Degrowth vs Classical Socialism: The Irreparable Rift

March 9, 2024 4:32 PM

You'll remember eco-communist philosopher Kohei Saito from our previous discussion of his surprising bestseller on the connection between Marx and the environment. But...was there a connection, or was Saito seeing an eco-Marx who never existed? More to the point, must we give up All The Things under communism? Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips offer a resounding 'no,' in their Jacobin review of Saito's newly-translated book: "Kohei Saito’s 'Start From Scratch' Degrowth Communism."
posted by mittens (35 comments total)

There are some statements in Orwell's essays to the effect that, because England's ongoing wealth was based on colonial exploitation, England would have to accept a lower standard of living under socialism--and this was a real problem for selling it to the lower classes. These days I expect he'd add "literally unsustainable environmental exploitation."
posted by praemunire at 7:03 PM on March 9 [6 favorites]

We've definitely some sensible ideas under communism, given individualist or capitalist societies look even more unsustainable, and Kohei Saito sounds worth listening too, but..

All ideologies formulated under the explosive growth of fossil fuels look kinda irredeemable. As Steve Keen mentioned, Adam Smith derailed economics away from being physical reality. Marx merely continued Smith's mistake. Afaik most later followers worsened things.

In particular, the labor theory of value is still human supremacist, and hence unsustainable, and hence suicidal. We'd ideally adopt ideologies that value the natural world similarly to, or more than, human achievements.

Island societies have sometimes gone extinct like Easter Island, but other Island societies like shogunate Japan become semi-sustainable, and the Dominicate Republic protested their forests under their dictators. It's kinda doable.

You could be more or less fair while becoming sustainable, but you'll definitely take resources away form humans. Also, you want sustainability under human politics, the maximum power principle, etc, which maybe problematic for those dictatorships. It's very tricky but not impossible I think, but one needs salt when reading claims that communism offers real solutions.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:37 AM on March 10 [5 favorites]

As for this article, Jacobin has become increasingly hostile to ecological concerns, so they should be taken even less seriously than Kohei Saito.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:44 AM on March 10 [7 favorites]

The Jacobin article read, to me, like a purist reading of a sacred text. "You mustn't misinterpt Marx that way," and barely addressed the degrowth issue at all other to imply all would be well if we followed the One True Path, which was pretty disappointing.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:32 AM on March 10 [3 favorites]

and this was a real problem for selling it to the lower classes.

I wonder why lower specifically? Do you have the name of the essay by any chance, praemunire?
posted by Selena777 at 7:31 AM on March 10

I wonder why lower specifically

Assuming “working class” is included in the lower classes, traditionally that’s been the target class to win over for Marxists, right? The middle class and the rich are the class enemy and beyond convincing as a whole, even if individuals might be swayed.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:24 AM on March 10

The Jacobin article read, to me, like a purist reading of a sacred text. "You mustn't misinterpt Marx that way,"

I'd suggest the opposite. Marx is a historical writer from the period of the 19th century industrial revolution. Saito seems to have scoured his writing for some justification to support a 21st century degrowth movement. It's not something people reading Marx for the last 150 years generally thought was in there, and it's clear what you gain from this contrarian reading unless you think Marx has some sacred power. Degrowth is necessary or not in our time based on our technology. Who cares what Marx thought about it in the era of steam power?

Saito sounds so bad on the historical Marx that I'd worry they are making a straw man out of Saito, but the Guardian article for the earlier FPP suggests probably not. The Jacobin article seems to be doing a legitimate historical reading points out, various times, "Yeah, Marx was a guy who got stuff wrong."

Whether we need "degrowth" or our standard of living is at a sustainable level over the next few decades or centuries or so is a practical question. It's a question of whether energy and manufacturing can be produced with decreased impact to the environment. I tend to the optimistic side of this, that if you imagine a world where we tackle the distributional issues we can maintain improve quality of life and give the environment room to recover. I could be wrong, but this is not a philosophical question or a spiritual question. It's a science and technology question. (And whether we will do it is a political question, but it's not like it's a harder political question than telling people to become poorer.)

