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.

Published
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After Montreal A View From the Past

The Montreal Climate Change Conference is over. In a certain sense it is the completion of a cycle that began in Montreal over a decade ago. The Original Rio Conference on the Environment which led to the Kyoto Accord, and this Kyoto 2 conference was the brain child of Canadian Maurice Strong.

He was and is a significant mover and shaker in both Montreal and Ottawa, Strong was head of the Power Corporation, and he was the original conference chair for Rio. It was appropriate that it ended in Mr. Strongs home province from whence it began. Mr. Strong pushed the environmental issue for business purposes, his is the environmentalism of the Hydro business, which includes the promotion of clean energy from nuclear power. And as a former head of Power Corp he was well connected with the Liberal Party. One of the reasons that Kyoto has been pushed by the Liberals is Strong.

It was also appropriate that given the current situation of crisis in the UN, that Mr. Strong was absent from the conference since he has been linked to the UN Food for Oil scandal in Iraq.

Mr. Strong's many accomplishments as a member of the Canadian ruling class are too detailed to go into here now, but he represents the rising ruling class of Trudeau Liberals in Quebec who foreswore seperatism for integration in the corridors of power, and in so doing strengthened both the Quebec and Canadian State in the 20th Century.

But the Climate Conference in Montreal, led to nothing new, Kyoto 2 is business as usual. The US didn't asign on, no big deal, they are still developing their own asymetrical approach to climate change. Capitalism can adjust to increased production and sharing of green credits, of carbon sinks, of new adapatable technologies, of capitalist business offering alternative green energy like wind power, (the wind power associations of Canada say No Government hand outs Please, we are businessmen).

Has the revolutionary potential of the ecology movement come and gone, despite the stuffed bears, and dancing flowers in the mass protests in the streets of Montreal outside the confernce, the tear gas did not choke or gag these protestors. Theirs was the quiet concern of millions of us, about our future. They were well behaved as were the police and the State. It was all very serious. Very scientific, very political.

But what has changed since Rio, since Kyoto 1? Capitalism has adapted. Has it come to the self recognition that its continued existance threatens our very home world? I think not.

For capitalism is us, and we have yet to put the wrench in the wheels that drive the marketplace. And this goes beyond the liberal ideology that we need to consume less. The very fact is that the contradiction of advanced capitalism is that it now is holding back a technology and productive capacity to provide abundance for all, because it is chanelling production into profit.

And in doing so it has failed to recognize the use value of recycling, reusing, and reduction. Instead we are producing more and more throw away items. The revolutionary idea of ecology so prevelant in the 1970's is not the Green Party or green conciousness, never was, never will be. Join the Audboun Society if you want that.

Nope as Murray Bookchin has pointed out Radical Ecology is part and parcel of the Anarchist understanding of the crisis of advanced capitalism. His works on Social Ecology and the Limits of the City were breakthrough works that have yet to be matched by many modern writers, for their far flung critique.

Several other European Leftists such as Andre Gorz also noted the signifigance and importance of an ecological critique of political economy for the Left. His most poular essay online is; Social Ideology of the Motorcar

But one of the Leftists to predate both Gorz and Bookchin was Pierre Cardin, one of many psuedonyms for Cornelius Castoriadis one of founders of the French ultra-left groups Socialism or Barbarism, which in England was known as Solidarity. They have published numerous works during the sixties that were staples for Left Wing Anarchist reading.

Notes From the Underground

Mr. Castoriadis's life combined high intellectual seriousness with intense political infighting. When he arrived in France from Greece in 1945, at the age of 23, he had already translated the work of Max Weber into Greek. He was also a veteran of the Trotskyist movement, which both the fascists and the communists were seeking to "liquidate," to use their polite term for "exterminate."

In 1948 Mr. Castoriadis found work at what would later become known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while also leading a small post-Trotskyist group called "Socialism or Barbarism," which published a journal by the same name. (Thus, Mr. Castoriadis was conducting statistical analyses of capitalism while preparing at night and on weekends to overthrow it.) "S. ou B.," as its comrades called it, never had more than a hundred members. It published a newspaper, Workers' Power, that circulated in some factories, but much of the group's energy was devoted to theoretical debates. As Mr. Castoriadis grew critical of Marxism itself, for example, he was opposed within the organization by a young philosophy professor named Jean-François Lyotard. (Ironically, Mr. Lyotard would later become prominent as a postmodernist who rejected Marx's "grand narrative" of history.)

The group's impact on radical students and activists around the world was disproportionate to its size. And its influence continued to grow even after S. ou B. dissolved in 1965. In the late 1970s, it became fashionable in some circles to claim to have once been a member. It was a development that amused Mr. Castoriadis. "If all these people had been with us at the time," he said, "we would have taken power in France sometime around 1957."

Emerging from the political underground, Mr. Castoriadis became a psychoanalyst, and also began teaching a seminar on philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He published numerous books reflecting an encyclopedic range of interests and an unblinking skepticism toward the "generalized conformism" of contemporary society. After decades of denouncing the Soviet Union as a monstrosity, he never became enthusiastic about the existing Western order. At a 1997 conference organized in Prague by President Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and the writer Elie Wiesel, Mr. Castoriadis described capitalism's "expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being" as "obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians." He also urged the adoption of a "new type of human life ... a frugal life, as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings, endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens."

