Climate Urgency: Degrowth, System Change — a Marxist Point of View
Photo: LSP/PSL
ISA WORLDWIDE
BELGIUM
Linkse Socialistiche Partij (LSP)?
Parti Socialiste de Lutte (PSL)
Left/Struggle Socialist Party
The COP28 summit in Dubai and the climate protests in December are a good moment to look at the demands of the climate movement. One of the proposals emerging is that of degrowth.
SATURDAY, 30 DECEMBER 2023 07:01 (CST)
Alain Mandiki, ISA-activist in Belgium and a shop steward. Interview by Constantin
First published in Lutte Socialiste, monthly paper of PSL/LSP (ISA in Belgium), written before COP28
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We are now approaching the 28th UN climate summit, but nothing seems to be changing. Why is this?
“The latest UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) report shows that we are heading for global warming of up to 3°C, whereas the Paris agreements aimed to limit warming to preferably 1.5°C and at most 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Moreover, despite all the industry’s promises to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, there has been an increase in investment in the fossil fuel sector.”
“This illustrates the failure of the ruling class to manage the climate problem through successive COPs. Meanwhile, the cold war between the US and China is intensifying. This leads to a process of deglobalisation and it forces each national bourgeoisie to put its own interests first and align itself with the imperialist bloc that best guarantees the protection of those interests. This new situation tends to severely limit the space for new multilateral agreements, while those already in place have proved their complete inadequacy.”
And what about the climate movement?
“The 2019 movement brought some impressive mobilisations that definitely put climate on the agenda. No one can ignore it anymore. Big oil companies like Total are trying to give themselves a ‘greener’ image, including through mechanisms of carbon offsets and credits — which in a way contain a form of colonial relationships — and through greenwashing campaigns.”
“However, if we look at the trajectory of global warming and analyse the data on it, we have to recognise that the mobilisations have not fundamentally succeeded in shifting the lines. This is one of the lessons of the movement: mass mobilisation on its own is not enough to change the situation to the extent needed.”
“The movement has to adapt. There is a certain radicalisation around more activist groups, such as Code Rouge [‘Code Red’, doing direct action in Belgium] or Extinction Rebellion. On the other hand, the movement is trying to find outlets through more institutional efforts, such as the lawsuits against governments that sometimes lead to convictions for climate inaction. Associations are critical of legislative initiatives such as the ‘Nature Restoration Act’. Institutional solutions remain quite limited and do not address the urgency of the situation. The radicalisation of part of the movement and the search for institutional solutions illustrate that the movement is seeking solutions in all directions.”
“The movement is not the same as it was a decade ago. There is a search for connection. Terms like ‘ecofeminism’ or ’decolonial ecology’ and slogans like ‘end of the month, end of the world: same struggle’ illustrate this. There is a growing understanding that the entire system is responsible for the climate situation. At the same time, however, there is no clear understanding of how this system works. We want to help deepen the discussion about the nature of the capitalist system.”
The concept of ‘degrowth’ emerged in the 1970s. It emerged from a part of the ecology movement, advocating less production of material goods and less consumption. In recent years, the concept has been adopted by part of the climate movement. How do you see it?
“It is an illustration of the search for answers. Again, the movement is evolving. Ten years ago, one of the slogans was ‘more ties, fewer goods’ (‘Plus de liens, moins de biens’). This expressed an idealistic critique of consumer society and the impact of production on nature. Today, the critique of degrowth is more radical. It is not just a critique of consumerism and productivism, but of the entire system. This is a positive development.”
“However, we have to be careful since degrowth as a concept is a theoretical catch-all term. It is used by the entire political spectrum, from the far right over spiritualist groups and the ‘deep ecology’ trend to left-wing anti-capitalists like Kohei Saito and Jason Hickel. The latter have a general critique of capitalism.”
“Degrowth brings a critique of the entire system, but the vagueness of the concept prevents us from fully understanding the mechanisms of the system and therefore from effectively opposing it. Marxists criticise the mode of production on the basis of an understanding of its functioning.”
“Capitalism, in our view, is a system that is fundamentally harmful to humanity, nature and the relationship between the two. In this system, production is not aimed at social needs, but at the accumulation of capital in the hands of a small minority. That is why capitalism produces a large accumulation of goods. The system turns everything into commodities. Commodities are primarily a crystallisation of a social relationship of exploitation. From its inception, capitalism has done everything to subjugate humans and nature. The demarcation and appropriation of land by large landowners led to the opposition between urban and rural, but also to destructive trade relations for the peoples of countries subjected to the yoke of slavery and colonial rule, where monoculture for export was the model. It is this scientific understanding of capitalism that we want to bring into the movement.”
Marxism puts a lot of emphasis on the need to develop the productive forces. Looking at the ecological record of ‘socialist’ countries in the past, it is understandable that some might ask what the relevance of a Marxist analysis around climate is. Isn’t degrowth also a critique of Marxism?
“The experience of the Eastern Bloc, actually of the Stalinist caricature of socialism, led a whole generation away from Marxism. After all, they only saw the dogmatic and distorted caricature. There were a lot of ecological disasters in the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is just one example. Many rivers and lakes were polluted. Bureaucratic planning did not take into account the link between humans and nature. In the People’s Republic of China, the ‘campaign of the four pests’ also caused major ecological imbalances.”
“This illustrates the inability of Stalinism to address ecological problems. With the ideological weight of Stalinism gone, this gives us an opportunity to look again at the real contributions of Marxism to political ecology.”
“For example, the concept of the metabolic rift plays a fundamental role in Marx’s thinking. From the beginning of his work, we see that the link between humans and nature is absolutely fundamental.”
