Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development

All important concepts are dialectically vague at the margins.—Herman E. Daly

The word degrowth stands for a family of political-economic approaches that, in the face of today’s accelerating planetary ecological crisis, reject unlimited, exponential economic growth as the definition of human progress. To abandon economic growth in wealthy societies means to shift to zero net capital formation. With continual technological development and the enhancement of human capabilities, mere replacement investment is able to promote steady qualitative advancements in production in mature industrial societies, while eliminating exploitative labor conditions and reducing working hours. Coupled with global redistribution of the social surplus product and reduction of waste, this would allow for vast improvements in thelives of most people. Degrowth, which specifically targets the mostopulent sectors of the world population, is thus directed at theenhancement of the living conditions of the vast majority while maintaining the environmental conditions of existence and promoting sustainable human development.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

World Development under Monopoly Capitalism

One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was…a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society. —Joan Robinson

The recent period of globalisation—following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the reintegration of China into the world economy—is one where global value chains have become the dominant organisational form of capitalism. From low to high tech, basic consumer goods to heavy capital equipment, food to services, goods are now produced across many countries, integrated through global value chains. According to the International Labour Organization, between 1995 and 2013 the number of people employed in global value chains rose from 296 to 453 million, amounting to one in five jobs in the global economy. We are living in a global value chain world.

The big question is whether this global value chain world is contributing to, or detracting from, real human development. Is it establishing a more equal, less exploitative, less poverty-ridden world? Which political economic frameworks are best placed to illuminate and explain the workings of this

Recent critical scholarship has applied monopoly capital concepts and categories to the analysis of global value chains and have illuminated how global value chains represent the latest form of monopoly capital on a world scale.

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Materialistic Value Orientation and Wellbeing

People with a strong materialistic value orientation (MVO) believe that the acquisition of more money and expensive material possessions will improve their wellbeing and social standing. Paradoxically, striving for evermore money and material goods as a means of improving wellbeing often undermines quality of life. This paper documents how MVO has been linked to poorer wellbeing across different facets of wellbeing (personal, social, and environmental) and that these negative associations have been recorded across the lifespan. However, it also shows that the link is complex in that it can be moderated by certain personal and cultural factors and is bidirectional in its nature. By demonstrating a predominantly negative effect of MVO on wellbeing, the evidence highlights a need for interventions to reduce MVO and alter how people relate to material possessions.

Consumption itself is neither good nor bad for wellbeing. What matters is the motives driving the acquisition of a product and how people relate to the items they are buying. If someone purchase an item with the intention to learn a new skill using it, or to gift it to another individual as a sign of their love, this may enhance their wellbeing. However, when people view the acquisition of products as a means of improving their image, increasing their happiness, or achieving a certain social status, this often has detrimental effects on their wellbeing. This latter view can be described as a materialistic value orientation (MVO).

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Just Transition Is About Systemic Change

Since the 1970s, a term has gained prominence as workers have forced governments to look at the social side to their environmental policies: just transition. Today the term is everywhere, its meaning at once elusive but also key to facing the multiple crises of environmental breakdown, social injustice, and global inequality. In a forthcoming collection on the concept and practice, Dirk Holemans unpicks just transition as cause for Greens.

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The Case for Universal Basic Services

This paper shifts the focus from transfers to public services. It mounts a case for Universal Basic Services (UBS): a proposal to safeguard and develop existing public services and to extend this model of provision into new areas. The first part argues that public services require a distinct conceptual justification and sets this out in terms of shared human needs and a foundational economy. The second part develops the normative arguments for UBS, in terms of efficiency, equality, solidarity and sustainability. The third part considers some of the issues to be faced in delivering UBS and the role of state institutions, with brief service provisions. The final section summarises some developments, including experience of Covid-19, which might enhance the political impetus for UBS.

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Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global Context

Agri-food production, consumerism, waste and food waste

The corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints.

In contrast, global overpopulation predictions based on empirical data analysis by Vienna Applied Systems analysts have declined over the last decade. From this perspective, the UN replicates another unsustainable pressure on fertile land in productive decline, under unreturnable alterations of soil properties, following ecological fractures in the Earth's biogeochemical and hydrological cycles. Among the consequences, meteorological collapse spreads through fires, high temperatures, droughts and water shortages. From the South, internal displacement, border crossings and migration to the North of thousands of people are escalating, driven by hunger, undernourishment, loss of food security and family livelihoods. At the same time, from different parts of the world, a variety of livelihood solutions are being developed outside of consumerism, with other political options for change and transformation.

