Degrowth: A modern form of malthusianism
Proclaims to be anti-capitalist. Has no scientific approach. “Growth-ideology”, whereas Marx wrote 3 Volumes of capital…
Growth isn’t just a mindset, but a do or die question (accumulation) in a race with eachother. It’s not a tap we can just turn on and off.
It’s like the the argument of keynsianism turned upside down / the other side of reformism. One side says:
“We can stimulate growth, that’s a good thing”, while the degrowthers argue for clamping down on it.
… there is a word for when you don’t have growth under capitalism… it’s called a recession. And it usually doesn’t work out so well for people.
Carbon emissions dropped very fast during the covid pandemic. Degrowthers celebrated, but for the majority of people, that meant suffering, the piling up of debts, inflation, job insecurity.
If you abandon a scientific approach and treat the economy as an ideological question, you fall back into the same utopian socialism that Marx was criticising.
Civilization hit natural limits many times before, requiring a qualitative change in technology and social organization to overcome them.
Growth under capitalism is captial accumulation. A threat to existing capital.
Under capitalism, transitioning to clean energy means degrowth, i.e. recession, i.e. mass unemployment, whereas under socialism, dirty industries could be disassembled on a planned basis, with workers being reemployed in new green sectors.
You could have a huge amount of economic growth by investing into carbon capture technology, etc., and it would be and enormous net good for society, but under the confines of capitalism, it’s not profitable enough to be worth doing.