Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your free time, you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and engage with local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, private jets, billionaires and SUVs no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.
We must massively reduce our energy and material consumption to have any hope of saving our environment.
They say that degrowth is utopian and delusional. But what could be more utopian and delusional than believing you can infinitely grow, consume, waste and pollute on a finite planet?
@gerrymcgovern well that's pretty much the basic principle of stock markets: you invest with the intention that it will grow. The reality that nobody dares to say is that we must put an end to stock market. Its just a fad and at best its transferring money from the poor to the rich.
@jlhertel@gerrymcgovern we’ve had them since 1602. I agree they have many many problems but if an institution has lasted longer than constitutional governance I think we can accept that it has some durability
@Lyle@jlhertel@gerrymcgovern Slavery has lasted longer than constitutional government or the stock market does that mean we should keep that particular peculiar institution?
Also the first stock market crash (Tulip Mania) was only a generation after the invention of stock markets. Seems like stock markets are designed to produce catastrophic outcomes!
Capitalism crashes on the regular. Every time it happens I swear I can hear the Mad Hatter scream "CHANGE PLACES!!" and there's a wild scramble for the dwindling number of musical deck chairs. People who are good at this game love it. Everybody else gets trampled.
@violetmadder@MisuseCase@Lyle@gerrymcgovern Honestly I don't see how we would change to a different system. So far only capitalism has been proven to work. Communism only works if you enslave people, so yeah, I rather stay with my freedom
sees a bleached cracker techie probably descended from enslavers of Black people as PFP”
sees hyperreductive “X-demand to give up some fekkin comforts/‘freedom’ to let others be able to fekkin live” esp via any alternate system to the inherently racist capitalist system (esp esp communism) as “slavery”
Yeah, that checks out.
White ppl stop waving “slavery” as a fekkin scare-word just for bare minimum asking y’all to really engage with what “freedom” means for y’all specifically, when LOL as if any of y’all will EVER face any of the horrors of the institution of slavery in your lifetimes.
The more Marxist/Leninist and Maoist types have a nasty habit of rounding up a lot of their anarchist comrades and arresting and/or executing them when they inconveniently won't stop complaining about how authoritarian state capitalism is not particularly communist at all... proving their point in the process, of course, not that many people remember when those distinctions and events get buried under propaganda afterwards.
@violetmadder@darlingofinana Curious, which state exactly implemented anarcho communism and it worked?
That's the standard excuse of everybody that supports communism: "everybody else implemented it wrong. If I were in power I would implement it correctly"
Same standard excuse for capitalism too, dude-- "this isn't really a free market" etc etc.
Thing is, asking which states have implemented anarchism is a lot like asking which religions have implemented atheism.
Anarchists don't generally go around saying shit like "if I was in power I'd X" because our whole point is that NOBODY should be "in power" in the first place. We say things like, "I'm doing X right now". Hell, you've done some of it yourself plenty of times without even realizing it. But you have no idea what I'm talking about.
In order to be able to see how to change to a different system, first you have to figure out how the hell to even THINK outside of the current system. When it's the only thing you've ever known, the only thing you understand, and the only thing you can imagine, well... thinking outside that box is a challenge you'd have to be actually interested in taking on.
"Extraction of raw materials could rise 60 per cent by 2060"
The promoters of "Green" Growth and "Green" Tech and the "Green" Transition tell us that to save our environment, we must keep mining. Not just that, we must massively increase mining.
Soon, we will be causing a Mt. Everest worth of mining waste every year. We simply cannot survive that sort of destruction and poisoning.
It's not the Green Transition
It's the Greed Transition.
@gerrymcgovern This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano, which basically predicts this future, except:
the majority of the population is kept busy with poorly paid makework projects and the world is actually run by a small, overworked and technocratic elite.
@gerrymcgovern Seeing as GDP hasn’t really worked to the benefit of ‘the many’ perhaps alternatives are vital but individualism now underpins economic policy with social policy as add-ons.
@gerrymcgovern I want to see degrowth supporters set out visions for how we will support the most vulnerable in our society. This piece is pitched to the middle classes (and I do understand the need to appease the middle classes) but I need to see how we will support disabled people, homeless people, poor people, refugees (economic, climate, and otherwise).
@elmyra@gerrymcgovern This is an important point because there’s a certain faction of degrowthers who will, when you press them on this issue, act like disability and chronic illness are symptoms of capitalism (instead of things that happen regardless of capitalism) and get real cagey about how we ensure that mobility-limited people will get around in a car-free society and diabetics will get insulin, etc.
@MisuseCase@elmyra@gerrymcgovern You misunderstand. All they have to do is withold my anticonvulsant meds, and now poof, no need to worry about how we can afford degrowth: just force disabled people to take up a larger share of the workforce through force.
One ultimate problem with "degrowth" is that it presumes that each person needs only the resources one person is capable of producing. Remove that extra cushion of productivity, and we all know who suffers first.
I'm genuinely confused where you are getting the that 'every person consumes just what they produce' is an assumption of degrowth. It's not one I've seen anywhere in the discussions and literature I've read.
I agree with others in the thread there is a long way to go to ensure degrowth is equitable to all, but it is very doable and seems far easier to acheive in the degrowth paradigm than our current growth-at-all-cost capitalism.
@MisuseCase@elmyra@gerrymcgovern if there are no other people on the roads driving high powered two ton vehicles, there's no need for the disabled to use two ton vehicles. A 100kg vehicle capable of 30mph and with a range of 90 miles will give them equal local mobility with everyone else; and for extra-local mobility there must be disability-friendly public transport. #Degrowth doesn't have to mean hair shirts; it means using less better.
