Episode 236 – The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism with Jason Hickel

Macro N Cheese – Episode 236
The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism with Jason Hickel
August 5, 2023

 

[00:00:00] Jason Hickel [Intro/Music]: The challenge that we face today is not only to reorganize production in order to meet human needs and achieve what Kropotkin called wellbeing for all, which is the goal, but also to scale down less necessary forms of production in order to reduce excess energy and material use directly so as to bring our economy back in the balance of a living world and achieve rapid decarbonization.

Access to universal services has an extremely rapid and strong impact on human wellbeing. It’s the most efficient way to convert resources and production into social outcomes.

[00:01:30] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Jason Hickel. He’s a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He’s the author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions and Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

Jason has also been a guest on this program two other times. Both episodes are really worth your time. Check ’em out in the future. Jason, thank you so much for joining me today, sir.

[00:02:20] Jason Hickel: My pleasure. Yeah, it’s good to be with you.

[00:02:22] Grumbine: The plumbing of Modern Monetary Theory, while extremely liberating and exciting and exposing us to the possibilities, the thing that I want to really focus on beyond that is the overlay, the political and class analysis. The understanding of societal needs that make MMT matter. I don’t care if somebody’s stock portfolio goes up, I don’t even wanna hear about it. I want to know how we can make people whole. And to me, that’s the only value I found in MMT, was that it gave me a pathway to making my family whole and seeing the future through a series of possibilities for all.

And you capture this stuff better than anyone that I’ve ever read, in terms of all that I just laid out. In fact, the most recent thing you sent to me, the Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism, in my mind puts together the best of MMT, gives us a class analysis and explaining the modes of production that would allow us to make the planet produce the kind of conditions that humanity requires, and civilization as a whole requires. Can you tell me a little bit about what ecosocialism is, and more to the point after that, let’s touch on that Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism.

[00:03:52] Hickel: Okay. This is a piece that I wrote that is going to come out in Monthly Review in September. For people who are interested in what we’re about to talk about, I would urge them to read it there in a couple of weeks, where there’ll be more detail and maybe easier to engage.

So in general, I think that it’s critical just to begin by recognizing the fact that we face a double crisis right now. It’s not just an ecological crisis, although that is of course, extreme and very worrying and something we have to focus on urgently. There’s also a very obvious social crisis, which I think people pay a little bit less attention to, because we’ve become so accustomed to it perpetuating itself in our society.

So we know that across the world there are several billion people who are deprived of access to basic goods and services. Deprivation is most extreme in the periphery, but even in the core countries, in Western Europe and the United States, et cetera, a huge share of the population cannot afford decent healthcare, or live in actual poverty or face economic insecurity or cannot afford nutritious food, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think we have to recognize that this double problem, an ecological crisis and a social crisis, are being caused ultimately by the same underlying issue, which is basically the structure of the capitalist system of production.

This is where our analysis has to ultimately lead, and the underlying pathology is basically that capitalism is fundamentally not democratic. And this is actually really important, I wanna emphasize this. When people hear the word capitalism, they quite often think of things like markets and trade and businesses. And these sound, of course, so innocent and almost natural.

How could you ever be against such things? And that’s fine because in fact, capitalism is not those things. Markets and trade and businesses existed over thousands of years before capitalism, and they’re innocent enough on their own. We don’t have to worry about that. We have to be clear about what the defining feature of capitalism is and confront that.

And that feature is the fact that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. And yes, let’s be clear, many of us live in electoral political systems like in the USA and where I’m at in the UK and elsewhere. We know that these are corrupt and captured by elite interests. So we know the democracy is flawed. But more importantly, when it comes to the system of production, which all of us are engaged in every day, on which our livelihoods and our existence depends, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter.

And the reason is effectively, it’s a system where production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital. By the large corporations, by major financial firms, by the 1% who own the majority of investible assets, et cetera, et cetera. Capital wields the power to mobilize our collective labor and our planet’s collective resources for whatever it wants to do. It determines what we produce, under what conditions, how the benefits are distributed, and so on.

And for capital, the primary purpose of production, the primary purpose of mobilizing all of that labor and all that capacity, is not to meet specific human needs, to ensure everyone has houses and food and decent lives, et cetera. It is not to achieve any specific social or ecological objectives, it is not to achieve progress or innovation. It is overwhelmingly to achieve and maximize the accumulation of profit.

And so what that ends up doing is it leaves us with a system that is focused on perverse forms of production. Capital directs finance to highly profitable outputs like SUVs and industrial meat and fast fashion and weapons and fossil fuels. But leaves critical shortages of absolutely necessary goods and services, public transit, renewable energy, public healthcare, nutritious food, things that we actually all need for our lives are in many cases woefully under produced or commodified and out of reach for a lot of people.

