Degrowth Communism vs. Climate Capitalism

I recently read a couple of books on how to solve the climate crisis, and their solutions were so divergent that I decided to review them together. The first is Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Marxist academic Kohei Saito, and the second is Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions by Bloomberg reporter Akshat Rathi.

Slow Down is a radical prescription for a new kind of society in which growth is no longer the goal; instead, we strive to share what we have more fairly to ensure a good quality of life for all. Climate Capitalism, on the other hand, collates stories from around the world showing how companies, entrepreneurs, governments and scientists are already working on solutions, and all we need to do is scale them up. Here’s a quick summary of each of them in turn, followed by my thoughts on which is more convincing.

Climate Capitalism

I know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Climate Capitalism the cover says so much, from the leaf-styled credit card to the blurb by Bill Gates:

“An important read for anyone in need of optimism”

And then there’s the subtitle: “Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions”. It sets the stage pretty well for what’s inside: an upbeat story of how competition and innovation can get us to zero emissions on the basis that it’s “now cheaper to save the world than destroy it.”

Rathi takes us through a series of examples from around the world to show the good work that’s already being done to address climate change, including:

• how China became the world’s largest maker and buyer of electric cars and batteries
• how India is building solar power plants to “grab on to the opportunity to leapfrog the fossil fuel era and start building clean energy at scale”
• how the International Energy Agency (IEA) has been transformed from an oil industry advocate to a key part of the global energy transition
• how Bill Gates and other billionaire entrepreneurs are using venture capital to invest in promising eco-startups and are lobbying the government for climate-friendly and corporate-innovation-friendly legislation
• how the CEO of Occidental Petroleum is betting on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) to make the company carbon-neutral by 2050
• how another oil company, Denmark’s Orsted, reinvented itself as a wind-power giant
• how the UK ended up with strong climate laws and net-zero commitments even amid the chaos of its recent political history
• how activist investors are challenging oil companies and sometimes winning

It’s a very hopeful book, and it’s also full of great details on the task at hand and what’s involved in making such a huge energy transition. Rathi doesn’t sugar-coat it—he shows the problems that the various heroes of his story have encountered in making the changes they want to make. He acknowledges the difficulty of getting to net zero, which the IEA estimates will require an investment of $4 trillion a year in energy systems, as well as dealing with difficult problems like emissions from cement, steel, and cattle.

But he shows us technologies and approaches that either are working or could work, and he argues that the rapidly changing economics may be a driving force for faster change. Lithium batteries, for example, were once unaffordable, but their price declined 89% between 2010 and 2020, and “the next decade is likely to bring another halving.” That makes electric vehicles cheaper, which means more people buy them, and you get a whole range of knock-on effects in areas like energy storage, which then has its own benefits to other technologies, etc.

To be fair to Rathi, he also admits that capitalism is what got us into this fine mess in the first place, and he also admits that the pace of change is far too slow. But he remains optimistic that, with a few tweaks here and there, capitalism is what can get us to zero emissions fastest.

“We now live in a two-track world. As long as we keep emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide, the world will see continued climate extremes leading to the loss of lives and livelihoods. That things keep getting worse, however, should not hide the fact that the scale of climate action is also growing. There are now more people working on solutions, more money available to scale those solutions and more government policies in place to help reach emission goals.

The tweaks he recommends are a mix of:

• voluntary social responsibility led by enlightened CEOs and ex-CEOs such as Unilever’s Paul Polman, which will show other companies that sustainability is also good for the bottom line
• shareholders holding companies to account, as hedge fund Engine No. 1 did with ExxonMobil
• public pressure and campaigning leading companies to stop being beholden only to shareholders and start serving all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, communities, the environment, and shareholders.

He also claims that it’s possible to decouple economic growth from emissions and says this is already happening in some European countries. So we can continue to grow and enjoy economic prosperity, without destroying the planet.

Degrowth Communism

And, in the red corner, we have degrowth communism. Kohei Saito’s view of the world is entirely different from Akshat Rathi’s. His purpose is to transcend capitalism and imagine a new system altogether, based on an updated view of Marxism blended with modern ecology and degrowth economics.

Here’s a summary of Saito’s line of argument in Slow Down:

Capitalism Is the Problem

Whereas other writers and thinkers blame things like “neoliberalism” or “unrestrained capitalism” for the climate crisis, Saito is clear that it’s capitalism. This is how it works: it’s an engine of infinite growth in which things like the environment and workers are just inputs to be processed into profit. Any climate solution that avoids confronting capitalism is doomed to failure.

Infinite Growth Is Impossible

Saito quotes economist Kenneth E. Boulding, who said:

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

That was half a century ago, but we keep single-mindedly pursuing economic growth as the main goal of our societies. We accept the need to cut emissions, but then we cheer when GDP goes up and are worried when it doesn’t. This is illogical.

