Exploring Acceptance

 

Seeing the forest through the trees can be difficult; this is the Section Eight Woods in the Cache River Wetlands in Southern Illinois

The one thing that never ceases to  amaze  depress me is the human capacity for denial. By now, of course, I have encountered this so many times and have written about different aspects of denial of reality so frequently that it is mind-boggling how so many people fail to see this denial. Since I have described DOR (Denial Of Reality) so many times, I won't repeat it here; my linked article should give one more than plenty of evidence. 

Since so much of the predicament of ecological overshoot is caused by this denial of reality and our mental separation of ourselves from nature, we often fail to see just how much a part of nature we really are. We fail to acknowledge our lack of agency and/or deny our lack of free will. We are so full of hubris and arrogance that we take our success for granted and ignore the fact that this success is for a limited time only. Soon enough, the energy and resources we've depended upon for our so-called success will be gone and we will be forced to succeed (or fail) without them. How much success will we have without advanced technology?

For those souls who know what the most likely answer to that question will be, they understand our inability to actually create habitat. They comprehend that if we did have the ability to create habitat, we probably wouldn't be so busy destroying the one we have that was provided for us by nature. Then again, maybe we aren't anywhere near as noble as a species as we often think we are.

This article is going to be a bit longer than my usual ones, primarily due to this next quote - a rather lengthy one - from Rhyd Wildermuth, pointing out how degrowth will happen whether we want it to or not (or plan for it in this case). This is from an article titled, "Borrowing Against a Future That Cannot Come," and although I think it is based too much on economic systems (which are essentially anthropocentric human-built systems which don't take ecological reality into consideration), much of this rings true:

"There’s a basic but rarely-stated problem underlying all economic theories. Feudalism, capitalism, communism, slavery, and every other system is an attempt to solve this core truth of human behavior. It’s a problem so fundamental to our desires — but also so unattainable in our lives — as to have become nearly impossible to speak of directly:

Most of us would really like to do only the amount of work we need to do,
and would really prefer not to do more.

It’s such an intimate part of human behavior and desire that it becomes almost rude to speak of, something best talked around but never brought to light.

But once in a while, some theorist or politician admits this truth publicly. When they do, however, they often bury it within a larger argument, a defense of one system or another and its ability to mitigate or even completely circumvent this stubborn human trait.

The most recent example I’ve encountered was in the latest attack on “degrowth” or “eco” Marxism, published in that most utopian of socialist journals, Jacobin:

"Upon the 1917 revolution’s final release of the peasantry from feudal servitude, peasants had no incentive to produce a surplus sufficient to feed workers in the city. The grim prodrazverstka during the civil war, the return of markets under the New Economic Policy, and Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization and the resulting famines were all different efforts at overcoming this underdevelopment. Evidence from history shows that regardless of what Marx thought about the mir, leapfrogging historical stages of development proved to be impossible."

Debates about degrowth have become quite current in leftist journals, especially in response to the incredible popularity[1] of the work of the Japanese eco-Marxist Kohei Saito. The authors of the essay quoted above, Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips[2], especially take aim at Saito’s body of work, positioning him as the primary theorist of degrowth and thus an essential target to discredit. What is degrowth, and why is it so contentious? First of all, it’s worth noting that the word itself isn’t quite an accurate description of the philosophy it is meant to label. Nor is another word sometimes applied to the framework, “decelerationism.” Both labels are mere opposites of the specific belief that they reject.

Put as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.
Degrowth starts from a fact easily observable in nature. Animal populations — especially herbivores like deer and cows — often “overshoot” the resources available to them. Their population increases in response to apparent abundance of food, but then they overgraze and those areas and start to starve.

It’s well known that apex predators such as wolves have a crucial role in balancing herbivore populations. By killing off some of the members of an expanding herd, they actually keep the entire population from facing starvation. Apex predators are not the only possible corrective, however: food scarcity tends to lead to reduced birth rates, sickness, and the death of many members of the group, which then balances out the population.
None of this sounds very nice, perhaps. In an ideal situation, we’d hope that the deer would just inherently know how many offspring to have and how much food was available to them so that they don’t need violent death to balance out their expansion. The problem, though, is that these (sometimes violent) natural cycles of expansion and contraction are precisely how deer — like all other living things in the world — actually thrive.

Now, human populations work the exact same way, with one important difference. Unlike deer or cows, humans are able to gain more extensive knowledge about available resources and limits, foresee potential crises, come up with solutions to stave off starvation and collapse, and especially to adjust our behavior to prevent our own ruin. In other words, we’re able to balance our desire to expand and the necessity of staying within limits in order to thrive.

