-take when I saw that the World Economic Forum is advocating for the same policy they are: reduced working hours.

It turns out the BC Greens are just the latest to join an odd convergence of interests supporting the four-day work week. Groups ranging from self-proclaimed “business leaders” to mainstream media outlets, climate activists, and radical economists seem to have joined forces in support of this policy.

What exactly is going on? Is it genuinely a win-win-win, a top-to-bottom alignment of class interests with climate benefits to boot, just waiting for someone to flip the switch?

If you think that sounds implausible, it’s because it is: the reality is that the anti-capitalist economists who first studied the four-day work week made a radically different case for it than pro-corporate magazines like Forbes. Whether it’s radical or not depends on the form and context in which it’s implemented.

The World Economic Forum and various other business interests—I’ll call them the “Davos contingent”—advocating for a four-day work week claim that it will help fight gender inequality and climate change (along with a few other trendy issues they can try to co-opt). Simultaneously, and here’s the crux, a compressed work schedule will improve worker productivity to the point that it more than offsets the reduction in working hours.

One article cites a Japanese study that saw worker productivity go up by 40 percent, nearly double the reduction in working hours, and goes so far as to claim that reduced working hours is essential for “preserving economic growth.” Every piece of support from this camp emphasizes that cutting working hours will actually help grow the economy.

There is some evidence that cutting out an entire day of work could reduce carbon emissions even if it stimulated economic growth, although the mechanism behind this raises some questions about who exactly the Davos contingent imagines enjoying the benefits of a four-day work week. Most pilot studies have found climate benefits coming predominantly from a decline in commuting and, in some cases, from reduced energy use at offices.

To capture these climate benefits, new employees can’t fill in for the old ones, which in practice limits the opportunity to businesses where daily presence isn’t required—effectively, to the so-called “knowledge sector.” A grocery store, for example, would not see the same climate benefits from implementing a four-day work week that a public relations firm might because they’re simply going to hire more cashiers to fill in their hours. The same goes for hospitals, schools, and much of the rest of the economy.

So there’s already some question about just who this policy is designed for, and what limitations that might have on its purported benefits. But to top it off, the vast majority of the articles coming out of the Davos contingent justify the potential emissions reductions by mis-applying research by a sociologist named Juliet Schor—research that demonstrated that reducing working hours could reduce environmental footprint precisely by reducing total economic activity.

The Davos contingent is, at least publicly, attempting to have it both ways, arguing that we should reduce working hours as a way to stimulate economic growth while simultaneously claiming the environmental benefits that radical economists have found would come with reducing economic growth.

Schor’s research on working hours is part of a tradition that is now known as degrowth: the idea that to remain within the Earth’s ecological limits, wealthy countries need to shrink their economies. Most degrowth advocates support reducing working hours, but precisely as a way to help reduce total economic activity while mitigating harm to workers. Shorter work weeks and job sharing are ways to ensure people can still earn a living even if total economic activity in wealthier, industrialized countries declines. If, as the Davos contingent proposes, reducing working hours increases total economic activity through improved productivity, then the benefits cited by degrowth economists disappear.

All that leaves us with the question: should we support it, and how? It’s helpful to look at this through the frame created by the socialist philosopher André Gorz. Is this a “non-reformist reform,” or a reformist one? It is clearly a boon for workers—at least, the workers it applies to. But beyond its immediate material benefit, will it further entrench class society or will it contribute to the longer-term project of overcoming it? Will it perpetuate or accelerate the rate of consumption, or will it put wealthy countries like Canada on a path towards shrinking their material footprint? Does it contribute to revolutionary change even though its support base includes those thoroughly in the reformist (and even capitalist) camp?

As Mark and Paul Engler explain, Gorz didn’t give us a clear litmus test for whether something is reformist or non-reformist: context, framing, and the process of fighting for the reform itself are key factors. Just like Rosa Luxemburg argued in her famous essay on the subject, reformists and revolutionaries often pursue the same short-term tactics, but by framing those tactics as the end goal themselves, reformists lose out on the more transformative benefits that stand to be gained.

1933

Companies and governments implementing a four-day work week because of the (claimed) benefits for business, workers, and climate? Reformist. Labour laws won by social movements that implement a four-day work week as a first step towards a bigger project of moving away from economic growth and towards sufficiency in the Global North? Non-reformist.

So where does that leave the BC Green Party’s campaign? Their framing is, at least so far, thoroughly reformist, presumably because they see that approach as a path to actually getting something passed. It’s a classic example of the hazards radical movements face when they obtain electoral power. But to their credit, the legislation they suggest the province adopt appears designed to apply to much more than just the knowledge sector and doesn’t specifically highlight productivity gains as a goal.

Ultimately, what it would take for this to be a radical campaign in BC is a shift in framing: are we simply trying to incrementally improve worker wellbeing and, maybe, cut a few tonnes of carbon emissions? Or are we trying to take a step towards transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society by moving away from the capitalist growth imperative?

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.

American workers feel alienated, helpless and overwhelmed – here’s one way to alleviate their malaise

Alec Stubbs,
The Conversation

November 12, 2022

Amazon worker

First it was the “Great Resignation.” Then it was “nobody wants to work anymore.” Now it’s “quiet quitting.”

Yet it seems like no one wants to talk about what I see as the root cause of America’s economic malaise – work under contemporary capitalism is fundamentally flawed.

As a political philosopher studying the effects of contemporary capitalism on the future of work, I believe that the inability to dictate and meaningfully control one’s own working life is the problem.

Democratizing work is the solution.

The problem of work

What can be said about the malaise surrounding work under capitalism today?

There are at least four major problems:

First, work can be alienating. Workers are often not in control of how they work, when they work, what is done with the goods and services they produce, and what is done with the profits made from their work.

This is particularly evident in the rise of precarious forms of work, like those that are found in the gig economy.

According to the Pew Research Center, there’s been a decline in people finding meaning in their work. Nearly half of front-line managers and employees do not think that they can “live their purpose” through their jobs.

Second, workers are not paid the full value of their labor. Real wages have not kept pace with productivity, driving economic inequality and a decline in labor’s share of income.

Third, people are time poor. In the U.S., full-time employed workers work an average of 8.72 hours per day despite productivity increases. Long working hours, along with a number of other factors, contribute to the feeling of “time poverty,” which has a negative impact on psychological well-being.


Constrained by the demands of work, many people find they have little time to pursue their own interests.  z_wei/iStock via Getty Images

Fourth, automation puts jobs and wages at risk. While technological innovation could in theory liberate people from the 40-hour workweek, as long as changes aren’t made to the structure of work, automation will simply continue to exert downward pressure on wages and contribute to increases in precarious employment.

Ultimately, the potential of automation to reduce working hours is inconsistent with the profit motives of capitalist companies.
Humanize work or reduce it?

On the one hand, many people lack work that is personally meaningful. On the other hand, many are also desperate for a more complete life – one that allows for creative self-expression and community-building outside of work.

So, what is to be done with the problem of work?

There are two competing visions of the best way to arrive at a solution.

The first is what Kathi Weeks, author of “The Problem with Work,” calls the “socialist humanist” position. According to socialist humanists, work “is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, from which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.”

In other words, jobs often make workers feel less human. The way to remedy this problem is by re-imagining work so that it is self-determined and people are better compensated for the work they do.