So on the substantial dispute I'm on the side of the authors. But I don't love the Jacobin article as a whole. Don't hate it either, but the science isn't great. One author is listed as a science writer, but I very much felt I was reading historians of ideas asserting things outside their field even before I got to this:

Today, we know that within all organisms (not just plants), via a series of chemical reactions, nitrogen along with other key ingredients get turned into amino acids, which are in turn the building blocks of the nucleic acids that form RNA and DNA, and of proteins, from which pretty much all tissues in an organism are made

This is would get you a poor grade on a high school level test. In between two authors and an editor any one should have caught it; amino acids are not the building blocks of nucleic acids.
posted by mark k at 8:36 AM on March 10 [8 favorites]

But even Saito’s cherry-picking from the Marxist canon is a secondary failing to what is in effect turning Marx and the tiny handful of Marxists that Saito approves of into prophets, rather than the fallible human theorists they were. Just because they said something does not make it correct.

The power and allure that Marx commands is that he prophesied a utopia by historical deterministic means. This alone makes one a visionary, whether right, wrong or otherwise. One should not be swayed by the fact that so many are deferential to Marx as if he made detailed sense to them.
posted by Brian B. at 9:09 AM on March 10

I wonder why lower specifically? Do you have the name of the essay by any chance, praemunire?

I'll see if I can't find it. It was in that big four-volume pile of his letters and shorter essays, unfortunately too big for me to keep in my modest apartment.

The lower classes in particular because (a) as noted above, they were his recruiting target but also (b) he believed that they were already so immiserated that the potential of a lower standard of living for all would hit them hardest.
posted by praemunire at 11:18 AM on March 10 [5 favorites]

the labor theory of value is still human supremacist, and hence unsustainable, and hence suicidal. We'd ideally adopt ideologies that value the natural world similarly to, or more than, human achievements.

jeffburdges, this sounds like deep ecology. Were you thinking of that?
posted by doctornemo at 12:31 PM on March 10

Saito sounds so bad on the historical Marx that I'd worry they are making a straw man out of Saito, but the Guardian article for the earlier FPP suggests probably not.

I haven't read him yet, but it sounds like Saito is following the well-worn Marxist traditional path of focusing on one of Marx's (or Engels') texts (or one co-written) to tease out a specific reading which becomes or supports a theoretical branch. For example, in the 1960s some read the then-recently-published Grundrisse notebooks to find a more voluntarist view of political action. (Note that I'm simplifying hugely, possibly catastrophically) (and am also a Grundrisse fan, in my vague anarcho-Marxist way)

Degrowth and its opposition is the subject of my next book (well, after the one I'm currently writing under contract) and I'm grateful for any posts on it.
posted by doctornemo at 12:35 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]

I know this is a big argument in the left community. Between Saito and Bellamy Foster (and I imagine more, but those seem to be the big two)...

I'll drop Derick Varn's discussion with Foster (note, I haven't listened yet, just showed up recently on his stream)

I'm not as committed to the full throated Marxism of dedicated scholars and many of my left cohorts, so I don't have an egg in this fight. But I am sympathetic to a socialist form of degrowth. Especially since the Boom has now happened, the boomers are dying and the pace of population growth is slowing, we need to find a way to "wind down" the overproduction. It really is disgusting when you look at just how much humans ... make/consume. And add in we're now doing it for "AI" all that energy wasted so corps can "train" their algo machines and spit out "art". At least that's pretty. Bitcoins/crypto was worse. And there's NOTHING on the techno-horizon that doesn't reek of 100% empty farts. They are out of gas and too much money with nothing to show but more of the same scams.

Let's get back to building things that matter that will do something for the mass of HUMANS rather than Capitalists. Build homes. Do something that maybe will reduce your disgusting need for profit quarter over quarter.