Unfortunately, though we’re capable of all this, we’ve recently stopped believing there is any such thing as a “limit.” We’ve been so successful at apparently overcoming limits that we’ve come to convince ourselves there is no such thing as a real limit anymore. We believe we can just keep expanding our economies, that we can keep endlessly growing, and that any time a limit seems to threaten our growth, a technological solution will inevitably be found.

Note that that I said “apparently” when I spoke of our success at overcoming limits. The core analysis upon which degrowth is founded is that we’ve not been nearly so successful in overcoming natural limits as we’ve come to believe. Instead, we’ve merely found temporary fixes which then force us to run up against other limits. We postpone one catastrophe by initiating the processes that will cause another, and when that second one approaches, we then initiate a third.

Readers in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.

What often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.

Degrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.

Fossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.

Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.
Where does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.

Degrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?

Certain leftist reactions against this critique are particularly fierce, especially from Anglo-American writers and activists aligned with variants of Democratic Socialism or Utopian Socialism. Generally, they tend to share a belief that a future socialist society will actually be more technologically advanced than current capitalist societies. Also, they generally believe that the transition from capitalism to socialism will involve the full unleashing of the “forces of production” towards the good of all.

In all fairness, there’s a logic behind this faith, and a long tradition of Marxist, anarchist, and other socialist thinkers and leaders who have also held this view. This idea is what animated both Leninist and Stalinist interpretations of Marxist communism, and it was core to the anarchism of Proudhon and much more recently that of David Graeber. It also predates all these frameworks, since it’s one of the core ideas of Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism.
The logic upon which these interpretations are based derives from an observation about the way innovation works within capitalism. The observation here is that both owners and workers in capitalism sometimes restrain technological “advances” when those changes will result in less profit or fewer jobs.

To understand this, consider the story Adam Smith approvingly told about a child laborer:

"a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labor."

Now, perhaps you already see the problem with this scenario. A worker who figures out a way to tie some strings to switches so that everything functions without him isn’t going to get to go play with his friends. Instead, he’s just put himself — and all other workers doing that same kind of work — out of a job.
The same thing happens with capitalists as well. Apple certainly knows how to make iPhones that last longer than they already do; even if they didn’t, they certainly have the money to hire engineers to figure this out for them. Regardless, Apple has no interest in actually doing such a thing, since the obsolescence of previous products ensures people will need to buy a newer version.

In view of these kinds of internal restraints on innovation with capitalism, it’s not completely absurd to believe another system might be better for innovation. However, many who argue this point also believe that capitalism is a necessary step to get to socialism. This is because, as Marx noted, the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) appear to have unleashed and accelerated the “productive forces” of labor faster than any other group in history.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor.

In their view, capitalism must happen, as it’s the only way to force the transition from feudalism to socialism. All of society — its social relations, its modes of production, and its methods of exchange — must first be transformed by capitalism before socialism can then take over.

The quote from the Jacobin essay I cited earlier shows this view clearly. Here it is again, with the relevant parts highlighted:

"Upon the 1917 revolution’s final release of the peasantry from feudal servitude, peasants had no incentive to produce a surplus sufficient to feed workers in the city. The grim prodrazverstka during the civil war, the return of markets under the New Economic Policy, and Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization and the resulting famines were all different efforts at overcoming this underdevelopment. Evidence from history shows that regardless of what Marx thought about the mir, leapfrogging historical stages of development proved to be impossible."

The specific crisis to which the authors are referring is perhaps the one known best from the early days of Soviet Communism. What happened was this: when the feudal system of agriculture in Russia ended due to the revolution, the peasants in the countryside were quite thrilled. Now they could grow food only for themselves and for their communities, rather than having their surplus extracted by the lords, the church, and the Tsar. This meant, however, that the cities which relied on those peasants to grow food for them no longer had any food, because the peasants weren’t growing more than they needed.

As the authors put it in the essay, the peasants had “no incentive” to produce a surplus anymore, but we must be clear what that previous incentive had been. They hadn’t been willingly growing extra food because they wanted to, but rather because they were being forced to do so.

In many interpretations of capitalism, including the kinds of socialist interpretations to which the authors of that essay and the editorial staff of Jacobin produce, a sharp line is drawn between feudal “incentives” and capitalist market “incentives,” and these latter incentives are seen to be more democratic and less dehumanizing than the former sort. From these perspectives, capitalism freed us all from subsistence farming, poverty, and the brute force of lordly and state economic exploitation. Now, we’re “free” to work for a wage that we then can use to purchase what we need to survive and what we want to consume.

