Strategies for Degrowth

In the face of global socioecological crises, envisioning alternative futures that are realistic and desirable, yet also address the urgency and scope of these crises, is a daunting endeavour. As degrowth theorists and activists argue, at the root of our multiple, interlinked, and accelerating crises is a socioeconomic system driven by endless economic growth. The consequence of this growth—the excessive material throughput of countries in the Global North—is but the tip of the iceberg. Behind this growth massive and systemic changes.stands the drive for the ceaseless accumulation of capital, itself built upon a constellation of exploitative relations. The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan, is a welcome addition to both untangling the capitalist relations that underpin growth while tackling the formidable task of envisioning a degrowth future that will entail massive and systemic changes.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

The case for a Social Guarantee: Universal access to life’s essentials

The Social Guarantee refocuses progressive politics on human relations, on how we care for each other, and on the importance of investing in the social infrastructure on which the rest of the economy depends. It draws on current thinking about the foundational economy, the care economy, and sustainable economic prosperity It offers a coherent, ethical, and well-evidenced basis from which to address such issues as investment, regulation, and carbon mitigation.

The internationally agreed goal of reducing carbon emissions to “net zero” certainly calls for a rapid transformation of the economy. But the economy is not just a bundle of interacting mechanisms – such as investment, debt, interest rates, trade, competition, supply chains, pricing, consumption patterns, and so forth – to be tweaked by experts. Rather, it is a social construct that involves processing human and environmental resources. And it is a means, not an end in itself. To restate the obvious, “we live in societies with economies, not economies with societies” So the “Great Turnaround” must focus on people as well as the planet and put human as well as ecological needs at the heart of economic change.

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Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other “-Cenes”
 

Why a Correct Understanding of Marx’s Theory of Value Is Necessary to Leave the Planetary Crisis

The perception that we are living in a critical historical period regarding the conditions of habitability on Earth—not only for humans but for many other living organisms too—is gaining more and more adepts among common people, academics, politicians, and social movements. This critical period has been typified as the planetary crisis of the Anthropocene Epoch and studies undertaken in the present century show that habitability on Earth is progressively deteriorating. There is an increasing perception too, though more restricted, of the close relation between the ongoing habitability crisis and today’s global capitalist society. This perception is based more on intuition and on the historical correspondence of planetary crisis indicators with the capitalist mode of social production than on scientific studies showing that the crisis is a structural necessity of capital reproduction. As a result, a number of alternative terms to the Anthropocene have been coined to name the present historical period. Although terms such as Plantationocene, Chthulucene, Growthocene, Econocene, Pyrocene, Necrocene, and so on may have a provocative scope, it is also true that they are based on an incomplete understanding of the ongoing crisis. Among the alternatives to the Anthropocene, Capitalocene is the term that has undergone a deeper conceptual unfolding. However, the concept of the Capitalocene is not devoid of important misconceptions regarding the crisis and its relation with the fundamentals of the capitalist mode of social production based on the reproduction of capital.

In this contribution, I undertake a critical analysis of the current terms for the ongoing planetary crisis, and of the different conceptualisations underlying these terms. The focus is mainly on the Anthropocene versus Capitalocene dispute both because these are the more widespread terms and because they have undergone deep theoretical development. I show that the flaws in these terms are based on a misunderstanding of both the planetary crisis and the fundamentals of the capitalist mode of production, and of their mutual intertwining. These shortcomings are reflected in the proposals to formalise the planetary crisis in the GTS and they are discussed in this context. Emphasis is put on the methodological and epistemological limitations of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene approaches, which are ultimately responsible for the weaknesses of their political proposals to leave the crisis behind.

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Notes from the Editors of Monthly Review on “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene”

Our article on the relation of capitalism to the Anthropocene, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” published in the October 2021 issue of Monthly Review, was directed at the question of how to characterise the current geological age of Earth history. In recent years, scientists have proposed that the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years should be seen as having been succeeded by the Anthropocene Epoch, reflecting the fact that anthropogenic (as opposed to non-anthropogenic) forces now constitute the dominant factors in Earth System change and lie behind the planetary ecological crisis. However, the designation of the Anthropocene Epoch within the Geological Time Scale, though still not officially approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences, means that we are now not only in a new geological epoch, but also in a new geological age, since every epoch has a number of ages nested within it.

