In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services. In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services. However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money.
This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project. Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit. Turns out that this isn't true. Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer. Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now.
Both writers agree on many things. They agree that capitalism (not just its neoliberal hyper-variant) is essentially exploitative, extracting resources from the environment and labour from workers to feed the engines of capitalist accumulation. This means that they agree that the solutions we most often hear for climate change and ecological breakdown - which go by titles such as 'green growth' - will not work. This is because the fundamental logic of capitalist growth ensures that as fast as we switch from fossil fuels to renewables, we will use our newfound energy resources to extract more materials and do more damage. Green growth, they warn, is a fantasy. Capitalist growth will inevitably lead to ecological and hence social breakdown.
For both Hickel and Saito, the answer is degrowth - that is to say, to reduce our production and resource use, bring our economies back to a sustainable size, and focus on wellbeing rather than growth. Their focus is particularly on wealthy countries - poor countries (which are contributing much less to ecological breakdown anyway) may need to continue to grow to meet their basic requirements, but wealthy countries are already too big.
The classic response to this is, of course, to say 'what, you want us to be poorer? Put it where it fits!'. Hickel's response to this problem is to suggest that growth, and our current level of economic output, are not actually making us better off. By way of illustration he points out that the USA, which has the highest GDP per capita on the planet, rates below many less wealthy countries in terms of life expectancy, health status, happiness and other measures of wellbeing. His poster child for this argument is Costa Rica, a Central American county which has about one fifth of the USA's GDP per capita but scores higher on most indicators of wellbeing.
His point is that merely having a large economy is not the secret to happiness and health, it's what you do with what you have. High quality public health services are much cheaper than privatised medicine and produce better health outcomes. Increased consumption is worse for us than more time spent having fun with friends. Many of our possessions could be shared if only we had better relations with our neighbours and stronger communities, but it's hard to build these if we are all working 60 hour weeks. All these things, however, require structural change.
Saito has a different problem. He wants to put degrowth into a Marxist framework, but classical Marxism pulls in a different direction. In the first volume of Capital and in other writings, Marx outlined a developmental theory of history in which societies first transitioned to capitalism, which would produce abundance and pave the way for workers to take over the means of production and transition to socialism. This leads to what is referred to as 'productivism' - capitalist societies need to grow to the point where they can become socialist, while non-capitalist societies need to progress to capitalism first.
Aside from its Eurocentrism (an awkward problem for the Japanese Saito) the current trajectory of the world indicates that capitalism will destroy our ecosystems before the socialist paradise has a chance to be born. Most of us would just say 'well, Marx was wrong then' but this won't do for a died-in-the-wool Marxist. Instead, Saito turns to the work Marx did at the end of his life which is revealed in his notebooks and correspondence. These show that while he was supposed to be finishing the second and third volumes of Capital and getting them ready for publication (a task eventually left to Friedrich Engels after his death) he was reading extensively on agriculture, ecology and cooperative economic structures.
This led to him developing the idea of the 'metabolic rift' which suggests that along with the separation of labour from capital, capitalism led to a rift between humans and nature with nature becoming an object of exploitation. More significantly, he also acknowledged in a letter to a Russian correspondent that cooperative economic structures like those found in Russia and India might provide a pathway to socialism that didn't pass through capitalism. Ergo, you can be degrowth and be Marxist.
As a Christian I have some sympathy with Saito. I'm no stranger to the process of trolling through the Bible trying to find in it the answer (or at least an answer) to some 21st century dilemma. However, since I don't regard Marx's writings as holy writ - just particularly perceptive political economics from the 19th century - I didn't find myself too attached to his analysis. He also didn't help me with my core problem - much as I think the idea of degrowth is attractive, it's hard to see how we're going to get there.