And so this is ultimately the issue. It’s not that we need a lot of additional aggregate production to solve social and ecological problems. We don’t. The problem is that our production system is geared in the wrong direction. And if we had more democratic control at the level of the state, at the level of firms, at the level of finance, over what we are producing as a society and who benefits from those things, then we’d be able to solve these problems very easily.

And that’s basically the argument of democratic ecosocialism. If you democratize the economy, and all of us believe that democracy is an important value, if we extend the principle of democracy into the realm of production, into the realm of the economy, then we can address these problems, fast. We do not need to worry about accelerating climate breakdown. We do not need to worry about perpetual mass deprivation. We can deal with these extremely quickly and easily with a reorientation of the productive system. That’s kind of the bottom line.

[00:08:46] Grumbine: You really spoke well to that, and your mention of Peter Kropotkin, I really want to touch on that. Kropotkin is of the anarchist side of the socialist side. The Conquest of Bread is something most of us on the left have read, it’s a very important book. But you brought this out specifically because, basically it describes today. This is 130 years ago and it’s describing the conditions today.

Can you address your view of Kropotkin’s words in this particular framework?

[00:09:20] Hickel: Yeah, it’s interesting because I read Kropotkin recently for the second time after ignoring it for years. And I kind of read it with new eyes because I’ve been influenced by Modern Monetary Theory. And I read and I was like, wow, the insights that he is articulating are so close to some of the insights that we are articulating today and addressing some of the same problems. One of the things that he noticed, when he was observing society 130 years ago, as you point out, was that even despite the fact that Europe at that time had unprecedented high levels of production, low by today’s standards, but still high by the centers of any historical period, most of the population, even in Europe nonetheless lived in misery, and he was asking, why is this? And his answer was simply that, it’s because under capitalism, production is mobilized around whatever gives the greatest profits to monopolists, this is what he wrote.

He points it out, look, if a few rich men effectively manipulate the economic activities of the nation, producing what they want and what makes them happy, and what enriches their lives, but nothing to do with what the masses actually require for survival. And so as a result, you have all of this labor and all these factories and all of this incredibly rich, fertile land organized around facilitating capital accumulation, when it could be organized differently to meet human needs and achieve social progress. So it’s interesting because he’s basically pointing to the fact that whoever controls finance, whoever controls finance, controls production, and determines what we produce.

And this is an insight that we actually get from MMT. Which is that the government, a democratic body, could just as easily issue currency, thereby controlling money for public good, to invest in things that we know are necessary for ecological and social goals. And this is effectively exactly what Kropotkin is saying. That if we are able to bring finance and production under democratic control, we can organize it to meet human needs with existing capacity. And that’s a very profound insight, I think. Now, of course, what Kropotkin did not recognize was that 130 years hence, we would be facing, not just mass deprivation as a result of the perverse orientation of the productive system, but also devastating ecological crisis.

And so, the challenge that we face today is not only to reorganize production in order to meet human needs and achieve what Kropotkin called ‘well-being for all’, which is the goal. But also to scale down less necessary forms of production in order to reduce excess energy and material use directly, so as to bring our economy back into balance with the living world and achieve rapid decarbonization.

And this is where the double objective of ecosocialism becomes clear. We have to build on what the socialists of the 19th century were saying, and point out that we now have these two objectives, well being for all, but also ecological stability. And our version of how the economy should operate and the principles according which it should operate, have to take that double objective into account.

[00:12:16] Grumbine: One of the things that’s very challenging, probably for most people listening to this podcast that haven’t been around government procurement, is the way governments set markets and the way they seed money projects. That money is a public utility, it’s freely created by the government. They don’t pay that money directly to people, they pay that to the business, and the business decides how to distribute it through society. There’s a very unelected, non-democratic means of distribution, just starting with that very first dollar spent by the government. And as a result of that, the closest thing we’ve got is our government telling them this is something we want done, and you bid on it, so this is what you must do.

Our governments are not providing for real goods and services for regular people. They’re not producing the means by which we can bring about equality. In fact, the government in the United States is content with allowing us to predate on the Global South, using them as our production farm, while stripping away labor in the United States.

Michael Hudson told me it’s impossible to bring production back to the US as long as there’s a class war going on. It’s a complete contradiction to say, yes, we’re gonna bring production back to the US while waging a class war against labor. I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on that.

[00:13:42] Hickel: I think the internationalist dimension is really vital here. It’s clear that the way that capital in the core operates, is not only by exploiting the domestic working class, but also by super-exploiting the working classes and the peasantries of the Global South. And the very high levels of material and energy consumption that are enjoyed by, particularly, capital in the core, are sustained by this massive net appropriation of materials and energy and productive capacity from the Global South. And if that’s not part of the equation for us, I think we’re clearly missing the point.

Now to some extent, that kind of imperialist appropriation from the Global South has been used to assuage class tensions in the core by saying, look, capital has denied the basic demands of the labor movement of the 20th century, which were basically much more radical than anything we have today.

