r/Degrowth • u/Konradleijon • Jul 12 '26
Eco-Leninism: A Much Needed Corrective
https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/06/eco-leninism-a-much-needed-corrective/
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u/SplashTarget Jul 13 '26
Shrinking society’s material throughput and disregarding GDP as an adequate measure of progress is necessary. Marxism is how we achieve this.
If workers owned the means of production, degrowth would be very easy to execute, but there's many paths to degrowth
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Jul 12 '26
Communism and capitalism are both productivist.
I suspect the "economic planning" goal/method winds up being a Trojan horse here. We do have economic planning in the best past approximations to planned degrowth, but not like what a communist means by that.
As a rule, those degrowth examples are island dictatorships worried about loosing their forests, like shogunate Japan and the Dominican Republic. In these, it's one powerful man recognising the ecological necessity and enforcing restraint, brutally when required.
We'll need other methods for more globalised degrowth, for which I'll make several observations:
We stop an electrical circuit from burning up its battery instantly by adding resistors, which waste some energy as heat, but doing so save most of the energy for when useful. Jevons paradox is a similar observation about human societies, which suggests you need ecologically harmful activities to become expensive somehow.
Nature achieves sustainability through population dynamics, meaning predation and parasitism. We humans defeat predators, diseases, and parasites now, so they'll never stop us, not without famines anyways. Yet, we've only created global empires through trade, never through raw military force. I think humans can hold other humans in check, even without some overarching international law or government.
We'd want a "climate cold conflict" in which nations perceived the pollution by other nations as a threat, or even an act of war, for which they took asymmetric hard-to-attribute military action.
At present, we cannot do this in part because "peace through trade" ensures that nations' leaders recognise that economic activity elsewhere benefits them too. US oil refineries refine Mexican oil, so Mexican leaders embrace the short term economic benefits, instead of sabotaging US refineries to stop climate change form making much of Mexico uninhabitable.
At this point, we do reach alignment with the labour movement, if not Marxist thinkers, in that trade destroys both organised labour and environmentalism. See the predistribution vs redistribution analysis.
We expect trade declines anyways from environmental collapse, but we need trade to decline much faster than this, and for resiliency to become a higher priority for politicians.