Dutch Election - Wilders Falters, Labour Crash, Green Left Gain

The political establishment across Europe are celebrating yesterday’s Dutch general election result, where Gert Wilders' party, PVV, did not make the large gains that opinion polling have been suggesting. The turn-out, at 80%, was unusually large.

The PVV stood on an unambiguous platform of anti-EU, anti-Muslim immigration policies, and it was thought would follow the right wing popularist trend of Brexit and Trump in recent protest votes. Well done to the Dutch people for rejecting this type of divisive politics.

The high turnout and spread of votes amongst several parties, played a part in halting PVV's advance, but perhaps more significantly, the centre right VVD party, stole some of the anti-immigration rhetoric from PVV, and the public row with Turkey probably helped as well.

Echoes of the UK, where the Tories are playing the same game, and thereby gaining former UKIP voters with anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. It is a widely held view that the rise of the National Front in the UK in the 1970’s was halted by the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, which was big on patriotism.

The Labour Party, PvdA, were the big losers, after participating in a coalition government with the centre right party VVD, with further echoes of the Lib Dems, this time, in the UK, and a continuing slide by social democrat parties in Europe that have embraced neo-liberalism. PvdA went from 38 seats to just 9.VVD won the most seats, with 33, down 8.

Smaller parties were the main gainers, with the Dutch GreenLeft Party (GroenLinks in Dutch) gaining 10 seats, going from 4 to 14. As the name suggests the party is a left wing environmental one, and describes itself as "green", "social" and "tolerant." Not explicitly ecosocialist, it is after all a reformist party, but certainly heading in an ecosocialist direction.

The result demonstrates that a Green Left party can take significant votes off social democratic parties, particularly in the bigger cities. GreenLeft topped the poll in Amsterdam.

A coalition government will have to be built between at least 4 parties, but GreenLeft have said all along that they will not participate in a right or centre right government. It would be wise to stick to that after what happened to the PvdA at this election.

This is an English translation of a statement by GreenLeft about yesterday’s Dutch general election. 

From their website GroenLinks:

Thank you for voting, thank you for your commitment to the campaign. We have shown along that ideals do matter in politics. We showed together that we can get the country moving. We have written history.

Together we form a great new movement, which connects green and leftist values together. A movement for change. We go on.

Join us so we can listen to you. We need you, to share concerns with each other. To exchange new ideas. To discuss how we proceed not only from The Hague, but also in the country to bring real change in the Netherlands.

Let's change the Netherlands together.

Congratulations to GroenLinks from Green Left in London.  

20th Century Socialism took the Eco out of Socialism

You could, no doubt, write a long book along the lines, and some have, that my headline suggests, but this a short blog post, so I can’t really go into huge detail here. It is a summary. However, I hope this blog stimulates some debate, and maybe encourages some to think about socialism differently.

There have been threads of socialist thought, and ecosocialist thought, going back hundreds if not thousands of years, but the concept really, self-consciously, began around the 1820s and 1830s. 

Around this time, of the industrial revolution, capitalism started to resemble the economic system we see today. The factory workers would soon realise their strength within the system, as well as their weakness, and a way of thinking about the way capitalism worked began to form out of necessity.

Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx emerged as the most important socialist thinker and writer, and his three volume work Capital, became the basis for much of what socialism stood for, and what it was against. In fact, it was mostly about what it was against, capitalism that is, in what was a brilliant and radical critique of how the system exploits those who only have their labour to sell.

Marx is a somewhat controversial figure for ecosocialists, with some thinking he was essentially a productivist, whilst others arguing that he was misinterpreted, and Marx was at heart ‘green.’ The American ecosocialist writer, James Bellamy-Foster, has developed an impressive thesis with the work he has done on identifying Marx’s theory of capitalism causing a ‘metabolic rift’ between humanity and nature. Taken from Marx’s volume 3 of Capital, and building on his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Bellamy-Foster says this is a "mature analysis of the alienation of nature."

Personally, I take the view that Marx’s thinking and writing was of its time and perhaps more crucially, it is incomplete. I can certainly see that Marx had a green side to him, and much of this is demonstrated in his volume 3 of Capital, where ecosocialists find encouragement.

Take this quote from the same volume of Capital which most ecosocialist will be familiar with, but maybe other socialists will not be:

“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

The Russian revolution in 1917 made socialism flesh, and in the early days of the revolution, it had ecosocialist content, such as the conservation of land and the integration of production at sustainable levels. And Lenin introduced national parks to the country.

Arran Gare, in Soviet Environmentalism: The Path not Taken writing about Lenin says he ‘interpreted Marxism in such as way as to acknowledge the limitations of the environment, and of the existence of dynamics within nature with which humanity must accord.’

This concern with ecology did not last though, under pressure internally and externally from enemies of the revolution, understandably in many ways, socialism in Russia took a productivist path in competition with capitalism. The economic advances made in a relatively short time, from near feudal economy in 1917 to putting the first man in space by 1961, was impressive. But this all came at a cost, to the environment and in the lack of freedom and democracy, not forgetting the brutality of the regime too. It also sowed the seeds of the eventual demise of these societies.

Marx’s concept of a free association of producers, which is accepted in the anarchist political tradition also, which he explored in, yes, you guessed it, volume 3 of Capital, is completely absent from the 20^thcentury socialisms that came into being, led by Russia (USSR).

What Marx meant by this is a relationship among individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, and no private property of the means of production. This gives individuals the access to the means of production enabling them to freely associate, and produce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their individual and creative needs and desires.

The 20th century socialisms all relied on the Party-state as the active force directing the revolution. They used the centralised state to direct accumulation by political means rather than the economic incentives that capitalism uses for the same purpose. What has been called state capitalism was the result. It was not socialism, in the true meaning of the philosophy, which to be fair these states realised, but they saw it as a staging post along the way to socialism, when in fact it was the wrong pathway completely.

A pathway that led to ecological destruction on a scale that was even worse than that of capitalist nations, as well as being rigid and authoritarian.

Ecosocialism is an attempt to return socialism to the right pathway, but this means going back to the beginning in terms of theory, there is no short cut. The ecosocialist revolution, if it comes, will not only come from the bottom up, rather than be directed from above, it will need to stay grounded at the bottom, to refresh and democratise the revolution as it proceeds. No vanguard party, no Party-state. A democratic, decentralised socialism with ecological rationality.

 

This is what ecosocialism is, and what socialism should have always been.

