this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Degrowth
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Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
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First of all it depends on how you define degrowth. Japan for example has a lower real gdp today, then in 1995. So a shrinking economy is certainly possible in a real world fairly capitalist system. Obviously nobody has a purely capitalist system. There are always government companies, coops, foundations and so forth which are not inherently capitalist. Other then that Japan does fine.
However nobody is going to choose to shrink the economy for the sole reason of shrinking the economy. After all the economy does provide a living for the population and less money, means some people have to suffer. This is were the problem with the word "value" comes up. If you just use value = money, then that has to stop. Obviously capitalism is not going to do it by itself, but we have enviromental legislation and other laws and systems reducing work time using public pensions and workers rights. There are ways outside of states as well, but they are less common today.
If capitalism really rules everything, it is basicly impossible to do, other then as a disaster, if you count that as degrowth. However we can set limits to capitalism and have done so in the past using governments, unions and so forth. However it would be simpler without capitalism.
I'd have to disagree on this point. All these things are capitalist because they employ wage-labor. Socialism isn't non-profits, governments, or coops, but a fundamentally different way of life outside the bounds of valorization, money, etc.
Government is not capitalist if it's under the workers authority. This is the big question : who controls the government? Public services for example employ wage-workers, but they do so for the benefit of everyone rather than the one capitalist who possess the thing.
Capitalism is about who controls the means of production. It is actually irrelevant to the form of government you have. And it is irrelevant to the use of money to organize the work or the society.
That reminds me that the Chinese communist journal Chuang 1 suggests that wage-labor under Mao-era China wasn't capitalist because it wasn't in service of capital accumulation or valorization. An interesting thesis, something I think about but have trouble fully agreeing. But the thing is that they agree that it isn't socialist either because it still had the existence of wages and a proletarian class.
That begs the question, what is worker's authority and is it socialist? I would say that it isn't socialist yet but has the potential to move towards socialism if it actually moves to progressively abolish class distinctions like wages.
I feel like you're leaning toward anarchism rather than socialism here. Hierarchy and authority are not necessarily bad things.
I see where you come from with wages I think though. There is a difference between the pay you get for a work, and a pay you would get to work. One would be a transaction while the other would be a societal agreement or something like that. I don't remember the details of this theory and I don't have the words to talk about it in English unfortunately.
Same goes for socialist, I feel the meaning you're using it for here is very specific.
I haven't even begun to get into the question of hierarchy and authority. But this is the meaning of socialism that was accepted by the first, second, and third international before the second and third international descended into chauvinism and Stalinism respectively. It's only relatively recently with the degeneration of social democracy into neoliberalism and Marxism to Stalinism that the meaning has become perverted and vulgarized.
The key difference between socialism and capitalism is who owns the means of production. For capitalism it is private ownership, whereas for socialism it is social ownership of some sort. Wages can be paid in socialism too and are not necessarily a part of capitalism(slavery).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
“Capitalism” and “socialism” refer to entire modes of production, not the specific details of who owns what under a capitalist mode of production. A mode of production is the sum aggregate of all social relations in a given society, not merely individual or collective ownerships in a given society. Social ownership isn't socialism, but socialism does mean the generalization of social ownership. It is vulgarism to say a mode of production is “mixed” between capitalist and socialist ownerships. Capitalist economies have always been mixed economies since the very genesis of capitalism. “Socialism” is not determined by government or worker ownership. Neither is socialism is when the government does stuff. A state corporation still operates under the logic of the capitalist mode of production, as do worker co-ops. Worker co-ops can be “socialist” in the sense that their tendency is socialist, not that their mode of production is socialist. Socialism cannot be built in one workplace, much less one country—it is a whole transformation of society moving away from profit, wages, valorization, and accumulation altogether. This means socialism has never existed, not in the Soviet Union, not in the People's Republic of China. What these countries were or are is “socialist” in the sense that their tendency is "socialist" (even if a vulgarized form of socialism), not that their productive capacities were socialist in content. These countries were "socialist" in the sense they proclaimed themselves socialist and the American empire proclaimed them socialist, but these are ideological and propagandistic categories, not material realities.
Capitalism is not merely private ownership because there have been societies where collective and state ownerships fulfilled the same social roles as individual capitalist owners. That is to say, under these societies, social relations of production remained on the level of wages, profit, valorization, and accumulation, even if the ownership was on the basis of state or cooperative ownership. This was the case in the Soviet Union and in the People's Republic of China before the neoliberalization of these countries.
tl;dr, capitalism and socialism are not determined by ownership, but by the aggregate social relations in a given society and the social functions between those social relations.