They wanted universal public services, they wanted job guarantees, they wanted more democratic control over production. All that was effectively denied. A little bit of public services were given in the social democracies of Western Europe and so on. The US has a little bit as well.

But the main principles that they were after, and this was informed by the socialist movement that gave rise to the labor movement — dignity, and freedom, and democracy and autonomy. Like, these principles were denied them, and instead what they were sold was a very shallow dream, a dream of cheap consumer items made cheap because of the super-exploitation of Global South workers. So it’s this real unfortunate bargain and a very violent bargain, let’s also say, that allows some of the class tensions in the core to be resolved this way.

And I think it’s crucial that we, as members of labor movements or other progressive forces in the core, look past that and find ways to recover the more radical demands that the labor movements of the 20th century had. Including by the way, solidarity with the working classes and the peasantries of the Global South. And that has been almost completely obliterated from the platform of the unions and the progressive parties in the core today.

And it urgently needs to be restored, especially now in the era of climate breakdown. It’s very clear that all of our futures are bound together and no one is free, until we have a just and ecological world for all.

[00:16:00] Grumbine: Yeah, you followed up in your writing about Kropotkin’s argument, and you touched on it previously, but I wanna tie this back. We can ensure decent lives for everyone on the planet. And the concept of producing what you said these movements were for — a job guarantee, universal basic services, so many different aspects of life that would make the precarity go away for the average human being.

And yet, going back a little bit to what I was saying with the way the government procures. Its focus is not on producing universal basic services. It’s on producing markets for those capitalists to maximize profit. It’s working antithetically to that because it depends on precarity of the working class, living in the worst of conditions.

So they’re willing to do whatever is pushed onto them. In this case, it feels strange that we have anyone that understands how economics works, that would celebrate or support a system that allows for that.

Taking it to the next step, you had also put a tweet out, I wanna blend three things ’cause I think they’re all tied tightly together. You’d said something about the problem with universal basic services is that they shouldn’t be basic, they should be exceptional. And I walked in, a few years back, to the unemployment office, and every chair in there had tape on it, the clock was sideways, the windows had tape on them like they’d been broken out, and I think it was intentional to make you feel worthless as you sat there.

These are propaganda. These are ways of framing the expectations of society. And I think that if we think about universal basic services as being the crown jewel, and making that the focus of how we get past these ecological problems by bringing together the forces of democratic socialism and populist movements and the people themselves, and making sure that they’re whole.

I think that’s key. I think you really nailed that. Can you take that further?

[00:18:10] Hickel: I think there’s something really important in what you’ve said here about the precarity that plagues a society. It’s interesting because the dominant discourse out there, this precarity, is almost like a natural phenomenon, as though it’s always been with us. As if human beings are just naturally in this condition of constant possible deprivation and immiseration, and only more capitalist growth will ever manage to solve this. And it’s a complete lie.

In fact, the precarity is intentionally produced and reproduced every day. Because it could be very easily solved. Again, we have far more than what is necessary in terms of aggregate capacity, to ensure decent lives for everybody on the planet. To say nothing of the fact that we could very easily, within the core, because of the extremely high excess levels of productive activity that occurs there.

So it’s artificially produced and it’s produced for a reason, which is basically to ensure that you have a constant flow of cheap labor for private firms to maintain capital accumulation. Because you’d rather have some unemployment, you have to have misery. You can’t have people having easy access to universal public services, ’cause they might walk away from your exploitative jobs or whatever it might be.

As long as you keep them in conditions where they need to double down, to compete with one another and work under whatever conditions you give them, you’ll be able to maintain this cheap labor force for accumulation. Which is necessary for capitalism, because remember, capitalism is a form of production that requires and depends on perpetually increasing accumulation. And to do that, you have to cheapen labor. And the key mechanism for cheapening labor is to maintain artificial scarcity of employment, and also of access to essential goods.

That’s it. It’s artificial, it can be abolished immediately. And to the extent that public services are given, as you point out, they’re quite often just absolutely miserable, and that too is intentional. There’s literally no reason that public transit in the US has to be such a dismal affair. When you know that other countries, with a fraction of the per capita income of the USA, can provide really high quality public transit. It’s not difficult to do, it’s just that the state is not willing to make those investments, and it requires state investment. Instead, capital goes towards things that are more profitable.

I mean, think about it. If investment is focused around what is profitable, you will never get investment in affordable housing, or in public transit, or in other essential goods that just are, by definition, not profitable. And somehow we’ve all been brainwashed into thinking the only form of production that is even worth doing is that which is profitable, which is a complete lie, because literally every day governments can and regularly do undertake production with no thought to profit whatsoever.

That is an ability that any producer has, particularly governments. And yet they routinely don’t, because they have accepted constraints, artificial constraints, on their ability to control finance and investment.

[00:21:12] Grumbine: So one of the things that we wanted to make sure we addressed is an ecosocialist manifesto, which we’ve been talking through. You asked, what would such an economy look like? And you laid out several objectives. Can you take us through those?

[00:21:26] Hickel: Yeah. So for me, there’s a couple of key things that we should be arguing for, and mobilizing for and thinking about. So I guess there’s mostly four here. I suppose the first one is clearly universal public services. And this is important for all sorts of reasons, and we could go on forever about this actually. Universal Public Services.

We know that access to universal services has an extremely rapid and strong impact on human wellbeing. It is the most efficient way to convert resources and production into social outcomes. So that’s critically important. We also know that it reduces growth imperatives because when you have access to universal public services, you don’t have this constant imperative to increase private production in order to ensure that people have access to the money that they require in order to access basic goods, which is at the core of so much of the instability in our economy right now.

It allows for a post-growth transition. It liberates our society from growth imperatives. But it also really crucially just mobilizes our productive capacity around what we know is essential for human wellbeing. And this is really core because that’s not happening under capitalist production. And so universal living services is essential to doing that, just reorganizing, remobilizing productive capacity in that direction.

The second key thing for me is a public work program that can immediately address some of the very urgent tasks that we have before us, both social and ecological. It could be geared towards mobilizing production around universal public services, so mobilizing labor for that purpose. But could also be organized and should be organized around core ecological goals, like building renewable energy capacity, by the way, something that capital is not doing much of, because it’s not as profitable as fossil fuels.

It’s waiting around for capital to decide that renewable energy is worth investing in. We should just invest in doing that ourselves, mobilize our labor and resources and capacity around doing that. Also insulating homes, retrofitting buildings with efficient appliances, producing efficient appliances, which are being under-produced right now.

Regenerating ecosystems. All of these are tasks that capital is not doing, again, because it’s not profitable to do, and yet they’re urgent on an existential level. We have to do them very quickly. We don’t have time to wait around for this to occur. So I think something like a Public Works program is essential for this.

And this is the third point I would say. As part of that, we should have a public job guarantee. And I don’t need to tell your listeners how important this can be, but I mean, this is essential to basically eliminating the artificial scarcity of unemployment. You deal with the perpetual insecurity of livelihoods through this option. It can also be very powerful for effectively setting the terms of employment across the private sector as well.

Whatever the job guarantee sets the wage level at, or other forms of working conditions, including working hours, workplace democracy, et cetera, private employers would be obliged to follow suit, otherwise they would lose staff to the job guarantee of the Public Works program. So it can be incredibly effective at doing that without requiring all of the additional legislation and political battles in order to achieve that objective.

So these are the three core ones, I think. And what’s powerful about these, I want to emphasize, is that it ends the political log jam that our societies presently suffer from, whereby it’s impossible for us to do any radical ecological or climate policy. Why? Because people are afraid of losing their jobs or of not having access to their livelihoods, because right now livelihoods are dependent on increasing production of capitalist enterprises.

And so, of course that’s a massive threat. And who should be willing to accept a situation where we’re doing ecological policy at the expense of working class livelihoods? That’s not acceptable. And of course, the unions themselves will never get on board with such policy either. If we want to deal with this log jam, then we need to deal with the question of livelihoods directly, and once and for all.

Universal public services, public job guarantee, abolish economic insecurity at its roots. Take the question of livelihoods off the table entirely, so it is never an issue again. And this is extremely feasible to achieve. It’s very simple to achieve, and this would allow us to have a rational conversation about real ecological and climate policy, including scaling down less necessary forms of production, which we know needs to be done in order to reduce energy and material use, to allow us to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization to meet our objectives under the Paris agreements.

So it’s critical. In some ways it deals with the Gordian knots, it cuts right through it, it would change our politics. It would open up the conversation, allow us to think more rationally about the economy. And then the final piece I would just add very briefly is the urgency of cutting the purchasing power of the rich.

And this also fits very neatly in with the MMT perspective, which is that if we are in a situation where we are increasing democratic capacity to organize production, then we’re gonna have to somehow also decrease capital’s capacity to organize production, and that can be done in various ways.

One of them is to scale down the purchasing power of the rich, so they have a lot less control over what we produce. But also to regulate private finance through credit regulation. But that’s a different story. But I think we have to accept the fact that in the middle of an ecological emergency, it does not make sense for us to continue devoting energy and resources to supporting and servicing the over-accumulating elite.

Effectively, climate change is a form of class war, that’s being overwhelmingly caused by the world’s richest, by capital, and that’s not acceptable, and none of us should be okay with it. And I think that clear policy on wealth taxes and maximum income ratios, et cetera, have to be on the table if we are to deal with that problem.

[00:27:28] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon; like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:28:19] Grumbine: You brought up something also in this, that bears some discussion. Within a true Marxist-Leninist perspective, the concept of private property is a non-starter. But this is ecosocialism we’re talking about. And to be fair, even if the end goal was to eradicate all private means of production, we’re not there yet regardless.

So one of the things you brought up was that private firms should be democratized. And I understand the push for co-ops, and shared ownership and management of companies, I know there’s a lot of that goes on in Germany. From your perspective though, what do you get from democratizing the workplace? And I have some ideas, but I’m very interested in your perspective of how that would impact this larger mission.

[00:29:05] Hickel: Let’s talk about this. So first of all, I just wanna be clear to your listeners who may be new to these ideas, clearly what is going to be necessary for us to deal with social and ecological crises is obviously, to bring certain forms of production out of the markets and organize them publicly and democratically.

This is basically what universal public services and public works and the job guarantee programs do. Now, that does not mean that all of production must be organized that way. There’s no reason why we still can’t have private firms provisioning other things. So if we agree that say, healthcare and education and water and electricity, should all be managed democratically and publicly, we may still want private firms provisioning other things like say, beer and watches, or something like that, right? There’s no reason you can’t have private producers doing those things. Sometimes they’re very good at them, and that’s nice.

But the key is that we can have post-capitalist firms. We can even have post-capitalist markets because again, capitalism is not the same as markets, and post capitalist markets have existed in the past and can exist in the future. The key here, what makes them post capitalist, is simply that they would be democratic firms. Basically, firms where decisions about production and the distribution of surplus, are made democratically by workers or other key stakeholders. Maybe it’s even the community. Maybe you have like a community solar farm or something like that.

You see what I mean? People who are users of the good perhaps, or people who are affected by the production of the good could also be involved. There’s various different forms of firm democratization that we could talk about, that are relevant to different kinds of contexts. What’s really critical here is that we know empirically, that under conditions where production and resource use are controlled democratically, people gravitate overwhelmingly towards objectives that focus on what is necessary for human wellbeing and ecological stability.

And this is so fascinating to me because it runs exactly against the propaganda that we are fed about human nature. We are told, within capitalist society, (propaganda) that people are, by nature, selfish and individualistic and maximizing. And all of the pathologies that we have in our society are a result of that.

This is actually not true at all. The majority of people, under empirical conditions, will opt for the opposite, again, focusing production on what is required for human wellbeing, sharing yields fairly. People have very strong preferences for a fairer distribution of yields and ensuring ecological stability for future generations. Extraordinary, actually.

And so we can assume that under more democratic conditions of production in firms, people would organize the firms around those goals. For example, if you’re a democratic firm producing SUVs, and people are then informed that SUVs are, in fact, destroying our world, and are overwhelmingly only consumed by the elites anyways, are people going to democratically choose to continue producing these death traps? Or will they say, let’s actually reorganize our productive capacities around some other objective, some other products that we know that we need, which can easily be done. And I assume that’s probably what would happen.

And so you’d see a pretty dramatic change in objectives of production around the economy. Especially in the context of where people have access to universal public services. They could even choose to abandon the business entirely, if for whatever reason it was decided that that product was destructive or unnecessary, they could walk away from the business without any loss to their livelihood, because they’d be able to easily continue to access housing, healthcare, education, et cetera. And also be able to shift into the public job guarantee where they could reorganize labor around some other objective.

So that would always be an option for any business that decided to close or not reorganize production in some other way. And I think that’s incredibly liberating, it would allow us to have rational, democratically informed, scientifically informed shifts in how production is done and what we are producing, which would be revolutionary.

[00:33:11] Grumbine: I love it. So Jason, with the concept of degrowth being so polarizing, your discussion during that debate with green growth: I felt you won. However, the green growth speaks to people’s current paradigm. Help me understand how we can differentiate between the two, so people are not chasing things that just sound good, but things that actually produce something valuable.

[00:33:42] Hickel: Yeah, I suppose there’s a few layers to this. The first thing is to say that green growth discourses have been around for 50 years now. They’ve been this promise from our ruling classes that has been sold to us as basically saying, we can keep everything more or less the same and just make it green and solve the ecological crisis, and carry on as we are forever.

Of course it’s not true. And all the promises that capital accumulation and capitalist production would be magically and absolutely decoupled from ecological impacts, have not materialized. Now this is not to say that it’s not possible to achieve, by the way, a decoupling of GDP from emissions, and even from material use in some cases. But simply that there’s just no evidence that it can happen fast enough to achieve our ecological objectives.

And when it comes to climate change, this is particularly clear, because emissions, specifically in high income countries, must decline very, very quickly. Well beyond what efficiency improvements alone can achieve. There’s a very strong understanding of this in the scientific literature. And we have to be scientific, especially as socialists. Science is a core value for any self-respecting socialist, we can’t just be fantasists about this.

