In order to slow the economy down and not wreak havoc, he said, we have to reconfigure our ideas about the entire economic system.
This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.
Sounds good to me. It is a fair point that the basic operation of our society depends on continual growth, but redistribution seems like it would be an effective way of mitigating those problems degrowth might cause. We have more than enough resources to keep everyone alive, we just have to use them.
I’d rather just do the full communism now path, where once every man, woman and child has all their needs and many of their wants met, there isn’t a desire to chase the next fashion craze, or buy the next iphone or “keep up with the jones’” as it were because the Jones’ have the same stuff you do, but maybe they spend their ample leisure time exercising, you spend your time gardening.
The only way that will work is if you have a violent dictatorship. Welcome Stalin back basically.
I see more future in putting laws in place that severely limits what companies can do. Companies cannot grow beyond 1000 people. Tax any wealth thing heavily. Tax negatively for the poor, tax a little for those with a little and more for those that are better off. Taxes go up and up once you are richer and Once your income and or networth reaches a certain level, tax 100%.
Institute 3-4 work day weeks
Institute universal income
Out extreme limits on advertising and marketing. Those two are the real evils of mankind.
Require news outlets be paid for by the government and be required to be neutral and factual
With changes like that we can remain a (serverely limited) capitalist system that pays for the very nice social system below that doesn’t focus in money anymore
Laws will be written with loopholes. Just nationalize industry run them for the public rather the for profit and fire the CEOs/Lobbyists and PMC’s that keep Capitalism operating.
Also I’ll take a Stalin for the initial break from Capitalism. After 10ish years, we can go to a more democratic government.
there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth
there should also be unicorns farting rainbows.
expropriate their purse or their person. It’s their choice.
Yeah, good luck with that. Won’t happen. Do you really believe that the 1% will give up it’s riches? Do you really believe that the politicians, you know, the guys with money, will decide on redistribution?
Good luck.
the politicians, you know, the guys with money
There is overlap, but ultimately it’s not a monolith. Anyone can be a politician and politicians succeed or fail on people voting for them. What are the rich gonna do with ownership of all the land and all the companies and all the resources anyway? Effectively enslave everybody? Wait for us to starve so they can keep playing number-go-up in secure enclaves while the world burns around them?
You mention universal income in another comment. If you do it right, that’s redistribution. You give people the means to keep living, every other problem gets less intense. I think there’s a good chance that when things get bad enough, even hardcore capitalists will go for it because it’s a way for capitalism to continue existing in a form that isn’t a dead useless husk. IMO a much better option than pulling for a civil war hoping the result will be a socialist utopia and not just evil warlords doing evil warlord stuff.
How about we do two things
Like how about we work less and we immediately and totally nationalize energy and agriculture haha just a thought haha (fireflies are going extinct haha)
nationalize … agriculture
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨
Do not worry, the CIA is contracting death squads to secure democracy in your country as we speak.
Way ahead of you, energy has already been nationalized here for a long time.
Where?
Multiple Canadian provinces.
That’s cool. Do they ignore climate change in their energy calculations? Because if they are nationalized and choose to burn Shale Oil for energy, then they are kind of missing the point.
The Canadian state is just 3 oligarchs a trenchcoat. It’s no different than if it was privatized.
It’s all renewable here.
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cronyism
This is like saying feudalism would be fine if you could get rid of the nepotism.
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The article is, in my opinion, purposely mischaracterizing the degrowth movement. I would say degrowth is more a natural reaction to the excesses of capitalism than movement about addressing climate change.
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Isn’t the former very naturally part of the latter though ? And doesn’t the article also raise that point as well? Fundamentally it’s an idea that often gets interpreted through both those lenses because it could help with both conflicts, which is also what by definition is it’s purposely trying to accomplish, the first explicitly and the second is implicit in
… within planetary boundaries.