@MisuseCase
These are, of course, huge and critical issues. There's so much work to do to try and set the conditions for a better and more sustainable society.
But I’m super sceptical of the vision laid out in that piece. There seems to be a kind of energy-blindness at the heart of it.
We will very probably have less generated power to work with, which will mean much more physical labour. Not least because in the early 20th century we had millions more draft animals than cars, and they won’t just magic back into existence when things fall apart
@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@MisuseCase@elmyra an awful lot of the energy we currently use is wasted. We don't need vehicles capable of illegal speeds; we don't need vehicles capable of neck-breaking acceleration. And most of all, we don't need two tons of vehicle to move 100kg of person.
@simon_brooke I agree. And I also know that electrical power is far far more efficient in many applications than fossil power.
But growing food without fossil inputs, which we are going to have to do, whether we like it or not, takes labour, lots of it. And without that, the trophic cascade of the surplus we currently take for granted doesn’t materialise
@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@MisuseCase@elmyra as someone who farms, albeit not well, I think this is wrong, too. It does mean we have to go back to rotation farming with pasture as part of that rotation, and ungulates (cattle) grazing the pasture to dung the land. And, given we can't use biocides, weed control (if we do it at all) will have to be done with labour.
Also, I'm not clear whether no-till cereal production can be done with pasture in the rotation. Tilling uses a lot of energy.
@urlyman@simon_brooke@gerrymcgovern@elmyra The unavoidable fossil input for agriculture is manufacturing fertilizer IIRC. This is a legit use for carbon capture as opposed to just letting industry write off its emissions.
@simon_brooke@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra Depending on what you’re calling “organic” farming, it may have a worse environmental impact than conventional farming (because it’s a loose marketing term).
And you do need fertilizer to produce enough food to feed everyone on Earth. That or some heavily genetically modified crops. We are likely to need both to ensure sufficient food supplies in an era of climate disaster.
@MisuseCase@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra no, seriously. You do not need artificial fertiliser; and you cannot use it if you want to be carbon neutral. Natural fertilisers are perfectly adequate. There's been no artificial fertiliser used on this farm for at least forty years.
@MisuseCase
I've seen a talk from a US farmer prescribing regenerative agriculture who maintains that he gets as good or better results from no till no fertiliser no pesticide, minimal herbicide than from conventional agriculture. He apparently ran it side by side when he started out.
The best techniques for agriculture may also differ by crop and region, and ideal results may still require genetically modified crops (which lots of people have problems with).
@MisuseCase
He said it wasn't technically organic farming because he used a small amount of herbicide to prepare the ground for annuals, but his point was that pesticides and fertiliser kill the soil life, which kills the structure just as much as tilling, and you need structure if the soil is going to absorb water etc.
Wikip. says that there international legally enforced standards for organic.. What do you mean exactly by marketing term?
@econads@simon_brooke@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra It’s used as a label to sell stuff to people in Whole Foods who don’t know about farming and don’t really know what the environmental impact of anything is, and it may cover a whole range of practices that aren’t really that good or different from conventional farming.
@econads@simon_brooke@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra If you create a genetically modified crop that can be cultivated easily and produce abundant, nutritious food without using artificial fertilizer, herbicides, or pesticides, and has lower environmental impact than conventional farming, you can’t call it “organic” because it’s a GMO. The standards are for marketing, not for environmental impact which is what matters.
@econads@simon_brooke@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra A lot of the things people think they hate about GMOs are things they hate about capitalism: that’s true of a lot of innovations. But GMOs are just a way of speeding up selective breeding of crops like we have been doing for millennia. And we will need them to face environmental and food security challenges.
@MisuseCase@econads@urlyman@gerrymcgovern@elmyra surely the main benefit of GMOs is that they allow megacorporations to patent the organisms which produce staple foods, and thus allow them to rent-seek off farmers everywhere?
@MisuseCase
So, what you're saying make sense. I don't really know enough about GMOs to have an in depth debate about them, so I'm going to assume you've some background in them. (If not please tell me to get lost :-) )
How do they integrate with existing ecosystems and affect biodiversity? This is a problem of conventional plants too if they are transplanted outside their native ecosystem.
@elmyra That's a great and important point. From what I've read, universal income is part of the degrowth approach. Fairness is key and essential. It's a cultural mindset that shares a lot with indigenous cultures I've read about.
@gerrymcgovern Durability and public transport are also key in degrowth. I have a feeling that most if not all degrowth concepts automatically benefit the most vulnerable in society. @elmyra
@elmyra@gerrymcgovern My view is that #degrowth is inevitable and unavoidable simply because infinite growth is literally impossible and always has been.
The question is thus not "Should we pursue degrowth?" but rather "Do we want a managed and organised degrowth, shaped and influenced by human society and our democratic wishes. Or, do we wait for catastrophic, uncontrolled degrowth dished out by natural forces that neither knows nor cares of our collective hopes, dreams and aspirations for society?"
If we have any concern whatsoever for bodycount, we will go with the former.
@Syulang@gerrymcgovern I think what the degrowth rhetoric increasingly glosses over in an effort to appease the middle classes is the need for concurrent radical redistribution. Not just from the private jet owning classes either. That article gives me the creeps because it's very much "you'll still have your lawn and white picket fence, you'll just work three days a week".
@elmyra
I was talking to an ecological economist a while back and she was saying that fairness was crucial to dealing with overconusmption. That is the society is fair, people don't feel near as much a need to "keep up with the Joneses'" because their aren't any Joneses. A motto may be: "Nobody gets too high. Nobody let fall too low."
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