So the reality is that to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization, we have to reduce aggregate energy use in the high income countries, faster than what efficiency improvements alone allow. And that has to be done by scaling down less necessary forms of production. This is very specifically what degrowth means, and that’s SUVs, private jets, cruises, fast fashion, weapons, advertising, et cetera. There are parts of our economy that exist, more or less, only to service capital accumulation or elite consumption, have very little to do with human wellbeing. And in the middle of an ecological emergency, when we’re trying to rapidly decarbonize the economy, they have to be scaled down.

And I think that we have to be able to confront that reality, and have an honest conversation about what the economy is for and what’s important to us. And this is actually, by the way, something that Kropotkin himself was very clear about in his own writing, is that we have to be able to distinguish between what is urgently and socially necessary, and what are forms of production that are destructive and less necessary. Or exist only to titillate the rich. And we have to be able to think that way too.

So it’s really very simple what degrowth calls for. Basically like instead of assuming, as existing economics does, that all sectors in all industries must increase production every year, perpetually, forever… regardless of whether or not we actually need them to. Let us have a democratic discussion about what forms of production we actually do need to increase, again, things like universal public services, renewable energy and efficient appliances. And what sectors clearly need to be scaled down. And this is in some ways the ultimate Democratic act, which we are prevented from doing right now. And that’s a problem.

But here’s the other thing, I think that degrowth is actually a critically important analytical term. It’s indispensable in fact. Because without it, we’re stuck with just ridiculous terms like sustainable developments or green economy. All of which have been heavily appropriated by capital. Even BP and Shell use words like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘green economy’, I mean, gimme a break.

So we need some clarity, and degrowth provides that clarity and that’s essential. Analytically and scientifically, it’s indispensable. Now, that is not to say that it’s necessary for us to use as part of a mass political project, given the fact that a lot of people will be coming to it for the first time, and will be confused about it, sure. In the same way they’d be confused about anything, MMT for example. There’s an on-ramp into these concepts.

At the podium, maybe you wanna choose different kinds of languages, or at least focus on just what the policies are about. And this is actually what I advocate for, is you don’t need the word, but you do need the policy and people can get on board with the policy ’cause it makes sense. So talk about how you’re going to do universal public services and a job guarantee to secure livelihood permanently, but also scale down what people understand already to be destructive and intensive and less necessary forms of production. People can get on board with this.

We know already that in Democratic citizens assemblies in France, Spain and the UK, people have opted for these policies themselves, democratically. They gravitate toward that kind of objective. So you don’t need the word, but you do need the ideas. And so I think that’s for me, the important points. At the same time, we should also recognize that the term degrowth was coined precisely because it was provocative, and forced people to reconsider their existing assumptions about reality and the economy.

And that has been very powerful because the term has gone from being unknown a couple of years ago, to now being widely understood, particularly within progressive circles. And I think that’s helped to change the discourse about what kind of future we want and what is necessary for us to do. I think we have to recognize these various dimensions of it. It’s complicated in that respect.

[00:38:51] Grumbine: I agree with that a hundred percent. From my vantage point, I don’t think I hide it very well, I’m terribly against the capitalist mode of production, in the way that we allow the co-opting of these concepts with ‘green growth’. Greenwashing companies to make them look like they’re the leaders in ecological production, and in reality they’re mass polluters, they’re undemocratic, and the fat cats at the top are definitely the fattest of them all.

And we’ve gotta find a way to take care of that, and I do believe that degrowth is exactly the correct path forward. As you stated, a lot of people are coming to this for the first time and they hear that, the marriage of degrowth and eco socialism seems to be such a nice marriage. You can’t just snap your fingers and suddenly we’re ecosocialists now. You might be personally, but as far as means of production and the way society’s structured, that’s gonna take some transition that I don’t think people are fully prepared for.

And I think the concept of degrowth helps us begin that anti-imperialist, anti colonialist, internationalist approach. And helps us see the Global North for what it’s been, and the Global South for what it needs, and where it needs to go as it has to develop. And it’s going to require carbon, it’s gonna require production for its own good and purposes. And in order to allow them to catch up, the North has to give back what it’s stolen, to some degree.

Call this reparations, I guess. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:40:32] Hickel: I’m glad you raised this. A really critical point to make here, and it’s actually absolutely core to any discourse about degrowth and core to the literature itself. Which is that we’re talking about the high income countries here. We’re not talking about countries in the Global South, where we know in many cases, they need to increase per capita material and energy use in order to build up the infrastructure necessary for decent living and for wellbeing for all. Public transit and electricity, housing, schools, hospitals.

This takes material and takes energy, and that has to be done. The important thing is we know for a fact that it is possible to deliver decent lives for everyone on the planet, with levels of material and energy use that are in fact sustainable and compatible with sufficiently rapid decarbonization.