Tired of tchochkes and plastic gimmicks shipped from china that people buy cuz "OH SHINY" and waste yet more resources. In the name of avoiding the concept of death, humans create, OVERcreate, and thus... inculcate the very death they try to avoid. And when it comes for them, when the effects come, as it is ever increasingly more evident, they merely double down with fingers in ears. I don't know the answer, and I think it's important to deal with. But I think the classical Marxists are ignorant and wrong in this case and contribute to reify the complaints of people like Russell Means who made a point about the USSR being even worse for the environment than the US.
posted by symbioid at 3:31 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

Not to defend AI but in my job I've started doing some "development" using Microsoft PowerApps. We've been talking about being ready for the AI assisted version that's coming down the pipe that I'm really excited about. The more that folks like me are able to build our own software tools the more time it frees up for higher level developers to work on higher level things. I mean, you're not wrong but I wouldn't totally write it off either. Most of it sucks but not all of it and it'll improve over time.

The real trick, of course, is to make sure the productivity gains that come out of all that work get spread around evenly.

RE: Communism and lower classes, I always thought the idea was that the bottom end of standards of living were supposed to rise while the upper and middle classes get lower. Like, I'm fine giving up my two cars and suburban home for something smaller and no cars if I'm getting free healthcare, a minimum quality of housing and good, easy to use public transit. There could also be cooler stuff like communal maker spaces and stuff like that.

In any case, there is no way anyone in the US will have the political will to do anything communist while actually calling that. I think best to hope for is to dress up communist and socialist concepts in capitalist clothes. I'm real big on the idea that in order to function as it's supposed to, capitalism must be heavily regulated. Aside from that, if the system isn't getting you the result you want (and I think there are a lot of people that would agree it's not) the system has to change and that's where I think you could sneak in some socialism all dressed up in capitalist terms.
posted by VTX at 4:31 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]

I'm glad to see some leftists arguing vociferously against degrowth, even if I also roll my eyes a bit at the professions that productivity would soar under socialism.

This review of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb seems quite relevant. As the review points out, the idea of population control was blamed on poor countries (Ehrlich recoiled at the teeming masses of Delhi, then a city of under 3 million), and was most harmful to poor countries. "In the 1970s and ’80s, India ...embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises." Nothing of the sort happened to First Worlders, who cause the bulk of ecological devastation.

The basic problem isn't "capitalism", it's fossil fuels. That's important because even if the US and Saito's Japan all do penance and go back to being peasants, it just doesn't matter to climate change so long as China keeps burning coal.

The oil problem was predictable fifty years ago, and looked like an unsolvable problem. Now, not so much, as renewable energy is improved and ramps up. China in fact is doing better in renewables than the US.

World population growth is expected to peak before the end of the century; note that this is largely due to technology which enables women to control their fertility, and social structures that do not rely on huge families to survive. Are these beneficial social changes able to survive under "degrowth" primitivism?

(To avoid some red herrings: the end of oil and peak population means that, of course, growth based on more oil usage, more cars, and simply more population is going to stop. Productivity growth can continue, and the world's problem isn't that it can't produce enough to support human beings, it's that production is unfairly and absurdly distributed.)
posted by zompist at 4:34 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

I usually enjoy a vigorous critique, but I got grumpier the further I got in the review. There appears to be over-generalization by Saito and by Huber & Phillips in their review of Saito.

The case study here may be climate change, but similar mismatches between market incentive and society-wide problem-solving occur across all environmental problems. Indeed, this misalignment of price signals and societal values occurs across all problems regardless of whether they are environmentally related...

And later

So long as economic growth, of either the capitalist or socialist variety, is held responsible for environmental problems, Saito’s neo-Malthusian ideology serves as a useful distraction for capitalists from the true source of the inability to adequately deal with such problems, the anarchy of the market, and the solution to such problems: socialist planning.

I think this exhibits a misunderstanding of extraction economies and accumulation by dispossession. Let's take smartphones as our case study. (Did I just visit an Apple Store to get my 2016 Macbook Air repaired and feel slightly seduced by all the shininess, maybe). I am having a hard time seeing how collective ownership of Foxconn factories by the workers (which power to the people!) can address the harms of rare earth mining given the current level of consumerism.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:59 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

I am having a hard time seeing how collective ownership of Foxconn factories by the workers (which power to the people!) can address the harms of rare earth mining given the current level of consumerism.