When he died at the end of that same year, Mr. Castoriadis left an apartment filled with manuscripts, including an enormous mass of lectures from his seminars on philosophical and psychoanalytic topics -- material indispensable to understanding his thinking on the question of human creativity. He left a widow, two daughters, and a network of comrades and admirers around the world.

Castoradis work included the following interview. It comes from a massive if somewhat controversial work online, THE RISING TIDE OF INSIGNIFICANCY

I originally had looked at copying some quotes from it as I felt that it was as relevant today, as when it was done back in 1993, perhaps moreso in light of the failure or success of the Montreal Conference, depending of course if you think anything actually occured there.

Instead I beleive it is time for us to reassess the NGO/Green/Animal Rights/ movements that claim to be anarchist, because they engage in Direct Action to meet their reformist ends. Castoradis makes many a cogent point especially about Green Politics, which looked far more radical then than now, in light of the Red Tory's that run Canada's Green Party.

One point I believe he is incorrect on, but that has been a common misinterpretation, is that Marx and Engels were anti-environmental pro productionist apologists. This I believe has been significantly challenged of late by John Bellamy Foster in the pages of Monthly Review and has been the focus of one of his recent books. While Castoradis denounced the expansive production of capitalism, I believe that Bookchin hit on the head when he announced the politics of post scarcity anarchism. But that is another debate for another time, as Homes said to Watson about the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

So here is some food for thought, and as usual I look forward to a spirited debate and your comments. Footnotes are at the end. Because of its length I have posted off site here:

THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE OF ECOLOGY.doc
Interview With Cornelius Castoradis (Pierre Cardin)

Questioning Our Limits to Leave Scarcity Behind

Giorgos Kallis
MARCH 2020
GREEN EUROPEAN JOURNAL

Whereas mainstream economics is about expansion and productivity, environmentalism has often taken it upon itself to remind people of the limits and the consequences of exceeding them. Too many emissions will see climate catastrophe. Too much resource extraction will see society break down. But is this way of thinking counterproductive? Does appealing to external limits deny society the chance to set its own path? We spoke to the political ecology thinker Giorgos Kallis about his new book, Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, to discuss problems with the standard discourse on limits and where to look for alternatives.

Green European Journal: Nowadays some of the talk about limits – to growth, to demography, of the planet – is based on Malthus and the Neo-Malthusians of the 1960 and 1970s. In Limits you explain that Malthus’s original message is quite different from the usual story about limits and overpopulation. (1) Can you explain?

Giorgos Kallis: We have come to think of Malthus as someone who worried about overpopulation and limits to growth. But if you read his An Essay on the Principle of Population carefully, Malthus makes clear that he does not believe there are limits to resources, not even to food production. (2) He is not worried about overpopulation, a term he never uses – he is worried about producing enough food to keep the population growing.

The secret to understanding Malthus is to remember that he was both a priest and an economist, the first professor of political economy. Malthus was a student of the theologian William Paley at Cambridge. For those priests, the greatness of a nation was measured by its numbers. Population growth was good, not bad. Malthus does not predict overpopulation and famines in the future. In his essay, he argues against redistribution, positing that if we take care of the poor they will become lazy and not work hard enough to produce food and support themselves. Keep them hungry so that they are industrious, and so the population keeps growing.

Malthus’s influence on subsequent economists and economics is much stronger than we often realise. He turned the Christian mantra to go forth and multiply into an economic principle. Population growth in his model was the greatest possible good for humanity, its God-given mission. Malthus translated this expansionary logic into a foundational assumption of economics. In economics, the religious dimension disappears but the assumption that our duty as humans is to expand, multiply, and colonise the earth’s surface (and beyond) remains.

Does the emphasis that economics puts on scarcity and growth come from Malthus?

Not only, but yes, Malthus played an important role. He was one of the first to hide the moral assumption of a duty to expand without limits behind seemingly mathematical language. His crude model was one of arithmetic, linear growth in food production clashing with geometric, exponential growth in population. But population grows exponentially only if you assume that for some reason people cannot limit how many children they want to have. Throughout history, humans have adapted their reproductive strategies to their environments. The moral and political assumption that humans must expand their numbers is hidden behind mathematics, giving it an aura of science. Unlimited wants and therefore scarcity are made to appear as facts of nature. What is a very particular morality appears as the natural state of things: we need to produce in ever-greater quantities because we do not have enough.


As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In modern economics, maximisation is no longer about population but consumption and an abstract notion of utility. If for Malthus we had to produce as much food as possible to allow the maximum possible growth of population, for modern economists, production has to increase to be able to enjoy as much as possible in a limited amount of time. Economists, like Lionel Robbins in his famous essay in which he defined economics as the science that studies scarcity, like to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe. (3) Robbins writes that Crusoe on his island had everything he needed – he could hunt, fish, grow food, and enjoy life. But if he hunted he wouldn’t be able to read, and if he read he wouldn’t be able to fish. So his time was limited and everything he did had an opportunity cost of not doing something else. Scarcity followed Crusoe in Paradise.

What I try to show in Limits is how this is a myth. It is a moral myth necessary for capitalism’s constant expansion, not some universal state of nature. As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In mainstream thought, maximising and expanding is always good. Where can we turn for alternatives?

