Precisamos de mudanças radicais para enfrentar as alterações climáticas. Mas o decrescimento acorrenta desnecessariamente a sua visão de um futuro socialista a um programa de redução agregada.
Matt Huber
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| Campo de painéis solares em Laghouat, Argélia. (Jemo2200/Wikimedia Commons) |
A perspectiva ambiental do decrescimento está ganhando força. Há alguns meses, o parlamento da União Europeia realizou uma conferência de vários dias “Além do Crescimento” com muitos oradores alinhados com a perspectiva. O ambientalista liberal Bill McKibben fez uma avaliação simpática na New Yorker.
O decrescimento está inclusive fazendo incursões na esquerda socialista. Há dois anos, a Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung na cidade de Nova York publicou um artigo, “Decrescimento e Organização Revolucionária”. Um livro importante, The Future Is Degrowth, foi avaliado favoravelmente no jornal Socialist Forum dos Democratic Socialists of America. No Japão, o marxista ecológico Kohei Saito vendeu quinhentos mil exemplares de um livro que defende o comunismo do decrescimento (o volume, intitulado Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, será lançado numa tradução inglesa no início do próximo ano).
E agora uma das revistas mais antigas da esquerda socialista, a Monthly Review - o seu primeiro número em 1949 incluía “Porquê o Socialismo?” de Albert Einstein - abraçou totalmente o decrescimento. A sua última edição intitula-se "Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development" e apresenta muitos dos mais proeminentes proponentes do decrescimento, como Jason Hickel e Matthias Schmelzer. A edição também inclui uma longa introdução do marxista ecológico de longa data John Bellamy Foster. Como de costume para um ensaio de Foster, há nele muitas coisas instigantes e com as quais vale a pena concordar. Mas, em última análise, tal como grande parte do movimento pelo decrescimento, acorrenta desnecessariamente a sua visão de um futuro socialista a um programa de redução agregada.
Ecossocialismo, necessidades humanas e planejamento
We all can agree with some aspects of Foster’s proposals: first, we want to shift to an economy that prioritizes ecological sustainability and provisioning human needs. We want an economy that produces for “use value” against capitalism’s focus on profit and exchange value.
Indeed, degrowth proponents and Foster are correct to reject our society’s fixation on gross domestic product (GDP) as the indicator of economic health. GDP ultimately fixates on exchange value regardless of whether it contributes to popular and environmental well-being.
Second, solving the ecological crisis requires a shift away from the anarchy of the market under capitalism and toward planning. Most of our ecological problems are rooted in fixed infrastructure investments — housing, transportation, the electricity grid — that the market is uniquely bad at provisioning. Restructuring such systems requires planning.
Are the productive forces "fully" developed?
It is on the question of the productive forces where Foster departs from a standard Marxist position. Traditionally, Marxists argued that the relations of private ownership and the profit motive inhibit or “fetter” the full development of the productive forces, and only a transition to socialism can allow us to fully develop the productive forces. Yet, Foster says that while this might have been true in the nineteenth century, we must reevaluate this proposition in light of the twenty-first century ecological crisis:
[T]he context in which [Marx and Engels] were writing was not today’s “full-world economy,” but rather a still early stage of industrialization. In the period of industrial development, extending from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the first Earth Day in 1970, world industrial productive potential increased in size around 1,730 times, which from a nineteenth-century perspective, would have seemed “a practically unlimited increase.” Today, however, it raises the issue of ecological “overshoot.”
Foster then goes on to draw from Engels in saying, “the goal of socialism was not the expansion of production itself, but rather the ‘free development’ of human beings.” This is true. The goal is not necessarily to increase production but to create the maximum conditions for human freedom. But the reverse is also true: the goal is not necessarily to decrease aggregate production.
Nearly all degrowth proposals have some call for “aggregate” reductions of “energy use” or “material throughput.” For example, take this from The Future Is Degrowth: “degrowth can be defined as the democratic transition to a society that... is based on a much smaller throughput of energy and resources.”
What Engels actually calls for in the cited passages from Anti-Dühring is for society to take full social control (planning) over the social relation to nature, as opposed to capitalism, which cedes it to anarchic markets. This requires total flexibility to what must be grown or degrown, and not rigid adherence to aggregate reductions.
