“Damage mag” Jokerfied zine

Degrowth isn’t just political poison, it is also based on faulty economics

ctrl + f “science” NOT FOUND

In reaction to the rise of degrowth, a new generation of socialists has emerged to forcefully argue that “the politics of less is a bad strategy” if your goal is to win over workers.

a new generation of Democrats who have innovative new messaging strategies to convince workers voters that Hillary Clinton’s Walmart CEO praxis is actually good for workers voters, and their small town deserves to be destroyed because its inefficient according to redditor spreadsheet analyses.

Matt Huber has written, “Degrowth… is overwhelmingly a movement of and for the professional class”

I don’t disagree that greenwashed neoliberal NGOs are reactionary idpol and not Marxist, but Jacobin writers should avoid this argument

if we take degrowthers at their word, they are not just making a political argument, but an economic one

I’m just trying to understand how our modes of production will be altered by new innovations, which no socialist talks about because they don’t really read contemporary science like Marx did: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=carbon+circular+economy&btnG=

By misdiagnosing growth as the culprit, instead of capital’s insatiable drive to accumulate profit, degrowthers fundamentally misunderstand both how and why capitalism produces both inequality and ecological destruction

Seems like a distinction without a difference but ok go off

Both the orthodox economists and the degrowth Left are guilty of mistaking effect for cause. Hickel does this when he says that “capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth.” The actual production of stuff is certainly necessary for capitalism, but contra Hickel, that new stuff is only important or “socially necessary” (within capitalist markets) insofar as it successfully realizes a competitive profit. It is therefore the profit-mania that Marx described that drives growth under capitalism, not growth for its own sake. If capitalists cannot earn sufficient profits, they stop investing, and growth disappears.

abstract philosophy about ‘do chickens or eggs come first?’ is a very important argument to debate while the world burns!

But what must be explained is the fact that over the past few decades, many advanced capitalist countries have seen continued economic growth with a simultaneous and steady decline in CO2 emissions. This is something Hickel regards as “an illusion of accounting”—in other words, it isn’t real.

finance imperialism exporting their messy pollution industry to the periphery happens in those very same countries (the segregated black side of town is next to the factories, weird!) as well as in other nations. New Rule: You are only allowed to critique degrowth if you know where your trash goes when you throw it out lol

…the expansion of low-carbon energy such as nuclear has always been achieved by active and powerful states through the pressure of working-class political movements. This was true in Sweden, where the Social Democrats and the Trade Union Confederation led the charge directly; in France, by a state-owned enterprise with strong ties to French Communists; as well as in the United States, which managed a less ambitious transition through New Deal legacy public power authorities.

coincidentally I recently posted about this 2011 science: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world’s energy needs”

news summary: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

full PDF: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/6021970/06021978.pdf

The degrowth cohort has reams of peer-reviewed papers claiming this to be true, and their entire worldview depends on clean energy taking too long to build.

But this is fundamentally a symptom of capitalist realism.

haha “i will not read those pages of science, instead I will quote that art critic Mark Fisher”. DSA socialism beyond parody!

a recent study shows that even reducing energy demand needn’t actually translate into reduced material throughput demand

so what are you doing to build infrastructure to get people things? Degrowth is about literally getting people access to what they need, like we saw in 2020 how using China to build medical supplies is not a smart plan lol. Workers are demanding local production of insulin, what kind of low-energy structures are you building to achieve this?

Cale Brooks is a video editor and also a former influencer content creator.

“socialism isn’t an out of touch gamerchair movement for arts school radlibs, I’m literally a communist” He’s got some nice theory, but in reality Marxism is about application of theory for praxis. Like workers taking control over production to do what they believe is right for their local community, instead of whatever the Pete Buttigieg PMC class of Walmart consultant spreadsheet nerds who make claims about what is ‘most efficient in the marketplace’ :pete: