Selling Degrowth
My realistic hopes about the climate and revolution
I’m not sure I can sell you on the kind of revolution we’re going to have to pull off to survive climate change.
You see, I think it is possible to survive. It’s just that, to do so, we have to radically change our way of life in ways that we cannot entirely conceive of. It’s going to look like giving up things we like, luxuries and conveniences, probably some things we even think we can’t live without. Not temporarily. Forever. We have to give up on everything we’ve been taught about the good life, the American Dream, the very idea of progress itself. We have to unlearn our conceptions of linear time, the absurd notion that human societies “develop” along a continuum from primitive to advanced, and the lie that economies can grow infinitely on a finite planet.
I can tell you those things because I believe they are the truth, but they are not what most people want to hear. Telling people what they want to hear is usually the better strategy if you’re trying to make a message popular. That is why the US inaugurated a fascist President today. But floods and fires are wiping out communities, the planet is sending a message, and she doesn’t care about clicks, likes, and views. Reality is coming for us. The climate apocalypse is now.
Our conundrum is that in order to survive this, the masses are going to have to get inspired to come together to engage in unprecedented levels of mass action, but the kinds of things that typically motivate Westerners, and Americans in particular, are simply not on offer in this revolution. The harsh reality is that the world we’re going to have to fight for doesn’t look all that inspiring compared to the vision of the “good life” that most people believe in. How do you sell “degrowth?” How do you get people excited about a world without electric grids, long distance travel, iPhones, or grocery stores? I grew up thinking that my life was better than that of previous generations. When I read history books or novels set in the past, I was grateful I got to grow up with hot running water, electricity, and video games. I thought the life of most people before modernity was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and that I could thank progress that I didn’t die in childhood from dysentery. Why would I fight for a future that looks like the past? Why would any rational person or community embrace regression unless forced to by calamity?
We’ve been propagandized into believing that what makes struggle “worth it” is that you get a reward at the other end. You train hard at a sport so you can win the trophy. You work hard in school and you get the right to a job with a higher income. You work hard at that job and you earn the right to a nicer house and a vacation. And if you string together a few dozen years of hard work, you earn the right to a restful retirement. Life might be a lot of drudgery, but if you’re still able bodied enough at retirement to not have to go straight to assisted living, the chance to go fishing a few times before you die is supposed to make the decades of drudgery worthwhile. That is the life trajectory deemed normative in the West, and any departure from that norm is considered a personal failure and a cause for distress. Never mind that very few lives fit the mold or live up to the standard, even among the privileged white demographic for whom it was largely reserved.
Our culture is clinging to this vision of the “good life” even though we all know it has become unattainable as inflation and stagnating wages put it out of reach of the average worker. I think most Americans realize we’re going to have to work until we die. And increasingly, we know our way of life is ecologically unsustainable, to boot. But because we know no other way to live, we continue to hustle and grind as though the rules that applied to the Boomers still apply, even as the fabric that holds the dream together disintegrates in our grasp. Or maybe we just hustle and grind because the alternative is homelessness, sickness, prison, and death.
The vast majority of politicians and so-called revolutionaries who acknowledge climate change are trying to salvage some version of the status quo. They’re telling us what we want to hear to get us to buy into their program. Both liberals and many Communists promise us a techno-utopia with gleaming megacities, a robust welfare state, and high-speed trains, all based on the myth of infinite economic growth built on so-called “renewable” energy. It is an attractive vision: the idea that if we pay higher taxes or stage a proletarian revolution, a comfortable life with modern conveniences, endless entertainment, and a cure for disease will be the reward for our sacrifice. This vision has two problems: 1) it doubles down on all of the industrial processes that are screwing up the planet, and 2) there isn’t enough oil to sustain it.
It is a fact as inescapable as the law of gravity that there is no such thing as “renewable” energy, and our governments and corporate elites are lying to us about the fact that emissions have continued to rise even as we invest in green energy at record levels. As Peter Gelderloos has pointed out, the “green” buildout is not replacing fossil fuels with windmills and solar panels. We are simply expanding the energy supply. And “green” energy production actually increases the demand for diesel because diesel (itself increasingly expensive to produce as oil gets harder to reach) is required for the mining and manufacturing required to produce “green” tech. This further drives emissions, and like every industrial process, it produces habitat destruction, displacement, and war.
