The term “green growth” was coined twenty years ago by Rae Kwon Chung, a director at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). The concept captured the emerging idea that, rather than being antithetical to economic growth and technological progress, these paradigms could be given a sustainable makeover through government investment in renewable energy, green agriculture, sustainable forestry, and the like. Growth — be that in the form of more jobs, improved standards of living, or increased consumption — need not, contrary to the environmentalist Cassandras calling for urgent degrowth in the face of the climate crisis, be sacrificed on the altar of sustainability.
It’s easy to see why Chung’s idea, beyond its embracement by technocentrists on both the left and right, scandalised those at either end of the political spectrum. For those parts of the right dubious about renewable energy and wilfully unconvinced of the threat posed by climate change, green growth smacked of Soviet-style economic planning. What we might call the left-wing objection, meanwhile, was nicely summarised by Paul Kingsnorth, writing about a proposed expansion of Britian’s windfarm industry in the Guardian just a few years after Chung’s speech:
Does this sound very “green” to you? To me it sounds like a society fixated on growth and material progress going about its destructive business in much the same way as ever, only without the carbon. It sounds like a society whose answer to everything is more and bigger technology; a society so cut off from nature that it believes industrialising a mountain is a “sustainable” thing to do.
In her new, provocatively-titled book The End of Capitalism, Ulrike Herrmann — an impressively credentialled journalist with training in banking, philosophy, and history, and a member of the German Greens party — Kingsnorth’s critique is elevated to a manifesto of sorts (although without much trace of Kingsnorth’s nature mysticism — this is very much an economist’s book, not an eco-poet’s one).
Herrmann’s thesis is straightforward. As she writes,
capitalism and climate protection are mutually incompatible. “Green growth” is an illusion — what we need is “green shrinkage.” Economic output must fall if we are to survive on just green energy.
The model for such an economically, politically, and socially transformative program? Britain’s wartime command economy, introduced in 1939, which virtually overnight replaced a predominately free-market economy with one that was centrally managed.
The most well-known feature of Britian’s wartime economy remains rationing. Herrmann is at pains to note that, despite its association with scarcity, it still more than provided for Britons’ recommended calorie intake, with the added benefit of increasing egalitarianism — but it also extended to state control (though not necessarily ownership) of resource production and distribution more broadly.
The result, achieved in essence through the drastic cutting back of growth in the use of non-war goods and services, was a fall in consumption by one third. This, Herrmann argues, is the sort of degrowth we require now, only on a worldwide scale, if we are to avert ecological catastrophe. “‘Green growth’”, she quips, “is a little like the dream of being able to eat as much cake as you want without putting on weight.”
The End of Capitalism abounds with examples of green technology as a false dawn. Electric vehicles require batteries which produce around twenty tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. New buildings, even those constructed according to ecological principles, are “crimes against the environment” consuming large amounts of “grey energy” (also known as indirect or embodied energy). (The Australian reader is helpfully reminded, too, that renewable energy continues to meet only a fraction of this country’s primary energy needs, while coal remains an important energy source.)
The solutions to these problems redound to Herrmann’s overall premise: we need significantly fewer vehicles on our roads, whether combustion or electric, and rather than building new dwellings to arrest the global shortage of housing, we might instead revitalise existing ones and address the issue of vacant and underused homes. (I wondered if here, as elsewhere, Herrmann might have usefully drawn on Marxist theory, for example by showing how many aspects of our economic system she describes, including housing, are embedded within and reproduce class relations.)
Herrmann takes climate economists and researchers to task for the former’s “sham logic” and the latter’s dearth of academic rigour. Both are guilty, in Herrmann’s view, of unwarranted “eco-euphoria” and “blindly [trusting] in technology’s ability to prevent the climate catastrophe.” Then there is the “rebound effect”, Herrmann’s name for the phenomenon whereby increased energy efficiency leads to the consumption of more rather than less energy overall. Such anomalies are plentiful in The End of Capitalism — another is the “early growth paradox”, which saw the living standards of Britons fall after the advent of industrialisation as the economy grew richer but workers poorer — and attest to capitalism’s profoundly contradictory nature.
None of this is to say that Herrmann scorns the current economic system in toto. In fact, one of the book’s more surprising aspects is the way the author challenges numerous anticapitalist shibboleths. “Capitalism”, Herrmann writes, “is actually better than its reputation.” She proceeds to cite the industrialised West’s remarkable advances in health, comfort, and convenience. The Global South, too, has seen dramatic improvements in lifespans, food security and access to consumer goods.
In the book’s opening chapters — a potted history of the rise of capitalism from England’s fossil-fuelled industrial revolution — Herrmann writes that,
many on the political left might be perplexed to hear that capitalism does not require low wages, exploitation, colonies, or war to exist. In fact, this is good news for all those who hope for more justice and equality in the world.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the Trump administration’s ham-fisted attempts to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — not in the name of peace, as it says, but of getting a hold of Ukraine’s mineral wealth.
Hermann occasionally muddles correlation and causation in such arguments and gives insufficient consideration to the roles of unionism and activism — both often pointedly at odds with the interests of capital — in improving the lives and working conditions of people under capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s bracing, as well as clarifying, to read a leftist critique of capitalism that, while arguing for its dismantling, does not attempt to elide its obvious benefits. It might, in fact, be argued that Herrmann’s case is stronger for this lucidity. Certainly, it will neutralise before it can be made the predictable right-wing objection that leftists are hypocrites for disdaining an economic system they have benefited from.
What will be more difficult to answer is criticism of the “they want us to live in caves” variety — the strawman quick to be erected by critics of degrowth advocates. Herrmann, to her credit, does not shrink from this challenge. Although, as she acknowledges, there is no plan for ending growth-based capitalism that does not entail the risk of economic crisis, it is clear that any such transition will necessarily involve individual and collective sacrifice on a considerable scale. This may have worked in wartime Britain, when national pride and other cohering social narratives could be less complicatedly drummed up and when people’s lives were not as saturated with technology and consumer goods as they are now.
But we live in a time of superabundance in which it may prove far harder to convince people to forgo the energy-intensive gratuities — cars, flights, meat, mobile phones and the like — that we have come to take for granted. If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated that asking people to accept even minor curtailments to their freedoms in the name of the greater good will likely be met today with mass resentment and resistance. To this we might add the obvious problem that, whereas presumably few Britons thought of the war as anything less than a fact, climate denialism is today widespread and overrepresented in circles of political and economic influence.
Still, The End of Capitalism is an important counterpoint to the technocentrist’s dream of an unbridled capitalism powered by the sun and the wind — not to mention an argosy of unproven green tech — rather than the remains of prehistoric plants and animals. Throughout, Herrmann’s tone is measured and matter-of-fact, and David Shaw’s fine translation maintains the integrity of her ideas as well as the clarity of their expression. Together, they have cogently set out the “why” of capitalism’s taking down, and its replacement with a circular, rather than growth-based, economic system. It will be for others to work out the “how”.
Image: a detail from the German cover of the book