Under feudalism, peasants were growing more than they personally needed (“surplus”) because they needed to pay the lord (usually 1/3 of what they produced). They also needed to sell some of what they grew for money to pay tithes and taxes. Under capitalism, peasants who weren’t forced off the land into the cities now needed to grow surplus food to pay taxes and rents. In both situation, the growing extra wasn’t really a voluntary decision, just as it’s not really honest to call our current wage labor system “voluntary.”
Also, considering how many peasants were forced into the cities into the wage system (usually in factories), and how many peasant revolts there were when they were forced off their land, it’s not really honest to call what capitalism offered “incentives.” That is, unless you take the view that growing your own food is an awful, primitive, and meaningless thing to do.
The kind of socialism I’m criticizing here tends to argue exactly that. From their view, the ultimate goal of socialism is a transcendence over these more primitive activities (and primitive social forms, like the family and the village). Some of the more extreme examples of this kind of thinking can easily be found in any issue of Jacobin, but the fantasy is perhaps most famously argued by Aaron Bastani’s book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Stated succinctly, all these fantasies assert that we can one day reach a moment of human development — progress — where most of the work is done for us by machines, all our energy is produced by renewable sources, and everything we think of as a natural limit (in some fantasies, even death) will have finally been abolished. And the key faith in all these proposed utopian futures is that we will one day eventually discover a way of replacing human labor with non-human labor. All the necessary and especially unpleasant work that humans now do will in that future be performed by machines, powered by endless energy.

The problem is that the energy to power all that work is not yet available, nor may it ever be. As I mentioned, all the alternatives to coal and oil require the very thing they are intended to replace, but there is an even more important part of the energy production chain everyone seems to forget: humans. It’s human labor which mines the coal and extracts the oil. It’s also human labor which mines all the minerals required for these alternative sources, and it’s especially human labor which builds, installs, and maintains the windmills, solar panels, dams, and nuclear power plants.

And this brings us back to the very first point I made in this essay, the problem facing all economic systems: Most of us would really like to do only the amount of work we need to do, and would really prefer not to do more.

All those energy sources proposed to replace fossil fuels area also proposed to replace the same thing that fossil fuels replace: human labor. Consider how, at the very beginning of the industrial era, coal-powered steam engines were celebrated as a way to replace the work done by humans (and also of animals[3]). Coal-generated steam substituted human labor via machines the way that the electricity does now in household appliances. Sure, you could handwash your own clothes,[4] or you can use a machine powered by electricity generated most likely by fossil fuels to do the same thing.
All these “labor-saving” machines aren’t actually saving anything. They’re more like a second line of credit used to pay for something you don’t want to purchase with your primary account — your own energy. You instead use the energy of something else: coal, the sun, decaying atoms, etc. But remember, all those sources of energy required human labor at some point, so you’re also using the energy of other humans.

Now, it appears more efficient to do work this way, and this scenario should have led to an overall reduction in the work we need to do. But it hasn’t, of course. Instead, these “labor-saving” machines haven’t actually decreased the amount of work, they have only displaced it. Like transferring one credit card balance to another account, we now must use wages derived from working for others to purchase the machines and pay for the electricity to “save” our labor so we can work to earn those wages.

The really strange thing about capitalism is that each time we displace labor in these ways, the economy grows. If I buy a washing machine and pay for the electricity to run it, I’ve contributed to economic growth. On the other hand, if I decide to no longer do this and instead wash my clothes with my own hands, I’ve contributed instead to economic decline.

This same equation applies everywhere throughout the economy, but it’s only noticeable when many people all do the same thing. If a very large amount of people decide to stop buying washing machines and paying for the electricity to run them, and instead wash their clothes by hand, the economy would suffer.[5] However, there would also be a small positive affect on the environment, with fewer machines being created and less energy being consumed in their manufacture, transportation, and usage.

A much larger positive effect on the environment would occur if we instead stop using automobiles, which are the ideal form of “labor-saving” devices. Driving requires less personal labor (including time expenditure) than walking to your destination. Cars “save” labor by instead using petroleum or electricity to travel, but as in other examples, that labor is merely consumed from a different line of credit. They also appear to free us to travel longer distances in shorter periods of time, but this means we now also must do this; jobs and stores become farther away from our homes, and our homes become farther away from each other. Also, we must work more in order to earn the wages required to pay for them. And especially, automobile manufacture and use damages the environment in quite a few ways: extraction of fossil fuels and raw materials, carbon emissions from the energy required to create and to run them, and physical destruction of land to create the roads and the parking lots for them.