Aside from the obvious possibility that the planet will force us there by being unable to yield any more natural resources, which wouldn't do much for our quality of life TBH, there is no sign that our mega-rich oligarchs are willing to give up their wealth and power, or that our political leaders have any interest in forcing it from them. Indeed, as the ecological crisis has got more urgent they have doubled down. Peaceful protestors, who were once given no more than fines for blocking infrastructure or chaining themselves to bulldozers, now find themselves facing prison terms of up to two years in may parts of our country. We even find the police anti-terrorism units taking the lead in enforcing these laws, as if there was no fundamental difference between blocking a lane of traffic on the Sydney Harbour bridge for half an hour and blowing the bridge up. We are doing our best, but so far we're not getting far.
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Although the term 'degrowth' has been recently popularised by accessible books like these it is not a new idea. It has roots in the anti-industrial thinkers of the 19th century. The idea was given legs in the 1970s by the publication of The Limits to Growth, an early attempt to use mathematical/computer models to predict the trajectory of our current economic practices. Essentially it showed that continuous expansion would lead to a crash sometime before 2100. It is perhaps no accident that the Club of Rome, which sponsored the research that led to this book, became a staple of right-wing conspiracy theories from then on. Their work was heavily criticised by orthodox economists, and contemporary modelling exercises are exponentially more sophisticated owing to the growth in computing power, but their basic conclusions have proved quite robust so far. This should not surprise us - it doesn't take a sophisticated computer model to tell us that the earth is finite.
There has been a continual stream of such writings since. An influential example here in Australia was Affluenza, published in 2005 by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, which likened our obsession with growth to a disease that was not only harming the environment but also our physical and mental health. Their prescription for this disease was a more mindful approach, buying and disposing of less and focusing on things like relationships. Of course they weren't blind to the structural elements of the issue, but they didn't address them in a systematic way like Hickel and Saito do.
None of this should be too shocking or confronting for Christians, although it is surprising how resistant some Christians can be to such ideas. Although all these authors are firmly secular, Christian teaching has long held that greed and covetousness are sinful, while generosity and material simplicity are both seen as virtuous. This led to the celebration of monastic vows of poverty as a high point of devotion, and to a tradition of calling the rich to account rooted in the Hebrew prophets and the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.
Sider's was far from the only such voice. John V Taylor's Enough is Enough, if I remember it accurately, was a more rollicking, combative take on the same ideas. I remember him describing the practice in his family where if they were watching TV and an ad came on he and his kids would cover their ears and yell, 'who are you kidding?' or words to that effect. John Stott, who more than anyone was the guru of all gurus for late 20th century Anglo-Evangelicals, also wrote extensively about the Christian responsibility to promote justice.
Once I developed the confidence to step out of my Evangelical lane I found even greater riches (or poverty?) on offer. For instance, the Catholic Liberation Theology movement that originated in South America in the 1960s and 1970s presented a much more radical vision of Jesus as champion of the poor and scourge of the rich, informed by a synthesis of theology and Marxist social analysis. Although they were reined in by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s their influence continues in various Catholic justice movements. They also influenced Protestants such as Jim Wallis and the Sojourners community and movement he helped found, which urged Christians in the USA in particular to devote themselves to the service of the poor and led eventually to what is often called the New Monasticism. I even learned that EF Schumacher, whose book Small is Beautiful I read at Uni as a secular economics book, was inspired by Catholic and Buddhist spirituality in his development of 'Appropriate Technology' and his advice to developing world economies on self-sufficiency.
All this is a rather long-winded way of saying that 'degrowth' is not just some kooky fad that arrived in the world recently. It is merely the latest iteration of a set of ideas that emphasise three things which seem almost self-evident.
- Our planet's resources and its capacity to absorb our waste are limited, and we exceed these limits at our peril. Use of these resources at our current level is unsustainable.
- The benefits and costs of our current economic system are far from being distributed fairly - wealthy Western nations get the lion's share of the benefits, while poor nations bear the biggest share of the costs. Even within rich nations, resources are still distributed unfairly - some sleep in mansions while others sleep under bridges. The insistence that growth will fix this diverts attention from the imperative of redistribution.
- While the poorest people in the world need more than they have to survive, those of us in the wealthy parts of the world can easily get by with less. In fact, having less can make us happier and healthier and bring us closer to God.
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