Degrowth debate 🍌

Technology, Ecology and the Commons – Huber and Phillips’ barren Marxism 📋
By Thomas Smith, originally published by Resilience.org March 21, 2024
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-21/technology-ecology-and-the-commons-huber-and-phillips-barren-marxism/
Technology 🖥️
authors correctly emphasise that capitalism only fosters and develops that subset of innovations and technologies which are profitable, rather than those which are genuinely socially useful.
Private jets ✈️
governments (such as in France and Spain) and communities are – I’m sure much to the chagrin of H&P – beginning to think otherwise and setting personal and societal limits on short-haul flights and private jets, at least to begin with. This is a start towards realising that – in the absence of any breakthroughs on ‘clean fuels’ – there are actual possibilities for setting technological limits for the benefit of the environment and wider society.
Agriculture 🥬
Agricultural soil fertility decline, climate change, or nitrogen pollution and so on are threats to us humans,
Commons 🌳
They accuse degrowthers of being out-of-touch with the realities of social change, and yet are so out of touch with deep wells of human sociality as to understand commoning, mutual aid and horizontal solidarity as mere buzzwords, not crucial modes of existence with histories spanning millennia.

Matthew Thompson
Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution 📋
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/31869/1/thompson-nishat-botero-2023-postcapitalist-planning-and-urban-revolution.pdf
postcapitalist countryside 🌳
The land question and postcapitalist countrysides:  Towards a town-country synthesis 📋
Yousaf Nishat-Botero (City, University of London) and Matt Thompson (UCL
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379514594_The_land_question_and_postcapitalist_countrysides_Towards_a_town-country_synthesis
landlords and rents 🏠
A first cut at defining a postcapitalist countryside, then, would foreground freedom from the domination of landlords and rents on nature of all kinds
elements of a postcapitalist or communist countryside – agricultural land that is managed collectively, through forms of common ownership and democratic planning, free from the dominations of either local landlords or global markets, and that’s put to socially productive use for meeting the needs of all.
Prior to capitalism, this ‘social metabolism’ between society and nature operated broadly sustainably with the needs of nature; nutrients and materials harvested as resources were returned to their source through sustainable cycles

Nowtopia
https://www.patreon.com/posts/degrowth-and-103360070?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=join_link

Cuba Organopónicos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organopónicos

Louis Proyect
Ecosocialists debate the Green New Deal 📋
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/05/01/ecosocialists-debate-the-green-new-deal-continued/

Beth Stratford
Green growth vs degrowth: are we missing the point? 📋
It’s time to stop talking past each other and unite against the real enemies of environmental justice
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/green-growth-vs-degrowth-are-we-missing-point/
https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/a-land-without-landlords-nick-bano-beth-stratford
https://theconversation.com/degrowth-why-some-economists-think-abandoning-growth-is-the-only-way-to-save-the-planet-podcast-170748
https://medium.com/postgrowth/diffusing-rent-extraction-could-reduce-our-dependence-on-economic-growth-1d21aecde9b

Giorgos Kallis
Degrowth is Utopian, and that’s a Good Thing 📋
originally published by Uneven Earth
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-04-30/degrowth-is-utopian-and-thats-a-good-thing/

MATT HUBER LEIGH PHILLIPS
Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism 📋
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/kohei-saito-degrowth-communism-environment-marxism
Workers 🔨
there is a growing number of environmentalists who say that as a result of the ecological crisis — from climate change to biodiversity loss — even these workers consume too much. They need to tighten their belt for the economy of the Global North to “degrow” in order to keep within planetary limits
This enthusiasm for degrowth ideology appears on the face of it neither compatible with socialist goals, nor trade unionism, nor the classical Marxist critique of capitalism.
agriculture 🥬
Saito’s main argument is that Marx became increasingly concerned about the natural limits to the capitalist development of agriculture. Unmentioned in the book is that many of those assumed limits were subsequently overcome by the development of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer
productivist socialism
Saito makes clear the object of his attack on what he calls “productivist socialism,”, or an alleged misreading of Marxism that espouses a “‘Promethean’ (pro-technological, anti-ecological) advocacy for the domination of nature.”
The adherence to fixed natural limits should immediately be recognizable as a species of neo-Malthusianism
planetary boundaries 🌎
these concerns have been repackaged under the banner of nine critical “planetary boundaries” based on arguments made by researchers with the Stockholm Resilience Centre (climate change, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, land use change, and more)
Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries 📋
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
Science 🧬
Friedrich Engels famously critiqued Malthus in 1844 for that one element the latter had forgotten to consider: “[S]cience — whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.” And what is true of science with respect to population is true of science with respect to the material and energy that population uses.
John Bellamy Foster
metabolic rift theory states that the capitalist mode of production has resulted in a breach in the normal, healthy interchange between society and nature. This breach is the source of all environmental problems we faced then and face now.



MARK ENGLER PAUL ENGLER
André Gorz’s Non-Reformist Reforms Show How We Can Transform the World Today 📋
https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory

Matthias Schmelzer and Aaron Vansintjan
Degrowth is not austerity – it is actually just the opposite 📋
Adopting a degrowth model can ensure abundance for the majority.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/9/19/degrowth-is-not-austerity-it-is-actually-just-the-opposite

Kai Heron,  Alex Heffron
Renewing the Land Question: Against Greengrabbing and Green Colonialism 📋
February 20, 2022
https://www.newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/renewing-land-question-against-greengrabbing-and-green-colonialism/
Agroecology 🍏
To begin, a national land bank could facilitate the purchase of new land that comes onto the market, to let out to tenants at a low rent, to farm in accordance with agroecological principles
County farms were established during the late-Victorian agricultural depression with the aim of easing access to land for those who couldn’t afford to buy land or pay rent at market rates.
Marx
in 1872, Marx knew that revolutionary land reform would bring about a dramatic shift in the balance of forces between the working classes, landlords, capital, and the state:
The nationalisation of land will work a complete change in the relations between labour and capital, and finally, do away with the capitalist form of production, whether industrial or rural. Then class distinctions and privileges will disappear together with the economical basis upon which they rest. To live on other people’s labour will become a thing of the pasT






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