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The New Irrationalism

More than a century after the commencement of the Great Crisis of 1914–1945, represented by the First World War, the Great Depression, and Second World War, we are seeing a sudden resurgence of war and fascism across the globe. The capitalist world economy as a whole is now characterised by deepening stagnation, financialization, and soaring inequality. All of this is accompanied by the prospect of planetary omnicide in the dual forms of nuclear holocaust and climate destabilisation. In this dangerous context, the very notion of human reason is frequently being called into question. It is therefore necessary to address once again the question of the relation of imperialism or monopoly capitalism to the destruction of reason and the ramifications of this for contemporary class and anti-imperialist struggles.

Today, Reason demands that both exploitation and expropriation, and the related exterminist tendencies of our time, be overcome. That can only be accomplished, as Baran noted in the 1960s, on the basis of “the identity of the material interests of a class [or class-based social forces] with… Reason’s criticism of the existing irrationality.” The source of such an identity of “material interests with a class” currently lies primarily in the Global South, and with those revolutionary-scale movements everywhere seeking to overturn the entire capitalist-colonial-imperialist system for the sake of humanity and the earth.

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Let the cities move by pedalling

The way urban space is designed has an immediate effect on our quality of life. In Spain there are more than 30,000 premature deaths associated with poor air quality. Let's put bikes on our streets

I think something is crucial: those who defend a car-centred urban model today are mortgaging the future of our future generations, condemning their health and ours, and destroying our planet. They are advocating cruelty. Those who condemn the transformation of public space towards a more sustainable way of life, who argue in favour of new traffic jams or longer journeys to our destinations, not to mention the need to inform themselves and observe the development of many of the cities already mentioned, are direct participants in the destruction of the planet's health and the depletion of its resources.

Today, most cities have embarked on a very positive path, imitating trends already well established in many European cities: taking space away from cars and giving it to pedestrians, public transport and cycling. Focusing on the space allocated to cycling, this distribution of public space is crucial for two fundamental reasons: it creates a pull effect, as it begins to be seen as the only viable option, and it reduces the space available for cars. Very important.

Surely it is time to look back and see how we moved more than 60 years ago when pedestrians and cyclists occupied a priority space in our cities, which are, after all, our social environment, where we build our lives, relate to each other and associate with each other.

"The bicycle is not just another means of transport. Its use produces value for society, not only in terms of mobility but also in terms of habitability, health, the environment, equity, sociability, etc. And it benefits those who use it and the rest of the population by freeing up space and reducing air and noise pollution."

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The United States of War

How could the massive U.S. military expansion in the post-Second World War years be explained? The usual propagandistic answer at the time—that the purpose of the U.S. war machine was primarily to counter military aggression by the Soviet Union—could be dismissed out of hand. Even hardened Cold Warriors, such as George Kennan, author of the “containment” strategy, together with such influential U.S. figures as diplomat Chester Bowles, Senator J. William Fulbright, and neoliberal journalist Walter Lippmann, all held to the general consensus among those in power that the Soviet Union was not an aggressive military power like Nazi Germany. Even William Schlamm, the former editor of Fortune magazine, who proposed threatening the USSR with nuclear Armageddon in order to force it to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, stated: “Communism thrives on peace, wants peace, triumphs in peace” (186).

Hence, “the American oligarchy’s need for a huge military machine must be sought elsewhere than in a non-existent. All of this has led in recent years to the development of more all-encompassing analyses of the history of U.S. militarism and imperialism.

One such reassessment is provided by MR author David Vine in his 2020 book The United States of War. Vine adopts a methodology of focusing on the history of U.S. military bases as a means of mapping the development of U.S. military power, beginning with the wars against Indigenous nations and peoples in the early years of the republic and extending all the way to what he calls the “hyper imperialism” of the years from .1991 to the present.

An extensive commentary on the U.S. way of death is provided by David Michael Smith in his 2023 book Endless Holocausts. Smith’s book consists of the detailed documentation, based primarily on establishment sources, of mass deaths due to war together with other forms of social murder, attributable to the “U.S. Empire” over its history. Thus, he details how:

Between 1945 and 1980, major U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia killed twelve million people. Washington also shared responsibility for the 1.7 million people who died during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, and the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan led to the deaths of at least 1.5 million. U.S. support for the Guomindang in the second phase of the Chinese civil war, for the French campaign to reconquer Vietnam, for the anti-communist exterminations in Indonesia, for the Biafran war, and for the Pakistani government during the Bangladesh War implicated Washington in the deaths of almost 11 million people.

Altogether, including other millions of deaths, the United States was directly responsible or shared responsibility for the deaths in that same period of some twenty-nine million people.