I think from TFA there'd be three points here:

(1) Foxconn collectivization is the wrong thing to look for to change mining operations. Collective ownership of the mines would help reduce the worker safety and local impacts around mining.
(2) The incentives for mining would also change so the goal is no longer to drive consumption to drive profit. Authors are clear they think price signals are horrible ways to tune production. I tend to like price signals, but agree that if you are pushing rational priorities being set democratically it's even easier to imagine mining will be done in ways that can reduce impact below what it is now. (Which is not the same as zero impact.)
(3) Along the lines of "more rational use of resources" it's also pretty clear they'd want to see fewer resources spent on phones on a constant upgrade cycle, and more of those resources put to things like vaccines and medications for the developing world.
posted by mark k at 9:57 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

Joseph Heath on the risks of degrowth in a democratic society, responding to Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, April 2015:

The second, incredibly risky response to the climate crisis that she recommends is a policy of “degrowth” (88). This is sort of a euphemism for reducing the size of GDP, which in practice means creating a policy-induced, long-term recession, followed (presumably) by measures designed to restrict the economy to a zero-growth equilibrium. Now because she plans to shift millions of workers into low-productivity sectors of the economy (126-7), and perhaps reduce work hours (93), she imagines that this degrowth can happen without creating any unemployment. So the picture presumably is one in which individuals experience a slow, steady decline in real income, of perhaps 2% per year over a period of 10 years (none of the people recommending this seem to give specific numbers, so I’m just guessing what they have in mind), followed by permanent income stagnation. (There would, presumably, still be technological change, so a degrowth policy would have to be accompanied by some mechanism to ensure that work hours were cut back in response to any increase in productive efficiency, in order to ensure that production as a whole did not increase.)

At the same time that incomes are either shrinking or remaining stagnant, Klein also proposes an enormous shift from private-sector to public-sector consumption, presumably financed by significant increases in personal income tax. Again, she doesn’t give any specific numbers, but from the way she talks it sounds like she wants to shift around a quarter of the remaining GDP. Plus she wants to see a huge amount of redistribution to the poor. So again, just ballparking, but it sounds as though she wants the average person to accept a pay cut of around 20%, followed by the promise of no pay increase ever again, combined with an increase in average income tax rates of around 25% (so in Canada, from around 30% to 55%). And don’t forget, this is all supposed to be achieved democratically. As in, people are going to vote for this, not just once, but repeatedly.

What I find astonishing about proponents of “degrowth” – not just Klein, but Peter Victor as well – is that they don’t see the tension between this desire to reduce average income and the desire to reduce economic inequality. They expect people to support increased redistribution at the same time that their own incomes are declining. This leaves me at something of a loss – I struggle to find words to express the depth of my incredulity at this proposition. In what world has this, or could this, ever occur?

In the real world, economic recessions are rather strongly associated with a significant increase in the nastiness of politics. Economic growth, on the other hand, makes redistribution much easier, simply because the transfers do not show up as absolute losses to individuals who are financing them, but rather as foregone gains, which are much more abstract. It’s not an accident that the welfare state was created in the context of a growing economy. (See Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, for a general discussion of the effect of growth on politics.) It seems to me obvious that a degrowth strategy – by making the economy negative-sum – would massively increase resistance to both taxation and redistribution. At the limit, it could generate dangerous blow-back, in the form of increased support for radical right-wing parties.

As a result, I just don’t see any moral difference between what Klein is doing in this book and what the geoengineering enthusiasts are doing. The latter are techno-utopians, while Klein is a socialist-utopian. But both are trying to pin our hopes for resolving the climate crisis on a risky, untested, and potentially dangerous policy. Furthermore, the idea that Klein’s agenda could be achieved democratically strikes me as being otherworldly, in a country where the left can’t even figure out how to get the Conservative party out of power.

posted by russilwvong at 10:59 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]

praemunire: There are some statements in Orwell's essays to the effect that, because England's ongoing wealth was based on colonial exploitation, England would have to accept a lower standard of living under socialism--and this was a real problem for selling it to the lower classes.