The second is what’s known as the “post-work” position. The post-work theorists believe that while doing some work might be necessary, the work ethic, as a prerequisite for social value, can be corrosive to humanity; they argue that meaning, purpose and social value are not necessarily found in work but instead reside in the communities and relationships built and sustained outside of the workplace.

So people should be liberated from the requirement of work in order to have the free time to do as they please, and embrace what French-Austrian philosopher André Gorz called “life as an end in itself.”

While both positions might stem from theoretical disagreements, is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Can work be humanized and play a less central role in our lives?
Democratic worker control

My own research has focused on what I see as a critical answer to the above question: democratic worker control.

Democratic worker control – where companies are owned and controlled by the workers themselves – is not a new concept. Worker cooperatives are already found in many sectors throughout the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe.

In contrast to how work is currently organized under capitalism, democratic worker control humanizes work by allowing workers to determine their own working conditions, to own the full value of their labor, to dictate the structure and nature of their jobs and, crucially, to determine their own working hours.

This perspective recognizes that the problems people face in their working lives are not merely the result of an unjust distribution of resources. Rather, they result from power differentials in the workplace. Being told what to do, when to do it and how much you will earn is an alienating experience that leads to depression, precarity and economic inequality.


Being told what to do and when to do it can make you feel helpless and dispirited.
rudall30/iStock via Getty Images

On the other hand, having a democratic say over your working life means the ability to make work less alienating. If people have democratic control over the work they do, they are unlikely to choose work that feels meaningless. They can also find their niche and figure out what’s fulfilling to them within a community of equals.

Democratizing work also leads to an increase in labor’s share of income and a reduction in economic inequality. It has been shown that unionized workers earn an average of 11.2% more in wages than nonunionized workers in similar industries. Income inequality is also much lower in worker cooperatives compared with capitalist companies.

But work should not be confused with the whole of life. Nor should it be assumed that a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and the acquisition of new skills can’t occur outside of work. Playing, volunteering and worshipping can all do the same.

However, in capitalist companies, labor-saving technologies do not afford workers with more leisure time. Instead, labor-saving technologies mean workers are more likely to face unemployment and downward pressure on wages.

Under democratic worker control, workers can choose to prioritize values that are consistent with themselves rather than the dictates of profit-seeking shareholders. Labor-saving technologies make it more likely that leisure time can become a choice. Workers are free to assert their own values, including that of less work and more play.
A mosaic approach

Of course, democratic worker control is not a silver bullet to economic discontent, and these changes to the workplace can’t occur in a vacuum.

For instance, trials of a four-day workweek without a reduction in pay are increasingly popular, and they have had resounding success in both the United Kingdom and Iceland. Workers report feeling less stressed and less burned out. They have a better work-life balance and report being just as productive, if not more so. Federal legislation to reduce working hours without a reduction in pay, such as through the implementation of a four-day workweek, could accompany a movement for democratic worker control.

The expansion of social services, the development of a public banking system and the provision of a universal basic income may also be important components of meaningful change. A broader movement to democratize the U.S. economy is needed if society is going to take the challenges of work in the 21st century seriously. In short, I believe a mosaic of approaches is necessary.

But one thing is clear: As long as work remains the dictates of shareholders rather than the workers themselves, much work will remain a source of alienation and will persist as an organizing feature of American life.

Alec Stubbs, Postdoctoral Fellow of Philosophy, UMass Boston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why We Have To Give Up On Endless Economic Growth

Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.

Ishaq Fahim for Noema Magazine

BY DOMINIC BOYER

MARCH 3, 2022
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist who teaches at Rice University, where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). He is a 2021-2022 Berggruen Institute fellow.

A new ecoliberal political consensus is struggling to be born — a consensus whose commitment to a truly sustainable modernity might well prove resilient to the authoritarian-nationalist and collectivist overtures gaining signal strength and ground troops around the world. But it has a long and difficult road ahead of it, and a paradox at its heart.

In 1984 Claus Leggewie and Brice Lalonde wrote about “ecoliberalism,” the idea that classic liberal values like individuality and industry can harmonize with serious ecological politics. The term describes a liberal-democratic trend dating back to the 1970s that has become more prominent in recent years as signs of climate catastrophe and ecologically influenced social destabilization have multiplied around the world.

It is sometimes mistaken for a neo-Keynesian economics, but Keynesianism had no great environmental mission to offer. Where Keynesianism and ecoliberalism do overlap is in their acceptance of growth-oriented capitalist industry as the economic core of liberal-democratic society.

Keynes saw market capitalism as a lesser evil than state-controlled industry, even if he dreamed of doing away with the types of capitalists who demand rents without adding value. Early ecoliberals helped shape the aspiration toward “sustainability,” which was (and is) predicated on the idea that advances in technology could eventually provide a secure industrial infrastructure for ecologically sustainable growth.

Today’s nascent ecoliberal consensus is exemplified by the recent passage of the European Climate Law, a binding framework for bringing Europe’s economy and society to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Though critics have said it made too many concessions to fossil fuel interests, there is good reason to think we will look back on the ECL as an important watershed in the global struggle against climate change. A legally binding pathway to decarbonizing roughly a sixth of the global economy is a historic achievement by any measure.

The ECL’s broader framework, the European Green Deal, originally aimed to “transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use.”

“Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.”

One could argue that the whole promise of ecoliberalism lives or dies on the term “decoupled.” Unfortunately, there is scant evidence thus far that decoupling economic growth from resource use is both possible and sustainable.

A major study published in 2021 that looked at both production- and consumption-based emissions from 2015 to 2018 in 116 mostly high-carbon national economies found that only 14 of them had been able to decouple GDP growth from both types of carbon emissions growth.

That might seem like progress, since a similar study published in 2012 found that zero countries had achieved decoupling. But the 2021 study also found that 22 countries that had managed to decouple between 2010 and 2015 had actually recoupled again after 2015. In other words, decoupling requires both pressure and vigilance. Worse yet, the study found, “Even countries that have achieved absolute decoupling are still adding emissions to the atmosphere thus showing the limits of ‘green growth’ and the growth paradigm.”

This is the ecoliberal dilemma in a nutshell. Legislation like the European Climate Law and the stalled Build Back Better plan in the U.S. show that sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster. The global supply of renewable energy will increase by about 35 gigawatts from 2021 to 2022.

That would be marvelous news, if not for the fact that the world’s power demand is projected to increase by 100 gigawatts during the same year. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects a 50% increase in world energy use by 2050, which renewables will only be able to partly cover, thus leaving the world in still worse emissions shape than it is today.

The EIA growth data is more convincing than its prediction that the energy mix will still be predominantly made up of fossil fuels in 2050. Still, it underscores a genuine problem. We are working harder and better at sustainability but finding ourselves falling still further behind.

Of the three core concerns of liberalism — liberty, private property and industry — the attachment to industry is strongest. Liberalism champions freedom and liberty relentlessly, but it has always quietly tolerated dispossessing and even enslaving some as the cost of enabling others. The private property commitment is more resolute, but certain variants of liberalism, notably Keynesianism, have displayed strong commitments to redistributive mechanisms in the name of public goods and national welfare. Industry, meanwhile, is liberalism’s one true love, a connection that dates back to the dawn of liberal political philosophy.

