--This is my top priority topic, so let’s dive right in…
The Questionable: 1) Labels and Framing: --I tEconomic Democracy within Planetary Boundaries…
--This is my top priority topic, so let’s dive right in…
The Questionable: 1) Labels and Framing: --I think a manifesto should start broad for a wider audience, while having a coherent and principled direction. Thus, my go-to intro on degrowth remains Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. --Saito’s book, while well-written, is more advanced in its framing (from labels to sources used). Is Saito’s use of the provocative label “degrowth communism” (after 3 chapters of build-up) effective?
1a) “Degrowth”: --I’m actually more frustrated by the confusion this label generates amongst radicals who are fine with labels like “socialism”! We can only excuse a part of this due to concerns over Malthusian elitist conservationism against the masses (ex. “overpopulation” fear-mongering conveniently hiding the elite’s colossal consumption/waste/control over production/investment), which I unpack in the messy Less Sucks: Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Degrowth. …However, it’s the political economy confusion from several of my top influences that I find perplexing. Critics like anarchist Chomsky (in The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet) and socialists/Marxists like Radhika Desai (see 56:33 of this video) always start with: sure, we need degrowth in certain areas, but we still need growth in areas crucial for social needs. …As if degrowth wants to stop everything from growing, including your children. …They simply avoid the anti-capitalist foundations of radical degrowth (which they share!) in order to confuse degrowth with (capitalist) austerity, leading to (capitalist) “stagnation”/recession. Palm meets face. …Desai then says Neoliberalism (since 1970s) actually hurts economic growth, implying economic growth is not a key driver of environmental overshoot: i) I assume Desai is confusing economic growth with “development”, which Neoliberalism did indeed sacrifice. ii) Even if the rate of annual GDP growth has lessened during Neoliberalism, the overall GDP is still experiencing compound growth (scary how unintuitive this rising curve is, as we always assume linear growth). The growth rate is applied annually to the growing base that includes previous growth; a constant 3% annual growth rate would mean total GDP doubles in 23 years! ...Of course, GDP is not directly the driver; it is an aggregate indicator of individual capitalists' goal of endless accumulation via profits/rents. Once again, the focus for capitalism's “economic health” (to prevent this volatile system from crashing) is on its extractive rates (flows; ever-more short-term; see Harvey's time-space compression) which contradicts with future costs/finite planet's resources (stocks; long-term)/their socioecological reproduction flows (long-term, from raising children to building communities to the biosphere's cycles). iii) Is Desai seriously recommending we return to the economic growth rate of post-WWII boom’s Military Keynesianism, the start of the “Great Acceleration” in overshooting planetary boundaries? (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System) …Imagine applying that annual growth rate onto our current GDP! Are we trying to build a wind turbine for every person?!
--Degrowth’s anti-capitalist foundations: i) “Growth” here refers to economic growth, notoriously measured by the “GDP” (Gross Domestic Product: summing up the monetary value of domestic market transactions) normalized after its role measuring WWII war production. On a deeper level, market transactions require: a) “Artificial scarcity“: --Markets for “real commodities” long pre-date capitalism. Capitalism’s peculiar markets were born from the “Enclosures” in Britain which privatized land (creating the land market) so proto-entrepreneurs (financed by debt, thus the money market) could use it to produce wool and thus textiles as a (real) commodity for global markets; the serfs dispossessed of land had nothing to sell but their labour (creating the labour market). For more on land/labour/money being “fictitious commodities” (not produced just for buying/selling), see: Why Can't You Afford a Home?. --Common access had to be violently prohibited (removing freedoms for the many) in order to create great freedoms for the biggest property owners to extract the raw materials and labour (fictitious commodities) needed to produce (real) commodities, ensnaring the masses in market dependency to sell their labour, purchase their goods/services, pay their taxes, rent land, fall into debt etic. since they lost their means of production/autonomy (a foundational capitalist contradiction up to today’s automation). Saito calls this the “Tragedy of the Commodity”, to counter the "Tragedy of the Commons" myth. --The value system under capitalist markets is dictated by market exchange-value. A forest (with unquantifiable socioecological value) has no capitalist economic value, unless it is (1) cut down and sold (exchanged) as timber commodities, (2) privatized and rented or hoarded for fictitious exchange on speculative financial markets (ex. carbon offset markets), or (3) burnt down (where fire-fighting services stimulates market exchange, indeed GDP). This is the viral rationality of capitalism. --Saito references the Lauderdale Paradox theorizing the inverse relationship between public wealth (Commons) vs. private wealth (artificial scarcity), by the eighth Earl of Lauderdale’s 1804 An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth. This