Ecosocialists and Degrowth Advocates Should Work Together

Abstract

Ecosocialists and Degrowth Advocates should be friends. Our concrete political directions are often remarkably similar. However, we have fundamental theoretical differences. The Ecosocialist says the central drive of capitalists is appropriating surplus value produced by exploited workers. The Degrowth Advocate says the central drive of capitalists is promoting unending expansion of the economic system. Despite our theoretical disagreements, we need to work together to transform the capitalist system by working to implement the many policies on which we agree, or we will all lose. Within Marxist economics, capital accumulation is the gathering of wealth to the individual capitalist leading to the growth (or expansion) of the capitalist system itself. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro puts it like this: “Capital accumulation ... is not reducible to ‘growth’ ... It is a process of appropriation and control to expand the ability to appropriate and control more [and is] not limited to... Gross Domestic Product calculations” (2012, 27–28). The material wealth enabling the complex process of capital accumulation, begins with the production, appropriation, and realization of surplus value (much of which becomes profits). Surplus value is produced by workers. Merely reducing or even reversing economic growth would not change the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of production. When it comes to operationalizing this high level disagreement (exploitation versus growth as the central capitalist drive), Ecosocialists and Degrowth Advocates mostly want the same things with lots of dispute on how to get there (or even whether we can get there). Both want to: (1) end the use of fossil fuels for energy production; (2) change the fundamental social structure in favor of something (not well defined by any of us) other than capitalism; (3) obtain more equal distribution of resources and wealth; and (4) adopt some of the more innovative and collective-oriented social structures being created by Indigenous peoples all over the globe. Good policy seems to follow from both schools of thought. Consideration of both