Greater energy efficiency doesn’t help in this case. Saito gives lots of examples of this, one of them being the famous Jevons Paradox: in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, coal-burning techniques became more efficient, so that more energy could be produced from less coal. But that led to the consumption not of less coal but of more coal as it became more advantageous for businesses to use it. The same effect has been observed with many technological advances.

Decoupling Is a Myth

Perhaps we believe in a “good” kind of growth, e.g. from climate-friendly technologies. Saito devotes quite a lot of time to showing that this is impossible. He shows the ecological and social devastation caused by things like lithium mining and the constant search for rare minerals for things like electric cars and renewable energy.

We have been told that it’s possible to “decouple” our economies from emissions. Rathi makes that argument in Climate Capitalism and gives some statistics to back it up, showing that some richer European countries have continued to grow even as emissions have slowed.

Saito rejects this argument. What’s happening, he says, is that the “dirty” parts of the economy like manufacturing have simply been outsourced to the Global South, so that the social and environmental costs and burdens of our consumption are borne by people far away, out of sight.

He refers to the “Netherlands Fallacy”—how is it possible for the Netherlands to be a rich country with high rates of consumption, and yet its air and water are clean and its emissions are minimal? Yet many poor countries consume far less and have far higher levels of pollution?

It’s because the dirty work is being done in another country. When someone in the Netherlands cycles to the local store and buys a T-shirt, that doesn’t seem to have much environmental impact. But if you add the whole supply chain, the picture changes.

“Decoupling” only works, Saito argues, by chalking the bulk of the emissions from that T-shirt up to Bangladesh and preserving the myth that the Netherlands is growing without much environmental impact. In reality, people in rich countries and their wasteful consumption levels are still the problem.

We Are All Complicit

To be clear, the Netherlands is just an example—the same arguments apply to other rich nations. Saito uses the phrase “The Imperial Mode of Living”, coined by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, to describe the way in which those of us in richer countries enjoy high standards of living based on the unseen and often unacknowledged exploitation of people and nature in poorer countries.

“Lowering the standard of living for those in the Global South is a prerequisite for the workings of capitalism, and the power imbalance between North and South is no anomaly—it is, in fact, a result of the system functioning normally. We experience this way of life as desirable, though, and are loath to give it up. If we were to acknowledge the state of things in the Global South, we would be forced to lower our own standard of living. Our way of life is, in fact, a terrible thing. We are all complicit in the Imperial Mode of Living.”

Saito says this not to make us feel guilty, which is useless, but to show us our place in the world and encourage us to do something about it. This section reminded me a lot of an Orwell quote that had a profound impact on me in my younger years.

We Can’t Keep Papering Over the Cracks

At this point, Saito goes back to Marx, who showed that capitalism works by displacing its own contradictions and rendering them invisible. This displacement doesn’t solve the problems and in fact makes things worse, but the system can continue as long as it can keep shifting the problems in these three ways:

• technological: new technologies appear to resolve one problem, only to create another
• spacial: the costs and burdens are dumped on other peoples and places, mostly in the Global South
• temporal: the problems are displaced in time, so that they affect future generations instead of us

Saito argues that we are running out of road. We are hitting planetary boundaries, and the Global South is no longer able to absorb all of the social and environmental costs of our over-consumption. The climate crisis is one of the symptoms of a system that’s losing its ability to shift its burdens elsewhere.

Capitalism Without Growth Is a Disaster

Earlier, I mentioned that we tend to cheer GDP growth and get worried when the economy slows or stagnates. In the current system, we are right to do so: without growth, capitalism doesn’t function. The only way for companies to continue to make profits is to cut employees, squeeze more productivity out of the remaining ones, overcharge customers, etc.

Saito knows about stagnation in capitalism, having lived in Japan for the past few decades. He describes the effects, and they are not good. Austerity Britain wasn’t much fun either. Falling standards of living, longer working hours, more stress, more inequality… Sound familiar?

So if we accept that infinite growth is impossible and that some form of degrowth is inevitable, then capitalism is not an appropriate system to rely on.

So Degrowth Communism Is the Answer

Since continued growth is madness, we need to transition to a steady-state economy. And since capitalism can’t exist without growth, we need a new system.

Saito calls this system “degrowth communism”, which is an interesting and in my view a dangerous choice. The “degrowth” part is clear from his previous arguments, but why “communism”? He accepts that it’s tainted by association with the USSR but makes it clear that the system he envisions is totally different.

He uses the word “communism” because he wants an economy in which we reclaim the commons—lands and resources that were once free for all to use before being enclosed for private profit.

Still, it’s hard to extract communism from its associations. Interestingly, the US edition of the book is called Slow Down: A Degrowth Manifesto. So clearly the “C” word was deemed to be too much for American readers. It’s likely to put off a lot of other people too, but there it is.