In other words "socialism " can not exist in the real world as not everybody can be treated fairly and everything else is "capitalism". That is a very conveniant definition of "socialism" to just be able to deflect of every failure of a system by claiming it was not socialist in the first place. At the same time it is obviously daming "socalism" to academia as no real world experince can be gained, as with even a bit of "capitalism" these real world experiments would not be "socailist".
Anyway talking about the only economic system in the real world "capitalism". It can absolutly do degrowth according to your definition. The problem with degrwoth is the definition of value and the deeply "capitalist" coops and somewhat democratic governments, as well as foundations have shown to be able to define that differently. Anyway I know why avoid "socialism"
Just because socialism has failed doesn't mean it is impossible or not worth doing. Much of degrowth will necessarily be socialist in content and tendency. Don't misunderstand me, I am for degrowth and for socialism and I believe these things are worth doing and are possible. We will fight for degrowth, but degrowth cannot and will not be won under the current mode of production. A revolutionary rupture will be needed and this is what degrowth will have to work towards.
I believe it is extremly important why socialism has failed until now. The key part of this is imho the structure of the Communist parties, which tried to push these systems throu. By being to down hierachical systems striving for power, they were and are easy to corrupt by power hungry individuals, which turns them into full blown dictatroships after they have won the revolution.
That is also true for a lot of democratic revolutions of dictators. They overthrow them, but lack the social system in the back to support a proper democracy. So you end up with a coup after the first problems of the new government.
To me the logical solution is to set up alternative systems of the kind I want to see, within the current system. This gives two big advantgaes. First of all it is able to test the ideas. If it fails to work with people, who actually activly want to be part of it, it is extremly likely to not work with millions of people after a revolution. Secondly it creates an organization, which can be used as a blue print after the revolution by either being scaled up or copied. There are a lot of systems or parts of systems, which are actually working pretty well today. We do have a lot of really well working prefiguration, which can be used to show people how things work.
Basicly I do not care about a system being pure socialism or capitalism or whatever. I have no problem with mixing parts of different politcal philosophies together to create a better working system. In fact I believe it is neceassary as the world has different regions and cultures requiring and pushing for different solutions for local problems. Obviously learning from each other is a good idea. So I do not have a problem with just replacing parts of the current system more slowly or taking smaller victories. We have a lot of solutions to lower growth to push for other values then money. Things like workers protection, unions, enviromental laws, carbon taxes and so forth all will slow down growth. If enough of them are brought together they will even shrink the economy. That might end up with a system very much like socialism and parts of it are going to need revolutions or at least violence against the current system to be brought throu.
In other words I do not believe the world is black and white, but grey. What I want is a better world and I will take it, even if it is not perfect.
Socialism isn't about creating a purist socialist system, but by creating an entirely new way of doing life outside the bounds of classes, the state, money, etc. It seems that you're arguing for prefiguritve politics, in building the new world in the shell of the old. This is admirable and prefigurative politics will always have its place in the socialist tradition with prominent projects like the Zapatistas and Rojava as prefiguring socialism. But we cannot mystify or veil projects as "socialism." Yes they are socialist in tendency and are building toward socialism, but while capitalism exists, its logic encapsulates everything. A new mode of production can emerge from prefigurative seeds. Capitalism itself emerged from and was prefigured by early commodity systems in the ancient and medieval world. It's quite possible that socialism itself can emerge and be prefigured by seeds today like with mutual aid, but we cannot confuse these seeds as the socialist mode of production itself.
Wars and crisis are degrowth that happens constantly and they are definitely not socialists. Unless sharing the loss and pain is the socialist part I guess?
Degrowth isn't the same as a shrinking of economy due to war and crisis. It is the intentional slowdown of the economy towards very specific ends: less work, less consumption, more welfare, etc.
That's not degrowth then. That's the repurpose of the economy. Definanciarisation would be a better term IMO. Or people oriented economy.
As I said, growth is an illusion for people to believe the system will benefit the poor as well as the rich. If they believe it, they can't wish for degrowth, because they understand very well who will suffer from the decrease of growth.
Of course that's degrowth. That's the accepted definition among degrowthers. Degrowth is about benefiting the poor as well. Stop talking out of your asshole.
The wikipedia entry has a big fat This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. due to the term degrowth being badly defined especially in English. So you get ideas like deliberatly shrinking the economy until in planetary boundaries to be part of degrowth. For example here it is used insuch a context:
https://degrowth.org/definition/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x