Maybe The Road to Wigan Pier, where Orwell is discussing the gap between left-wing intellectuals and the working classes?
posted by russilwvong at 11:09 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

The basic problem isn't "capitalism", it's fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are a problem, no question. But they are not the problem, many other current human practices are detrimental to planetary health, which is well publicised. I don't think it's difficult to imagine a near-ish term future in which we all drive lovely electric cars and the planet is worse off than it is now. Perhaps partly because of our lovely electric cars.

Furthermore, the idea that Klein’s agenda could be achieved democratically strikes me as being otherworldly, in a country where the left can’t even figure out how to get the Conservative party out of power.

I am sympathetic to the idea that producing more stuff for evermore and getting off scott free is contrary to the laws of physics. But the idea that the cultural change necessary for the average western person to accept less material wealth than their parents can be achieved on anything but a generational timescale is unhinged. In that sense the merits of degrowth are irrelevant.
posted by deadwax at 12:58 AM on March 11

I recommend Mann's _Wizard and the Prophet_, which zompist referenced in the linked review.
A fascinating dual biography of two opposed 20th century figures, one calling for increasing agricultural output, the other urging humanity to react to hitting planetary boundaries.
posted by doctornemo at 5:05 AM on March 11

Arrticle abandons from physical reality early with "It is science and technology, shackled to egalitarianism .. that allows us to overcome those limits.". We needed fossil fuels to even develop the technologies that overcame those population limits, primarily transport and fertilizers. We could now create some fertilizer using renewables, but we've concluded in other threads that our global transport system looks unlikely. Agriculture overcame earlier population limits, but these guys would not think so far back.

I've never read much on deep ecology, doctornemo, but they're some green anarchism, no? Afaik anarchism does not simplify being sustainable. In fact, dictatorships seemingly provide our best examples of sustainable societies, especially advanced sustainable societies. As I said above, I'm dubious sustainable dictatorships could really be stable, and I really doubt global statism could stay sustainable, but ideologies should really prove themselves by delivering sustainability, so right now anarchism looks no better than statism for conventional nation sizes.

Afaik primitivists are kinda strawmen, zompist. Degrowth typically means "planned degrowth", so they envision retaining tech when possible. "Post-growth" would include degrowth, and some actual primitivists. "Post-growth" often denotes people who love degrowth, but believe degrowth looks extremely unlikely, with reasoning ranging from realpolitik to philosophy motivated by thermodynamics. It's common these "post-growthers" discuss preserving technology, dispite not having the degrowthers' orderly transition.

Almosts all post-growth wants "private sufficency & public luxury", well except primitivists lol, so in particular no personal cars, only bikes and ideally ebikes.

Yes, degrowth comes off "otherworldly" like Joseph Heath says, in the sense that we cannot imagine some direct an/dor peaceful political transition into degrowth. At least degrowth is phyiscally possible though, unlike green growth, so degrowth-like societies maybe reachable via an indirect series of semi-violent transitions.

I've argued elsewhere that civil rights looked kinda otherworldly too, until the Black Panthers being Marxist-Leninist created a credible threat. We've zero credible threats from ecological movements right now, but some nations could engage in violence that change this.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:17 AM on March 11

One risk to degrowth that I haven't really heard people talking about--maybe I've missed it--is that at a certain point, if wage growth is sufficiently suppressed, you end up accidentally curing Baumol's cost disease, which means--wait for it--the return of servants to middle- and working-class households! (Which you'd think would be a selling point if you want a certain population to really embrace degrowth: "You won't have the latest SUV, but someone will wash your dishes for you!")
posted by mittens at 8:55 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

but they're some green anarchism, no?