Climate Change and Eco-Socialism

Written by Jason O’ Neal and first published at Facts for Working People

Climate change is a fact of life in the twenty-first century. Our society’s dependence on fossil fuels to encourage more economic growth is directly contributing to the global warming crisis.  Climate models accounting for changes in surface air temperatures, ocean currents, land masses, and polar ice cover have forecast extreme weather events occurring on a more regular basis.  Organizations such as the Pentagon, the UN, NASA, and 90% of the world’s scientists forecast the end of life on Earth as we know it in the decades ahead unless things are changed.

For the past several decades, scientists and government policy makers have modeled possible solutions to the problem based on stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at 350 ppm, (parts per million) a level that is probably no longer feasible.  If CO2 concentrations within the atmosphere continue to increase, the ability of the planet to sustain the environment will diminish.  Possibly crashing the entire ecosystem.  How did we arrive at such a dangerous precipice? And, can we do anything about it?  Current debates are between market-based approaches of taxes on emissions or trading programs against stricter government regulation.  What is left out of this discussion on the economic front is how to rapidly reduce emissions and improve carbon sequestering capabilities, both natural and technological.  With the easiest path to 350 ppm by the year 2030 becoming an unrealistic expectation, where do we set the next target? And, how did climate science and our political and economic goals become so disconnected?  

The use of carbon-dense fossil fuels helped to industrialize America as productivity exploded and the economy expanded.  Two hundred years had passed since the transition from feudal labor relations to industrial labor relations created the Second Industrial Revolution.  Rural communities were realigned with workers migrating to urban areas where they were forced to sell their labor for income.  The emerging economy became one based on social relations and interactions that were held in place by commodities.  Like the arguments between early economists during the transition between mercantilism and capitalism, questions about who was best equipped to responsibly manage surpluses from the economic boom remained.  Because ‘capital’ needs to be free and allowed to work in a global economy, neoclassical economics became the preferred economic system in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century.  The downside of this heightened productivity was that it was based on energy from fossil fuels and the risks associated with climate change were an unknown threat at the time. 

However, economists were concerned with the availability of fossil fuels, as indicated by William Stanley Jevons in his book The Coal Question, published in 1865.  Jevons’ answer was to maximize the “effects at the margin” and to not be “concerned with the last piece” as coal mining was no longer a physical restraint, but an economic restraint based on a “difficult” adjustment to the costlier extraction process.  The material comfort of society was based on efficiency and access to resources, but what Jevons failed to realize was that efficiency accelerated the process of extraction and his concept of maximizing at the margin did not solve the question of depletion.  Again, the atmospheric effects of burning fossil fuels was not addressed, perhaps not even considered, as economists were focused on control of the production and distribution process.

The first pushback against neoclassical economics was from, John Maynard Keynes, a British economist.  Keynes stated that people with money to invest prefer to “sit-out” of the economy waiting for better returns on their investment, “parking cash” elsewhere and saving it for future opportunities.  A strict “monetarist” economy, based on a free and self-regulating market that could only be adjusted by supplies of money through interest rates, would not solve this problem.  Keynes advocated for direct government intervention through increased spending to stimulate the market.  This was a fundamental element to FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression which allowed the U.S. government to redirect surpluses through taxation of those who were hording the money.

The successes of the New Deal and the increased production during World War II faced a new economic threat.  The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war as the two major economic powerhouses in the world.  With both sides arguing for national security and access to developing world markets, the Cold War became a chess game of foreign policy and economic stability.  The hard stance of anti-trust against monopolies taken by the U.S. during the early twentieth century began to change after World War II. 

The Chicago School of Economics took the lead on economic philosophy to counter the state-run socialism of the Soviet Union under Stalin.  The Chicago School’s interpretation of neoliberalism was not as critical of private control of the economy as much as it was with government control.  The 1960s witnessed the horizontal integration of energy companies as they began to control physical resources.  After the early 1970s access to petroleum fields would eventually determine currency pricing and demand as the dollar remained the world reserve.

Part of this shift was helped by Milton Friedman, an American economist and critic of Keynes.  Friedman attacked social programs which he claimed created a dependency on welfare and he argued that the private sector could perform better at providing services to the public.  Economic systems need to naturalize themselves and neoliberal free-market ideology created by conservative economists, like Friedman, limited economic policies to market reasoning.  This gained influence through the popularity of his book, Capitalism and Freedom, and Friedman became a well-known and integral part of the economic policies of the Reagan administration. 

Also, The Volker Fund, named after William Volker, assisted large corporations to spread capitalism as a global management system.  This Volker Fund controlled the structuring, curriculum and ideas that were vetted for the Chicago School during this time and it now functions as The Heritage Foundation, a think-tank promoting neoliberal economic policies.  Unfortunately, neoliberal economic growth models focus on “sustainable growth,” not “sustainable environment.”

A voice of reason not so popular at the time, was an American mathematician and economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.  A Romanian immigrant, Georgescu-Roegen argued for a return to biophysical thought as a foundation for economics.  Because resources have been treated as if they have no limits, his work with ecological economics was classified as outside of the normal parameters of economic policies.  Georgescu-Roegen argued that all production is based on materials and energy and that the earth’s natural resources were irreversibly downgraded when used in the economy.

These natural resources would eventually be depleted and the world economy would ultimately collapse.  Introducing thermodynamics into economics, although he was mistaken in some interpretations, Georgescu-Roegen was the inspiration for “de-growth” movements across the globe.  This forced many people to rethink neoclassical economics and its ties to “Promethean technologies” which helped to industrialize the process of food production and has resulted in more environmental degradation and deforestation to convert ancient forests into farmland.

Another ecological economist who was critical of neoclassical economics was Howard Odum.  He conducted his Silver Springs study to track energy inputs/outputs in a natural ecosystem.  Working on general systems theory, Odum also introduced the concept of “energy memory,” or Emergy, which is a measure of energy used in the past to form our environment today.  Because of the biophysical limits of the earth, Odum argued that “physical capital” will level off. 

His focus on Energy Return on Investment (EROI) showed how production growth is tied to energy efficiency, or outsourcing the energy consumption, and any step up the energy ladder (possibly using secondary sources which will become more energy expensive because they are based on a dwindling fossil fuel) could lead to irreversible climate change.  Odum advocated for an energy policy which offered a “prosperous way down” arguing that a complex adaptive living system must sustain itself.  Under current economic policies and development the addition of capital and labor has not reduced the use of energy; it has led to more energy consumption.  Increased infrastructure of the energy sector begins drawing more energy to produce and maintain itself. 

This results in an “infrastructure trap” where resources are exhausted with diminished returns on investment for maintaining the structures of society .  Odum criticized the economic philosophy of social structures built on a wave of cheap energy in the face of diminishing supplies from natural resources.  Although he was less enthusiastic of nuclear energy, because of costs associated with production and ecological degradation, Odum was not convinced that neoclassical economists placed our development on the right path.  We are now “constrained by the complexity of society.”