There are many possible ways to arrange our affairs, other than thinking that we live in world of scarcity and that we have to expand. Many pre-capitalist societies had a logic of limitation where they trusted their environments and lived in a steady state, satisfied with what they had. I’m not saying we can turn a world of 9 billion people into a hunter-gatherer civilisation trusting its environment. Rather, I’m saying that human societies have been organised differently and that this is a reason for hope that capitalist civilisation can be followed by a different arrangement not predicated on limitless expansion.


The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

But the first step is to recognise where we’re at and why. Part of the problem today is that even environmentalists frame the present state of affairs as one where we are producing and consuming too much, overshooting planetary boundaries, or that our ecological footprint is too big. Framing things this way feeds into the idea that our needs are naturally without limits and that we clash with an external world that limits us. We have to build a story instead that starts from the basic truth that humans know how to limit ourselves and that a meaningful and truly free life is a life that knows its limits.

Our popular myths today are about expansion – think of the self-made entrepreneur or the Hollywood blockbuster where the hero always beats death in a happy ending. We lack meaningful, popular stories of freedom within limits. We need novelists and artists who tell different stories with different forms and cultural heroes that show different ways of being, celebrating those who refuse the mad pursuit of more and who organise for the protection of their communities and for wellbeing within limits.

Should this emphasise personal restriction?

Where we environmentalists are wrong is that we think that by appealing to a future disaster, we will prompt people to limit themselves. But facing death, people choose to live and not to think about tomorrow. If they know that they will die soon, they will live even more madly (or worse, become depressed and retreat). A different story should dismantle the idea that liberation means living without limits. The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

The environmentalist discourse of “sacrifice”, that we can’t live like Donald Trump because then the planet will be ruined, leaves intact the idea that living like a billionaire is nice to begin with. Many of us do not want to live like Trump, Elon Musk, or The Wolf of Wall Street (even if occasionally we laugh with them and their megalomania). As Spanish philosopher Jorge Riechmann put it in the title of a book, some people who do not want to colonise Mars; some people want to live a good life down here on Earth with their friends and loved ones. (4) Can we have stories about these people? Can we have stories that remind us that behind the scenes the lives of Trump or Musk are miserable? Maybe not miserable, but banal, boring, empty of meaning, and hysteric in their meaningless pursuit of power for power’s sake.

You argue that environmentalists are stuck in a discourse of external limits. You come from the degrowth movement, how can its insights help us see matters differently?

There are two narratives in the degrowth movement. One is the idea of continental political ecologists such as Ivan Illich, André Gorz or Cornelius Castoriadis that we need self-limitation and that we should collectively set our limits. Another comes from the Anglo-Saxon debate on limits to growth – the idea that limits are set by the planet and food, resources, and energy are running out. Most degrowth scholars, such as Serge Latouche or myself until recently, treat these two notions of limits as one and the same. In my new book, I try to set them apart into an autonomous understanding of limits – i.e. it is we who shape our desires and our limits – and a heteronomous one that attributes limits to the external forces of nature.


For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in.

Heteronomy is anti-political and anti-democratic, Castoriadis argued. If your laws and limits are given by an external force, God or Mother Nature, then there is little that you as a collective can to do other than obey these forces, and their messengers or representatives. Now, the fact that we as a society determine our limits does not mean that there are no limits. You cannot jump from a skyscraper and land intact. But ultimately the decision whether to jump or not out of the skyscraper is yours, no matter how catastrophic the result may be. As long as we frame this choice as “Damn, the law of gravity limits me and I can’t jump off the skyscraper!”, we will be searching for ways to jump. The point is to stop and ask, “Why jump?”

Climate change and disasters are coming, but is it useful frame climate change as a problem of external limits, scarcity, or a limited atmosphere that cannot absorb any more of our emissions? As long as the language is that of terrible metaphors such as “sink” or carbon “budgets”, then the natural reaction is to think how can we exceed these limits, how can we engineer the climate so that it can take more of us and our desires. This is the logic that dates back to Malthus: producing more to confront a world of limits.

For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in. Of course, we should not stop talking about planetary thresholds, which like stepping off a skyscraper will bring catastrophic consequences. But the emphasis should be on the economic system and the forces that push us over the edge.


People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Autonomy is central to many 20th-century political ecology thinkers. What possibilities does the concept of autonomy offer the green movement?

The concept of autonomy puts green politics in a much broader and more encompassing perspective than discourse around disasters, peak oil, and the rest. People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. Autonomy is about the capacity of people to manage their lives collectively and their place in a world where globalisation is taking everything away. It claims a real democracy. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Ecology means true freedom, as André Gorz first claimed. It is commonplace to caricature Greens as enemies of freedom, those who want to take your car and your steak away, telling you how and how not to live. This myth rests on an idea of freedom as freedom to do as you please, which means freedom for the strong. Real freedom can be exercised only within limits. Think of a piano player who needs a limited keyboard to create beautiful music or the painter who needs a canvas. Limits liberate because they reduce the debilitating weight of limitless choice. Limiting oneself leaves space for others to live too. Ecology is first and foremost about limits, about autonomy, about freedom.

Alternative movements and political projects are often limited to cities or at best regions. What does autonomy mean in practice for movements engaging with the state and running for office?

