What drives this reactionary idea is a willingness to change everything in order to save seen as the natural order of things.
Ultimately, this proposal would lead to a more unequal world than exists today, and would still lead to a massive collapse of the current system. Importantly, both camps — globalists and neo-fascists — support growth. They just support different ways to implement it.
Productivity
On the other side, there are also two telephone poles at the Porto Alegre camp. On the one hand, there is progressive productivism: in the traditions of socialist and social democratic labor movements, those parts of the left focus on growth, the improvement and redistribution of technological productivity, and tend to favor vertical forms of organization.
Often, these leftists advocate keeping the existing technological infrastructure but try to make it more efficient and social through centralized and hierarchical state planning.
Utopian advice based on overcoming work by increasing productivity or “Fully automatic luxury communism‘ also falls into this camp. Let’s call it “leftist productivity”.
On the other hand, liberal movements and currents have a strong focus on bottom-up self-organization, fundamentally questioning growth – what we might call “left-wing liberalism”.
This pole opposes hierarchy and productionism, and seeks to fundamentally change global relations towards a multipolar, post-growth internationalism.
employment
Today, degrowth has become one of the key reference points for left-wing liberalism in the global North—or, as in most recent volumein the “alternatives puzzle” of the fight for a better life beyond growth, industrialism and domination.
For the past five years, one word has been at the center of the controversy and potential alliance between the productive and liberal poles: the Green New Deal.
Some watered-down versions of the Green New Deal, or “Green New Deal,” have been pushed by governments, international organisations and the European Commission, which essentially boils down to the ecological modernisation of capitalism. These will be seen as green growth globalism, firmly in the Davos camp.
But here we are only interested in the more transformative left-wing variants. The Green New Deal has been around for a long time as a set of transitional policies supported by Green Party candidates. In recent years, it has increasingly become the cornerstone of radical environmental politics in larger parties such as the UK Labour Party and parts of the US Democratic Party.
The basic proposal aims to radically reduce fossil fuel consumption and transition to a fully renewable economy through public investment and regulation, while guaranteeing just working conditions and full employment, as well as substantially improving living conditions for all, especially the marginalized Community.
post-fossil
Inspired by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal implemented after the Great Depression in the 1930s, the idea was a Green Keynesian mass mobilization and public investment program to fundamentally restructure the economy.
At first glance, these more transformative left-wing Green New Deals and recessions may seem stark contrasts, but we’ve been arguing in our new book, The future is recession: a world guide beyond capitalism There are many overlaps and similarities, and the scope for mutual learning and cooperation is broad, and degrowth provides important corrections to existing Green New Deal proposals.
Degrowth’s particular strengths include in-depth analysis of the biophysical metabolism of capitalism, the global justice and resource implications of ecological modernization, the ideological hegemony perpetuated by growth-based economics, and the more profoundly transformative policy recommendations of autonomy-based economies, Caring and adequate.
The most obvious difference between degrowth and other socio-ecological proposals is the politicization of social metabolism and its implications for policy design.
Degrowth, like most ecological modernization programs and the Green New Deal, calls for massive investment to rapidly build the physical infrastructure of a post-fossil society.
tear down
This includes community-controlled renewable energy and democratically managed public transportation networks, transformed social or collective housing, and worker-owned industrial plants to produce durable, repairable, and recyclable consumer goods.
Similar to Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel A. Cohen and Thea Riofrancos in a planet to windegrowth also called for “a ‘final stimuli’ for green economic development in the short term to build a landscape of public affluence, develop new political and economic models, jump off the growth treadmill, break with capital, and enter a slower track”.
However, de-growth analysis – given extensive research into climate injustice and the possibility of decoupling emissions from economic growth – argues that this needs to be accompanied by an economy-wide transition beyond economic growth. These studies suggest that a Green New Deal with growth—even temporarily—may be unsustainable.
Therefore, while Green New Deal proposals tend to emphasize this investment-driven and sustainable growth of all, de-growth also at least as strict Focus on the many things that must be done.
To achieve a global just and sustainable economy, large areas of production and consumption need to be dismantled and other systems need to be built to replace them.