Today’s argument about climate change and how to best reach 350 ppm has become one hinged on atmospheric limits and trade-offs for interest rates by “discounting the future.”  The neoclassical economists’ favorite champion for intergenerational equity is William Nordhaus.  A Yale economist working on climate change models, Nordhaus’s most often cited model is DICE, an interpretation of climate change optimized for the economy while limiting the worst case scenarios for damage to the environment.  Nordhaus is still tethered to neoclassical economics and its “laissez-faire” attitude toward markets as the arbiter of climate change.  His position is that a social cost per ton of carbon should be discounted higher because future generations will have more money to combat climate change.  However, this limits the available options for structural change with every passing year as global temperatures are now exceeding forecasted predictions. 

Nordhaus’s opposition opinion is held by former chief economist at the World Bank, Nicholas Stern.  In his review he called for immediate and drastic measures to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.  Nordhaus was a harsh critic of the “Stern Review” and he claimed Stern went too far, possibly because Stern advocates for a world economy with the ability to regulate carbon emissions to encourage their reduction.  Stern linked climate change to neoclassical economics and called it humankind’s “greatest market failure.”  When models for their positions are compared to one another they take different approaches for reaching their target goals.  Nordhaus uses a higher discount rate to not upset investment in the hopes that future generations will solve the crisis, while Stern uses a lower rate which values the quality of life of future generations over profits.  Perhaps a reasonable compromise between the two would suffice, but it would be more beneficial to do as much as possible now. 

Marx identified the contradiction of a stationary state in capitalism—he said it could not exist.  If a stationary state is needed to “de-grow” the economy and reverse the effects of climate change, then perhaps capitalism must go away.  Currently, policies are drafted about “reality” based on what the “economy is telling us.”  These policies dominate our social and environmental life and they restrict our ability to see our existence without it.  Capitalism is based on growth and, as it stands, infinite growth is not possible.  Would the answer be to allow governments to produce and distribute resources in a sustainable way to prevent ecological degradation, species extinction, pollution, and climate change?  

Economic models explain the interactions of members of different societies and their relationships to one another in a system of exchanges.  A basic mechanical representation of capitalist economics in the United States would be a grandfather clock.  Like the clock telling the time of day, a phenomenon which would still exist without the clock, models of American capitalism attempt to describe what is happening within the economy.  The pendulum on the clock swings from side to side like a smooth and reliable business cycle responding to monetary policies or fiscal spending through government intervention.  However, just like the clock that was designed more than a century ago, the working gears on the inside of the economy need to be re calibrated.  Before mechanics can make the required changes they must decide what size gears to use, this is also the puzzle facing most economists when it comes to adjusting the economy to mitigate for climate change. 

Do we make small changes to facilitate continued growth hoping on a technological breakthrough, possibly at the expense of future generations?  Or, do we make drastic changes in our current lifestyle and consumption patterns to allow our civilization to arrive at a safe place in a distant future?  One thing is for sure.  Doing nothing will not fix the clock and, as each second ticks by, the time to act is running out.   

Unfortunately, all the different suggestions for how to combat climate change have one thing in common. They look for a solution within the boundaries of capitalism. But environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, starvation, global drought, these all threaten to destroy life on Earth as we know it and the harsh and brutal reality is that there is no solution to these crises on a capitalist basis.

All these economists and climate change people refuse to face this reality. Keynes, when he was faced with the inability of his economic theories to solve capitalist crisis, when he was faced with the inevitability of wars and catastrophe under capitalism, came up with the pathetic response: "In the long run we are all dead." This is an appropriate answer to all the economists and climate change people who are trying to find a solution on the basis of capitalism. In a recent article on this Blog we referred to the scientist Stephen Hawking who recently said that the human race would only have a future if it emigrated to another planet. Capitalism cannot solve the problems of society. The capitalist class is driving the human species and the planet down the road to disaster. This is the reality. So is there no hope?

A common expression that business likes to use these days is “thinking outside the box.” And this is what working people have to do if we want to solve the issue of climate change. Capitalism is one system of social organization but there is an alternative system and that is democratic socialism. And there is an alternative social power that can bring about that system and that is the working class, the vast majority of people on the planet.

This system would be based on democratically elected workers and poor peoples councils that would be linked together worldwide. Through their democratic integrated structure the wealth and resources of society can be taken out of the private hands of the capitalist class. On this basis, and with the help of today's new technology and communications systems which exist as never before, the working class would be able to draw up a democratic sustainable economic world plan of production, distribution and exchange.  The working class internationally represented in their councils would have available to them the knowledge and resources that humanity possesses.

We rarely think of it but why do factories have to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week all year long?  Think of the energy this requires. The only thing that halts that process is when recessions or slumps occur and production is halted by the capitalists themselves in the interest of profits. Under a democratic socialist system, the drive to produce would be based on social need, not profits. The working class would not draw up a plan that would destroy the planet’s environment and our own futures.  This democratic plan could be broken down industry by industry, sector by sector, workplace by workplace, even worker by worker. On this basis every worker would be able to know what work they had to do to meet the plan.

The building of 2400 square feet homes for two people would be curtailed. Mass transit, rationally planned housing and the way we construct society would be entirely different.  This in turn would allow people to be at one with their labor, would end the alienation of people from their labor. And flowing from this, as production increased and met the needs of society, the working week could be reduced and the human species could move forward into a new world.

Capitalism is wasteful and inefficient because profit is the prime mover. There are more than sufficient solar, tidal, wind and other natural resources to provide energy for the world without using destructive fossil fuels.

This is the alternative to the threatening catastrophe of capitalism and only the working class can make it possible. As Marx pointed out, “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.” The economists and climatologists who tinker at their computers to try and solve the environmental crisis under capitalism are never going to be able to succeed. Capitalism cannot solve the crisis of climate change. Not only that. They are doing harm to the entire discussion of climate change because by their refusal to stand up and say the crisis of climate change cannot be resolved under capitalism, they are maintaining illusions that it can. They are maintaining illusions in capitalism and the capitalist class. They are refusing to assist the working class to see that it and only it can save life on the planet as we know it. 

Jason O'Neil was Founding Member Green Party, UC Berkeley

As the Climate Melts, Democracy Must Be Rescued and Transformed; Capitalism Can’t Be

Written by Stan Cox and first published at Green Social Thought

Both capitalism and electoral democracy impede effective climate action. But while we have to defend and transform democracy, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with either global climate mitigation or social and economic justice.