I guess you have the political experience of Barcelona en Comú in mind. The rise of a citizens’ movement in power in Barcelona in 2015 was in many ways an interesting experience, even if it lost a bit of its steam and promise along the way. It became wrapped up in the Catalan question as well as becoming exhausted, as all political projects eventually are, by the passing of time and everyday bureaucratic battles. The original impulse, however, coming from civil society and from the grassroots movements that networked in the indignant squares, pointed to a possible articulation between alternative ways of living and alternative economic practices such as commons, and organising for seizing political office and power through elections.


Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives.

In our recent work on degrowth and the state, Giacomo D’Alisa and I claim that we should move beyond a division which sees people and civil society on one pole, and authorities and the state on the other. This perspective is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the state as the amalgam of political society and civil society. Political society is the space of political institutions and legal control with its police force and legal mechanisms of coercion, whereas civil society is the sphere of the commons with institutions such as the family, unions, associations, church, and sports clubs. Political society exerts force to rule but it cannot go far without the consent of civil society. The acts of political society have to make “sense” to people, so culture and re-articulation of existing common sense(s) in the sphere of civil society is crucial in any political transformation.

Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives. As Silvia Federici has put it, the point is not to demand that the state provides our meals or teaches our children, but to self-organise communally to educate and feed ourselves and our children, asking the state to pay and support our initiatives. There is no alternative to the state in this sense, we will always need a higher level of social organising and redistribution of resources. But the form of the state would have to change dramatically in a socio-ecological transition towards the commons.

Barcelona en Comu did not emerge as a political movement out of thin air. It was built, thought, and practised by people active and sweating every day in alternative economic initiatives, from movements against house foreclosures and for a debt jubilee to consumer or housing co-ops. The political party was born in the grassroots, as activists realised that transforming society requires engaging with the state and its institutions, however difficult that may turn out to be. There are parallels with the Occupy movement and organising for Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the U.S.

So individual change comes first?

No. Nothing comes first, not the egg nor the chicken. I believe in co-evolution, butterflies changing with flowers. Unless we have different people, living and desiring to live differently, we will not have political change to support different ways of living. Who would organise to see such change through? But unless we have political change to alter social and material infrastructures and to support different ways of living, it is very hard for people to change and live differently. Changes need to co-evolve. So no, I am not proposing individual action as an alternative to political or structural change. But I also do not think that individual change, or changes in ways of living, consuming, and desiring is secondary, and that changing the “mode of production” will see everything else to fall into place. We need individual change, but not just for the sake of reducing resource consumption (however important that may be, it is insufficient alone), but because political change is not possible without individual change. This is why my book focuses on the ethic of collective self-limitation as a foundational stone for a new political project. I do not mean that a different culture or ethics alone will change capitalism, far from it. But reversely, unless we start decolonising our imaginary from the ethic of limitless expansion, we may find one day that we escaped capitalism but that everything has stayed the same.
FOOTNOTES

1. Giorgos Kallis (2019). Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

2. Thomas Malthus (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Goodwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson in St Paul’s Church-yard.

3. Lionel Robbins (1932, 1935, 2nd ed.). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, London: Macmillan.

4. Jorge Riechmann (2004). Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata.

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

4 Problems for the Degrowth Movement

Though increasingly influential in activist circles and policy discussions, the degrowth perspective on addressing climate change suffers from serious analytical and political flaws. We need a program of green growth to decarbonize the planet.

By Daniel Driscoll

February 24, 2024

Source: Jacobin

A barn and wind turbines in rural Illinois. (Wikimedia Commons)

Amid the French protests of May 1968, the idea of degrowth was born under the name décroissance. It quickly gained traction in Parisian Marxist circles with work from the likes of Austrian French philosopher André Gorz and others. When in 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, the term décroissance came to the mainstream.

Today décroissance is having another moment, this time under its English moniker, as degrowth enters both policy circles and popular discourse. It is, however, a distraction for left climate movements, one that we can ill afford when the world has such limited time to decarbonize.

Degrowth provides neither empirically grounded, actionable solutions nor a credible theory of social and political change. It suffers from four big problems.

1. Degrowth often confuses correlation for causation and overextrapolates from the past.

The strength of the degrowth movement comes from accurately recounting how wealthy countries developed through the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels and economies coevolved together: coal powered the earliest factories in the Industrial Revolution. Electricity then lit, connected, and expanded cities around the world. Oil and gas knit the post–World War II world economy together.

Economic growth, then, went hand in hand with the growth of emissions. The degrowth movement argues that while switching to green growth may be theoretically possible, sufficiently rapid decarbonization requires degrowth.

The focus on growth, however, may lead to confusing correlation for causation, and at worst distorting our policy priorities. Therefore, an elementary reminder is in order: carbon emissions come from burning carbon — they are CO2 emissions, not GDP emissions. To decarbonize, we need to replace carbon energy sources with clean energy, and repressing growth will not solve the problem of financing electrification and energy-input replacement.

This point may seem obvious, but many people seem to forget it and focus too narrowly on economic growth and GDP (which is of course a controversial indicator of well-being). Growth is contingent upon energy input, but that energy does not need to come from carbon. Those who argue that decoupling emissions from GDP cannot happen fast enough are extrapolating from the historic association of emissions and growth. If historical trends routinely and straightforwardly predicted our economic future, then much of the risk that we know to be endemic to the stock market and the financial sector would not exist, as the past would be a sure guide to what’s coming next.