More to the point, the climate crisis actually fits Marx’s “fettering thesis” quite well. It is entirely clear that solving climate change requires massive development of the productive forces — productive forces that capital is specifically reluctant to invest in.
For example, prominent modeling from Princeton University suggests that zeroing emissions by 2050 will require, among other things, 80 to120 million heat pumps, up to five times an increase in electricity transmission capacity, 250 large nuclear reactors (or 3,800 small ones), and the development of whole new industry — carbon capture and sequestration — from scratch.
This is why socialists argue that it will require a massive social effort of public investment and planning to accomplish this. In other words, we need entirely different social relations of production to fully develop the productive forces necessary for our historical crisis.
But, even if we look beyond the ecological crisis, at the core of the socialist project is the aim to abolish class itself and the widespread poverty that afflicts humans all over the planet (even in “rich countries” like the United States). Imagine what it would take to give the entire planet public housing, public transit, reliable electricity, and modern water-sewage services. Now imagine trying to achieve this while also shrinking aggregate material resource use. To say the least, this sounds like a difficult task.
Overall, it would be quite sad to build a socialist movement capable of seizing the means of production only to prohibit from the outset the further development of the productive forces. Socialism is not stasis. What about fusion power? Curing cancer? We still have so much left to accomplish as a species that capitalism might be holding us back from.
Planetary boundaries?
Of course, degrowthers say that the reason we need aggregate reductions is because the crisis is rooted in “the crossing of planetary boundaries” (not just climate change, but others such as biodiversity and freshwater resources). Foster writes: “Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s ‘full-world economy,’ it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput.” Oddly, this sweeping claim is backed up by a citation to a nearly twenty-year-old paper by an advocate of immigration and population control, Herman Daly.
But as soon as the concept of fixed planetary boundaries was proposed, it was hotly debated and critiqued by scientists of various stripes. And, even if we accept that the science on these boundaries is fixed and settled, it is not at all clear that the answer to many of them is degrowth or aggregate reductions. Again, the solution to climate change requires at least initially a massive expansion of production and infrastructure investment.
One of the boundaries — stratospheric ozone depletion — has basically already been addressed by a simple technological switch initiated by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. Overall, addressing each of the boundaries is complex and calls for more contextual qualitative transformations of specific sectors of production, rather than some abstract or generalized commitment to degrowth.
Nearly all degrowth proposals have some call for “aggregate” reductions of “energy use” or “material throughput.” For example, take this from The Future Is Degrowth: “degrowth can be defined as the democratic transition to a society that... is based on a much smaller throughput of energy and resources.”
What Engels actually calls for in the cited passages from Anti-Dühring is for society to take full social control (planning) over the social relation to nature, as opposed to capitalism, which cedes it to anarchic markets. This requires total flexibility to what must be grown or degrown, and not rigid adherence to aggregate reductions.
More to the point, the climate crisis actually fits Marx’s “fettering thesis” quite well. It is entirely clear that solving climate change requires massive development of the productive forces — productive forces that capital is specifically reluctant to invest in.
For example, prominent modeling from Princeton University suggests that zeroing emissions by 2050 will require, among other things, 80 to120 million heat pumps, up to five times an increase in electricity transmission capacity, 250 large nuclear reactors (or 3,800 small ones), and the development of whole new industry — carbon capture and sequestration — from scratch.
This is why socialists argue that it will require a massive social effort of public investment and planning to accomplish this. In other words, we need entirely different social relations of production to fully develop the productive forces necessary for our historical crisis.
But, even if we look beyond the ecological crisis, at the core of the socialist project is the aim to abolish class itself and the widespread poverty that afflicts humans all over the planet (even in “rich countries” like the United States). Imagine what it would take to give the entire planet public housing, public transit, reliable electricity, and modern water-sewage services. Now imagine trying to achieve this while also shrinking aggregate material resource use. To say the least, this sounds like a difficult task.
Overall, it would be quite sad to build a socialist movement capable of seizing the means of production only to prohibit from the outset the further development of the productive forces. Socialism is not stasis. What about fusion power? Curing cancer? We still have so much left to accomplish as a species that capitalism might be holding us back from.
Planetary boundaries?