was not able to dethrone Adam Smith’s glorification of capitalism’s private wealth accumulation benefiting the public in 1776’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as the socioecological costs of the rise of capitalism was conveniently externalized from the ivory towers and onto the masses (dispossessed working class in “dark Satanic mills”/urban slums without sanitation/coal mines/workhouses at home, to slave plantations/coolies/indigenous genocide abroad). b) “Radical abundance”: --Thus, degrowth challenges the growth of artificial scarcity to force labour/ecological services for the super-parasites’ endless accumulation. Beyond our basic needs (where capitalism still incentivizes linear waste rather than sustainable circularity: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage), capitalism’s logic is that of social addiction to keep its boom/bust elite accumulation going. --As capital is allowed to traverse the globe in nanoseconds, labour struggles to keep up as its increasingly-precarious hamster wheel of work (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory; The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class)/vapid entertainment/stress consumerism to recover from work (Captains Of Consciousness: Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture) keep us distracted from the use-value of a fulfilling life: autonomy not just for our own time but also for the socioecological communities we build with that free time. …Over-work, over-production with mal-distribution, addictive mass consumerism, all amidst artificial scarcity to discipline the masses and no value for socioecological relations, this quantitative cancerous growth is no longer achieving quality of life improvements (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture). The value system to reverse this sickness is antithetical to the decay of today’s capitalism: decolonization, Commons (ex. People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons), more free time and value for care-work and long-term ecological relationships, cooperation/reciprocity, universal social services, creative workers’ autonomy rather than disciplined division-of-labour, etc. --For debunking “green growth”, Saito mirrors the intro from Hickel’s Less is More, while also mentioning the use of planetary boundaries in Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist while noting Raworth is less clear on critiquing the capitalist root (production/markets/class).
ii) Degrowth targets the Global North’s overextraction of the Global South (The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism), thus acknowledging the Global South requires “growth” to decolonize and improve their standard of living. …I would add that even the latter can benefit from an anti-capitalist degrowth lens: the Global South needs space (currently suffocated by rent-seeking foreign debt/intellectual property/cash crop trade dependency, which Global South elites also conveniently exploit) for radical alternatives to leap-frog over the Global North’s fossil fuel/artificial scarcity/class domination/crisis-ridden development path, otherwise the initial infrastructure would lock in the Global South for escalating emissions and little grassroots power to dismantle it! (Elsewhere, Saito references André Gorz’s “open” vs. “locking” technologies). …After all, the Global North’s path requires an external source (Global South) for super-exploitation and to externalize its many socioecological crises. …So much of capitalism’s wasteful means of production are already outsourced to the Global South. Of course, this is mal-formed into scattered subcontractors to promote ruthless competition and prevent substantial nationalization, which is why South-South cooperation is foundational to pool resources and de-link from Global North’s rent-seeking Finance capitalism (debt/intellectual property). -ex. article on IBSA and BRICS (IBSA: India, Brazil, South Africa: South-South cooperation where India shared its means of production in pharmaceuticals, blocked by Global North’s Big Pharma intellectual property rent-seeking). -Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present -A People’s Green New Deal
1b) “Communism”: --While this label may become more viable for younger generations, the Cold War Red Scare era boomers (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism) are a significant demographic owning most of capitalist assets. …Curiously, capitalism’s unparalleled volatility (recall The Communist Manifesto: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”) is hidden in abstraction (ex. “hot money” gentrifying booms and capital flight busts), opening a vacuum for conservatives to scapegoat visible changes (immigrants, i.e. labour trying to catch up with capital movement). …Ex. Jordan Peterson’s critique of “chaos” (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) carefully avoids capitalism, putting the blame on Leftists who critique the status quo (assumed as stable, when in reality the volatility is built into the status quo: Thinking in Systems: A Primer). …Saito frames “communism” as following degrowth’s aim to reverse artificial scarcity/global finance dependency and build radical abundance of Commons, cooperation, and self/community autonomy, where economic democracy is foundational. …So, if we sum up these labels, I would say “degrowth communism” can be translated as “use-value economic democracy” or “economic democracy within planetary boundaries”. Labels will always be limited, so the sooner we jump to the content, the better.