How We Get There

The problem of systemic approaches like this is always the question, “How do we get there from here?” Saito doesn’t map out a step-by-step route, but he does offer some pointers, which are based on a reading of Marx’s unpublished notes later in life, when his thought evolved beyond the productivism and Eurocentrism of his earlier writings and came to embrace what Saito calls degrowth communism.

Here are the five main ways in which degrowth communism would differ from our current social organisation:

1. the transition to an economy based on use value
2. the shortening of work hours
3. the abolition of the uniform division of labour
4. the democratisation of the production process
5. the prioritisation of essential work

To understand the difference between use value and monetary value, think back to the early days of the pandemic. We had no masks and gloves because they had not been sufficiently profitable to make—they had little value, but suddenly a whole lot of use value. Vaccines, likewise, had a lot of use value, but pharmaceutical companies had been focusing their resources on more profitable avenues like treating male erectile dysfunction.

The abolition of the division of labour and the prioritisation of essential work are about making work into “something creative, an avenue for self-realisation.” Bullshit jobs would be abolished, and instead of having their work split up into tiny tasks for greater profitability, workers would enjoy more ownership and decision-making power. Companies as we know them would be transformed into worker-run cooperatives.

In his final chapter, Saito gives some current examples of movements that embody what he’s talking about. These include:

• the Fearless Cities movement
• the Zapatistas
• Via Campesina
• the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (SAFSC)

Saito is also clear that it’s unfair to impose degrowth on countries that never benefited much from capitalism in the first place. He refers to Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics” to show how while rich countries have overshot planetary boundaries, people in poor countries have not even had their basic social needs met. So a fair solution needs to uplift the poor at the same time as it reins in the rich, so that we all live in the sustainable zone of adequate social provision without overconsumption.

It’s more of a sketch of a future society than a fully realised plan, but I think his point is that it needs to come about through popular engagement and participation rather than having its form dictated by Kohei Saito or anyone else.

So Which Is More Convincing?

Clearly these are two extremes, and our natural inclination is often to believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That’s often a good impulse, but I don’t think it’s true in this case. In a world of impending climate catastrophe, I think the middle road is the problem. Business as usual, with a few tweaks here and there to go more green, is not the answer. The middle road leads straight into the eye of the storm.

The answer lies, I believe, in one of these two extremes: either use all the powerful levers of capitalism to solve this crisis through massive investment in the kinds of technological solutions that Rathi highlights, or abandon the idea of growth altogether and focus on sharing the wealth more fairly. Floor the accelerator or yank on the hand brake: those, I believe, are the only realistic alternatives. Neither seems particularly appealing, but that’s the situation we’re in. Easier solutions existed thirty years ago, but we ignored them. From now on, some level of pain is required, and the longer we continue down the middle road, the more the pain will increase. At some point, we have to pick our poison.

Saito’s solution requires a massive change in how we live, with radical cutbacks to the kinds of consumption that those of us in richer countries or in the richer segments of poorer countries have become accustomed to. It’s not clear exactly what that would look like, but it would seem to involve great sacrifice on a material level, although with benefits from living a fairer, less competitive kind of life. And it’s not at all clear how we get there from here or whether we can do it in the limited time we have.

Rathi’s solution is far simpler and requires almost nothing from us on an individual level. It’s a top-down view of change, with no real role for the likes of us other than to press our elected representatives to be more open to Bill Gates when he lobbies them with great ideas for saving the planet. The poison we will have to accept is the poison of capitalism itself—the kinds of accelerating inequality that require violent repression and the acceptance of blatant injustice as the price of admission. As an advocate of capitalism, Rathi doesn’t say any of this, of course, but he is silent on the points Saito raises about injustice and the outsourcing of costs onto the global South.

Overall, I found Saito’s argument much more convincing. While Rathi’s individual stories to show the possibility of progress, it’s not clear to me how they could be scaled up without running into the problems and paradoxes that Saito highlights. And even if they could, they would perpetuate the inequalities and divisions that are a big part of the problem, and in a world of increasing scarcity and harsher natural disasters, that could lead to some very ugly outcomes.

Saito’s book, on the other hand, faces the contradictions head on and tries to find solutions that will be fairer to all and won’t involve hiding the problems in some faraway place. It will be very difficult to achieve, but the same goes for any good outcome at this point. This would at least be worth striving for.

It may sound strange to come to this conclusion since Saito’s ideas sound so radical and outlandish, but I think that’s a reflection of the insanity of our current social order. Rathi’s argument is the sensible one that mainstream economists and pundits would call “realistic”, and Saito is the mad prophet whose visions would be seen as attractive but clearly not feasible.

Since the dominant mode of thought is taking us speeding to the edge of a cliff, however, it might be worth paying attention to the guy who’s waving his arms and yelling at us to turn around.

The post Degrowth Communism vs. Climate Capitalism appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.