This connection I think should be embraced because climate change is more attractive as a topic to most people than critiques of capitalism but obviously one leads naturally into the other. Saying that degrowth aims to address climate change is more just a description of partial content rather than a mischaracterization and the body of the article tries reasonably to explain other parts as well, less work and better well being are right there in the title, both not a dishonest description of other parts of the philosophy.
After all no one that accepts degrowth as a concept would answer the question “Should we degrow to combat climate change ?” with a “No” All answers would be “yes and …” or “yes but …”
At the end of the day Vice writing will never be perfect but nowadays for genpop media outlets it tries much harder than most to paint an honest picture of the world, and calling this article a mischaracterization seems to me a little harsh, if you’ve never heard of it the article certainly could honestly teach and spark interest for a this “new” way of thinking, and you need just one word to google to get more rigorous explanation if you wanted it.
This will go the same way the “Green New Deal” did. It will scare the ruling class, the ruling class will send its media minions to demonize it, and nothing will change.
no actually, you forgot the final step of “loudly and blindly double down”
You mean like destroying new light bulbs and rolling coal to trigger the wokes?
also funding the police
But, muh IPhone 32 ?
But the phone is 5% lighter this time!
… and will be replaced in a year
If the phone were 5% lighter that would be an actual improvement. Instead phones get heavier and thinner and bigger. So overall the experience diminishes as they try to be tablets.
Even if it was 5% lighter throwing the damn thing away every year is so much e-waste.
No disagreement there. But a problem with modern consumer electronics is that they AREN’T ACTUALLY BETTER then last year’s model. Sure you can talk about pixel density etc, but that was actually a solved problem almost 10 years ago. Apple called it a “retna” display. They idea is that at a certain pixel density and screen size, there is no benefit to adding more . But capitalism always requires more, so since you can’t add pixels, you have to add screen space. But the iphone was already designed to be used one handed. People’s hands haven’t grown in the past 10 years, so why are they making the phones bigger which makes it a worse user experience?
Anyway, I dont’ want to derail into phone chat. but I’ll say that if they did actually start making lighter phones with the same battery life, I wouldn’t consider that an actual improvement to that space, but that isn’t what is happening :/
Degrowth is such a fucking stupid idea. What we need is socialism. The demonic oligarchs that run the world are never going to prioritize reducing climate change. They’ve made that clear over the last century. There’s too much profit to be made.
Worker owned means of production is the only solution. Only then can we direct the productive forces toward solving the most immediate problems that humanity faces. We’ve created so much productivity, but we need to guide it in the direction of sustainability instead of the profit motive.
You’re conflating two very different things. You can have an equitable system of worker owned coops that still has a growth mindset and destroys the ecosystem. You don’t magically become sustainable when socialism becomes a thing. Growth itself when we’re bound by the resources of a single planet a problem, period.
China seems to be achieving this just fine and without the worker coop part even.
Degrowth could definitely only be accomplished under a socialist model where we aren’t price gouged for food and housing. A life with less work and less disposable crap sounds really fucking good though.
Agreed, but that’s not what’s being advocated for here.
Degrowth in absense of socialism is nonsense but it is necessary. Lazy socialism is the way.
I agree. Once we have socialism, we can have degrowth. But none of these articles that come out about it are advocating for that. They’re advocating that the working class take the hit for climate change via increased unemployment, poverty, and ultimately death.
Yes, we’ll save ourselves by resetting the clock and never undoing the conditions that led to where we are
From the narrowly focused aspect of clothing, what can we do? Repair. Repair your clothes. Don’t throw away a ripped shirt, don’t replace it with a flimsy new shirt made by underpaid workers. Sew it. Patch it. Check your library for books about mending, go to YouTube and seek out basic repair videos. A packet of needles, a thimble, a spool of black thread, and a spool of white thread will take care of the majority of repairs. What you can’t do yourself can be handled by your neighborhood laundry or dry cleaner.
Practice radical repairing. Mend your way to a better world.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out” 2.0
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That also means massive unemployment
Look around you. Are there things to be done? Parks to be cleaned? Old houses to be renovated? Run down areas of town? Are there any hungry children in nearby schools? If you answered yes to any of those, then there is work to be done.