In his “Second Treatise,” John Locke, for example, describes labor as intrinsic to the establishment of property: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” But not even all hard work is created equal.

Much as Adam Smith would later echo in this theory of opulence, technology combined with labor (in other words, industry) was the decisive formula for creating value out of the natural resources God gifted humanity. Technology functioned, according to the philosophy of the time, as a sign of grace dividing the world into those with the rational wherewithal to make the most of divine gifts (European men mostly) and those who allowed their gifts to lie fallow and go to waste.

“There is an ancient symbiotic relationship between liberal political ideology and the industrial growth orientation.”

How this equation functioned as a pretext for global colonial occupations and dispossessions for several centuries is the subject for another essay. My point here is that there is an ancient symbiotic relationship between liberal political ideology and the industrial growth orientation that is usually glossed as the internal logic of capitalism. Buried in growth is the pursuit not just of profit, but also of grace, and above all the moral right to accumulate resources and exert dominion.

I believe this history sheds light on why ecoliberalism hasn’t yet proved itself capable of fully acknowledging, let alone remediating, the problems (ecological but not only ecological) created by its centuries-long legacy of relentlessly expanding industrialization. These problems are constantly discounted and marginalized in mainstream liberal politics. Back in the 1970s, when the unsustainability of the current global trajectory first came into clear focus, the few, like André Gorz, who were brave enough to talk about the obvious need for “degrowth” were laughed out of the political sphere.


Today, degrowth is poised to become a much more salient political movement, one that is gaining strength from new economic theories — like Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, for example, which seeks to rethink economic activity as finding a “safe and just space” for humanity between social minima and planetary maxima. Such theories are being put into experimental practice by city governments in places like Amsterdam and Barcelona.

Mainstream liberals, and many ecoliberals, continue to laugh them off. But the laughter is increasingly nervous, a recognition that degrowth is likely on the horizon one way or another: either through collapse of the current civilizational trajectory or through some of kind of managed transition to widespread industrial and economic downscaling. In a fundamental way, liberalism finds it difficult to imagine, let alone to embrace, such a future. Liberalism has historically always been about the quest for “more.” It has no idea what to do with “less” as a rallying cry.

Instead, at the moment, ecoliberalism (as well as the “green capitalism” that is its symbiotic companion) is betting the only hand it really knows how to play: technology. From massive investments in speculative technologies like nuclear fusion and deep geothermal, to the serial boondoggles of nuclear fission renaissance and carbon capture and humbler options like solar photovoltaic technology, everywhere ecoliberalism seeks the cure for several centuries of rampant industrialism in the emergence of new forms of industry.

It imagines that it can beat out the worst scenarios of environmental collapse by coming up with a technological solution that allows us to have it all: that is, a universal so-called “middle class standard” predicated on massive energy and resource use that can center a global ecoliberal dispensation. But the truth is that it hasn’t yet found an ensemble of technological solutions that are adequate to take on even one of the several hyperobject-level environmental dilemmas facing us (e.g. global warming, plastic and toxic pollution, species extinction) let alone all of them together. And the solutions that is has found so far are not keeping pace with the rising global demand for “middle class” lifestyles.

The problem is less the technologies themselves than the expectation that they must combine efficiently with a model of endless capital development. The more foresighted among contemporary ecoliberals — let’s say Elon Musk — combine a fabulous technological inventiveness with a clear thirst for the extraplanetary as the only way to keep the current ecological Ponzi scheme going more than another few decades. The truth is that if we stay on just this one planet, degrowth needs to be taken more seriously

“Liberalism has historically always been about the quest for ‘more.’ It has no idea what to do with ‘less’ as a rallying cry.”

Degrowth is not a new idea and urtexts like Gorz’s “Ecology as Politics”deserve reevaluation today. In it, Gorz argues that sustainability will never be attained in a capitalist economy because of a dynamic he calls the “poverty of affluence.” Like Marx, Gorz doesn’t doubt that capitalism is very effective at producing useful things through its constant innovation of technology.

What also remains constant, however, is that new technology emerges in a context of scarcity that preserves class inequality and hierarchy. According to Gorz, new technological achievements and luxuries enjoyed first only by the elite attract the desires of the masses toward them. As the masses gain access to old luxuries, new unattainable luxuries develop to replace them. This dynamic is intrinsically growth-oriented: “the mainspring of growth is this generalized forward flight, stimulated by a deliberately sustained system of inequalities.”

Even if capitalism can lift the floor of poverty as measured by consumption, it also raises the ceiling of luxury just as quickly. Technologies may themselves be helpful, but the dynamic of constant innovation and consumption is intrinsically unsustainable. Gorz imagines the world of degrowth as defined instead by universally available highly durable goods, beautiful public dwellings and transportation and a 20-hour work week focused on providing essential needs for all, with the remaining time left over for creative self-realization.

Contemporary degrowth thinking is not simply Gorzian — it is an experimental space for many ideas including ecofeminist and Indigenous interventions like the Red Deal. But it tends to be at least loosely anti-capitalist in its orientation and critical of the luxury consumption trends of the global North. Degrowthers, generally speaking, do not wish to deprive the global South of the opportunity for material development. They want to see the degrowth of Northern high energy consumption, creating the opportunity for a more equitable planetary modernity.

The core reasoning that the global economy needs to slow down — if only to buy ecoliberalism more time to solidify its consensus and improve its technology — is solid. And, in an ambitious way, degrowth synthesizes certain Keynesian and ecoliberal ideas into a worldview that seeks to remediate both social inequality and environmental destabilization at the same time.

Contemporary degrowth theorists tend to share a Pikettyian sensibility that the world does not lack sufficient capital development to address human misery; rather, the problem is resource hoarding by wealthy nations and classes, meaning that the world distributes its abundant existing capital poorly. Here’s how Jason Hickel puts it in “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World,” one of the more comprehensive and persuasive texts in the emerging degrowth canon:

“Capitalism is a giant energy-sucking machine. In order to reduce energy use, we need to slow it all down. Slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste, and slow down the mad pace of our lives. This is what we mean by ‘degrowth’. Again, degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation.”

Hickel joins ecoliberals in fierce opposition to obvious scandals like ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and the massive energy waste associated with speculative instruments like crypto. He also offers a rough list of intermediary objectives for making this new civilization, including: ending planned obsolescence, limiting advertising, shifting from ownership to usership, ending food waste, downscaling ecologically destructive industries (industrial beef for example), redistributing labor to avoid unemployment, and reskilling labor toward low carbon industries.

Still, Hickel openly acknowledges that “we don’t yet have all the answers. No one can give us a simple recipe for a post-capitalist economy; ultimately it has to be a collective project. All I’ve done here is offer a few possibilities that I hope will nourish the imagination. As for how to make it happen — that will require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history.”

The pivot away from degrowth governance and toward movement politics inevitably raises questions such as “degrowth by whom?” But I don’t think Hickel and others are trying to be evasive, so much as realistic that talking best practices of governance before a strong social movement emerges is a cart-horse reversal.

“There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a creative, experimental and joyful approach to remaking civilization.”