This is amazing news. It’s incredibly important empirical optimism, but this is going to require what is effectively, a convergence in the world economy. Where you have a reduction in excess energy and material use in the core, along with that an increase or a reclaiming of material and energy use in the periphery.

By ‘reclaiming’ what I mean is that, let’s be honest, they’re doing a lot of production already. The problem is all that production is organized around servicing multinational corporations through global commodity chains. So they benefit very, very little from that production. So it’s about reclaiming that productive capacity for them to meet the national development objectives, but ultimately on a global level converging to levels of energy and material use that are again, compatible with human wellbeing for all and ecological stability.

And that has to be the goal for any self-respecting ecosocialist movement. That has to be front and center. And sadly, for a lot of the left in the core, they never think about this issue and it’s actually egregious and that needs to be addressed. So there’s clearly an important, anti-colonial dimension to degrowth scholarship and activism and political demands. I think that’s gotta be highlighted.

But I wanted to go back to one of the things you said earlier about this marriage between degrowth and ecosocialism, because I think this is really interesting to say. I think that one of the reasons the marriage, the unity, the synthesis is so important is because without the eco socialism side, degrowth has a problem. Which is that it immediately sounds like you’re talking only about reducing materials and energy without any transformation of the underlying economy, towards human needs and wellbeing.

ecosocialism, at least in the word itself, draws one’s attention to that objective, and so that’s really important. Of course, on the other hand, ecosocialism without degrowth can quite often go off in a kind of green growth fantasy direction. Which violates empirical evidence and violates anti-imperialist principles, and that’s also important to address.

And so synthesizing these two perspectives, I think brings these core elements together. And this is what I was trying to articulate in the essay that we started talking about earlier, The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism. We need this synthesis, and I think that bringing degrowth and eco-socialist ideas together is really essential here.

But also because we need a political movement that is capable of bringing about this kind of transformation. And it’s very clear that this is going to require class mobilization. Working class movements, unions, other working class political formations have to be part of this, otherwise you will definitely lose.

And so simply having environmentalists arguing for, we have to have, this is never going to work until you have a unity of political forces, a unity of the student movement and the environmentalist movement and working class political formations, that can mobilize around the double objective, around wellbeing for all and ecological stability. And build a movement that is powerful enough to force incumbents to change course or otherwise unseat them.

And I think that has to be our objective because it’s very clear that our existing political establishment is incapable of addressing the fundamental contradictions, both social and ecological, that capitalism produces. And they have no intention of trying in any meaningful way. So either look, we sit back and we continue to watch this kind of death spiral that we’re very clearly in, with accelerating ecological consequences and accelerating cost of living crises and class misery, or we mobilize to do something about it at a very fundamental level.

And this is really what I want to bring to the fore here, is that, we can talk all day about how beautiful an ecosocialist future might be. We can talk all day about the empirical possibilities of a just and ecological world economy, but until we incorporate core, feasible ideas into our political movements, then we get nowhere.

And so I really urge listeners to take very seriously the objective of thinking about how to make universal public services, a job guarantee, et cetera, core to our political and social movements, both to the unions and to the environmentalist movements. These are essential to accomplishing both our ecological and social objectives, and we need to start mobilizing around them.

[00:45:39] Grumbine: Your quote from the paper that we’re talking about is so unbelievably powerful. I’ve had this highlighted, and I’ve been waiting to get to it. So if you don’t mind, I’m gonna take a moment and read from “the future”, that will be in the Monthly Review in September. It says…

“none of this will happen on its own. It will require a major political struggle against those who benefit so prodigiously from the status quo. This is not a time for mild reformism tweaking around the edges of a failing system. This is a time for revolutionary change. Further go on to say it is clear, however, that the environmentalist movement that has mobilized over the past several years cannot serve as the sole agent of that change.

While it has succeeded in bringing ecological problems to the forefront of public discourse, it lacks the structural analysis and political leverage to achieve the necessary transition. The bourgeois green parties are particularly egregious with their dangerous inattention to the question of working class livelihoods, social policy, and imperialist dynamics.

To overcome these limitations, it is urgently important for environmentalists to build alliances with the unions, the labor movements, and other working class political formations, which have much more political leverage, including the power of the strike. “

This is so powerful to me Jason. Because one of the things that I’ve been saying for some time now, and you give form to the idea here, is that we have to go beyond just political parties. The parties themselves are a hollowed husk in many cases, that have been captured by those same capitalist forces. When I look at the unions and other environmentalist actions and other working class movements, to organize as a vanguard beyond just a political process, and wield political power through direct action and through organizing. I think it’s really vital.

[00:47:42] Hickel: I think it’s essential, and I think it’s clearly the next step that we need to take, is to realize that a different kind of political formation is going to be necessary here, and we should waste no time in trying to build it. I think we should also realize this is gonna be a process of trial and error, and we just have to start trying things until something works and sticks. It’s gonna be impossible for us to sit down and formulate what the perfect, effective political mobilization would look like. But we have to try and we have to see where things go, and I think that that’s already occurring in some ways. We’ve seen XR rise and become exhausted. We’ve seen fights for future rise and become exhausted.

