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/310/ Do You Want to De-Grow? (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-03 12:25:53
Edited:
2023-01-03 12:30:22
Imported:
2024-07
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On 'degrowth communism'.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Why the rage for degrowth now? With deindustrialisation, energy rationing and severe pressure on standards of living, it looks increasingly like degrowth is official policy.

Yet its advocates, drawing from the work of radicals like Mike Davis, John Bellamy Foster, Jason Hickel, and Kohei Saito, would argue that ecological Marxism or degrowth communism is wholly different from stagnant capitalism. How much continuity is there between much older generations of socialists and the contemporary left?

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Paul Brewer

I'm not interested in defending de-growth, so don't take my comment in that vein. However, the idea that the 15-minute city is some kind of novelty is misleading. When I first lived on my own in London, car-less in 1982, in effect I lived in a 15-minute city as just about everything I needed was around 15-minutes walk away. We had a doctor (who made a house call!), supermarkets, a Woolworth's for household sundries, butchers, fruit & veg, TV rental shop, etc. And this was imposed by coercion, too. The coercion was called 'money' and 'space'. People couldn't afford as many cars as they could just a decade later, and developers in the Victorian and inter-war era hadn't allowed for as many cars as was feasible to buy in 1982, let alone the 1990s. I could go on, but the point I'm making is that some kind of coercion is an inevitable part of a democratic society simply because resources have to be rationed somehow. My rule of thumb is that any significant initiative will feature 20 per cent of people being against it. They don't have a veto, so the minority are coerced. Phil seemed to be arguing that the planners of Canterbury don't have a democratic mandate, but one could equally say that, in the absence of any party taking up the cause of opposing the 15-minute city plan, that there seems to be a consensus in favour of it, probably subtracting that 20 per cent who include those people complaining. We'll only know with certainty once the politics of opposition is organised.

Ghost Runner

Is not the question about what type of growth? Capitalist growth is chaos and all about extracting surplus value. Degrow under capitalism is ultimately a capitalist class politics but rational growth under a different mode of production could (I hope) be more ecologically sound and less alienating.