And where the movements are already vigorous enough to impact governance — for example, Barcelona — the early results of experiments in creating a “solidarity economy” are encouraging. Cooperatives like Som Energíaand Som Mobilitatare more than conventional service providers offering electricity and EV ride sharing, respectively. They are active agents of energy literacy and degrowth ethics who are helping their customers learn to use less power and to drive only when truly necessary. Som Mobilitat even found a way to make degrowth less about denial by sponsoring a lively energy efficiency race, in which the objective was to see who could travel the farthest on a set charge.

With all due respect to good governance, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing a creative, experimental and joyful approach to remaking civilization. Together with Cymene Howe and Daniel Aldana Cohen, I led a public event in Austin, Texas, a few years ago called “Low Carbon Leisure, Low Carbon Pleasure,” the point of which was to remind us high-carbon Northerners that much of what is truly enjoyable in life is either already low carbon or could find a low-carbon substitute with relative ease.

Low-carbon play, in other words, remains available to us even in a world defined by the high-carbon treadmill. Degrowth sounds like sacrifice, especially to ecoliberals. But what if the pursuit of less was framed as the pursuit of happiness by better means? Decoupling is much more likely to be achieved sustainably if citizens and governments are rowing in the same direction.

Ultimately, I think collaboration with the degrowth movement is part of what solves the ecoliberal dilemma. It will help ecoliberalism to fall out of love with industrial expansion while reinforcing the values of liberty, equality and justice that liberalism has long championed. I’m not expecting ecoliberals to fall in love with degrowth, at least not right away. But perhaps they can develop a solid friendship based on their common cause to avoid the worst scenarios of environmental catastrophe.

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FAVORITE VILLAN OF THE CULTURE WAR
What Herbert Marcuse Got Right — and Wrong

Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.
Herbert Marcuse, photographed on May 18, 1979. (DPA / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

BYJEREMY COHAN BENJAMIN SERBY

12.27.2021

This article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. 

Few intellectuals have been so closely identified with a social movement as Herbert Marcuse was with the transatlantic New Left in the late 1960s. In 1966, the year One-Dimensional Man was issued in paperback, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) included the book in their political education curriculum, alongside the works of C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, Paul A. Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Following its translation into German and Italian the next year, it quickly became recognized as “a primary ideological source” for young radicals in Europe, according to Hubert J. Erb in the Austin Statesmen in 1967. In the upheavals that rocked universities during the first half of 1968, Marcuse, the “prophet of the New Left,” was suddenly everywhere. Students in Berlin held a banner proclaiming “Marx, Mao, Marcuse!” — an alliterative slogan more elaborately formulated by demonstrators in Rome: “Marx is the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword!” Although dismissed by most liberal critics and increasingly denounced by a motley chorus of conservatives, left sectarians, and Soviet apparatchiks, One-Dimensional Man maintained its position as the “bible” of the New Left through the end of the decade, providing, as American commentator Allen Graubard noted in 1968, a “special philosophical vocabulary” that graced New Left journals “as if it were part of ordinary language.”

This article aims to introduce and critically reevaluate One-Dimensional Man for today’s socialists. We begin with the book’s enthusiastic reception within the New Left, capturing why and how it resonated with a generation of young activists in the 1960s. Marcuse’s resolute moral and political opposition to the destructive direction of late capitalist society helped resuscitate the sense that the status quo was unsustainable and change was urgent. Unfortunately, however, some of the book’s weakest aspects — such as its offering as alternatives to the status quo various paths (cultural radicalism, new subjects of history, ultraleftism) that proved to be dead ends — were often its greatest draws for its New Left readers, something Marcuse himself understood and resisted.

In important ways, the New Left missed core aspects of Marcuse’s critical project that are worth retrieving for today. We turn to reconstructing and evaluating Marcuse’s moral and materialist analysis of late capitalism. We lay out the philosophical basis for his critique and his insistence on the breadth and depth of the moral commitments — to freedom, equality, happiness, reason, and peace — undergirding socialist politics. We then examine Marcuse’s materialist social theory, which raised critical questions about the gap between socialist theory and social conditions in “the affluent society” that resonate in our own moment. Our interpretation emphasizes the overlooked degree to which the “classical” Marxism of the Second International provides the underpinnings of One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse’s materialist analyses of working-class integration through consumerism, a rising standard of living, and the culture industry aimed to explain capitalism’s unexpected resilience and absorptive capacities.

It would ultimately be left both to Marcuse’s contemporaries Ralph Miliband and André Gorz and to today’s socialists to draw out the political implications of Marcuse’s questions and method and to formulate a socialist strategy adequate to the advanced capitalist world. Though he insisted that the basic premises of Marxist social theory remained correct — a distinct and underappreciated quality of the book — a sense of futility with the theory’s practical implications in the present, as well as fidelity to a vision of social change as total historical rupture, drew Marcuse to paint an imaginative but inadequate picture of his moment as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s proverbial “night in which all cows are black,” void of possibilities for radical social transformation.

There are, we suggest, two souls of Herbert Marcuse — on the one hand, the critical and materialist; on the other, the moralistic and defeatist — each with its own significance for today’s activists. We close by suggesting that One-Dimensional Man’s decline from its previous stardom may offer today’s Left a chance to learn from its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings regarding commodified liberation, while leaving firmly in the past its political Manichaeism and culturalist despair.
Guru of the New Left

Hebert Marcuse, a German-Jewish philosopher, lived a turbulent but scholarly life that hardly seemed to set him up to become a household name and “father” to a mass movement. He grew up in Berlin, and though he was politicized by the abortive German Revolution of 1918–19, he soon went to Freiburg to study philosophy under Martin Heidegger. (Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers’ council during the revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.) Blocked in mainstream German academic circles with the rise of Nazism, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research (also known as the “Frankfurt School”) and, in the late 1930s, emigrated to the United States to teach at Columbia University. During World War II, Marcuse worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helping to guide the war effort against the Nazis. He eventually returned to teaching, first at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego, where he became a bête noire of the Right, facing the condemnation of then governor Ronald Reagan.

Among Marcuse’s major writings, his first book published in English, Reason and Revolution (1941), remains one of the best interpretations of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and an expression of the engaged philosophy that he would continue to champion throughout his career. His other most important works were: Eros and Civilization (1955), a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud that aimed to historicize modern psychology, investigate the psychic sources of domination, and articulate a utopia of fulfillment and sexual liberation; The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), which argued for the centrality of art, imagination, and sensuality to human emancipation; and, of course, One-Dimensional Man (published in 1964, but substantially finished in the late ’50s), which is the subject of this article.The New Left missed core aspects of Marcuse’s critical project that are worth retrieving for today.

Indeed, it may seem especially surprising that One-Dimensional Man, widely regarded as abstruse and pessimistic in the extreme, should have become so deeply insinuated in the discourse of a mass movement. While Marcuse promised, in his preface, that his argument would vacillate between two contradictory hypotheses — “that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future” and “that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society” — One-Dimensional Man was virtually silent on the second point, ultimately presenting a critical theory of society with no “liberating tendencies” capable of translating it into reality. Reviewers charged Marcuse with overlooking the obvious social ferment in American society at a time of escalating civil rights and antiwar militancy. Others excoriated Marcuse for characterizing the welfare state as a container of radical energies rather than an achievement by and for the working class. Although remarking that “qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without,” Marcuse even expressed skepticism toward the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. This great refusal to name possibilities in the present, this maddening tendency to see all apparent opposition as always already absorbed into and reinforcing the system, followed from the traditional materialist framework of Marcuse’s analysis, on the one hand, and the Luxemburgian quest for a total negation of the existing order — a social force capable of “breaking out of this whole” — on the other.

