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Degrowth is utopian, and that’s a good thing ...and it’s scientific, too
By Giorgios Kallis *UnevenEarth* 4/26/19
*Excerpts from a rather long essay at*
http://secure-web.cisco.com/1-3I2_S3dpjtksenERIHoQCktywOuyXyYcxvetui_8bSeDPIIiF8PTpubGNBpyK-amXuVHkNS4TL3SH431LN4HxoeHyS9wxqGypxz1fQgnywTUZ26r-f2O4KBRawBezRly6g4DvnRf1Cblk0op-9pSVznOsy5coNEkKSOz9pEpPmAX1njm2S8RXZWNghl0u_aJd3oUxKAJqRLBs8XTSwy5uBROvmDjepPMU4eyYKBq2422ICEA29l3wBxWrrEwik4qz8EdqX-ei3-ZkUVVoSyE6jJW9dKTeIrx5pO9rahwN7QBN5MqOAsIA6VsY0cPFbYT8mIV_mwiPVi3OJVPWwUik7nl2XnAWmohKbFZHV2GGB8YTxB0lEeNkK2SPh14-bI/http%3A%2F%2Funevenearth.org%2F2019%2F04%2Fdegrowth-is-utopian-and-thats-a-good-thing%2F
What we dream about the future affects how we act today. If utopias express
our desires, dystopias distill our fears. Utopias and dystopias are images
we invoke to think and act in the present, producing futures that often
look very different from either our dreams or our nightmares.
An oft-repeated criticism against the green movement is that it is
dystopian and catastrophist (some call this ‘Malthusian’) when it comes to
its diagnosis, and utopian when it comes to its prognosis. On the one hand,
greens warn of a scary future of planetary disaster, and on the other,
offer a peaceful dreamland where people bike to their artisanal work and
live in picturesque houses with well manicured food gardens and small
windmills. Nowhere to see is a realistic political plan on how we could
ever escape from the current capitalist nightmare, and move to something
remotely close to an egalitarian and ecological future.
I won’t deny that some green writings, especially in the 1970s and 80s (but
also still today) merit this critique. But in the meantime, there has been
a lot of new thought, under the labels of ecosocialism, degrowth, or
environmental justice that cannot be caricatured and packaged in this
simplistic mold. And yet this is what geographer Matt Huber does in a
recent article published at the Socialist Forum, entitled Ecosocialism:
Dystopian and Scientific. Huber argues that there are two types of green
socialism, one that is utopian and unscientific, and one that is realistic
and scientific, his….
What I want to argue is that, first, being utopian is not a problem as
Huber makes it seem it is, and second, we [utopians] are scientific, at
least as scientific as Huber can claim his position is….
A scientific socialism, Huber tells us, is one ‘grounded in analysis of
what kind of socialist society is possible given historical and material
conditions’. So far so good. Only one problem: who is to judge what is
really ‘possible’?
Huber, for example, seems to think that something close to the energy or
material consumption of an average American, secured for everyone in the
world, is possible (Huber is against wasteful capitalism, and implies that
unnecessary production and consumption could be curtailed, but is not clear
what he classifies as waste –and in any case, insists on the point of
‘abundant energy’, which one can only think means at least as much energy
as it is currently consumed, if not more). Energy should come from
renewable energy, or why not 80% renewable and 20% nuclear, which is fine,
Huber claims – and food from robotic agriculture. Moreover, we will do all
this without exploiting anyone, taking everyone’s concerns democratically
into account, somehow minimizing damage, or at least making those on the
receiving side of such damage concede to it ‘democratically’….
Huber also has a second take on the meaning of ‘scientific’. He writes that
‘let’s get real, or ‘scientific’ … we are not going to win the masses of
workers with a socialist program based on … ‘drudgery for all’. Science
here seems to refer to realism about how can ‘we’ (sic) win the masses of
workers. There are problems with this formulation too.
First, even if Huber were right and there were a mass of workers that
wouldn’t be mobilized to anything that sounds like ‘less’, that still
wouldn’t make it materially possible to have ever more stuff. Huber argues
that given that the workers will never buy into a degrowth utopia then ‘the
key to an ecosocialist future is finding some way to replicate the
labor-saving aspects of the fossil economy with clean energy’.
This actually seems to me a very unscientific, and utopian in the bad sense
– having to ‘find some way’ to make something possible, independently of
whether it is materially possible or not. Rather than consider integrating
your political strategy to what is materially possible, the call here is to
bend material possibility, one way or the other, to what you came to think
as the only possible political strategy.