Clearly, these have brought us to a certain extent, but are not capable of taking us further. And so we see the rise of other kinds of formations like Just Stop Oil or Climate Vanguard, which are beginning to incorporate a class critique and class demand, more into their organizing. But there’s still a long ways to go.

And I think that one thing is clear, which is that for any environmentalists, it is urgent that you join unions, you work with unions, you speak to unions, you understand their concerns. That has to happen as a matter of absolute urgency, but it’s also clear that the unions need to move too. And I say this not as a critic from the outside, but as a lifelong member of unions.

It’s apparent to me that somehow we have allowed our political horizons, as a movement, to shrink down to like, industry specific battles over wages and conditions. And we have forgotten about our core vision, which was to deal with the deeper problem, the general structure of the capitalist economy. That it is fundamentally anti-democratic, that it does not meet human needs in a reasonable way. It produces the artificial scarcities that we’re constantly battling like Whack-A-Mole.

So instead of being unions that are dealing with Whack-A-Mole, like let’s deal with some employer abuses here, let’s deal with some job losses there. This is not going to cut it. We can’t do this anymore. We have to revive our original ambitions, and mobilize to secure the social foundation for all. With universal public services, with a job guarantee, with living wages, with economic democracy, and with radical ecological action. That has to be the objective of the unions. Otherwise, we are just a shadow of what we could be.

And so this double transformation has to occur within the environmentalist movements and within the unions, to converge at this ecosocial movement that we’re calling for.

[00:50:10] Grumbine: I appreciate your time. This has been incredible for me. My final question to you Jason, it focuses on the counter-revolutionary forces at play. You talked about Extinction Rebellion rising and then exhausting, and different groups. And what has been clear since the days, of even the French Revolution, is that when the people rise up, the counter-revolution learns from what you’ve done. They take action and then they become a pseudo revolutionary force in their own counter-revolutionary way.

We’ve watched governments learn from movements like Occupy Wall Street, crack down on them, shut them down. We have seen fascism rising all around, stifling movements such as this. How do we operate within that space? What kind of sacrifice do we have to be willing to take on, as individuals and as groups? I know you said it’s trial and error. History is a good guide of what happens with social movements and you can see their arc and how the counter-revolutionary forces meet them, and close them down. What kind of a fight are we looking at here?

[00:51:24] Hickel: Yeah, I think we can’t underestimate the scale of the struggle that is really involved here. I think that we have to take inspiration from successful social movements that have occurred in the past. There’s this amazing line from Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso that goes ‘we are the heirs of the world’s revolutions’.

Pretty much every good thing that we have is the result of revolutionary forces that fought to bring that to be. Everything from literally the minimum wage, as pitiful as it is, to the weekends, to whatever admittedly meager forms of democracy we get to exercise. These are all the benefits of revolutionary movements that have at least won some concessions in the past, and in some cases against extraordinary odds.

Think about the anti-colonial movements of the middle of the 20th century, where the poorest, most oppressed people on the planet, overcame power of the most violent imperialist forces in the world, that history had ever known… and succeeded in establishing independent nations.

We saw that there was of course, backlash against that as well, but I mean, the scale of the accomplishment is extraordinary. The labor movement in Western Europe in the 19th century was very successful in many crucial respects. The movement for women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. These are absolutely incredible achievements. Again, these are all rights that are constantly under threat, but the achievement itself cannot be understated.

So think about what that required. Study their tactics, understand what it takes to achieve that kind of thing, and that kind of transformation. It takes real organizing. It takes door to door, wall to wall solidarity, building relationships in communities, planning, strategizing. These are things that most people in high income countries who enjoy a certain amount of comfort and privilege are just not used to, and it’s something we have to start taking seriously.

I think that learning from, and crucially also uniting with, struggles that do understand the stakes and necessary tactics, is indispensable. And we just have to be serious about that, I think.

[00:53:36] Grumbine: Thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciate this. This has been very enlightening for me. Let me ask you what other things you got going on? Where can we find more of your work?

[00:53:47] Hickel: We are just starting a new research project. We’re in the process of hiring a team right now and it’s gonna be working on advancing the frontiers of a lot of the knowledge around this. So I’m really excited about this, keep an eye out for what this team produces. I think it’s gonna be revolutionary and exciting, and will hopefully continue to inspire movements and learn from movements and synthesize insights, that are coming from so many quarters right now. So stay tuned for that.

[00:54:14] Grumbine: Fantastic. Alright, well, thank you so much Jason for joining me today. This is Steve Grumbine, I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. My guest, Jason Hickel.

We are outta here.

[00:54:31] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive Writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.