“When Marx analysed the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, he noted that for the first time in human history, producers were physically disconnected from the means of production. The purpose of demarcating land was to deprive peasants of their land. The result was the first alienation of the worker from his tools. As a result, people were forced to sell their labour power to survive. Among other things, this led to the separation of urban and rural areas.”
“Previously, there was a certain harmony between man and nature, made possible by the reabsorption of waste resulting from the production process by the soil, so there was a kind of natural cycle. However, rural exodus and massive industrialisation have broken a whole series of natural cycles. For example, the destruction of the nitrogen cycle causes a whole series of ecological problems. The fertility of the land is declining. Moreover, the urban-rural divide has led to an accumulation of pollution and waste in urban centres.”
“The discussion on the development of productive forces is one of the most debated and interesting discussions. The Stalinists made a caricature of it, but what Marx meant by this and what is expressed in the Communist Manifesto is that, for the first time in human history, we have reached a stage where social, economic and ecological crises are caused not by underproduction but by overproduction. This is due to capitalism, which, in order to resolve all its internal contradictions, overcomes the social and natural obstacles that stand in its way. Today it is not so much a matter of increasing the number of goods put on the market, but of producing rationally and in line with needs. We also want people’s lives to stop being alienated. Therefore, we want to get rid of the wage ratio. We want the time spent producing what is needed to be limited to the bare minimum so that we can enjoy what each of us finds pleasurable and we can live happy lives. This is what Marx called the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”
Surely we cannot wait for another production system to address climate urgency? Would degrowth be a good starting point to get straight down to it?
“The time argument should not be taken lightly. There is an urgency. There is the problem of CO2. Of the nine planetary boundaries that must not be crossed in order to maintain the conditions for human development, six have already been crossed and the other three are also heading that way.”
“At the same time, the argument of urgency is too often misused to make us accept the inadequate measures the ruling class is willing to give. The argument is then that any small measure is better than nothing at all. It is this kind of reasoning that takes us to the abyss where we are today.”
“Permanently cutting growth under capitalism is impossible. Capitalism needs to grow to constantly expand profits. Any attempt to cut growth under capitalism would be fiercely resisted by the ruling class — just witness how they refuse even to reduce the burning of fossil fuels.”
“Besides the problem of global warming, the entire relationship between humans and nature is problematic under capitalism. This system is unable to respond to all the contradictions on different fronts.”
“We see this in Belgium with the PFAS crisis. Manufacturers knew for years that too high a concentration of this product was dangerous. In order not to slow down the flow of profits, they did nothing, endangering the local population. When the scandal of the 3M plant in the Antwerp region became public, the consequences did not fall so much on the owners, but on the staff who saw jobs lost.”
“It shows one of the main weaknesses in the approach of degrowth. That approach emphasizes the need to reduce consumption and production, but does not analyze the contradictions in society. A recent Oxfam report shows that the 1% richest on the planet emit as much CO2 as the 66% poorest. This is an expression of the fact that society is divided into classes. We must ask which class can confront the contradictions of capitalism to address economic, social and environmental problems. Capitalists cannot be trusted. The many public health and environmental scandals caused by their greed for profit make it clear that they are totally incapable of doing anything for the common good.”
“Radical measures will have to be taken to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to prevent the average temperature from rising by more than 1.5° Celsius.”
“We know that there is a need for large-scale reforestation in contiguous areas and we know that ecosystems that have been destroyed by capitalist production methods need to be rebuilt. So there must be a whole series of restrictions on production. Then there are the social needs. The last forty years have been marked by an explosion of inequality and deficits. These also exist in the so-called ‘rich countries’, but especially in the neocolonial countries, where the development of capitalism lags behind and social needs are enormous. This means that not only do we have to work on keeping life in society compatible with nature, but a whole series of social obligations are imposing themselves.”
“To do this, we have no choice but to plan the economy rationally so that we can democratically decide how to make the necessary ecological transition. This is impossible without nationalizing key sectors of the economy. We must have the means and tools to decarbonize our economy.”
To achieve this ecological transition, it is certain that certain sectors will have to greatly reduce their activities, such as the oil industry, for example. But isn’t it reasonable to simultaneously also drastically expand the activity of sectors such as public transport at the same time?
“Absolutely. In fact, most left-wing advocates of degrowth recognize this. It would be unfair to equate the political project of the left degrowth movement with a recession detrimental to the social majority as a whole. However, it does force us to ask what is fundamentally wrong with capitalism. The problem is not limited to GDP growth. It is about the fundamental purpose of capitalism, which is the accumulation of commodities in order to sell them and make a profit. Commodities are above all a social relationship of production and exploitation. And this is the problem. In a socialist society, the discussion of growth would take place on a very different basis, because the goal would be primarily to satisfy social needs. Social needs are also environmental needs, because it is the social majority that suffers from the effects of climate change.”
Building a society where social needs take precedence over profit will require a huge struggle. How can we build the relation of forces that will allow us to do so?
“We need to draw on recent experiences. The mobilizations of 2019 were historic. They did not work. Not because the mobilizations were futile, but because the question of power was not properly asked. Where does power lie? In the social relations of production. This is why our strategy starts from class relations. We must respond to this fundamental contradiction of capitalism. The fact is that when workers stop working, the capitalist cannot continue the process of capital accumulation. That is why the strike is still the best weapon we have. Strike alone is not enough. We must put on the agenda the question of appropriating the means of production for the needs of society. Obviously, such a movement cannot be built in a day. Every time we mobilize, it is an opportunity to convince those around us that a different system is needed and that an alternative exists in the form of democratic socialist planning.” |