Why, if there is work to be done, is it not getting done? What type of society undervalues such critical work such that you would look at the state of the work and think that there is not enough work for everyone to contribute.
There are plenty of jobs, there is infinite work, but the current value system doesn’t incentivise this work that would improve everyone’s life.
So two questions.
- Why doesn’t the current system value this work?
- What would the world look like of that type of work was valued?
That in mind, given that you assume mass unemployment, which is questionable at best, reconsider why that would be. Who, or what, would be the cause?
That happens anyways so
There are a lot of BS jobs that don’t create any value (real estate agents, advertising, …) and a lot of work that is not getting done because nobody would pay for it, for example cleaning up the environment, worker shortage in hospitals and elder care.
That’s actually a good thing, assuming that employment wasn’t tied to surviving nor thriving.
How would business work? Currently a business’s purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don’t need to pay for right now, it’s external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What’s the benefit of degroth over internalizing costs?
Please think of the companies! Won’t anyone think of the poor profit motive?!
Is degroth individual or government driven? If it’s individual, I’m all for it. If it’s government, I think there are more effective ways of helping the environment than telling businesses to not make money.
Yes individual actions are the best and most effective way to deal with collective problems.
Obviously companies making money has no impact on the environment either
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
Remember, you said it in your comment, “… a business’s purpose by law is to make money.” The business doesn’t pay the cost, the worker pays the cost.
Your example of carbon capture is great, a “business” starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to “offset” their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy “poop free kitchen sink credits” to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says “somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I’ve pooped in this sink today,” … I’m still pooping in your kitchen sink.
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
The poop in the sink example isn’t applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it’s all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don’t care in that case whether you don’t poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop’s worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.
You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That’s harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That’s a much more variable exchange, so it’d be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don’t think it’s impossible.
pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it.
How many different gas stations do you see during your daily travels? Are the prices all over the place or are they the same? What are the price differences between different manufacturers of the same type of TV? They’re all pretty much the same with one or two very high end or very low end models being the exception. There won’t be much price competition because that hurts businesses, if one of your business peers raises their prices you are now under pressure to RAISE your prices so that you’re not loosing potential profits.
I’m pretty sure that manufacturing any particular type of thing or extracting any particular type of resource will produce the same amount of environmental degradation regardless of which company’s name is on the paperwork. Exxon doesn’t have some special way to extract oil that is better for the envrioment than the one ConocoPhillips uses. So there won’t be any competition that way.
It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no. Decreasing emissions means a company is pumping less oil or making less iPhones or selling less gasoline. This gives a company’s competitors who aren’t decreasing their production a way to capture its market share because somebody else will still have product to sell to meet the demand. So it there would be no net positive change so long as competition in the free market is allowed in this type of situation.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no.
It’s never directly correlated. You can always transport by ship instead of plane or use more local resources or use less material. There’s always efficiency that can be squeezed out of a system, and a company that doesn’t pursue cost efficiency in that area will fall behind. But right now there’s no reason to do so.
Are the prices all over the place or are they the same?
Gas or the food things?
Often the prices are all the same because the higher cost ones have gone out of business or adapted to the lower cost method. Price fixing (which is what you’re describing) is hard to do when there is a lot of competition, since any one company can disrupt the whole thing and make more money because of it. But it is more likely were competition is scarce. In duopolies or similarly few players, they can price fix more easily. That’s why I am in favor of nationalizing industries like that, or at least they need more oversight.
That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
Why should we give money to rich parasites that contribute nothing when we could just nationalize their “business” and run it at a loss? Why must everything have a profit motive?
Because a profit motive does much better for efficiency. Government run things are not known for their efficiency and innovation.
Plus the government is very inefficient deciding how to delegate resources. Democracy isn’t able to get a lot of information from everyone about their exact priorities and desires without extreme expenditure. But people can show how much they value some services over others by how much they’re willing to pay, doing prioritisation automatically.
