(This is a repost from Jacob Winter's Medium page. Visit the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/against-the-new-malthusians-1d2480f5df7d)

The environmental movement today has become infected by a new form of ecological austerity, a vicious and regressive ideology that would sacrifice all human progress to save the planet, even when other, more progressive, solutions are readily available. The tactics and aims of the environmental movement have become nothing but a blatant assault on the working class. The Left must think cautiously about lending their support to this new movement, lest everything we’ve worked for be for nothing.

Climate change is a problem. Although there is no official scientific consensus on just how existential the problem is, there is no doubt that it is an urgent issue. Regardless of whether or not climate change will render the Earth a livable hell or will wipe out mankind entirely, the growing environmentalist movement shows a clear popular discontent with either choice. Whether it be the mass movements of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, bringing schoolchildren out in the masses to protest government inaction or Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain blocking roads to raise awareness for their cause, the environment has become the issue of the day.

A current amongst all new environmental groups, however, is a belief in the concept of degrowth. It may not be in their manifestos, their declarations, or at the front of the minds of their members, but the logical conclusion of the vast majority of environmental campaigners is degrowth.

Degrowth broadly means shrinking and reversing economic growth, rather than expanding economic growth. It’s becoming a particularly popular theory amongst the environmentalist movement, as deindustrialization has become key to their idea of halting damage to the climate. At its least harmful, it’s a generally counterproductive strategy that hasn’t managed to effectively tackle climate change, and at its most harmful it's outright Malthusian.

The general logic of degrowth is that, if we consume less, we extract less of the Earth’s resources, and therefore damage to the Earth is minimized. You can understand why it’s such a compelling theory, as it seems to track. But then you think about it for 5 minutes and you realize it’s bullshit.

Why Degrowth is Bad (in general)

Economic Growth is not just some numbers on an evil financier's spreadsheet. It’s children being fed, its vast swathes of the Earth having clean water, it’s being able to heat your home at night. Economic growth is the lowering of global poverty statistics and child mortality rates. As Tom Chivers puts it:

Two things. First, economic growth saves children’s lives. That is one of the most basic, starkest facts about the modern world.

Second, there is a thing called the “degrowth movement”, which wants to stop economic growth. And, yes, this would lead almost inevitably to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of children a day.

To actively reverse economic growth in the name of the climate would not save the planet, but would instead keep the global poorest exactly in the same conditions they are now. Economic degrowth requires a decline in human standards of living, which may be acceptable for some in the rich West, but not for those at the global periphery who already live in poverty.

Degrowth and Austerity are more or less identical. The gutting of the state in order to prevent economic growth would almost certainly lead to the inability of the state to conduct its other operations, such as welfare, the National Health Service in the UK, or the maintenance of state schooling. More anarchist-leaning members of the environmentalist movement would cheer this on, foolishly believing that humanity would just get on fine without these state interventions; that all medicine would be produced by the commune bog-witch; and that humans would be entirely self-sustainable without the infrastructure to distribute food and water. For those us of with our sanity intact, however, this is clearly a bad thing.

Why Degrowth is Bad (for the Left)

Economic growth is not inherently capitalistic, the growth of economies is a necessity within socialism. The development of productive forces, as written by Marx, is inherently at odds with the mode of production we know as capitalism. Production per capita is something we must strive for, and it’s capitalism that holds back this development. As Trotsky writes,

The deepest, the most objective and the most indisputable criterion says: progress can be measured by the growth of the productivity of social labour.

For the sake of the climate, we must look toward sustainable economic growth within socialism. As Engels writes,

“There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.”

For the world that the Left hopes to create, we would need a massive expansion in infrastructure and energy production for this new economy to function. But if we lend our support to the degrowth-supporting environmentalist movement, this will become even more of a fantasy. Today in the world there are 1.6 Billion people with no electricity. There are billions without access to public transport. Billions of people have little or no access to education and health care. To halt economic growth for the sake of the climate would leave these issues unsolved, and the answer socialism provides would fall on deaf ears.

Degrowth in the Constitutional Environmentalist Movement

Degrowth has become a core tenet of the mainstream “constitutional” climate groups, particularly European green parties, such as the German Die Grunen and the British Green Party.