Ultimately, it is the depth of Marcuse’s quest for revolutionary rupture, and his insistence on its necessity, that accounts for the impact of One-Dimensional Man on the youth of affluent nations. Even if the book suggested that such a rupture was nowhere on the horizon, its account of the domination and repression subtly pervading advanced capitalist society confirmed the unarticulated observations of many newly politicized activists who were, moreover, enchanted by Marcuse’s expansive conception of liberation and his willingness to speculate about a utopian future. While the book’s departures from orthodox Marxism caused less shrewd critics to conclude that he had retreated “into the realm of Hegelian idealism,” the Marxologist George Lichtheim correctly recognized One-Dimensional Man, upon its release, as the introduction of Western Marxism to an American audience. To Lichtheim, the book was “a portent” of things to come, and, indeed, the few hopeful passages in the book seemed to anticipate the social unrest coming from exactly the groups Marcuse identified as “those who form the human base of the social pyramid — the outsiders and the poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions.” Thus did Marcuse’s elegy for the revolutionary working class intensify an ongoing search for new subjects of world-historical transformation, despite his explicit warnings that no such subject existed.

“It is sometimes said of Marcuse that the students who follow him haven’t the slightest idea what he means,” the Washington Post observed in 1968. Initial reviewers cautioned, “This is not an easy book,” noting its difficult syntax and disquieting aporetic conclusions. The ambiguities of One-Dimensional Man are legion. Does Marcuse’s argument depend, as Alasdair MacIntyre charged, on “a crude and unargued technological determinism”? Is his “technological order” in fact a political-economic system — or not? Does he describe class exploitation, or universal enslavement to the apparatus of domination? While oblique references to “the particular interests that organize the apparatus” evince a class analysis, much of the language in the book — including its very title — aligns with conventional mid-century humanistic discourse. Indeed, while it was possible for one reviewer to describe the book as decidedly not “just one more journalistic work on the alienation of modern man,” R.D. Laing, writing in the New Left Review, drew the opposite conclusion. Anticipating much of the book’s reception, Laing channeled what he took to be the lament at its core: “Will man be able to re-invent himself in the face of this new form of dehumanization?”

To Marcuse’s New Left interpreters, at least one point was unequivocal: the working classes were bought off, a conservative force, leaving, three SDS theorists wrote in 1965, “virtually no legitimate places from which to launch a total opposition movement.” Invoking Marcuse against calls like Bayard Rustin’s for a coalition politics anchored in the trade union movement, these activists looked beyond purportedly oppositional groups that had succumbed to the lures of parliamentarism and the welfare state, calling instead for “a thoroughly democratic revolution” led by “the most oppressed” — those least captured by existing institutions. But while they looked to the urban poor (as opposed to the working class), by 1968, the search for a revolutionary subject that was carried out under the sign of One-Dimensional Man just as often led to college students, disaffected intellectuals, and the “new working class” of salaried technicians and professionals. Within SDS, opponents of the workerist proposals put forward by the Progressive Labor faction “drew heavily on the ideas of Herbert Marcuse” to support an approach to organizing groups outside “the traditional, narrow industrial working class.” In Europe, students cited Marcuse on behalf of their view of the university as a nexus of revolutionary power. For his part, Marcuse at times seemed to encourage this reading. When asked about the radical forces in the world in July 1968, he placed “the intelligentsia, particularly the students” at the top of the list, followed only by “minorities in the ghetto.” They alone — not the working class — resisted incorporation.

This turn away from the labor movement accompanied other shifts in perspective: from “exploitation” to “alienation,” and from class to consciousness, as the source of radical opposition. As one popular underground newspaper, Berkeley Barb, summarized the argument of One-Dimensional Man in May 1968, “Only those groups on the outside of automation and ‘progress’ — the unemployed, the blacks and minorities, the students — think.” Late-1960s enthusiasts of cultural revolution, such as Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, enlisted Marcuse in their Romantic attacks on consumerism and technology, dispensing with the materialist underpinnings of his analysis and, as Russell Jacoby noted, conflating his critique of instrumental reason with a subjectivist abandonment of reason itself. By a sleight of hand, Roszak cited Marcuse in order to unmask Marxism as “the mirror image of bourgeois industrialism,” guilty of the same soulless hyperrationality as the society it ostensibly opposes. For Reich, meanwhile, the totalizing ideology-critique in One-Dimensional Man had demonstrated that the source of domination is not in the social relations of production but in consciousness, attitude, and lifestyle. “Nobody wants inadequate housing and medical care — only the machine,” he explained:


Nobody wants war except the machine. And even businessmen, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in America. They are all fellow sufferers.

While it is true that Marcuse could hardly be held responsible for these depoliticized corruptions of his ideas, it is telling that he felt compelled to respond to them — more than once.

In fact, Marcuse’s drift away from One-Dimensional Man began almost from the moment it landed on bookshelves, as he attempted, in one historian’s words, “to break out of the theoretical box he had placed himself in with that book.” Writing in the International Socialist Journal in 1965, he declared, “The contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger,” thereby guarding against the impression that advanced capitalism had achieved permanent stability. Speaking to leftist students in Berlin the following year, he waxed enthusiastic about “the militant Liberation movements in the developing countries” and — picking up a theme that would become dominant for the rest of the decade — the alienated youth of the affluent nations. By 1967, he had come to view the counterculture as representing “a total rupture” with the ideology of advanced capitalism, a force heralding “a total trans-valuation of values, a new anthropology” and the development of needs that the existing political and economic system could not satisfy. The student uprisings of 1968 reinforced Marcuse’s growing conviction that “the only viable social revolution which stands today is the Youth” and that “the New Left today is the only hope we have.” So profoundly did this belief in these groups’ emancipatory potential shift Marcuse’s social theory that his 1969 book An Essay on Liberation was initially to be titled Beyond One-Dimensional Man. In the 1970s, even as he worried over the turn to the right (“counterrevolution”) in US politics, he would embrace ecology and especially the women’s movement — “perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have” — as pointing the way to a qualitative break with capitalist society.Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory.

In the final analysis, however, Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory. The student movement, the hippie counterculture, the radical intelligentsia — these were catalyst groups with a “preparatory function.” Their task was not revolution, but “radical enlightenment”; lacking a mass character, they could at best move the broader population from false to oppositional consciousness. Their signal achievement was having called into question “the prevailing structure of needs” and freed “imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason.” Marcuse applauded the New Left but cautiously warned his readers not to overrate its significance. The rebellions in Paris in May 1968, while encouraging as “a mass action,” were not a revolution, and the American campus revolts of that season in no way changed the fact that the situation in the United States was “not even pre-revolutionary.” Even at his most utopian, Marcuse inserted escape clauses like the following:


By itself, this opposition cannot be regarded as agent of radical change; it can become such an agent only if it is sustained by a working class which is no longer the prisoner of its own integration and of a bureaucratic trade-union and party apparatus supporting this integration.