I would be in favor of nationalizing some industries where free market forces don’t work, for example healthcare or Internet. But free markets with profit motives are very efficient.
And I claim that they can be moral if the external costs of immorality are internalized. Make a business pay exorbitantly for being bad, and they’ll stop being bad.
Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, and Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?
Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China’s doing, I think we would agree that it’s more government-directed than US-style “free-market capitalism”).
I’m curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it’s not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it’s the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.
To your point of “regulate businesses to ensure good behavior”, surely you must realize the reason we don’t already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.
I’m curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you.
It would be whether there can be sufficient competition to prevent anti competitive behavior. Healthcare inherently has less competition since you shouldn’t be deciding what treatments you get, the doctors should. But you can also get less competition due to extreme barriers to entry, such as trains, mobile networks or internet.
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
@Chetzemoka @inasaba @JohnDClay
The issue isn’t law. It’s base greed.
Protip: if you want your movement to gain any political traction, don’t call it the degrowth movement
What would you call it? Its kinda like the “defund police” thing. If they called it “reallocate police resources” opposition to the movement would just use the stronger “defund police” language as a cudgel to smear it. It’s best to own it and educate
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Pro tip: any one telling you the problem with your movement is the optics, doesn’t actually care about the objectives of thst movement
I care very much for this objective, I just think you’ll never convince the dumber people with a name they’d immediately perceive as very negative
I’d figure you’d convince people by… I dunno… talking to them about it instead of worrying about what they might think about a particular word.
This has extremely strong “defund the police is not a good slogan” energy.
Also i don’t view people who share my position yet are not yet aware or educated yet on why they should stand in solidarity with the rest of their class as “the dumber people.”
That kind of language and outlook isn’t something i view favorably. Its ar best borderline ableist, and conveys a sense that you veiw yourself as superior to those you should be in solidarity with.
If you do care about these issues then i suggest a little self crit on this
I’m sorry I’m hurting feelings all over the fediverse. I just care so much that I’m not afraid to say out loud that it’s a dumb slogan and those that picked it are dumb because of it
It’s not my feelings you’re hurting. You’re hurting yourself if you’re viewing other people as inferior.
My point about the slogan thing is more about the disingenuous statements from liberal pundits and specifically Obama’s comments on “defund the police”, as opposed to a criticism of you, so sorry if my critique came off as too harsh toward you on that.
If you think its a bad slogan that’s fair, but that line has been used by disingenuous people to try and derail things and thats what got me aggro.
Defund Wall St.
One Shrinky Dinky movement coming up just for you 😘
Eh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff. This will never catch on. It’d be cool if it did. But it won’t.
Humans are hard wired to take care of each other. You’re mistaking human nature with materialism.
But hey, do you doomer.
This belongs in a capitalist propaganda bingo card
naturalistic fallacy intensifies
Even if people were “hard wired” to do bad things, a system that encourages those bad things is a worse system.
Human nature is sculpted and shaped by the material conditions around you, it’s not something immutable and forever the same.
If a society is built around endless accumulation then of course it would be considered only natural to most.
After all, if you were born and lived your whole life in a coal mine, you’d say it’s human nature to cough.
It won’t happen because the ones interested in keeping us convinced we’re hardwired to acquire stuff would not want it, and they’re the ones in control.
Ascetics exist. Minimalists exist. Fuck, Marie Kondo exists. The desire for stuff is not some immutable force like gravity. It’s just what we’ve been taught by the ones selling the stuff.
Nope. That’s just you.
Macroeconomics student moment
Eh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff
[Citation needed]
I disagree that we’re hardwired to acquire stuff. But even if we are, we’re sentient beings who overcome a lot of things we’re hardwired to do, so that is just one more thing we should be aware of about our own thinking.
Materialism could also in part be the result of a lack in other areas that humans are hardwired for. Community, emotional care, daydreaming, …