Donald Trump plans to dismantle America’s already weak climate policy, potentially dooming not only this country but the entire world to runaway greenhouse warming. The day after Election Day 2016, star climate scientist Michael Mann was already saying he feared that it was “game over” for the Earth's climate.

But at the same time Trump is taking a blowtorch to climate action, he and his allies in Washington are taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. So what do we do when we face two simultaneous emergencies: a slide toward fascism and a descent into a greenhouse climate gone haywire?

Writing recently in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster argued that given the threat we face, the necessary ecological-social revolution will have to be carried out in two stages, and that “The first would involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled after the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s Popular Front would need to be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel-financial complex and its avid right-wing supporters.” But then, “the ecological revolution will have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have to assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all . . .”

The struggle must be taken to every front. Many continue to see the immediate struggle for civil and human rights and against fascism, racism, and economic exploitation as having top priority, given the all-out assault coming down from Washington, many state capitals, and law enforcement. Others continue to argue that we have to lead with an all-consuming effort to eliminate greenhouse emissions and ecosystem destruction if we are even to have a chance at keeping the Earth livable.

Then there are those, including those of us at Green Social Thought, who have long insisted that the two struggles be given joint top priority, because if we succeed in either one but not the other, catastrophe is unavoidable. And importantly, there is no contradiction between the two struggles; in fact, they energize each other.

Capitalism: can’t live with it, might live without it

The dramatic swerve down the road to fascism in the United States, Europe, and Russia has further hobbled our chances of prevailing in today’s struggle for democracy, humanity, and the Earth. I say “further” because the odds were stacked against us long before 2016. The chief threat was then, and still is, capitalism. A well-functioning capitalist economy depends on maintaining large, competing pools of vulnerable labor and on the continuously increasing throughput of energy and resources that feeds the climate emergency.

A few months before America’s political sinkhole opened up, Paul Cox and I put it this way in our book How the World Breaks: “From the point of view of those with vast wealth at stake, the cure for climate catastrophe—deep, ongoing restraint in production and consumption to limit greenhouse gas emissions—would be far more devastating than the worst earthquake, flood, or hurricane.” The same applies to a realignment of economic power in favor of today’s beleaguered majority.

In an article published by Nature Climate Change just fifty days after the US presidential election, two scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that if America does nothing to cut greenhouse emissions for the next four years, it is still possible that the Earth can avoid runaway warming, but only if we do launch drastic actions immediately after that hiatus, and only if the rest of the world ignores our slacker example and starts meeting its climate obligations immediately. That means our chances of maintaining a livable planet are clearly very slim. But they're not zero.

Also in December, Yale economist William Nordhaus published a paper in which he metamorphoses before our eyes from one of the world’s foremost climate optimists into a deep pessimist. Having updated his world economy/climate model with assumptions reflecting the new climatic reality, Nordhaus found that an “optimized” economy (one that, through cost-benefit analysis, carefully balances greenhouse emissions cuts with the need for economic growth) can now be expected to blow through the much-discussed 1.5-degree rise in world temperatures (a widely accepted threshold for global disaster) by 2030 and hit a cataclysmic 3.5 degrees by 2100. (Mann says we have already hit 1.5 degrees.)

More aggressive climate mitigation scenarios that could eliminate net greenhouse emissions by 2040 and keep the temperature rise down to a still-dangerous 2.5 degrees were characterized as “unrealistic” by Nordhaus. So in an eminent economist’s view, capitalism is incompatible even with climate strategies that would reduce emissions but still usher in runaway warming. (Economists would presumably view as worse than unrealistic a detailed, highly practical plan to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees that was modeled on the U.S. mobilization for World War II and published by The Climate Mobilization.)

Nordhaus’s conclusion is not the kind of thing climate optimists like to hear, especially now that they are under assault from retrograde climate deniers at the very top of the power structure. Back when technocrats were still in power, Paul and I characterized what we saw as optimists’ unrealistic view of climate catastrophe this way: “Disaster could be domesticated, soaked up by the economy, so we the people could all experience the event as something distant and manageable, canceled out on future balance sheets by its silver linings. . . . This type of optimism is, we believe, what we will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate change denial anymore.”

What we didn’t know back then was that from 2017 onward, we’re still going to have to worry about climate denial and many more dangers all at once. For years to come, as seas rise and landscapes shrivel, America could remain immobilized within the iron triangle of climate denial, climate optimism, and economic “realism.”

Democracy: might not live with it, can’t live without it

It has been obvious for more than four decades that we can have either capitalism or a livable planet but not both. We’ve known even longer that we can have either capitalism or economic and social justice but not both. For most of us, there’s no dilemma there; only for capitalists themselves does the need to preserve capitalism warrant ruining the Earth for human habitation or having the majority of our fellow human beings live in misery. But in coming years we will have to face a question that should terrify us all: have we reached the point at which we can we have either effective climate action or representative democracy but not both?

With every updated run of global climate models, it becomes clearer that only an immediate, steep decline in greenhouse emissions can give us even a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic warming. That will require a hard ceiling on fossil-fuel burning and other emission-generating activities, a ceiling that must be ratcheted down year by year. In a further tightening of the belt, a big slice of that declining resource budget will have to be set aside for building renewable energy generation capacity and other emission-reducing infrastructure. These moves will constitute a rationing of production.

Struck by this one-two punch—the ceiling on resource use and the diversion of much of what’s left into green conversion—the economy will see an inevitable decline in production of consumer goods and services.

Most of the past year’s proposals for a World War II-style climate mobilization are based on a comparison involving only the second punch, that is, a parallel between the walling-off of resources and human power for war production in the 1940s and the necessary walling-off of resources for renewable energy development now. The consequences of that wartime mobilization—most prominently, conversion from civilian to military production and rationing of consumer goods—were broadly accepted by an electorate that was facing an existential threat. American democracy rose to the occasion. Presumably, we could handle a green conversion of similar scale today, were it to be attempted.

The parallel between climate and World War II mobilizations breaks down, however, back on the first punch, with the immediate, steep decline in fossil-fuel use that is necessary to prevent climatic calamity. In the 1940s, by contrast, America had enough resources and pent-up industrial capacity to boost total production and achieve full employment and higher wages. For the sake of fairness, civilian consumption had to be limited by rationing, and there were shortages of some imported items, but people knew that those conditions were temporary, and consumption soared once the war ended.

Now imagine an America of the 2020s that is weighing whether, better late than never, to declare a climate emergency that includes the necessary steep decline in emissions, production, and material consumption. If that succeeds, it will mean that (1) a majority of politicians have turned their backs on Big Business and have committed to severe limits on resource use and (2) American voters are willing to support them in that effort.