2) Political Action…How?: --This topic is only briefly mentioned near the end; I would like more in a manifesto. …Saito repeats what seems like the standard academic-Left answer here: referencing “3.5 per cent”, the percentage of the population required for nonviolent civil resistance to win according to the research of Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. This is also the centerpiece of Extinction Rebellion: This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook --Saito also briefly outlines the lineage of direct action/participatory democracy/citizens’ assemblies: i) 1993 Via Campesina’s (“The Peasants’ Way”) international farmers’ cooperative struggling for food sovereignty/agroecology vs. capitalist agriculture’s capital-intensive monocrops/export crop trade deals/debts/intellectual property; 1994 Zapatista uprising in protest of the start of NAFTA. ii) Extinction Rebellion; Yellow Vests; Ecuador’s indigenous movements’ buen vivir (“to live well”); Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline protests; Barcelona’s “Fearless Cities” movement, etc. -A People’s Green New Deal -The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth -This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
…see the comments for the rest of the review (“The Good”)......more
2023’s masterpiece maps out the unexpected demise of “Capitalism”…
Preamble: --Let us not get stuck on surface labels (which social media seems to amp2023’s masterpiece maps out the unexpected demise of “Capitalism”…
Preamble: --Let us not get stuck on surface labels (which social media seems to amplify into binary "agree"/"disagree" divisiveness) and forget to dive into the substance (where there is much to synthesize). --After all, how can a single term (even “capitalism”) encapsulate the contradictory mess of the real world (without many asterisks noting contradictions)? …Instead, I treat these concepts as lenses to view the world. Think of the difference between a microscope’s lens and a telescope’s lens. Each starts with certain assumptions (and limitations) which allows each to focus more clearly on certain observations. Depending on our questions, some lenses are indeed more useful than others. The challenge is to remember each lens’ assumptions when we try to synthesize the specific observations into a totality. --So, let us use the “Technofeudalism” lens and see what we can (and cannot) observe (i.e. from the history of capitalism to today’s New Cold War on China/war in Ukraine/Musk buying Twitter, etc.)…
Highlights:
1) ”Historical materialism”: a lens for human history: --It is a crime that so much of “history” is taught as a series of names/dates/events, missing the forest for the trees (on systems not being merely the sum of its parts, see: Thinking in Systems: A Primer). No wonder there is so much confusion with “human nature”, culture, and social change. --The gist of the “historical materialist” lens is to start with: i) Material conditions needed for human reproduction, ii) How humans relate to such material conditions to produce their needs, and the resulting class relations/political bargaining powers (which is reflected in culture, i.e. the stories that narrate our value system). …For more, see "What is Politics"? video series; start from the beginning, and note episodes: -"6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works and Why" -"7. The Origins of Male Dominance and Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson get wrong" -"7.1 Material Conditions: Why You Can't Eliminate Sexism or Patriarchy by Changing Culture" -"8. Materialism vs. Idealism: How Social Change Happens" --Varoufakis applies “historical materialism” using insights he received from his parents, which he later found in Marx’s works. In particular, a historical materialist lens views history as a process. Why process (i.e. change)? Why didn’t humans just figure out an optimal means of material conditions relationships and stick with it? …Along with the variations and changes in material conditions and class conflict, we find another key concept that plagues Marx: contradictions. Marx’s empiricist critics can say this is a black-box cop-out (i.e. how can we prove you wrong when you can say both yes and no?). But these empiricist critics are themselves plagued with quantification bias, by missing the importance of what they cannot quantify. Varoufakis found his father’s contractionary views of technology in Marx [emphases added]:
In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.
--Varoufakis’ father leans more on materialism in conceptualizing how human history sped up through its relations with technology: stone, then bronze, then iron. Varoufakis later pairs this by emphasizing the social (class/political bargaining power) side [emphases added]:
I speculated about what would have happened had James Watt invented the steam engine in ancient Egypt:
The most he could have expected is that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his Empire was.
My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures [see later].
2) Feudalism to Capitalism: --The aforementioned “Enclosures” are key in Polanyi’s “great transformation” from feudalism to capitalism, by creating the 3 peculiar capitalist markets of land/labour/money: i) land: privatization of Common lands (the “Enclsoures”) aimed to use these lands to produce commodities (i.e. wool) for the global market (the new source of wealth/power, rather than feudal lords merely sitting on land), thus creating the land market ii) labour: the dispossessed serfs became the labour market. iii) money: proto-capitalists in the wool industry started with credit/debt from the money market. Under capitalism, finance precedes production. …See Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails. --Varoufakis reminds us of this prior transition [emphases added]:
As consecutive mutations multiply the variants of an organism until, at some point, a brand-new species appears, so technological change proceeds within a social system until, suddenly, the system has been transformed into something quite distinct, though that doesn’t mean that all of the materials out of which the system is built – capital, labour, money – have necessarily changed. […]
Suppose we were living in the 1770s [First Industrial Revolution], as the first steam engines began driving the water pumps that kept the mines dry and turning the wheels of William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. […] we would not be wrong to speak of an emergent ‘industrial feudalism’ or ‘market feudalism’. Technically, we would be correct.