Of course, degrowthers say that the reason we need aggregate reductions is because the crisis is rooted in “the crossing of planetary boundaries” (not just climate change, but others such as biodiversity and freshwater resources). Foster writes: “Science has established without a doubt that, in today’s ‘full-world economy,’ it is necessary to operate within an overall Earth System budget with respect to allowable physical throughput.” Oddly, this sweeping claim is backed up by a citation to a nearly twenty-year-old paper by an advocate of immigration and population control, Herman Daly.
But as soon as the concept of fixed planetary boundaries was proposed, it was hotly debated and critiqued by scientists of various stripes. And, even if we accept that the science on these boundaries is fixed and settled, it is not at all clear that the answer to many of them is degrowth or aggregate reductions. Again, the solution to climate change requires at least initially a massive expansion of production and infrastructure investment.
One of the boundaries — stratospheric ozone depletion — has basically already been addressed by a simple technological switch initiated by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. Overall, addressing each of the boundaries is complex and calls for more contextual qualitative transformations of specific sectors of production, rather than some abstract or generalized commitment to degrowth.
Austeridade ecológica
Os defensores do decrescimento resistem às acusações de eco-austeridade porque, tal como Foster, apelam à desmercantilização das necessidades humanas básicas. Na verdade, esta deveria ser a exigência central de todos os socialistas para mitigar a insegurança e a indignidade da dependência do mercado sob o capitalismo.
No entanto, o ensaio de Foster mostra que o decrescimento é uma espécie de austeridade no seu significado original: um compromisso fiscal com a contenção orçamental. O decrescimento não defende o corte dos orçamentos governamentais reais, mas a linguagem da contabilidade e das restrições permeia o discurso.
Foster equipara o decrescimento à “formação líquida de capital zero”, invoca algo chamado “orçamento do sistema terrestre” e afirma que “o crescimento contínuo ocorreria em algumas áreas da economia, tornado possível por reduções noutras”. Enquanto os governos devem equilibrar os orçamentos em termos monetários, os defensores do decrescimento baseiam-se em conceitos quantitativos igualmente abstratos, como o “produto material”.
Contudo, este conceito, tal como o próprio PIB, não seria um indicador útil do progresso ecológico. Como disse Kenta Tsuda, as suas medidas mais cruéis não conseguem determinar “os danos ecológicos diferenciais dos materiais, por exemplo, o de uma pilha de cinzas de carvão infundidas com mercúrio e uma massa igual de restos de comida num recipiente de compostagem”.
No geral, um compromisso quantitativo com a “formação líquida zero de capital” introduziria uma mentalidade de austeridade em toda a sociedade, onde todos os aumentos devem ser equilibrados. Uma coisa é avançar com uma crítica estratégica do decrescimento: num sistema capitalista definido pela privação, quem apoiará uma redução centrada no programa? Mas o seu outro problema é que procura impor restrições de fato aos nossos futuros programas políticos. O objetivo do socialismo, no entanto, é libertar o potencial humano das algemas do capitalismo e dos seus imperativos de mercado.
Existe, claro, a possibilidade de que, se apreendermos os meios de produção, a ciência possa informar uma determinação coletiva de que é necessário “decrescer” de alguma forma, mas por que faríamos disto um pré-requisito do nosso programa e excluiríamos essa determinação democrática?
O ensaio de Foster contém muitas outras afirmações estranhas - incluindo a sugestão de que “o próprio trabalho pode ser substituído pela energia dos combustíveis fósseis”, uma proposta que nos condenaria a uma economia de trabalho penoso e mais intensivo em mão-de-obra - mas no seu cerne, o socialismo do decrescimento de Foster é mais uma tentativa de vestir a ideologia ambiental pós-década de 1960 com roupas marxistas.
Foster termina citando o apelo do economista político Paul Baran ao socialismo como um “excedente econômico planejado”, apenas para insistir que as necessidades ecológicas podem forçar uma “redução do excedente econômico”. Mas o conceito de Baran parece útil. O socialismo exigirá um excedente: a questão é: o que fazemos com ele? Planejar o excedente tendo em mente objetivos ecológicos é algo em que o capitalismo é excepcionalmente mau. O socialismo pode fazer melhor.
Colaborador
Matt Huber é professor de geografia na Syracuse University. Seu novo livro, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, foi lançado pela Verso Books em 2022.
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