2. Degrowth doesn’t acknowledge that redistribution can drive growth.

Degrowth requires political suppression of consumption and production. To offset the massive income reductions this would entail for poorer populations, many degrowth experts argue that this decrease in production and consumption should be accompanied by wealth redistribution.

At first glance, that proposal looks reasonable — we can decrease emissions and inequality at the same time. But simultaneously reducing growth and redistributing resources is not so simple. Redistribution to lower income groups or populations who have a higher propensity to spend can actually increase household consumption, which all other things equal may in turn increase emissions.

Redistribution is a worthy goal, but on its own it will not decarbonize the economy. Some nuanced degrowth writing focuses loss prescriptions on wealthier residents within rich countries and rich countries overall. This is sensible, but it ignores the emissions that are likely to come with emerging market economy (EME) development in countries like India. It also ignores the recoil of investment in EMEs that would result from reductions in consumption and growth in wealthy countries, which would tend to bring excess capital back home to the richer countries.

Degrowth advocates might argue that these problems could be addressed through national and global planning regimes, which could (e.g.) restrain households from increasing consumption too much and force capital to invest more in poorer countries. But the kind of state planning required to mitigate emissions and regulate behavior while reducing overall production and consumption would need to be a globally coercive regime, with otherworldly institutional capacities and knowledge. Imagine the surveillance and punishment apparatuses needed to constantly monitor people around the world to enforce production and consumption quotas. Few would voluntarily agree to this system; governments now are not even following through on relatively modest climate accords. Maybe a sacrifice of democratic governance would be worth it, as some have argued. But even if an authoritarian regime of global planning were justified, what social forces would have the capacity to institute one?

To be clear, this isn’t an objection to planning per se. To address the climate crisis, we clearly need a big dose of democratic economic planning that prioritizes ecological goals over profit. But large-scale planning becomes both more technically and morally fraught when it involves forcing most of the world’s population to accept lower living standards.

Historically, industrial transformations have required growth, and relatively lower growth in the context of such transformations has led to horrific casualties (e.g., the Soviet Union’s creation of famine in Ukraine during its industrialization drive in the early 1930s). Lower growth means more trade-offs and losses in a transition, meaning that new capital formation comes at the cost of greater suppression of consumption and thus of living standards.

This is because the new capital needed to transition has to come from somewhere. It can come from reallocating resources from traditional growth sectors (e.g., from agriculture to industry) or from a rising tide of growth that can improve the living standards of the majority. Therefore, a global investment boom is necessary to pay for decarbonization — not a decline in investment, as many degrowth advocates claim.

3. Degrowth adopts unjustified assumptions from orthodox economics.

Degrowth has a lot in common with carbon-tax advocacy. Carbon-tax supporters, like degrowthers, have advocated decreases in consumption as the way to decarbonization.

This approach has not gone well historically. The French government imposed carbon taxes without offering adequate substitutes for citizens (such as affordable electric vehicless or sufficient public transportation options); as a result, living costs increased for lower-income households who spent larger shares of their budgets on energy, and eventually widespread social unrest resulted.

The truth is that a narrow emphasis on reducing consumption is deeply rooted in orthodox economics. An orthodox economics perspective would claim that we must decrease consumption to decrease emissions. This outlook tries to predict the future by holding variables in the present constant. It assumes that resources and worker productivity are always being maximized and also that energy unit costs will not decrease.

Those are false assumptions: resource utilization, productivity, and energy costs change a great deal. Resource utilization can become more efficient over time; think about how small computers have become since the 1980s thanks to increasingly powerful microchips. Productivity and efficiency constantly vary. Why else would firms share information and techniques with each other in order to improve themselves on those measures? And energy costs can also decrease — look at the recent collapse in the price of solar.

This means that decarbonization through decreased consumption may not be necessary. In fact, carrots (economic gains) have had more political success historically than sticks (economic losses) when implementing climate policies.

Decarbonization will likely require massive investment. By the most sophisticated measures, global decarbonization will cost roughly $4 trillion per annum, and some version of state-led green growth is probably our best route. Such investment on a smaller scale is already increasing the availability of carbon-free substitutes in the United States and China. Degrowthers often focus too much on economic suppression when we need to acknowledge that electrification, energy replacement, and economic justice may require one last economic boom.

4. Degrowth doesn’t have an adequate theory of political transformation.

From the radical social reorganization of the Paris Commune to the policy outcomes that followed the civil rights movement, historians and social scientists have studied the conditions that lead to successful political transformation. To explain movement strengths or weaknesses and predict or evaluate movement successes and failures, many scholars will plug a movement into what they call a “political opportunity structure.” A political opportunity structure has three components: (1) public consciousness, (2) organizational or mobilizing strength, and (3) macro political opportunities.

What is the political opportunity structure of the degrowth movement? Despite academic chatter, the degrowth movement is irrelevant to most people in the world. To get a pulse of public opinion, I compared Google searches of “degrowth” versus “how to get rich.”Google searches for “degrowth” versus “how to get rich.” Note: On y-axis, the value of 100 indicates peak popularity. Explore more here. The recent peak in “how to get rich” searches represents the Netflix release of a show under that name.

Not only do most people prioritize growth and prosperity over addressing climate change (as discussed throughout), but most people also do not know or care about degrowth. The degrowth movement fails in the arena of public consciousness in both opinion and salience.