Although he insisted that “the traditional idea of the revolution and the traditional strategy of the revolution” had been “surpassed by the development of . . . society,” Marcuse confessed in 1968, “In spite of everything that has been said, I still cannot imagine a revolution without the working class.”

By the end of the 1960s, it was clear to Marcuse that while the “Great Refusal” he had predicted in the conclusion to One-Dimensional Man had materialized, it was bound to remain a mere gesture — even a reactionary “confusion of personal with social liberation” — if it could not reawaken the working class from its slumber. And yet he was extremely pessimistic about the development of revolutionary class consciousness in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). For this reason, he strongly condemned New Left intellectuals who sneered at the student movement and retreated into “vulgar Marxism,” declaring in 1970:

To a great extent it was the student movement in the United States which mobilized the opposition against the war in Vietnam. . . . That goes far beyond personal interest — in fact, it is basically in contradiction to it and strikes at the heart of American imperialism. God knows it is not the fault of the students that the working class didn’t participate. . . . Nothing is more un-bourgeois than the American student movement, while nothing is more bourgeois than the American worker.

Statements like this one hastened the death of late-1960s Marcuse-mania. Already in 1968, he was booed by students at the Free University of Berlin for inadequately affirming their excitement about the supposed fusion of Third World and proletarian revolutionary forces. “A Revolution is waiting to be made,” one disappointed former admirer complained, “and he offers us California metaphysics.” A study of campus bookstores conducted in late 1969 found that One-Dimensional Man had been surpassed in sales by the works of Black Power militants, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and a string of paeans to cultural radicalism (Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, and Laing’s The Politics of Experience). Marcuse’s defense of the university, his willingness to condemn violence, his concerns about the “anti-intellectualism” that had “infected” the New Left, and his calls for organizational discipline in the years that followed further diminished his standing. Although more than 1,600 people turned out to see him speak at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 1971, many in the audience were dismayed by his failure to discuss “the joyful possibilities of youth culture.” “I have always rejected the role of a father or grandfather of the movement,” he told Psychology Today. “I am not its spiritual adviser.”

So, what exactly was Marcuse’s theory, as laid out in One-Dimensional Man? How much was it a product of — and subject to the limits of — its time? What remains from the work? We will focus specifically on the social theory of the work, on which Marcuse’s ideology-critique of culture and philosophy rested, which was the book’s greatest influence and is most relevant for left-wing readers today.
Critique

One-Dimensional Man, most of all, is a resolute, unsparing, and honest depiction of a monstrous society, set for destruction, whose possibilities for change seemed far dwarfed by the forces of the status quo. The society Marcuse analyzed had more than enough technological ability to be decent and humane; instead, it teetered on the edge of destruction, preserved deep injustices, and relied on mass quiescence engineered by systematic manipulation. It was a sick, insane society that passed itself off as reasonable and orderly.

Marcuse’s call to radicalism rested on three main diagnoses of mid-century capitalism that have only shown signs of intensifying as the ruling class has tightened control:
Irrationality and destructiveness. The imminent possibility of nuclear war is the shadow that hangs over all of Marcuse’s critique, from the first sentence on. (“Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger?”) The prosperity and relative peace of the Trentes Glorieuses were purchased at the cost of an unending buildup toward a nuclear war that could annihilate the entire human race. Imperial ventures and the use of defense production to wastefully subsidize the private sector, keeping up profits and employment, trumped the survival of the species as a whole. This imminent destructiveness was also contained in the devastation the consumer society visited on the natural world.

Manipulation and unfreedom. Marcuse believed that some level of general material security and prosperity had been exchanged, in a devil’s bargain, for the broader demands of the socialist movement for autonomy. Workers had little decision-making power in the face of gigantic corporations, elections were organized spectacle rather than an opportunity to realize the will of the public, and the culture industry utilized techniques of mass manipulation to keep people pacified. “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing.” One-dimensionality was compliance in the guise of freedom.
Continuing poverty and exploitation. Despite the advances achieved by the working class of the period, Marcuse would emphasize the continuing poverty amid plenty that characterized the United States especially, and the vast differences between rich and poor countries. Moreover, he would insist that society was holding back the general decrease in working hours that could accompany the mechanization and automation of production.

Marcuse and Classical Marxism

One-Dimensional Man, then, offers the case for the continuing relevance of the Marxist critique of capitalism. But what about the theory’s understanding of collective action and social change? If social change is so urgent, why is society characterized by such a muted opposition? One-Dimensional Man answered by attempting to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse is insistent that an adequate explanation for working-class quiescence will have to be a materialist one. Something deep must have changed in the economy and society for mass consciousness to shift as it has. It is difficult to understand what that thing is, since the mid-century United States was surely still capitalist, characterized by the same injustices and systemic dynamics. Moreover, Marcuse treats as his point of departure what we might call the basic strategic formula of “classical Marxism” (broadly, from Marx and Friedrich Engels through the Second International and ending with the last attempts of international revolution of the early Third International), as the only rational theory for comprehensive social change.

That formula, more or less, runs as follows:

working-class majority + party + crisis = socialist revolution

The emerging working-class majority has particular structural advantages for exercising power, with their numbers, their concentration and accompanying capacity to organize, and the power of their strikes to shut down production and touch the powerful where it most hurts. These workers saw their basic survival, let alone their thriving, as fundamentally threatened by capitalism, and they had the power to tear it down. They needed to be organized into a political party, in order to intervene on the level of the state, to develop a consciousness that things could be different, and to formulate a strategy for how to get there. (Of course, precisely these kinds of mass working-class parties had developed all over the advanced capitalist world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Finally, the persistence (and possibly radicalization) of generalized capitalist crisis would afford opportunities for dramatic revolutionary change, in which a class-conscious party would lead the majority toward a new, truly democratic order. (This theory sometimes goes by the name of “Kautskyism,” after its authoritative expositor, Karl Kautsky, in The Class Struggle (1892), The Road to Power (1909), and other works.)One-Dimensional Man attempted to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse argued that the conclusion of the Marxist theory of social transformation still uniquely followed from the premises, but that those premises no longer applied to the world in any obvious way. Some sinister combination of defeat and partial victory had paralyzed politics.

The interesting task of One-Dimensional Man is that, though it accepts both the necessity of fundamental social change — especially given the severity of the threat of nuclear war and the irrational destructiveness of the social order — and the classical Marxist formula of how to get there, it argues that social change has undermined the latter without providing any alternative. (This was a common problem for many heterodox [ex-]Marxists at the time.) It’s a work that admits to being stuck in a way that was both intellectually forthright and so unsatisfying that Marcuse himself — and especially his epigones — would search for easy ways out to escape the dilemma.
The Theory of Integration — Social Democracy as Impasse

Beyond describing these matters and giving force to the kind of impossible frustration they must cause in anyone who reflected on the matter, Marcuse also laid out a hypothesis as to how this had happened. Marcuse argues that it was precisely the accomplishments of the working class and their institutions in the face of the last crisis that were standing in the way of the further, necessary change. There is perhaps no more powerful analysis of the capacity of capitalist society to absorb opposition and commodify liberation than One-Dimensional Man. Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on “an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.” Another way he had of expressing this was the intertwining of the perfection of the means of production and the means of destruction, pithily summarized in the juxtaposition of the “welfare and warfare state.” Social democracy was, in this view, the enemy of democratic socialism.