But in a society designed so that its basic working parts are individuals, each acting to their personal benefit, a candidate doesn’t get into office by telling voters what is essential for the common good.

You get in by promising voters that they will be harmed personally if your opponent wins but that each voter will benefit personally if you are elected.

So if you’re a candidate wanting effective climate action, you might declare in a stump speech, “If you folks elect my opponent, the consequences will be terrible. Within a couple of decades, millions of people around the world will have lost their homes to flooding, and others will be going hungry because of crop failures.” So far, so good. Voters may think to themselves, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to see that.”

But then you continue: “On the other hand, if you elect me, there will be a much narrower range of goods available to you, and you will be buying a lot less. You will have a smaller house and will be tightly limited in how much you can drive and fly, and you can forget about that new boat. Don’t worry; the government will ensure that you have access to sufficient food, basic goods, a cleaner, healthier world, and your Constitutional rights, but a large share of the nation’s resources will have to go toward building up our renewable energy capacity and reworking our infrastructure—not into the consumer economy. And we’ll never go back to today’s levels of production and consumption.” At that point, you might as well step from behind the lectern, turn around, bend over, and moon the audience. You’re sunk.    

Given that, given our history, and especially considering our recent experience, getting American voters to approve sweeping climate policies is a hard thing to imagine. That has led some (including me at times) to wonder if saving the climate is even possible in our electoral system. But we simply cannot afford to indulge in that sort of speculation. We have no choice but to reject and condemn any calls to jettison our democratic institutions, however inadequate they are. On the contrary; we must first defend democracy against the current authoritarian onslaught and then set about transfoming it.  

Both our form of government and our economic system are throwing hurdles up between us and climate action, but while we can work to improve and transform politics, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with global climate mitigation and justice. We have to use what’s left of our democracy (inside and especially outside of electoral politics) to simultaneously fight the fascism that threatens humanity and the capitalism that threatens the Earth as a whole.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is an editor of Green Social Thought and author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing. Write to him at cox(at)howtheworldbreaks.com. 

Socialist tendency formed in Australian Green Party

Written by Paul Gregoire - Sydney Criminal Lawyers

Left Renewal is a group of left-leaning rank and file members of the NSW Greens party that caused a stir amongst the broader Australian Greens, when they announced their presence in December last year and declared their anti-capitalist agenda

The arrival of this socialist group has posed a challenge to the mainstream Greens as a whole, as they’ve always stated that there are no factions within the party ranks. The party line has always been that they’re self-governing and their policies are based on a consensus model.

However, Left Renewal tend to differ on these points. They believe the Greens have strayed from their more radical roots. And that today, the party doesn’t formulate all of their policies democratically and some of the party leaders aren’t elected.

Calling themselves a tendency, as the term faction has negative connotations, Left Renewal base their ideology on the four pillars that the Australian Greens were founded upon. These are ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and peace and non-violence.

Left Renewal’s ideology

The tendency released their Statement of Principles on December 21. They’ve pledged “to take a strong stance on the struggle of the working class” and this includes fighting “to bring about an end to capitalism.”

Left Renewal acknowledge that “Australia is based upon an act of genocide” and in doing so support the struggle of that nation’s Indigenous people “for their sovereignty and land rights.”

They’re calling for “an international perspective on climate justice,” as well as supporting union activity, an end to national borders and “an explicit rejection of imperialism.”

The response from the top

The emergence of Left Renewal caused Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale to speak out.

“The Greens have never had factions,” he said. “I will never support going down the Labor route of establishing formal factions within the party.”

Senator Di Natale further stated that he did not support the overthrow of capitalism and implied that it was a “ridiculous notion.” He said if the members of the tendency were “so unhappy with Greens policies” that they should go and find another political party to be a part of.

No politicians involved

Initial reports stated that the group were centred around NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon. However, Left Renewal explained that the senator was unaware of their formation, until they publicly announced it.

Indeed, there are no current or former MPs, MLCs or senators involved with the group.

Tamara is a long-term member of the Greens party, and an activist from regional NSW. She was involved in the formation of Left Renewal prior to the group going public.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke with Tamara, a rotating spokesperson for Left Renewal, about what they stand for and how they plan to go about achieving their aims.

So firstly, who are Left Renewal? What are its origins? And why has the tendency formed now?

In the past months, we’ve seen that the world’s eight richest men have accumulated more wealth than the poorest four billion. We’ve seen the nightmarish Trumpism that has decreed Muslims are banned from entering the US. And also, the confirmation that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded.

So in terms of how to tackle all those things, we go back to Greens NSW, who had its roots as a protest party from the 1970s era of the Builders Labourers Federation and the dissolving of the Communist party. This is actually different from the other state’s Greens parties, some of them came out of the Franklin Dam issue.

We go back to the infamous Green Bans that inspired our party founders, where ecological and social justice were fought for in the streets and on work sites. We want to go back to and strengthen those roots.

Regarding why we formed now, we point out that tendencies have always existed within the Greens. And we’re sick of backroom ideology and shadowboxing over process. We just want to be transparent and talk about different politics and ideologies openly.

We go back to the four pillars of the Greens. And we think if people want to organise passionately around what they view as the best realisation of those four pillars, then it should be encouraged.

Some of the tactics in the past that have been used by the different tendencies – and by the right tendency we would say – but not declared openly, are factional organising and local groups, dirty tactics in preselections and process-based wars against the Community of Management, which is the body that makes decisions in the Greens, in between State Delegates Conferences.

The ideology is focused around socialism versus social democracy, class politics versus liberalism, non-hierarchical versus hierarchical organising and non-electoralism versus electoralism.

We encourage internal debate, whereas the other tendency has opposition to dissent, and would try and shut that down.

Who amongst the Greens party’s rank and file members make up Left Renewal?

We’re a grouping of rank and file members, who believe in revolutionary politics and class struggle. And members are welcome to self-identify, and many of them have. But membership lists won’t be made available to the public.

We’ve slowly been posting Q&As with some members on the Facebook page. So people are welcome to look through the ones that have already come out, or wait for more to come out from those that feel comfortable.

At the events in Sydney, the right tendency made a list of all the members there. And they’re threatening comments from people. So not everyone wants to become public.

And am I right to think that it’s mainly younger members of the Greens that have joined Left Renewal?

We have a variety of ages. Someone on our page, who’s had their profile published, is 52. And then there’s someone else who is 60. So it’s a variety of different ages.

