In the last week of September, degrowth scholar Jason Hickel was in town and we had the opportunity to attend and help organise several inspiring events on postgrowth with him.
When Jason was here last year, the political context was very different and looking back, it was a context we should perhaps have cherished more. Now we have a ministry of Climate and Green Growth and a right wing cabinet that seems unimpressed by Climate Change and seemingly only used social policies as a way to collect votes. We also have an EU Commissioner for clean growth (our own Wobke Hoekstra!) and a European Parliament where the far right now forms a significant block, dramatically changing power dynamics, leaving the EP without a progressive majority. We will have to fight against regressive policies on climate, immigration, equality, social issues, and LGBTQ+ rights among others.
Jason Hickel and Winne van Woerden (Oxfam) in conversation at an FNV hosted event.
Nevertheless, we had a good week, as Jason tirelessly set out his vision and research on the need to transition to post-growth and eco-social policies during a string of events. He illustrated with scientific studies that green growth is not going to cut CO2 emissions fast enough to achieve our Paris Agreement objectives of 1.5°C , let alone protect other planetary boundaries. Events included a session organised by the Ministries of Economic Affairs and of Climate and Green Growth, a public conversation with the trade union FNV and its chair Tuur Elzinga, as well as a panel discussion at the TNI 50 years festival in Pakhuis de Zwijger. Together with Oxfam we hosted a roundtable with Members of Parliament to discuss the state of red-green politics and what’s next. Here are some important ideas and takeaways from Jason’s approach and from the various conversations with civil society, ministry officials, members of parliament, trade unionists, and academics.
Our Takeaways
i) We need to build a core social economy & economy of care; this implies growing public provision and decommodifying essential goods and services.
ii) Other production can occur in the market economy, rather than just capitalist firms. Cooperatives, steward ownership, and other post-capitalist modes of organising would benefit economic democracy and distribution, and the respect of ecological limits.
ii) We can redirect finance: credit guidance could direct private finance to invest less in harmful enterprise and more in useful production, and public finance could be grown to invest in sectors that are not necessarily profitable yet essential.
Put economic insecurity and inequality at the core of green politics.
The new Dutch governments’ agenda for the transition is neoliberal: it prescribes ‘true pricing’ policies, such as carbon taxes, as the solution to reduce carbon and ecological footprints. However, carbon taxes are regressive taxation tools, meaning they reinforce socio-economic inequalities and put the ecological costs of our economies on to consumers. At a time where we are facing the cost-of-living crisis, growing inequalities and austerity, such policies are politically untenable. They are unfair and not surprisingly therefore, unpopular.The failure of the green parties in Europe to connect to the working class resides in this narrative that blames people for their individual consumption, which does not resonate with the majority who are living in precarious conditions. The cost of the transition should be largely borne by corporations and by the rich, as they also largely hold responsibility for the ecological crisis. Red-green politics should not prioritise ecological objectives over social wellbeing, no matter the urgency of the climate crisis: tackling economic insecurity and inequality should be at the heart of the green transition.
We need industrial policy.
There is a strong resistance to ‘planning’, however our existing economy is already planned: maintaining the industrial status quo takes a lot of planning by capitalist corporations, such as the fossil fuel industry. Instead of letting capital decide what should be produced and invested in, these decisions need to be made democratically. The Netherlands needs an industrial policy that lines up with social and ecological goals, and which entails a plan for each sectors’ degrowth, steady state or growth. The current growth imperative leads us to produce goods and services that have no social use without limit, and are often even harmful in one way or another. We should degrow the parts of our economy that do not foster greater social wellbeing while having a heavy carbon and ecological footprint (e.g. fossil fuels, the military, private jets, meat industry, advertising…). This would liberate labour and resources for essential sectors, which provide meaningful jobs and social services, and need to grow for the climate transition (e.g. care sectors, agroecological farming, renewable energies, …). Jason Hickel argues that this industrial policy needs to be coupled with a public job guarantee, which channels labour directly into ecological and socially useful sectors and takes away insecurity. This insecurity is holding back the transition. The job guarantee would enforce the right of all workers to dignified jobs and offer paid training in the face of the green transition, matching unmet needs with available resources.
The public provision of universal basic services is essential
We should decommodify the goods and services that are essential to social wellbeing through universal public services. Those should be extended beyond education and healthcare, to e.g. public transport, energy, water, childcare, and housing. By providing sustainable, decommodified and socially accessible alternatives, universal public services ensure greater economic equality and security, especially in the face of the transition. If we want to scale down the car industry, we will need to provide an efficient public transport alternative for all; and when we phase out fossil fuels, we need a public renewable energy infrastructure. We should secure basic needs through services that will not be subjected to economic fluctuations in order to make the climate transition possible and just.
Finance needs to be reclaimed for public goals
Private capital could be regulated by credit guidance and we can broaden our public financial tools. Our financial system cannot be completely left to be governed by private actors, which provide credit on the sole condition of profit. We will need to mobilise public spending and public investment schemes for goods and services that are not profitable, yet essential for our collective wellbeing and for the green transition e.g. universal basic services, home insulation programs. For the private sectors, we need credit guidance which regulates access to credit on financial markets, as well as investment guidance which ensures that the surplus created by our collective labour is invested in our future. If we want to justly tackle climate breakdown, borrowing for fossil fuels projects should be more expensive despite them being a profitable investment; while borrowing to insulate your house should be accessible and have a low/no interest rate, since it’s an investment for socio-ecological wellbeing.
A new narrative
A new narrative for red-green politics is needed: one which highlights that the green transition is about democratising the economy and reclaiming our productive capacities. We have the labour, technologies and material resources needed for the energy transition as well as for creating greater social wellbeing. Yet these are now controlled by capital and geared towards exponential growth. Through public policies (e.g. industrial policy, public job guarantees, UBS) and public finance (e.g. public investment banks, credit guidance) we can reclaim our productive capacities to meet our social and ecological needs. This way we can expand our core social economy and the decommodified space in our societies and economies. The market can also be reclaimed through post-capitalist modes of production such as steward ownership, association and cooperatives.
For all this, political education is crucial, to re-politicize the public sphere, civil society and economic enterprises, and to foster collective learning and action in the form of long-lasting public projects and social movements.