Things look even more dire when examining other aspects of the movement’s political opportunity structure. There is no major social movement organization or institution centering degrowth in its platform. If such organizations do exist, they have feeble resources and networks, which are key ingredients for movement success. The civil rights movement, for instance, boasted black colleges, churches, and activist organizations (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality) tied together through strong networks and alliances. Degrowth has no natural constituency, and creating it would require a global-scale transformation of political consciousness.

Finally, the macro political conditions to support the movement are not present. There are no political regimes interested in advancing the movement. Not even the European Union, arguably the international bloc most committed to decarbonization right now, is interested in degrowth. At the “Beyond Growth” Conference, European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen stated, “A growth model centered on fossil fuels is simply obsolete” and called for “a different growth model that is sustainable far into the future.” She’s talking about green growth, not degrowth.

Furthermore, studies find again and again that democracies prioritize economic prosperity over real decarbonization. Economic growth can enhance people’s quality of life (barring wars, or the trend of wealth concentration outpacing growth that Thomas Piketty has documented). National governments are legitimized by growth, and when they fail to provide it, there are political consequences.

If economic stagnation often leads to explosions of anger at the status quo in wealthy countries, imagine how emerging market economies will deal with forced degrowth (those countries’ growth rates in the coming years are projected to dwarf those of advanced market economies). It is hard to believe that emerging economies will accept nondevelopment for the sake of climate goals. (No wonder social scientists in BRICS and non-OECD countries favor green growth over degrowth.)

Degrowthers might reasonably retort that proponents of green growth policies also lack the public consciousness, organizational or mobilizing strength, and macro political opportunities to win meaningful change. The difference is that the vast majority of society has an interest in an egalitarian green growth agenda along the lines of the Green New Deal, because they stand to benefit from a massive public investment in green jobs, infrastructure, and public transportation that would raise their standard of living. And organized workers in strategic sectors like electricity and auto have the structural leverage to win key climate demands.

In other words, the broader climate movement has a potential coalition with the interests and capacity to achieve its goals — but it still needs to be organized. That means a green growth program has a plausible potential “political opportunity structure,” unlike degrowth.

What’s at Stake?

Despite degrowth’s unclear prospects of achieving decarbonization and lack of a plausible popular constituency, many smart people have been distracted by it. Instead of trying to convince everyone that we need to fight economic growth, there are more immediate practical problems that those who want a green transition need to attend to. To name a few:Financing emerging market economies. EMEs cannot afford to abandon fossil fuels and fund the green transition with their own balance sheets.

Ending austerity in wealthy countries. Rich countries can afford decarbonization already. But they have been stymied by neoliberal ideologies and policy approaches that have prevented them from using the power of the state and public investment to transform their economies.

Compensating losers in the transition. Households with higher energy costs and workers and regions reliant on carbon-intensive industries will need support, in the form of welfare programs, job training, and so on as economies transition away from fossil fuels.
Critical mineral extraction. How can we harvest critical minerals to build green technologies without abusing labor and destroying ecosystems?

Using the power of “the big green state” to achieve a just transition. If private capital is in the driver’s seat for the green transition, there is the danger that public goods could be privatized, key goals could be sacrificed for quick profits, and inequality could worsen. And not all decarbonization is profitable. How do we do green planning to ensure a transition that serves the public rather than private interests?

Addressing geopolitical challenges. Some countries are either apathetic about climate change or have assets that are directly threatened by decarbonization (e.g., petrostates). How do we get them to decarbonize?

These are just a few of the critical problems we face moving forward with decarbonization. Limited time means we must place bets and prioritize solutions to them now. Degrowth may be an appealing idea for morally committed left academics and activists. But it is not a serious path forward for the climate.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

Daniel Driscoll  is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Starting fall 2024, he will be an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Virginia.

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.

Habermas

Some Notes on Habermas and the Public Sphere of Politics.

Habermas draws a distinction between two types of action: communicative action, where the agents base their actions on (and coordinate their interactions by) their mutual recognition of validity-claims; and instrumental/strategic action, where the coordination of actions is linked to the their successful completion. Habermas argues that instrumental and strategic actions are (conceptually and in reality) always parasitic on communicative action. Hence instrumental and strategic actions alone cannot form a stable system of social action.

Habermas’s conceptual distinction between communicative action and instrumental action is paralleled by his distinction between lifeworld and system in his social ontology: his description of the nature of social being. The lifeworld concerns the lived experience of the context of everyday life in which interactions between individuals are coordinated through speech and validity-claims. Systems are real patterns of instrumental action instantiated by money (the capitalist economy) and power (the administrative state).

In his later work, Habermas made a distinction between "lifeworld" and "system." The public sphere is part of the lifeworld; "system" refers to the market economy and the state apparatus. The lifeworld is the immediate milieu of the individual social actor, and Habermas opposed any analysis which uncoupled the interdependence of the lifeworld and the system in the negotiation of political power-it is thus a mistake to see that the system dominates the whole of society. The goal of democratic societies is to "erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld" (Further Reflections).