In Left Renewal’s opinion, what’s the problem with the mainstream Australian Greens party at present?

We think that there’s an emphasis where the Australian Greens have lent themselves to professional liberalism. They want to wear suits, make deals and be pragmatic, so as to achieve, what we would see as, non-outcomes and just so-called electoral success.

In order to impose that, they’ve sidestepped the membership at times, with unelected leaders and policies that members don’t get to debate. So at the moment, the federal parliamentary leader is not elected by members. That is something that we’d push for, a democratic election policy.

And there are other policies that we don’t get to debate, even though we’re meant to be a grassroots party. They’re sometimes just announced.

That means that we’ve backed down on important policy questions, such as Palestine and imposing foreign intervention in countries like Libya. We’ve ignored and dropped the ball on other questions, like free education, the ABCC and refugees.

We’ve even condemned Indigenous activists and called them violent for burning the colonial flag. And our leader has called opposition to capitalism a “ridiculous notion,” and is pushing regressive policies like the sugar tax, without authorisation from the membership.

With the sugar tax, we would say, that it harms working class people the most, and it’s shown not to be successful in stopping what it’s supposed to stop.

In doing this, focusing on professionalism, electoralism and centralising of campaigning – instead of coming from the bottom up – we say that the Greens have betrayed our roots as a party of activism and working class struggle.

And we need to be more serious about racism, wealth inequality and the bread and butter issues, like health, education and public transport for working class people. Rather than chasing the votes of a non-existent middle class sensible, professional centre.

We say that it ties into Australian and global politics at the moment that will allow a far-right populist like Pauline Hanson take centre stage, as we’ve seen with the votes increase.

We need to be appealing to working class voters and not just the middle class centre.

Left Renewal states that it’s fighting “to bring about the end of capitalism.” But many people with socialist leanings would argue that this goal is hard to achieve working within an established political entity like the Greens. How does Left Renewal propose to go about achieving this end?

One of the fundamental differences between the Greens and the left of the Australian Labor party is that the Greens do not inherently need to be a party that aspires to government and managing capitalism.

We recognise as revolutionaries, during a low period of struggle, that the revolution is not something we can expect in the immediate future.

We aim to be an ideologically militant minority within the party that can cause the Greens, as a whole, to be a more left populist project that will inspire people to organise against the status quo.

And we think Greens MPs can resource and amplify that when organising community campaigns.

Murray Bookchin – an anarchist in the United States, who helped found the US Greens and inspired revolutionary action in Kurdistan – saw similar values in Greens parties outside the establishment. He believed that they’re an important part of local organising to initiate change at the grassroots level.

And that continued into the US Greens – which is obviously a parliamentary party as well – where the youth wing managed to win over the party leadership and they now have a formal anti-capitalist position.

In the Left Renewal Statement of Principles it’s outlined that “Australia is based upon an act of genocide which exists within the broader framework of global imperialism.”

There’s been a lot of talk from government over recent years about constitutional recognition to bring about some form of resolution for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Many 

Indigenous rights activists reject this proposition as mere window dressing. These activists look towards the establishment of treaties between the government and the various Indigenous nations.

Where does Left Renewal stand on the issue of what needs to be done to begin to bring about some sort of resolution for the nation’s First Peoples?

I live in Bega, in rural NSW, in Dyirringan country. On Invasion Day, I remember an important thing that Rodney Kelly, an Indigenous activist, who organised an event down here, said is that solidarity with First Nations people is about sovereignty and treaty. And those words are left out when people are talking about the Recognise movement.

A lot of Indigenous activists point out that the Aboriginal nations weren’t even consulted until after the Recognise campaign was launched. And there’s widespread dissent as it seems to want to ameliorate the dissent of Aboriginal people to their ongoing colonisation and subjugation in Australian society, instead of actually addressing that.

Constitutional recognition, according to many Aboriginal activists, will have no bearing on the ongoing colonisation and they reject the legitimacy of our constitution in the first place, as do Left Renewal.

We don’t want to take up space from Indigenous activists, like WAR and FIRE, and others across the country, who should be consulted on these issues and should be leading the discussion.

There needs to be education and changes to the curriculum in schools across Australia. There needs to be country, language and culture returned. And government subsidies to fund those programs.

People should be looking at the tent embassy in Canberra and different states – there’s one in Sydney as well – where they’ve declared they don’t accept the right of the colonial parliament to rule over them. So we’d tell people to look at what they’re saying.

Environmental issues have always been a key part of the Greens political agenda. Left Renewal calls for an “international perspective of climate justice.” Can you outline what the tendency means by this?

It’s about shifting the Greens conversation to climate justice, which is a term that is for framing global warming as an ethical and political issue, not just an environmental and physical one.

A fundamental proposition of climate justice is that those who are least responsible for climate change suffer its gravest consequences. What we mean by that statement is that the impact that it will have on global working class communities is the most dire.

For example, the rising sea levels already mean that five Solomon Islands are now underwater. They’ve literally disappeared and were there as late as 2014. And the government there has started to have to look at how they can provide for people as climate refugees, and look at the legal framework as to how they can keep existing as a nation.

So Left Renewal, like all Greens, think there is a global climate crisis, but we think that those communities who stand to lose the most, including Indigenous communities, should be centred in the conversations across the world.

The last point is that we think there is no such thing as isolationist environmentalism. A lot of environmental rhetoric places the environment against migrants or refugees, and we say that they’re intertwined.

This sentiment pretends Australia’s economy doesn’t rely on exploiting other people across the world and that we can’t be environmental by exclusion, at the expense of others, who stand to lose the most.

Since the Greens have been around, there’s been a perception that the party is somewhat ambivalent to the concerns of the working class. Especially, when it comes to the economic consequences of environmental regulations. Left renewal has pledged “to take a strong stance on the struggle of the working class.”

How does the faction plan to deal with the perceived conflict between the interests of the working class and the interests of the environment?  

We say that the ruling class tries to pretend the environment is a separate issue to others, and counter-posed to the creation and existence of jobs.

We saw this internationally, for example, during Thatcher’s attacks on coal miners, in the pretext of sustainability. But also in the early forestry campaigns, with the north-coast Greens and NSW, which were involved in an antagonistic relationship with workers.

And more recently, with the closing of one of the biggest coal mines in Victoria, and the Greens celebrating that, but not talking about how they would create jobs or how there should have already been jobs created.

We argue for a just transition for workers in energy industries. This means plural redundancies, retraining and reallocation of jobs in the renewable sector, if workers wish. Investment in regional infrastructure and opposition to trade deals. Free education and a living wage for all.