The hard truth is that we cannot have our “nice things” without empire, and whether it is a “green” capitalist welfare state or a Communist one, the end is the same: war, climate chaos, and catastrophic collapse, with Indigenous peoples and the global south being the first sacrificed on the road to mass extinction. The children of Gaza and the Congo pay the price for the existence of megacities like New York, London, and Shanghai. And increasingly, those deadly consequences are coming home as American cities from Asheville to Altadena are wiped off the map.
“We can’t have nice things” isn’t exactly an inspiring revolutionary slogan. What then? “Degrowth or death?” Not dying is perhaps a more effective motivator, but fear breeds dark impulses. It could just as easily point us towards some new brand of ecofascism for those happy to sacrifice the life and well-being of others for their own comfort and security.
I would much rather be inspired by a beautiful future. That is partially why I’ve experimented with writing science fiction: I want to imagine that a life without the electric grid has a possibility of not only being worth living, but kind of nice. I want to try to challenge the Western propaganda that I was raised with, the idea that history progressed, and that the life of each generation was somehow a little easier and better off than the generation before it. Or the idea that, whether we like it or not, our current social and political arrangements are inevitable because they are baked-in to human nature.
In their masterful work, The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow dismantle these myths, pointing to abundant examples of how humans have always exercised the freedom to experiment and reinvent social relations in the interest of freedom and equality, and that archeological evidence actually points to freedom as being a more determinative theme of the human story than hierarchy, domination, and war. Without idealizing them, they highlight the Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America as being prime examples of an egalitarian political tradition that emerged as a conscious rejection of attempted state formation in the 12-14th centuries, choosing paths that valued collective care and “ease, comfort, and time” over the abundance of material goods.1 Similarly, Mayan peoples turned away from centralized temple-building regimes to localized, decentralized societies that have persisted to this day in spite of waves of attempted colonial conquest from the Conquistadors to neoliberalism.
Graeber and Wengrow point out that freedom of movement and the freedom to disobey authority are both constitutive of the ability to determine one’s political forms throughout history. Before the emergence of modern states, kings often had little ability to impose their will beyond a very limited sphere. In the case of North America, woodland communities ended the Mississippian “civilization” by voting with their feet.2
Our lives under capitalism are comparatively hemmed in by the regimes of private property, surveillance, borders, and bureaucracy, leaving us figuratively and literally caged in almost every area of life. Today, freedom often looks like carving out mini rebellions in the cracks and hidden spaces of society until we can explode into open but temporary revolt.
Speaking as someone who grew up safe and secure as a middle class descendent of white settlers, I can say that the most joyful, meaningful experiences of my life have not come from my privileges or accomplishments, but from the moments I have joined with others in some form of rebellion against the system that privileged me. Living communally with people from all walks of life, cooking together, gardening together, engaging in ritual and meaning making, defying the state together, engaging in common work for the sake of building a more just and loving world: these are the moments where I’ve experienced the strongest sense of human belonging and purpose, regardless of whether it was in a warm house with wi-fi or a chilly camp off the grid in the mountains. The joy of life comes from loving and being loved in the embrace of a community that cares for each other and the land.
I cannot paint an exact picture of what a beautiful revolutionary future looks like because it will be many futures, each one shaped by the caring relationships of affinity between people and the landscapes in which we find subsistence. We can look to the past and the present for messy examples of people all over the world who’ve pulled off their own versions of freedom, equality, and ecological balance, and we can get a pretty good idea of what our way of life could (or should) look like. But for those of us in the US who have no living or ancestral ties to the land or collectivist cultures, we must recognize that we have a gaping cultural wound to heal that nobody else’s culture can heal for us, even as we must enter into relationships of respectful learning and solidarity with communities who know how to survive. We will be making new meaning, creating new culture, through the process of resisting and building together.
There is no doubt that surviving the chaos our civilization has unleashed will be hard work, and we will have to join hands and walk through hell, one way or another. We have to scale down our economy, and that will mean deliberately smashing and composting old systems while simultaneously cultivating new cooperative economies that center human needs. We will have to relearn the skills of subsistence, caring for the land and living within the limits of what the land consents to provide. If we survive this, our descendants will be living lives that look more like Indigenous hunter-gatherers and communal subsistence farmers than any conception of urban green utopia. But I also believe they will be happier than us. Committing ourselves to a path of deliberate degrowth is not only necessary for human survival, it is the condition of possibility for having the life of our dreams.
Graeber & Wengrow, 38.
Ibid., 452.