Habermas argues that the self-intepretation of the public sphere took shape in the concept of "public opinion", which he considers in the light of the work of Kant, Marx, Hegel, Mill and Tocqueville. The bourgeois public sphere eventually eroded because of economic and structural changes. The boundaries between state and society blurred, leading to what Habermas calls the refeudalization of society. State and society became involved in each other's spheres; the private sphere collapsed into itself. The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure, and private people no longer existed as a public of property owners. Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture consensus. This is particularly evident in modern politics, with the rise of new disciplines such as advertising and public relations. These, and large non- governmental organizations, replace the old institutions of the public sphere. The public sphere takes on a feudal aspect again, as politicians and organizations represent themselves before the voters. Public opinion is now manipulative, and, more rarely, still critical. We still need a strong public sphere to check domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope that power and domination may not be permanent features.

Enlightenment Democracy, Relativism, and the Threat of Authoritarian Politics

A central issue in Habermas's effort to sustain the Enlightenment project is the problem of relativism. This problem underlies several postmodern critiques of modernity, the Enlightenment, and Habermas, and is thus a useful first path into Habermas's thought.

The Enlightenment project of justifying democratic polity (and thus justifying emancipation from non-democratic polities - e.g., the prevailing monarchies of the time) rests on these key conceptions:

1) however diverse cultures and individuals may vary from one another in terms of religious convictions, traditions, sentiments, etc. - reason (at least in potential - a potential that must be developed by education) stands as a universally shared capacity of humanity;

2) such reason is characterized first of all as an autonomy or freedom - a freedom which, for such central figures as Locke and Kant, is capable of giving itself its own law;

3) just as this reason seems capable of discerning universal laws in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences (witness the success of the Copernican Revolution and Newton) - so reason, it is hoped, is capable of discerning universal laws and norms in the moral and political domains.

As an example of such a universal norm: if I am to exercise my freedom by choosing my own goals and projects - this freedom requires that others respect these choices by not attempting to override them and make use of me for their own purposes. (In Kantian terms, others must never treat me simply as a means, but always as an end.)

But if I logically require others to respect my freedom as an autonomous rationality, then insofar as I acknowledge others as autonomous rationalities - reciprocity demands that I respect others' freedom as well.

This norm of respect then issues in the political demand for democracy: only democracies, as resting on the [free and rational] consent of the governed, thereby respect and preserve the fundamental humanity of its citizens ( i.e., precisely their central character as rational freedoms). [This argument, initially launched by John Locke, finds its way into Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and from there into the arguments for women's emancipation in writers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the arguments for civil rights as articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.]

On The Living Wage/Guaranteed Income

To give this idea a more radical twist, we could endorse a general, state-guaranteed citizen income, as originally proposed by Andre Gorz and now backed by Claus Offe, among others. Severing the link between income and employment would place the current "economic society"--now centered on the traditional role of full-time wage labor-on a new footing and create an equivalent for the disintegrating welfare system. This "basic income" would absorb the capitalist world market's destructive impact on those who slide into the increasingly "superfluous" population. Such a radical redistribution program requires, however, a change in deep-rooted values that will be difficult to orchestrate. Also, under present conditions of global competition, we might wonder how the program could be financed within the budgetary limits of individual nation states, since the target income would have to be above the lowest level of welfare support.

The globalization of the economy ends the history of the welfare-state compromise. While it by no means ideally solved capitalism's inherent problems, this compromise had at least succeeded in keeping social costs within accepted limits. Despite the bureaucratization and "normalization" so convincingly criticized by Michel Foucault, the scale of social disparities under this compromise was limited sufficiently to avoid the manifest repudiation of the normative promises of the democratic and liberal tradition.

Religion in the Public Sphere

What is most surprising in this context is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of
Western society. Though there is statistical evidence for a wave of secularization in almost
all European countries since the end of World War II, in the United States all data show
that the comparatively large proportion of the population made up of devout and religiously
active citizens has remained the same over the last six decades.5 Here, a carefully
planned coalition between the Evangelical and born-again Christians on one side, the
American Catholics on the other side siphons off a political surplus value from the religious
renewal at the heart of Western civilization.6 And it tends to intensify, at the cultural level,
the political division of the West that was prompted by the Iraq War.7 With the abolition of
the death penalty, with liberal regulations on abortion, with setting homosexual
partnerships on a par with heterosexual marriages, with an unconditional rejection of
torture, and generally with the privileging of individual rights versus collective goods, e.g.,
national security, the European states seem now to be moving forward alone down the
path they had trodden side by side with the United States.

Against the background of the rise of religion across the globe, the division of the West is
now perceived as if Europe were isolating itself from the rest of the world. Seen in terms of
world history, Max Weber’s Occidental Rationalism appears to be the actual deviation. The
Occident’s own image of modernity seems, as in a psychological experiment, to undergo a
switchover: what has been the supposedly “normal” model for the future of all other
cultures suddenly changes into a special-case scenario. Even if this suggestive Gestaltswitch
does not quite bear up to sociological scrutiny, and if the contrasting evidence of
what appears as a sweeping desecularization can be brought into line with more
conventional explanations,8 there is no doubting the evidence itself and above all the
symptomatic fact of divisive political moods crystallizing around it. Irrespective of how one
evaluates the facts, there is now a Kulturkampf raging in the United States which forms the
background for an academic debate on the role of religion in the political public sphere.

Faith and Knowledge

First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refers
to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state.  This
meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal
modernism in general.  Since then, the word "secularization" has been
associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the
successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being
emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.

According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living
have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents.
According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be
regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest.  The "replacement" model
lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas
the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a
rootless modernity.