We’ve seen some strong work on this from the NSW Greens, where David Shoebridge and the late John Kaye worked to support steel manufacturing workers in the Illawarra. But the Greens must continue to do and dramatically expand this work.

We had the Australian Young Greens Conference recently. And we spoke to Jill Stein, the leader of the US Greens, and she was explaining that over there they look to Germany for their view of just transitions.

They’ve recently had to close a really big coal mine and thirteen hundred jobs were lost. They offered voluntary redundancies across all industries. And then the people were retrained and at the end of it, there were very few people without jobs.

So we would be looking at that in the forestry and coal industry.

In December, Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale criticised the formation of Left Renewal. He said that the members of the tendency should consider finding a new political home and claimed that the aim to overthrow capitalism was a “ridiculous notion.”

How does Left Renewal respond to Senator Di Natale’s criticisms?

At the Sydney event that we had, one Greens member, who wasn’t a Left Renewal member, she summarised it well, when she came up to the microphone and stared down the camera and said,  “Hi Richard. I’m a member and firmly anti-capitalist. And I’m here to stay.”

So we echo that. We won’t be driven out by other members or leaders, especially the leaders that are meant to be democratically reflecting the views of members, not trying to expel them.

We’re a group of passionate people in the Greens, who are trying to enact, what we see, as the realisation of those four pillars. And if people disagree with our view of how they should be enacted, then that’s totally fine. But they shouldn’t take it personally and try and kick us out of the party.

And lastly, what’s next for Left Renewal. The tendency has formed and stated its principles, how does it propose to go about implementing them?  

We think a big part of what the Greens is missing at the moment is both political and campaigning education. We want to focus on that.

We had a reading group last Friday about climate action and how to go about that in an anti-capitalist society.

So reading groups like that. Other education events across NSW and the country. We’ve done one in Sydney and one in Canberra. And we’re looking at doing some more.

And policy initiatives of things that we want to be pushing. For example, open borders, especially in the climate of Trumpism, and all the anti-refugee and racist rhetoric. So talking more about open borders and what that means.

Running social media and real life campaigns in, but also outside of, the Greens.
Attending events like the Anti-Capitalist Symposium that’s being held on March 11. That’s not organised by Left Renewal, but by members of the NSW Young Greens and the broader Greens.

After the last State Delegates Conference – which is where we all make decisions together – a proposal was put forward that the NSW Greens adopt an anti-capitalist position. And as a result of that, there’s going to be a symposium, where people can interact and listen to speakers.

So supporting those kind of events, but also organising practical events that affect people right now. Like housing in Campbelltown, where 800 public houses were recently sold off by government. We’d be looking at organising something there, as the community are pretty outraged.

The Greens could be doing better in representing those working class voices out in western Sydney.

And the final point is, supporting other activist groups and organising Greens contingents to events like May Day, which is about workers’ rights, and the Palm Sunday Refugee Rally.

Tamara thanks very much for the great interview today. And best of luck with Left Renewal further establishing itself as a political entity within the Greens.

That’s alright. And thank you.

Beyond the limits of nature: an Ecosocialist view of growth and degrowth

Written by Eleanor Finley and first published at Entitle Blog

For more than two centuries, a critical narrative has emerged problematizing economic development, consumption, and growth. While its terms and definitions have shifted over time, the underlying logic remains the same: human society is growing too fast, faster than the limits of nature can accommodate.

In order to avoid global catastrophe by destroying the environment on which we depend, human beings must dramatically reduce the quantity of our own energetic and material consumption. Since the 2008 global financial collapse, a revised form of this analysis called degrowth has gained momentum among European environmental activists and Left academics.

In contrast to their predecessors who rejected the ‘industrial society’,  degrowth advocates blame capitalism as the engine of current ecological crisis. Joining a chorus of eco-socialists and radical ecologists, degrowth advocates argue that a planet of finite resources simply cannot sustain a social system based upon an axiom of production and consumption for its own sake.

In Can there be a socialist degrowth? ecological economist Giorgios Kallis argues that a tension is present between socialism and the apparent need for degrowth, arguing that a socialist society may not necessarily be post-growth, and thus ecologically sustainable. Such a conclusion rightly suggests that degrowth calls for the transcendence of traditional socialist concerns of labor, production, and technological advance. Yet, it does not yet account for how a socialist society may pursue growth along qualitatively different lines to produce a comfortable, materially abundant, and technologically sophisticated society.

In this article, I revisit the concept of growth from the libertarian socialist perspective of social ecology.  Social ecology, first introduced by revolutionary social theorist Murray Bookchin (1931- 2006), shares degrowth’s concern over the conflict between capitalism and nature. However, it rests on a fundamentally different core theoretical analysis. Social ecology situates capitalism within a broader historical development of domination and hierarchy, arguing that the current ecological crisis- including the problem of capitalism’s endless growth- cannot be solved without dealing with hierarchy in general.

Murray Bookchin

Here, I use insights from Murray Bookchin’s collection of essays Post Scarcity Anarchism (1970) to interrogate the limits of a degrowth conception of ‘growth’, and argue that we might find more opportunities for social and political transformation in social ecology’s analysis of post-scarcity and growth as ecological development.

Growth and Degrowth

The basic parameters of growth-centered discourse was established in 1798 by clerical scholar Thomas Malthus. In his highly influential work An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus warns against the rise of industrial society because it  removes the natural “checks” upon growth of the global population. In his work we find that technology, consumption, and population are linked in a tight causal progression:

“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second”.

In other words, the continuous death of poor people ultimately benefits society by keeping food available for the rest of us. This state of affairs is produced not by social systems, but by nature itself:

“Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them…Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds”.

In Malthus’s view, people are consumers, not producers. And while the “imperious” and “all pervading” laws of nature may give life to many organisms, they just as easily take life away. Famine for all is the inevitable result if society’s elites are unable to appropriately measure and restrain the existence and consumption of common people.

The post-war period in the U.S and Europe witnessed a reemergence in anti-humanism and population alarmism. In 1972, Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s elite transnational research group, the Club of Rome, published a highly influential text, The Limits to Growth, which sought to delineate the objective boundaries to global population by assessing “tangible, routable items, such as arable land, fresh water, metals, forests, the oceans”. The book represents a discursive shift from traditional Malthusian alarm over population onto the subject of societal ‘growth’. However, it too ultimately prescribes a rapid and immediate controls on global population and targets society’s most vulnerable members.