Eh, in a sense, like some other 1990s ecological activists were, but more to the point is their belief that we shouldn't embrace human supremacy, and instead view humans as one more species among others.
posted by doctornemo at 9:28 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

Saito's degrowth does represent a Neo-Malthusian approach, which is not a bad thing, considering that Malthus originated most of the discussion about social planning by first pointing out the problem as it related to population. Malthus concluded that overpopulation was a natural equation and the only intervention was restraint because contraception would lead to vice, and this made him priggish. Marx and Engels began their ideological careers by responding to Malthus, concluding that it was the appropriation of a surplus value of labor that caused the problem which made it appear as overpopulation and misery, and if this exploitation did not occur then things would be fine (see .pdf link and quote below). Both Marx and Malthus have been mostly ignored for the last hundred years, the former because of modern money controlled by state sponsors for stability, and the latter because carbon reliant technology allowed population to skyrocket. Now the overpopulation view of technological remediation is back with global warming, and Saito is likely attempting to make Marx relevant to Malthus again, but not in disagreement.

15 This conclusion is important because Malthus argued that population had always, and would always press upon food supply such that the problem of population was always and would always be with humankind. The reader is encouraged to keep this point in mind because in the next chapter it will be seen that this is a point Marx denied more or less explicitly when he argued that if production were not incumbered with capitalists appropriating surplus-value, production would not only keep pace with population growth, but would exceed any increase in population thus making the problem of population growth a nonproblem. This is a fundamental point of disagreement between Marx and Malthus which goes to the heart of the debate between them and illuminates the essence of Marx's alternative position.
posted by Brian B. at 10:57 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]

i recall hearing, a while back, that it's a cliché in cuba to observe that cubans live like poor people and die like rich people, i.e. no one has very much stuff, and the stuff they have is run-down and improvised and janky, but also the medical care is best-in-world.

that's my degrowth vision. though with an additional proviso about everyone getting educated like rich people too.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:09 PM on March 11 [4 favorites]

means--wait for it--the return of servants to middle- and working-class households! (Which you'd think would be a selling point if you want a certain population to really embrace degrowth: "You won't have the latest SUV, but someone will wash your dishes for you!"

Can you explain? It seems more likely to me that before that happened, you'd get people with lots of 'non-wage' benefits (or under the table pay) at what were previously 'high growth jobs'.

If that was successfully regulated against, then you'd see a serious drop in the employment participation rate before you got servants for the middle class, all other things being equal.

I mean, right now, 'regular home servant' is only regularly available at the $2m+ in household net worth group in general, below that, they are sporadic at best. So this tells us that unpaid domestic labor, mostly done by women (of course), is far preferred to paying for domestic labor, even though wage rates for home cleaners aren't high, so that people can pay for things like fancier cars and larger homes.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:20 PM on March 11

Can you explain?

Sure. In our current, growth-oriented world, jobs where you can increase productivity see their wages get higher over time. Jobs where you do not increase productivity, however, also see their wages get higher over time. Meanwhile, the increase in productivity suggests the prices of goods will come down. And so you can think of a little model: A guy who works at a dishwasher manufacturer, his manservant who does the dishes for him, and the dishwasher that comes out of the factory. The manufacturer increases productivity; our guy can make more dishwashers per hour, increasing his wages and bringing down the cost of dishwashers. But his man Jeeves does not experience productivity growth; there are only so many dishes, and so much time. However, to be fair and reflect on Jeeves' service over time, he gets a yearly raise (that is, of course, substantially less than our guy's raise). So at some point, it will be cheaper to buy a dishwasher than to maintain Jeeves' services.

Although here in the real world, wages have not kept up with productivity growth, the pattern remains true, and so while my parents grew up in a world where it was not uncommon to have someone come in and "do" for you if you were working or middle class, I live in a world where my boss can afford a cleaner and I cannot.

But degrowth (I think) begins to rewind the film. Putting a cap on productivity means wages can't grow indefinitely, and will begin to shrink. Products will become comparatively more expensive, even while the gap between those with formerly high-productivity wage growth and low-productivity wage growth narrows and narrows over time. At some point, if we try to imagine our guy again, he may find that he cannot afford a dishwasher after his breaks--but Jeeves will suddenly become cost-effective again. (especially if, as you indicate, formerly high-productivity jobs being replacing reported wages with some unreported perks--expanding the gap between the two types of jobs even further.)