In the 1770s, and for at least another century, wherever one looked one saw feudalism. Feudal lords dominated rural areas, owned the freehold titles of most city blocks, commanded armies and navies, and presided over parliamentary committees and government bodies. Even in the 1840s, as Marx and Engels were writing their manifesto in response to the worldwide effects of the capitalist class, most production was still taking place under the auspices of the old feudalist class, the landed gentry. Land ownership remained the main source of political authority and rent continued to be more powerful than profit, especially in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815] when landlords regained the upper hand over capitalists by banning grain imports with their Corn Laws [1815-1846].
And yet something critically important would have been lost if those who forged the language of that era had been reluctant to ditch the word feudalism, choosing to call the nascent system not capitalism but industrial or market feudalism. By boldly calling it capitalism, a century before capital had fully dominated our societies, they opened humanity’s eyes to the great transformation unfolding around them as it was happening.
3) “Capitalism”: volatility and contradictions: --Varoufakis centers Adam Smith’s distinction between: a) Profits: new wealth initiated by capital investments, which other capitalists can also initiate, thus profit is vulnerable to market competition over prices/quality. b) Rent: privileged access to a fixed supply (the obvious example being nature’s resources, esp. land and fuel). --Note: for profits, Smith focuses on the production of “real commodities”, where the rising wealth/power of the global market drove the "great transformation" from landlord feudalism to Industrial Capitalism. Classical liberal economics anticipated the latter, with the value system switching from land (feudal ownership) to labour (key input in commodity production; i.e. the Classical “labour theory of value”, focusing on reducing the cost of production, ex. the factory's “economies of scale”). ...However, there's an obvious growing contradiction that Varoufakis does not seem to emphasize. The rise of the global market (in “real commodities”) led to the creation of capitalism’s 3 peculiar markets (land/labour/money), which feature “fictitious commodities” (humans/nature/money) which are not “produced” (with a “cost of production” calculated by capitalists) simply to be bought/sold on markets. These 3 capitalist markets are particularly susceptible to rent-seeking! i) land: ground rent ii) labour: imperialist rent, unwaged care-work iii) money: usury (interest) --Note: Smith had a major contradiction in his works on the source of profit, between (a) capitalists employing their capital vs. (b) labourers doing the work (“labour theory of value”); Smith also conveniently assumed capitalists obtained their capital through hard work/savings (i.e. “primitive accumulation”, where primitive means “prior” and later critics assumed as “violent”), which Marx critiques in the last part (“Part 8: So-Called Primitive Accumulation”) of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 highlighting the violence of the enclosures/creation of capitalist property/markets (given Marx’s appreciation of class conflict). --Varoufakis stresses how rent survived as a parasite, thus the driver (host) has been profit. Parasites require disguise, thus rent has tried to disguise itself as profits (ex. oil companies access/real estate ground rent/privatized utilities monopolies). --Elsewhere, Varoufakis notes how steel was still rare in the First Industrial Revolution, and the primary material reliance was on slavery/colonialism. I would synthesize this observation with the profit vs. rent definitions given by Smith, as Classical (liberal) economics had major omissions: i) imperialism (Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present), ii) environment (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World; also, Jason W. Moore centers “cheap nature” in defining capitalism), and iii) social reproduction/care-work (The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values). …Thus, rent may be a parasite on profit, but profit is a parasite on all these “externalities” (beyond direct exploitation of wage labour); centering profit as the key driver of capitalism is useful in recognizing capitalist accounting, but we must also account for the externalities which capitalism requires to reproduce itself. --By the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914 WWI), steel becomes mass produced, and private bank money facilitates mass production. However, the capitalist contradiction of saturated markets (falling rate of profit/lack effective demand) led to imperialist rivalries leading to global industrial carnage (late 19th century Europe/WWI/WWII).
...See the comments below for the rest of the review: "4) Capitalism’s mutations" "5) Technofeudalism"...more
Loading...