Inspired by population discourse, anti-humanist targeting of women, people of color, and the Global South penetrated the Radical Ecology Movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. Advocating “deep ecology” some adherents went so far as to advocate mass extinction and the eradication of human life altogether. Yet this sensibility extended to progressive ecologist and activists circles as well. For instance, the radical ecological journal EarthFirst! repeated injunctions against women having children. Rather than focusing on wealthy elites who control vast majority of the worlds wealth, Earth First! chided women to “Love your mother, don’t become one”.

Leftists, eco-socialists, political ecologists, social ecologists, and degrowthers alike have passionately critiqued population alarmism for its racist and sexist conclusions. They rightly point out that “industrial” society is in fact capitalist society; a system driven by unabated, blind exploitation the natural world for sale in the marketplace. The degrowth movement in particular has responded by calling on wealthy, consumer-driven post-colonial nations of the Global North to repay an ‘ecological debt’ to the Global South. They also promote feminist and ecological economics as an alternative form of economic valuation.

Nonetheless, degrowth draws the basic framework of its discourse from a tradition of economic thought underpinned by the hegemonic assumption of natural scarcity. Within this mindset, nature is approached as a finite pool of resources from which society detracts. The central problematic continues to be conceived as “growth”, and the solution continues presents itself inevitably as “restraint”. This mechanized account of the natural world derives from bourgeois society itself. We also see this represented in the discursive field of degrowth, which is dominated by quantitative terms such as “limits”, “surplus”, “consumption”, and “sustainability”. By definition, this economistic conception of the world flattens qualitative difference and reduces nature to measurable quantities.

While degrowth arguments are useful in policy boardrooms or economics classrooms, by ascribing political meaning to nature only for its “limits”, a degrowth framework is systemically incapable of transcending the conceptual framework which gave rise to the very problems it seeks to address. The “limits of nature” we conceive as scientific facts are just as much moral limits; boundaries that our sense of ethics refuses to cross. Yet a mindset of limitation and scarcity is precisely the mindset an ecological society must overcome.

Reclaiming Growth

The framework of social ecology offers a more nuanced account of the natural world and points the way forward for those seeking to build a socially just, rational, and ecological society. First, drawing from the work of Theodore Adorno, social ecology conceives of human society as located within nature, rather than outside of it.

Modern, bourgeois society has taught us to view society and nature in binary opposition. As the needs of society are seen in inevitable conflict with nature, political authority is legitimized as a mediator and a manager of society’s rapacious expansion. In contrast, social ecology recognizes capitalist society’s destruction of the natural world not as an inevitability, but as only one aspect of the human potential. We also have the capacity to intervene as a creative force that can “produce changes in an ecosystem that would vastly improve its ecological equality”. Social ecology brings clarity to the fact that our current predicament depends not on society’s scale or external limits, but rather its internal quality and ethics.

Social ecology emphasizes nature’s creative features; it’s fecundity, resilience, and open-endedness. Social ecology recognizes that organic entities are not finite in the same way as inorganic entities such as a rocks or minerals. Forests, for example, mature over time, acquiring qualitatively new attributes as well as greater degrees of diversity and differentiation. Bookchin referred to this organic unfolding as dialectical naturalism. The natural evolution of which humanity is a part is an open-ended dialectic, moving toward increasing degrees of differentiation, diversity, mutualism, and creativity.

Thus, rather than accepting bourgeois society’s picture of growth as endless appropriation and expansion, social ecology also invokes an alternative understanding of growth as qualitative development. An ethical society, infused with the recognition of humanity’s role within nature, actualizes ecological principles through moral and democratic institutions. Yet in order to do so, we need not to abandon sophisticated technology, material comfort, transportation, or leisure time. To the contrary, technology has a vital role to play in the realization of a liberated society.  By freeing human beings of onerous toil, machines liberate human beings to interact with the material world through the practice of craftsmanship. Bookchin calls this a “technology for life”,

“In a liberated community the combination of industrial machines and the craftsman’s tools could reach a degree of sophistication and of creative interdependence unparalleled in any period in human history…We could truly speak of a qualitatively new advance in technics- a technology for life”

Bookchin uses the term post-scarcity to describe the economic and cultural sensibility that underpins the development of a technology for life. While bourgeois society is characterized by the imposition of manufactured scarcity, a post-scarcity society cultivates an attitude of abundance. This sense of abundance does not live in the realm of ideology alone, it is also a lived reality practiced through ecological and democratic institutions. In this way, a post-scarcity society would enhance not only ecosystems, but also lead toward human life characterized by comfort, leisure, and intellectual, cultural, and social stimulation.

How might a post-scarcity society approach production, consumption, and the management of collective resources?

The economic principles and practices of a post-scarcity society can be described succinctly as a moral economy. Visionary historian E.P. Thompson coined the term moral economy to describe the presence of moral and ethical values in patterns of working-class and peasant economies. Self-interest and material need can only partially explain economic choices, even at the individual level. 

Equally important are conceptions of fairness, expectations of reciprocity, and social bonds. As an analytic device, moral economy calls upon social scientists to privilege our understanding qualitative economic values rather than quantitative measurement.

Social ecology invokes moral economy not only as an analytic device, but also as a normative principle. A moral economy can also be understood as one based on ethical principles of reciprocity, usufruct (or ownership by use), the abolition of property, and production for use and not profit.

Equally important to a post-scarcity society is the politicalization and democratization of the economy. The people who live in a given city, town, or neighborhood ought to have the power to directly manage the basic economic decisions which structure everyday life. It is not coincidental that the terms ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ share the same etymological root, which is oikos, the ancient Greek term for household. The principles of an ecological society and a moral economy are one in the same.

As global climate and ecological crises worsen, the deeply intertwined nature of social, economic, and ecological life is growing more apparent urgent than ever. Degrowth attempts to address this problem by calling for a significant and rapid reduction of global production and consumption. Such a process constitutes human society reigning itself back within the limits of nature.

In this article, I have criticized some of the underlying assumptions of degrowth critiques, suggesting that our appeals to the ‘limits of nature’ are really appeals moral and ethical boundaries. On a social ecological framework, we might reclaim growth as development, and move toward a free, ecological, and comfortable, technologically sophisticated society.

Human beings have the ability to play an elaborative role in natural ecosystems that fortifies their stability while enhancing their diversity and fecundity. What is called for today is not restraint, but an unleashing of humanity’s creative, elaborative, and social potential.  Material degrowth can describe this process only partially. In order to achieve the kind of society the vast majority of degrowthers are after, we are tasked with integrating a de-growth prescription with a coherent movement for holistic social emancipation and popular political power.

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*Eleanor Finley is an organizer and a board member at the Institute for Social Ecology, Vermont. She is currently doing her PhD in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where her research focuses on social movements, political ecology, and energy politics in Northern Spain.