But I think both interpretations make the same mistake.  They both consider
secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the
productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on
the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church.  This image no
longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of
religious communities within a continually secularizing society.  And most
of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically
enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal
third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and
religion.

>From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities
are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of
violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith.  This
understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful
within a pluralistic society.  First of all, the religious conscience must
handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively.
Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social
monopoly on knowledge.  Finally, it must participate in the premises of a
constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality.
Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing
societies develop a destructive potential.  The phrase "reflective thrust,"
of course, can give the false impression of being something that is
one-sided and close-ended.  The reality, however, is that this work of
reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs
its course through the public spaces of democracy.

As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology,
becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and
non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated
world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological
pluralism.  If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and
with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand
what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution
mean in a post-secular society.  In other words, the ideologically neutral
state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either
side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious
faith.  The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of
secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal
distance from vital traditions and ideological content.  But such a state
retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically
open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.

Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and
must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences.  But the
scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of
our everyday knowledge essentially untouched.  If we learn something new
about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of
our self-understanding changes.  Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the
geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews.  But the destruction of the
astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less
effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place
of mankind in the natural order.  It appears that the closer scientific
knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding.
Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our
consciousness.  But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility
and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?

Pluralist Societies

The expanded concept of tolerance does not remain restricted to the sphere of religion but can be generally extended to tolerance of others who think differently in any way. Within today’s pluralist societies where the traditions of various linguistic and cultural communities come together, tolerance is always necessary "where ways of life challenge judgements in terms of both existential relevance and claims to truth and rightness" (J. Habermas)

Multiculturalism and the Liberal State

 My  article, n1 which provides the basis for our discussion, is a response
  to my friend Charles Taylor's The Politics of Recognition. n2 The
  controversial issue is briefly this: Should citizens' identities as
  members of ethnic, cultural, or religious groups publicly matter,
  and if so, how can collective identities make a difference within
  the frame of a constitutional democracy? Are collective identities
  and cultural memberships politically relevant, and if so, how can
  they legitimately affect the distribution of rights and the recognition
  of legal claims? There are many aspects to multiculturalism, but the
  present debate focuses narrowly on normative questions of political
  and legal theory. Without any attempt to summarize the arguments of
  the book, I would like to remind you of the two opposed answers to
  the question at hand - the liberal and the communitarian positions
  - and of my own response, which is critical of both. n3
           I cannot go into the details of the argumentation here, but it might
  help just to mention both the philosophical and the political contexts
  in which my response to Taylor was embedded. 

As to philosophical themes, those familiar with discussions in political theory will have discovered two controversial issues at stake. First, I am defending liberals against the communitarian critique with regard to the concept of the "self." The individualistic approach to a theory of rights does not necessarily imply an atomistic, disembodied, and desocialized concept of the person. The legal person is, of course, an artificial construct. Modern legal orders presuppose abstract subjects as carriers of those rights of which they are composed. These artificial persons are not identical with natural persons, who are individuated by their unique life histories. But legal persons, too, should and can be constructed as socialized individuals. They are members of a community of legal consociates who are supposed to recognize each other as free and equal. The equal respect required from legal persons pertains, however, also to the context of those intersubjective relationships which are constitutive for their identities as natural persons.

Together with the communitarians I am, on the other hand, critical of the liberal assumption that human rights are prior to popular sovereignty. The addressees of law must be in a position to see themselves at the same time as authors of those laws to which they are subject. Human rights may not just be imposed on popular sovereignty as an external constraint. Of course, popular sovereignty must not be able to arbitrarily dispose of human rights either. The two mutually presuppose each other. The solution to this seeming paradox is that human rights must be conceived in such a way that they are enabling rather than constraining conditions for democratic self-legislation.

Turning to political themes: The idea of a "struggle for recognition" stems from Hegel's Phenomenology. n8 From this perspective, we can discover similarities among different but related phenomena: feminism, nationalism, conflict of cultures, besides the particular issue of multiculturalism. All these phenomena have in common the political struggle for the recognition of suppressed collective identities. This good is different from other collective goods. It cannot be substituted for by generalized social rewards (income, leisure time, working conditions, etc.) which are the objects of the usual distribution conflicts in the welfare state. But those struggles for recognition, fought in various forms of identity politics, are also different in many other respects. One such aspect is law: Since of these groups only women and ethnic minorities have been recognized as objects of constitutional protection, only feminist and mul- [*853] ticulturalist claims can be, at least in principle, settled within the frame of the constitutional state.

Finally, an example. The immediate political context in Germany at the time of my article was the debate on "asylum," which in fact was about immigration. Applying the principles above, one can arrive at the following conclusions: First, there are good legal reasons for defending a right to political asylum. n9 On the other hand, there are only moral reasons, albeit rather strong ones, for establishing a liberal immigration policy. The claim to immigration and citizenship in the receiving country is a moral claim but, unlike political asylum, not a legal right.

Second, immigrants should be obliged to assent to the principles of the constitution as interpreted within the scope of the political culture: that is, the ethical-political self-understanding of the citizenry of the receiving country. Once they become citizens themselves, they in turn get a voice in public debates, which may then shift the established inerpretation of the constitutional principles. The obligation to accept the political culture may not, however, extend to assimilation to the way of life of the majority culture. A legally required political socialization may not have an impact on other aspects of the collective identity of the immigrants' culture of origin.

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