In almost every way we can think of, the labor savings offered by capitalism produce growth for the economy but destruction for the environment. And again, they aren’t actually savings at all, just payments made from other lines of credit that someone will eventually need to pay back.

This is how “growth” and technological advance within capitalism always appears to have bettered our lives and reduced the amount of work we need to do, while actually just substituting one kind of work for another while accruing unmanageable environmental debt. This is also why the techno-socialist fantasies of a “Green New Deal” are merely just another borrowing scheme. Such visions again propose we substitute certain kinds of work for other kinds of work, paying down one credit card with yet another one while maintaining the overall economic growth which drives capitalism.

Every socialist scheme that doesn’t involve a total change in the current economic relationships (“social” and “productive”) of capitalism assumes that we’ll always tolerate doing more work than we need or want to do. Capitalism has been able to trick us into thinking we’re actually doing less, that we’re “saving” labor even though we’re actually working more than feudal peasants did.

It would seem that socialists like Leigh Phillips and Matt Huber are hoping to trick us, too, but I suspect it’s something much more tragic than that. They appear truly to believe the capitalist lie that there is no such thing as a natural limit, that we can all borrow indefinitely against a future solution to all the problems we are causing.

Thus, the threat of degrowth to such theorists is the same it poses to capitalism itself. Everything that lives must also die, no matter how large it has grown during the days of its life. Neither capitalism nor a retooled socialist version of it can expand forever. Eventually, there will be no new lines of credit to obtain, and all our accumulated debts — of labor, of resource extraction, of environmental damage, of carbon release — will come due. There will also be no more “incentives” for the workers of the world to produce surplus they don’t want to produce, because, like the peasants outside the soviet cities, we’ll realize the revolution they’ve proclaimed isn’t actually for us.

1) His most recent book has already sold 500,000 copies in Japan, while one would be very hard pressed to find a title by any American leftist writer selling even a tenth of that number in the United States. It’s now also published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.

2) Leigh Phillips is known quite laughably for his wildly techno-utopian fantasies and beliefs, including that fossil fuels are “a source of liberation” for the poor, that there should be a “right to air-conditioning,” and that the left should argue for “private jets for all.” 

3) There’s a reason, for instance, why the speed and power of an automobile is measured in “horsepower.” It’s because the very first steam engines were replacing the work originally done by draft horses, and thus their power output was described in relationship to what a typical horse could do.

4) I do, actually, and have done so for years, but I’m weird.

5) And not just from reduced consumption of washing machines and energy. They’d all find their clothes last longer and don’t need to be replaced so often." 

I offered a bit of a further critique here, quote:

" 'Now, human populations work the exact same way, with one important difference. Unlike deer or cows, humans are able to gain more extensive knowledge about available resources and limits, foresee potential crises, come up with solutions to stave off starvation and collapse, and especially to adjust our behavior to prevent our own ruin. In other words, we’re able to balance our desire to expand and the necessity of staying within limits in order to thrive.'

While we have these capabilities, we've never actually been able to accomplish preventing our own ruin, and every civilization that has ever existed has also collapsed because of this reality. What one person can do individually is often confused for society having the same capability. A community might have this ability whereas societies risk their viability as a society if they allow degrowth while a competitor continues growing. This is why nature ends up always being the ultimate fascist when it comes to collapse, both with humans as with all other species. We simply lack agency but deny said lack of agency." 

The one simple issue that keeps coming back to the forefront over and over is that as a species, we have been so successful that we are wiping out our source of sustenance. We're no different than any other species which went into overshoot and experienced collapse as part of the bargain. In other words, at the end of the day, we have been so successful as to be a failure in reality. 

On a side note, that (long) quote above also brought up David Graeber (of his and Wengrow's book, "The Dawn of Everything," which has yet another new critique). I have posted several other critiques of the book in earlier articles. 

Rather than deny reality, one way to begin resisting this denial is to begin investing in truth instead. In this article about embracing death and the "death positive" movement, Steffie Nelson introduces us to Death Cafes and the work of Caitlin Doughty. Discussing these issues is one of the primary ways to begin true acceptance of the predicaments facing us. Once again we are reminded of the Cycle of Life and that our best response to all of this is to Live Now!