In our article, we proposed that the first geological age of the Anthropocene Epoch, following the Meghalayan Age—the last age of the Holocene—be named the Capitalinian Age, reflecting the fact that it is the capitalist system in its mature phase of globalised monopoly capitalism that has given rise to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. This framework was subsequently carried forward in a new book by one of us (John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene [Monthly Review Press, 2022]) and in our article “Socialism and Ecological Survival,” published in the July–August 2022 issue of Monthly Review.

Unknown to us when developing this analysis, Carles Soriano, a geologist and volcanologist at Geosciences Barcelona (part of the Spanish National Research Council, or CSIC), in a 2020 Geologica Acta article titled “On the Anthropocene Formalisation and the Proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group,” had already introduced—prior to our discussion of the Capitalinian—the notion of the “Capitalian as a Stage of the Anthropocene Epoch.” In this article, Soriano argues that this designation is necessary to ensure that “a truly comprehensive understanding of Earth history is obtained, which comprises the ultimate causes of the ongoing planetary transformation and its stratigraphic expression.”

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Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment Humanism: A Revolutionary Ecological Perspective

The fact that Karl Marx was the foremost revolutionary critic of Enlightenment humanism in the nineteenth century can scarcely be denied. No other thinker carried the critique of the Enlightenment’s abstract, egoistic Man into so many areas—religion, philosophy, the state, law, political economy, history, anthropology, nature/ecology—nor so thoroughly exposed its brutal hypocrisy. But Marx’s opposition to Enlightenment humanism can also be seen as transcending all other critical accounts down to the present day in its distinctive character as a dialectical and historical critique. His response to bourgeois humanism did not consist of a simple, one-sided negation, as in the Althusserian notion of an epistemological break separating the early and mature Marx. Instead, it took a more radical form in which the substance of his original humanist and naturalist approach was transformed into a developed materialism. The result was a simultaneous deepening of his materialist ontology, which now took on a definite, corporeal emphasis focused on the conditions of human subsistence, together with the extension of this to the historical realm in the form of a practical materialism.

Marx’s analysis was thus unique in offering a higher synthesis envisioning the reconciliation of humanism and naturalism, humanity and nature. Rather than stopping with a mere antithesis (as in most contemporary “post” conceptions), the object was the supersession of those material conditions of the capitalist mode of production that had made Enlightenment humanism the paradigmatic form of bourgeois thought. This radical rejection of bourgeois humanism was integrated with the critique of colonialism, where capitalism was seen as walking “naked” abroad, exposing its full barbarism. In this regard, Marx’s revolutionary response to Enlightenment humanism helped inspire the later critiques by such anticolonial thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, all of whom called for the development of a “new humanism.”3

Recent research into the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, particularly his conception of the metabolism of humanity and nature mediated by social production, has brought out more fully the depth and complexity of Marx’s overall critique of capitalism’s alienated social metabolism. This line of investigation demonstrates that, far from being anthropocentric, or succumbing to the Enlightenment notion of the conquest of nature, his vision encompassed the wider realm of what he called “the universal metabolism of nature.” This included an appreciation of other life forms and his critique of environmental destruction in his famous theory of metabolic rift, giving rise to what can be called a revolutionary ecological perspective.

Post-humanist (including so-called new-materialist) thinkers have recently sought to challenge Marx’s metabolic vision and revolutionary ecology in general by promoting a phantom-like world of “dark ecology,” hyperobjects, and vitalistic forces. However, such irrationalist views, as we shall see, invariably fail to address the fundamental criterion of the philosophy of praxis: the object is to change the world, not simply to reinterpret it.

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Rational and Irrational Rationing in the Age of Energy Descent

We have to decide what our priorities are: energy waste or fuel for tractors and harvesters, casinos or hospitals, Amazon or neighbourhood shops.

How Imagine a tough night ahead. You have four children, only one loaf of bread and two choices: ration it equally or let the strongest one eat the piece he wants, even if the others starve to death. The humane, honest thing comes first, doesn't it? Needless to say, anyone would do the same. Well, not anyone.