One of the main achievements of the working-class movement was its cutting off the logic of immiseration characteristic of the rise of capitalism and creating the power to extract profound concessions from capital in the form of high wages and the welfare state. (It should be noted that Marcuse seems at times to severely overestimate capital’s ability and willingness to accede to these demands in the text.) This increased standard of living, Marcuse insisted, was a real achievement, and was not to be denied as the basis for any real conception of human freedom.

However, this achievement had, for Marcuse, a fundamentally depoliticizing effect in several ways. First, the rising standard of living itself produced a cooling effect. Revolution occurs when, among other things, a subordinate class sees the existing order as absolutely opposed to its life. People revolt for want of bread — give them bread, and they don’t revolt. By giving the working class something to lose besides its chains, and by eliminating total immiseration for the vast majority in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism had made systemic change less likely.Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on ‘an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.’

Consumerism, the form in which this rising standard of living is realized, also, Marcuse argues, blunts working-class politics. This is, first of all, for material reasons. Consumption is atomized, so that the modes of life that once brought working-class people together now help to drive them apart. Working-class popular culture is replaced by a commoditized mass culture. There is, too, an ideological analogue. The system’s demonstrated ability to increase consumption is used to sideline any questions around life’s quality and meaning, the destructive externalities and militaristic uses of the production process, and the increasing concentration of control.

This changing standard of living was also based in changes in the labor process itself that, Marcuse argued, blunted opposition. Marcuse speaks of the mechanization of the production process increasingly relieving work of backbreaking destructiveness, as well as an increase in white-collar work and administration. These diminish the strength of the opposition of the worker to the capitalist and also diminish the leverage of workers. Again, these changes have an ideological analogue: the machine seems to play a role in production independent of any particular capitalist — it appears merely as the product of reason itself, and thus relatively uncontestable.

Finally, there was an overt trade-off between the satisfaction of needs and autonomy. (This is the best way to understand his characterization of “false needs” versus “true needs.”) The labor movement more or less gave up contestation over the prerogatives of management, ceding control of the production process; in exchange, it got greater wages and benefits. Marcuse saw this trade-off on the factory floor as the microcosm of a larger social transformation. Privacy and the freedom to criticize were being hemmed in on all sides. But the offer of greater prosperity and security quashed opposition. This is the basis for Marcuse’s use of the word “totalitarian” to refer to liberal-democratic capitalist societies just as much as Nazi or Soviet ones.

Advanced capitalist society “delivers the goods” to the majority, making questioning and attempting to change the irrational system itself seem totally unreasonable. In some ways, Marcuse simply updated for the advanced industrial world the criticism of Juvenal against the bread and circuses of Rome. Even as capitalism increased the power of the ruling class, exposed individuals to systematic and many-sided manipulation, and condemned the vast majority to alienated work and a still-significant minority to poverty, it also offered a two-car garage and spectacular entertainment. The most powerful and hard-to-counter ideology of the period was built on that basis — things are the way they are because technology and prosperity say so.

Thus, Marcuse provides a materialist theory of working-class integration through the rise in the standard of living (capitalism “delivers the goods”), the changing structure of occupations, and the atomization of the class through consumption. (Indeed, in classic Marxian fashion, it is the workers themselves who produce their own integration and subjugation. That is, it is ultimately their labor, their social action, and even now their consumption that reproduces the conditions of their own comfortable and bland unfreedom.) On top of these mechanisms are built a cultural totality that increasingly invades individual experience. Capitalist mass culture, due to its corporate structure, fundamentally sifts out information necessary for working-class people to get a bearing on how society works and overwhelms the individual with distractions and entertainment. Socialization through mass institutions such as the media reinforces the obstacles toward social change that shifts in capitalist production and the partial victories of social democracy erected.
Insights and Impasses

Some of Marcuse’s insights have become common sense on the Left. For instance, that corporate media systematically narrows the scope of political contestation is the raison d’être for today’s growing left media ecosystem, both independent and through established channels. We know that it is part of our fundamental task to expose how “opposition” parties are anything but when it comes to the sanctity of profits, the blind faith in technology’s ability to solve social problems, and militarism.

There are other insights that seem fresh and alive and worth recovering in light of some of the theoretical problems today’s socialists face. The reorientation of the Left around a program of class-struggle social democracy has allowed it to finally grow and engage with political reality. Marcuse at his best made normative, analytic, and strategic contributions that are worth revisiting in this context.

Let us begin with the normative. One of the freshest aspects of One-Dimensional Man today is its attempt to wed the critique of inequality with critiques of unfreedom, systemic irrationality, and destructiveness. Today’s Left has rightly restored obscene inequality and redistribution to the center of its politics, thereby broadening its base and concentrating its efforts. Still, Marcuse pushes us to remain expansive in our indictment of capitalism by discussing forthrightly aspects of the “good life” that it denies most individuals. Our society’s degradation of the natural world, everyday cruelty and meanness, trivial intellectual culture, boredom, depression, and puritanical preening are not incidental to our criticism but form a core plank of it. Politics and philosophy ought to clarify, not deny, the ordinary ways in which people express their happiness and dissatisfaction. This is a deeply sick society that denies important and ordinary goods to most human beings — liberty, love, satisfaction, security, peace — and it is rational to rebel against it.

Moreover, in cases where the normative and the practical-political are in some tension, we should admit the difficulty rather than elide it. It can be too easy to neglect the most fundamental issues of our, as Noam Chomsky puts it, “race to the precipice” — nuclear weapons and climate change — because they are related in only mediated, complex ways to economic interests. There is a temptation to either engage in empty moral gestures or push the problem aside to a later day. But the difficulty in formulating a concrete strategy around these issues is no excuse. Serious moral thinking and serious political economy must be joined.

Second, Marcuse offers analytic resources for considering what should be the central problem of the day: the separation of the working class from radical consciousness. Much like in the period of the New Left, the Left in the advanced capitalist world is still relatively isolated among the highly educated, despite wide popular appeals of a left-wing economic program. Marcuse both foregrounds the centrality of this question for any radical political strategy and offers a materialist method for analyzing the problem. He began with an analysis of changing class composition to understand the limits of oppositional politics with a narrow base since, however much he welcomed the New Left, he insisted that no fundamental transformation would occur without overcoming obstacles to working-class radicalism. He then offered an intriguing and still relevant hypothesis: that capitalist consumerism integrates through atomizing the neighborhoods, leisure, and general experience of working-class people. The intellectual task for today’s Left is to size up the sources of working-class atomization at work and at home, and to approach these obstacles as organizers.

And while hardly an immediate problem, Marcuse’s analysis of how partial victory can paralyze oppositional forces, and how a high level of capitalist development turned out to mean a low level of revolutionary potential, are absolutely essential for the Left’s long-term strategic perspective. It bears repeating that today’s Left should begin with the analysis of a relatively stable capitalism due to the near elimination of starvation in the advanced capitalist world and the spread of democratic and activist states. Furthermore, the Left should be ready for both severe defeat and partial incorporation. Are there ways that the Left can anticipate these plausible paths and prepare for them? Already, the increasing will to organize on the Left — remarkably well-developed since the Occupy Wall Street days — is a good sign, as organization is essential for maintaining continuity between high and low points of struggle. The rise of member-based organizations with vibrant internal cultures is again a promising development. Most of all, the Left needs to fight for structural reforms that increase the capacity to mobilize in the future and to find ways to plausibly resist the urge to demobilize with victories.