The British Greens are a good example of where a party embraces degrowth to the detriment of human standard of living. Caroline Lucas, the sole Green MP in Parliament, virulently opposed the HS2 Railway, as well as being a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth. Lucas claimed that,

“It’s time to stop annihilating nature in the name of short-term financial gain for big construction companies and its time to scrap HS2 before it does any more damage.”

This shows a much broader trend in the environmental movement to stop any infrastructural development, no matter how beneficial it would be. Die Grunen in Germany has copied this trend, by engaging in vast anti-nuclear energy action, succeeding in having all the power plants within Germany shut down aside from 3.

Die Grunen are no friends of the Left, shown by their attacks on the German union movement around the turn of the millennium, in collaboration with the SPD. They likewise, as Leigh Phillips puts it,

“layed the neo-mercantilist foundations of the current ongoing Eurozone crisis, a crisis in which the sizeable Die Grünen faction in the European Parliament has regularly backed EU policies that favour central European financial interests over those of the ordinary people of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland”

Degrowth in Radical Environmentalism

Extinction Rebellion, the mass climate movement which mobilized vast amounts of young and old to protest against government inaction on climate change, openly supports degrowth. Posting misleading infographics, hosting zoom debates, and holding placards supporting the end to all economic growth, Extinction Rebellion has positioned itself against working people.

Just Stop Oil, the most recent incarnation of the UK’s road-blocking environmentalists, is openly advocating for the end of all oil imports to the UK, in the midst of an energy crisis where people this Winter will need to choose between heating their homes and eating. Again, positioning themselves against those the Left is supposed to be helping. Instead of promoting sustainable economic development with other energy sources, JSO blindly follows the cause of simply ending all fossil fuel usage.

The Darker Side of Degrowth

Within radical environmentalism, degrowth takes a much darker trend at its most radical. One of Malthusianism, population control, and a dark anti-human sentiment. Pentti Linkola, a Finnish “deep ecologist” thinker, promoted the extermination of the vast majority of the human race in order to stop damage to the climate. He once stated,

“If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.”

These anti-human ideas on population control have been popularized by people as popular as David Attenborough, who once stated that,

“What are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”

The aforementioned Caroline Lucas reposted an article by John Vidal in The Guardian, titled “It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate.” The article proposes fewer children should be born, which may seem innocent, but would actually be devastating to the economy and as a result, to quality of life.

Britain’s birth rate is almost half what it was at its most recent historic peak in the 1960s. In 2020, the birth rate was 1.58, well below the necessary “replacement level” of 2.1. As Brendan O’Neill writes for Spiked,

“It points out that the flight from procreation has coincided with great successes in sustaining life in the twilight years. So we have more older people and fewer younger people. You don’t need a PhD in demography to know that this could prove problematic. ‘At present, there are a little under three over-65s for every 10 workers, but by the middle of the next decade that ratio will rise to 3.5, and by the 2060s the number will be closing in on four’, the SMF’s report says. It warns that a ‘combination of a lower share of the population in work and a higher share in need of economic support clearly has a negative effect on the productive capacity of the economy’.”

Despite how clearly disastrous this idea of decreasing the production of human beings is, these general beliefs lead to one man and his grand libel against the human race committed 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus.

Malthusianism is the belief that population growth is exponential while resource growth is linear, leading to a population die-off by either war, famine or disease. To stop this, Malthusians would advocate for the mass indiscriminate killing of people to skim the population and prevent this “Malthusian Trap.” This is exactly what Linkola advocates, and a softer version of this theory is practiced by those who advocate for population controls. Not all degrowth-ers are Malthusians, but it doesn’t take a massive leap to end up there, and the logical conclusion of ending all economic growth may well result in this “skimming” of the population.

Conclusion

Engels accused Malthus of making a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature”, while Marx referred to his theory as a “sin against science.” The Left has forgotten these criticisms, and by willingly associating with these degrowth delusions, they may well sign the death warrant of socialism and of human progress as a whole.

The only way to solve climate change is through sustainable economic growth, a planned economy, and an end to capitalism. Unless these criteria are met, the Malthusians will control the debate, and an eco-fascist future is inevitable.