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Trees and the ‘Net-Zero‘ Emissions Hoax

The trees of the forest, a natural paradise of complex plant engineering under the deception of 'net zero' emissions in the Amazon. The irreconcilable contradiction between the cycles of nature and the spiralling growth of capital

The U.S., the European Union and China, the world's biggest polluters, have fallen far short of the commitments and targets in the climate change targets. These were to be achieved by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This is evidenced by the 1.1°C rise in global temperatures, the highest since the end of the 19th century. The climate policies of the North are driven by the rhetoric of energy transition and a return to fossil fuels. At the same time, in the Global South, countless corporations, environmental NGOs and private investment funds are scattered everywhere to plunder the natural world. Together they are selling carbon credits to third parties at higher prices, replacing fertile agricultural land with large-scale commercial monoculture tree plantations, and selling off land, water, air and photosynthesis as part of the definition of ecosystem services.

In the Pan-Amazonian region, corporate policies of adaptation and mitigation to the climate crisis have updated old mechanisms of ethnic-peasant eviction from their territories and accelerated the destruction of vegetation cover, and native trees, including ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole. After COP27, green capitalism has swept through tropical rainforests and natural reserves for the conservation of biodiversity, as well as the oceans, water, air and photosynthesis. Among the legal instruments, the concession, another form of deterritorialisation of indigenous peoples, occupies a privileged place. This is defined as the act or effect of granting, making available, and making accessible consent or permission. This is the case of the Fundo or Fecho de Pasto communities, who are confronted with concessions in defence of their customary rights by supporting the notion of dispossession established in colonial times with renewed exploitative tools. Capital accords with local governments, its unconditional accomplices in the fragmented surrender of every component of the majestic Amazon forest to financialised capital.

From the Pan-Amazon region, we ask ourselves, will the trees at the top of plant evolution survive the sixth extinction of humanity? We do not know, but we are sure that extinction announces and also forewarns us about what to do about the coming eco-social instabilities in the making. For more than fifty years, a conflict between industrial societies and nature's biophysical limits has been predicted to engulf the Global South. We are at a turning point. Projections are distorted, and politicians are confused and make decisions contrary to the demands of their citizens in the face of an avalanche of unexpected climatic, environmental and social events. In these scenarios, the only possible reality is uncertainty. Hence sooner rather than later, rebellions will be the order of the day.

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Africa boasts examples of ecological resilience

Despite its low pollution levels, the black continent is much more committed to ecological transition than many other territories tied to their old patterns of industrial production.

It is no longer news. In recent years, Africa has emerged as the region most affected by global warming. There is a wealth of evidence to support this assertion: temperature rises of more than 1.5°C since pre-industrial times in various regions, creeping desertification in the interior, coastal erosion along the entire western coastline, increasing droughts in the east, floods and hurricanes - all linked to a disrupted hydrological cycle that is pushing the continent to its environmental, human, social, economic and political limits.

This context becomes even more painful when we consider that Africa is not the least responsible for the climate change we are denouncing: the warming caused by human activity and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Indeed, it is estimated that African countries account for only 3.8% of total emissions, very little compared to China, the United States or Europe, which account for 23%, 19% and 13%, respectively, of global emissions.

Africa is not waiting for the industrialised world to react. There is no time for this any more. On the contrary, it is quite possible that, despite its low pollution levels, the black continent is much more committed to ecological transition than many other territories tied to their old patterns of industrial production. It is this idea that I try to highlight in África: cambio climático y resiliencia (Publicaciones UAB, 2022).  

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Vegan capitalism: food multinationals and BlackRock

After seducing the population with the supposed wonders of the vegan diet, transnational meat producers and big investment funds have landed in the food industry, presenting themselves as substitutes for the vegan diet

Until not so long ago, six or seven decades ago, the majority of the rural population's diet was austere, balanced and subject to the possibilities of their territories. In parallel to developmentalism and the concentration of the people in the cities, study centres, universities and prestigious magazines - in coordination with the food industry - spread the message of the need to improve eating patterns, increasing protein consumption, especially animal protein. Through the power of much advertising and propaganda, as in the case of fast food, the message permeated the culture and was installed in the imaginary as the pattern to be followed. To satisfy this "created" demand, the food industry, capable of producing much milk, meat and its derivatives at low prices without contemplating or worrying about its excessive externalities, was justified, thanked and exalted. Traditional food and agriculture were scorned and ridiculed, affecting bodies and territories. From buying and cooking fresh food, we moved on to ultra-processed food reheated in the microwave, and the industry was the clear winner. Something as intimate as our food has ended up being delegated to a few mega-corporations controlled by investment funds.  

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