Yet Marcuse also articulated a form of defeatism that has plagued the Left of the advanced capitalist world. Marcuse’s liberatory and socialist message was largely abandoned and repressed with the defeats of the New Left, but his doubts as to the possibility of majoritarian left politics became the common sense of the New Left and the elite liberalism that would follow.

Critics of the strain of gloomy mid-century social theory Marcuse exemplifies often point to how wildly inaccurate the portrait of a fundamentally static world turned out to be. High growth rates, proportional wage growth, high unionization, and more were hardly permanent. But Marcuse was certainly not alone in failing to accurately predict how far we could fall backward. Some variation on the theory of state capitalism was widely held at the time. Everyone missed the possibility of a strong revanchist turn to a seemingly permanently discredited laissez-faire liberalism.

More problematic is Marcuse’s obfuscation of class theory. On the one hand, Marcuse depicts a society ruled by the few, which the vast majority has an interest in changing. As we mentioned, he continually returned to the necessity for working-class action in order to change society. On the other hand, when describing the various mediations that interpose themselves between this basic sociological analysis and late capitalism, he frequently presumes what he ought to prove — that working-class people have been not only effectively adjusted to but have even happily embraced their position in late capitalism. He presumes that the modal consciousness in advanced capitalist society is working-class consent rather than resignation. This has significant consequences for the theory and for organizing. Resignation is a different habit of mind to break through for organizers, which requires different tools than how one might approach the converted.


Some of Marcuse’s contemporaries noted the illicit presumption of working-class enthusiasm for the social order of the day and its quietist implications. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse cites a pamphlet by the Trotskyist Marxist-humanists on automation and speedup in Detroit, among other studies on the mechanization of the production process and the bonding of workers to the machine. Yet Raya Dunayevskaya, in her review of One-Dimensional Man in the Activist, would write that Marcuse “leaves out entirely the central point of the pamphlet, the division between the rank and file and the labor leadership in their attitudes toward Automation.” Marcuse supplemented references to this pamphlet with “many references to bourgeois studies which maintain the exact opposite”; Marcuse has “[failed] to hear this powerful oppositional voice at the point of production itself,” and instead chosen to listen to authors who claim that workers have been incorporated; he is wrong to adhere “to the view that the new forms of control have indeed succeeded in containing workers’ revolt.” Even as Marcuse plausibly pointed to the change in workers’ situations as being enough to present fundamental problems for a theory of social change — golden chains are less likely to produce revolutionaries — he less plausibly claimed that the overall reaction to this situation mostly eliminated tension, dissatisfaction, and opposition rooted in the production process, between workers and their bosses. Though he would insist that the underlying conflict of interests remained, the gap between imputed and actual interests threatened to become an abyss.

This provided a basis for New Left activists inspired by his works to reach the conclusion he refused to countenance, that there could be a socialist politics that somehow occurred independent of working-class radicalization. The “cultural turn,” with its overvaluation of interventions into culture and the discourse — and the increasing orientation to middle-class concerns that this implied — was both a plausible implication of Marcuse’s pessimism about integration and at the same time a conclusion he had to refuse given the critical theory of capitalist society. The theory also seemed to countenance a never-ending search for actors who were too marginalized to be incorporated into the system, less because of the moral importance of the flourishing of every human being than the conceit that, there, one might find the “real” revolutionaries. Both these trends are in no way immune to the commodification of opposition characteristic of late capitalist politics that Marcuse himself analyzed.

Moreover, Marcuse’s presumption about the form of political change necessary does not seem to have been subjected to the same critical consideration he insisted on applying to the working class. This vision of revolution is nobly related to the barricades of Marcuse’s youth in the betrayed German Revolution. Yet it is also rather all-or-nothing. The intransigent anti-capitalist consciousness that demanded the narrow debate of the period be burst open also threatened to lead to a kind of apolitical idealism.

This is, again, not unique to Marcuse — the severity of the chasm between the Second and Third International was real enough to facilitate the rise of Nazism. And Marcuse was severely critical of the parties or sects of the Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals. But the weakness of the vision of social change in the idea of the “Great Refusal” is related to Marcuse’s dismissive criticism of the parliamentary participation of the Italian and French communist parties (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI and Parti communiste françaism, PCF) and silence on the civil rights movement. Marcuse had little hope that participation in liberal democratic politics or the achievement of significant reforms could meaningfully shift the dynamics of the system overall (and the totality of the system is what mattered, in the final analysis). He only saw how they served to further integrate the working class into an increasingly powerful system, handicapping opposition before it could really get off the ground.

This led generally to an overvaluation of subjective radicalism and an undervaluation of objective transformation. The hope Marcuse placed in the New Left was that their cultural subversion, aesthetic sense, demand for a less narrow and repressed life, and expanded sense of need could flow over into demand for a transformation of the basic structures of social life, especially the economy. et he seemed to have very little hope that mass politics focused on redistribution could overflow its boundaries in the other direction.

Yet this was hardly the only conclusion one might reach from his premises. Starting from the premises that the working class of the advanced capitalist world was not likely to lead an insurrection, especially given its higher standard of living, while all the same it continued to suffer from alienation, exploitation, inadequate public investment, and diminished democracy, other theorists looked to develop a political strategy on these grounds that did not presume the same subjective integration that Marcuse did. André Gorz in France, influenced by the Left of the trade union movement in Italy, introduced in his Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal the idea of “non-reformist reforms” — aggressive measures that took on capital’s prerogatives, built the capacity of labor, and addressed the wide range of needs that were unmet by advanced capitalist societies — as a path forward for the Left. Ralph Miliband in Britain would underscore the importance of this idea for a socialist strategy adequate to the fact that no advanced capitalist state had ever collapsed and that revolutionary dictatorships had hardly proved fertile ground for socialist democracies. Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington in the United States insisted that mass politics oriented toward (removing conservative obstacles to) expanding a hobbled American social democracy could spill over into fundamental system change. These theorists suggested that the causal arrow could, and indeed must, move the other way, from political action to a deepening of revolutionary consciousness.
Conclusion

We have said that there are two souls of critical theory in Herbert Marcuse. On the one hand, there are roots of what has become a sort of common sense among some of today’s liberals (however little they would be able to trace this to the Frankfurt School): the replacement of interest-based politics by ethics, self-expression, and identity; of class organization by cultural contestation; of majoritarian aspiration by elite pose. This is the long-standing tendency on the Left to flee the dilemmas of organizing a working-class majority in the advanced capitalist world, which is understandable but not tenable. On the other, there is the attempt to preserve and develop a socialist strategy adequate to the transformations of contemporary society — mass politics, the welfare state, the further application of technology to production, and mass media. Indefatigably critical, morally expansive, and analytically materialist, it forthrightly analyzes, and then seeks to overcome, new obstacles to organizing a working-class majority to press for a transition to a new society.

Republished from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jeremy Cohan is the director of the Honors Program at the School of Visual Arts. He is currently writing a book on the political economy of neoliberal school reform in Chicago.

Benjamin Serby writes about the intellectual and political history of the postwar United States. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Honors College at Adelphi University.