I think it might be important to note that the concept of "unpaid domestic labor" gets tricky under degrowth as well, because that labor begins to require more and more work, without a reasonably predictable stream of productivity enhancements. If we do not have the expected late-20th-century amenities for housework, then the basic activities of social reproduction go back to being extraordinarily tough and require help.
posted by mittens at 2:07 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

and so while my parents grew up in a world where it was not uncommon to have someone come in and "do" for you if you were working or middle class

The only thing I'd quibble with is that in our (great-grand) parents (and before) generation, immigration was far higher than it is now (not to mention race and gender-based employment limitations), so they were able to exploit a huge labor surplus to be able to hire domestic workers.


But I think I otherwise (sort of) agree that upper middle class would spend more on domestic labor if labor-saving products (like dishwashers and cars) move out of reach of the middle class, and limitations on employment opportunities due to degrowth came to town.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:32 PM on March 11

contraception would lead to vice, and this made him priggish

Remember that Malthus was a curate, not just some random writer.
posted by doctornemo at 5:50 PM on March 11

mittens, do you think population declines will reduce the number of potential servants?
posted by doctornemo at 5:51 PM on March 11

bombastic lowercase pronouncements: Cuba does in fact have the highest literacy rate in the world, and their kids' math scores are pretty high too. So while they're not exactly being "educated like rich people", there's some significant lessons there for capitalist countries as well.
posted by adrienneleigh at 6:54 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

Yes, Cuba provides a nice positive example of "degrowth ready" communism, which makes Kohei Saito's case better than any delicate reading of Marx.

We'd servants when we'd much lower populations, doctornemo, so that's not the obstacle. It's likely the film rewinds in some ways but not in others, maybe depending upon actual triggers & responces.

Also, live-in-servant relationships would today be a choice by both parties, motivated by cultural and human factors, not only economics.

> If we do not have the expected late-20th-century amenities for housework, then the basic activities of social reproduction go back to being extraordinarily tough and require help.

Yes this matters more. Also, human labor is pretty energy efficent, especially once you have the human there anyways. It consumes some humans' time though, making it less dopamine efficent.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:00 PM on March 11 [3 favorites]

do you think population declines will reduce the number of potential servants?

What I find a little worrisome, trying to think it through, is what if population doesn't decline under degrowth? I mean, I talked a few threads ago about my fears around population decline's effect on the economy, and you'd kinda think the two things would balance out--smaller population, smaller economy, everybody's happy, yay! But unless someone's got a mad-scientist laboratory with a dial marked Population and another marked GDP, and is turning them very carefully, then you could see some frightening scenarios play out: For instance, birth rates climbing to maximize household income in the working class. We know how well that turns out. I mean, we know birthrate is not tightly tied to GDP in that way--if you look at countries whose economies are in trouble right now, you don't see a corresponding spike in birthrate, so maybe that worry wouldn't be borne out.

But what then? If the number of potential servants does drop, then the price of servants rises--and maybe we keep our increasingly expensive dishwashers? What do you do if you can't afford servants or appliances?
posted by mittens at 8:28 PM on March 11 [1 favorite]

if you look at countries whose economies are in trouble right now, you don't see a corresponding spike in birthrate, so maybe that worry wouldn't be borne out.

Arguably though it may be because the correlation or connection with modern productivity rates is still uncoupled, rather than GDP? When that happens (needing more hands to do the work), in combination with general population reduction in basic educational gains plus increased maternal health risks and childhood fatalities, then you might see population behaviour of before. The implication is it's a scenario of degrowth where it's a consequence of sociocultural regression. Otherwise, in that other scenario where there's a lower population replacement rate, in the near-long-term it seems to me immigration tends to respond accordingly.
posted by cendawanita at 10:05 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]

what if population doesn't decline under degrowth?

Fascinating thought. The collapse in birthrates is a clear effect of modernity/development (and especially improvements in womens' rights to education, work, and bodily autonomy). If we undo modernity, perhaps people will return to the pre-industrial norm of lots of kids for agricultural labor
posted by doctornemo at 7:12 AM on March 12 [1 favorite]