It’s likely that not even a single person on the planet consciously desires for any harm to come to it. Despite what we’re told, this includes even capitalists, a familiar target of climate-change alarmists, whose entire premise is that the planet is being killed by these chief growth-producers and the innovations they provide.
Such slander comes from the same eco-religious lefties who type “death to capitalists” on their so-called planet-killing laptops and smartphones while flying squadrons of air-polluting private jets to Davos for climate conferences.
Amid the hypocrisy, globalists now seem to be taking a hard turn left, abandoning calls for arriving at so-called earth-friendly solutions in favor of all-out Marxist austerity measures — an Orwellian power grab that’s newly and boldly being marketed as “degrowth communism.”
The term is cropping up in all forms of media, including Current Affairs, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Just last month, The Atlantic joined the cacophony with its feature, “Is America Ready for Degrowth Communism?” that questioned the movement’s feasibility, even amid its powerful momentum.
But they could have simply asked, Is America ready for less freedom?
Degrowth communism is merely the latest iteration of what was previously called the “degrowth movement” in the 1970s — only this time it looks to Marxism for inspiration. Its premise advocates for a leveling-off of gross domestic products for most developed nations by way of slowing consumerist-fueling industrial production.
More productive countries boasting robust GDPs are called upon to slow production and output, mandated to throttle downward to match that of mid-tier countries. Conversely, low-tier countries are urged to expand production, mandated to throttle up output, increasing their GDPs to meet those of mid-tier countries. Proponents insist this ideology is the best, most equitable approach to save what they insist is a dying planet. But a goal of global GDP parity and chaining the free market is really just the typical Marxist regressive race to the bottom.
Those who rightly debunk degrowth ideology point out that capitalism is the only economic system that has been proven to lift all boats, from dinghies to yachts. And they list its incredible inventions and solutions, including cancer treatments, improved neonatal care, the automobile, airplanes computers, phones and even indoor plumbing, which have all had significant impact on humanity’s overall health and welfare.
Further, they point to a time when degrowthers actually had their way during the global COVID-19 lockdowns that included mass closings of so-called “nonessential” businesses.” That period didn’t exactly work out so well: stalled economies, decreased GDPs and reduced innovation. As crazy as it sounds, that’s the kind of economy – stunted and government-regulated — that degrowth communism alleges the planet urgently requires for survival.
Critics of the degrowth ideology correctly summarize this global COVID nightmare as “degrowthism in action.”
But like every Marxist who ever explained away communism’s atrocities by saying “This time it will be different,” degrowth proponents responded to the criticism — as demonstrated in this CNBC video called Degrowth: Is It Time To Live Better With Less? — by insisting that true degrowth would be different “because it is a planned contraction that aims to be equitable.” The video’s host even refers to restrictive degrowth legislation already enacted in Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand as “green shoots of progress.”
Naturally, the usual suspects are pushing degrowth communism: the ever-power-hungry Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and his acolytes around the world in government and media.
Schwab believes caps on resource consumption and the introduction of new indicators of progress, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI, as opposed to the GDP, are absolutes in order to strike the right balance and save humanity from ecological collapse.
To clarify, the GPI “accounts for figures such as pollution and natural asset depletion.”
Anthropologist Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics wrote about the Anthropocene — a proposed geological epoch describing the time humans have had an impact on Earth, from our earliest times up to the present — for the World Economic Forum in a 2018 article.
“If we are going to have a decent shot of surviving the Anthropocene, rich countries will have to scale down their consumption, and fast,” Hickel wrote.
“This may sound scary. People worry that cutting consumption by 75% – the amount needed for rich countries to operate at the safe boundary – means poverty and misery. But it doesn’t have to be so. We have been told that high levels of consumption are necessary for high levels of human development, but it’s simply not true.”
For Hickel, the right of most people to produce or consume should be limited, and he has particular targets in mind for such restrictions. “It’s not humans per se who are causing our crisis, it’s a particular subset of humans,” Schwab continued. “It’s those who live in societies — mostly in North America and Western Europe — that see material consumption as a paramount virtue, and who insist that their economies deliver more of it each year, on an exponential curve, regardless of the consequences.”
Kelsey Piper of Vox Media, however, pointed out one of the many problems with Hickel’s argument — a huge one — in an article that asked, “Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy?” Piper suggested that under degrowth communism, it wouldn’t be the rich countries that would be producing the most carbon emissions over the next few decades, but the developing nations.
“Already, developing nations account for 63 percent of emissions, and they’re expected to account for even more as they develop further and as the rich world decarbonizes,” she wrote.
To that point, Hickel also conveniently failed to mention that a country like America cutting consumption by 75 percent would not only result in fewer creature comforts, but the need for far fewer workers as production is dramatically reduced. The resulting mass joblessness would lead to widespread poverty and — you guessed it — government dependence.
Still, the degrowthers insist these drastic and immediate measures must be taken by 2050 to avert their much-propagandized climate calamity. That’s the year the WEF insists net-zero carbon emissions need to be reached — or else.
The Biden administration, which has plotted to declare a national climate crisis, has fully embraced degrowth communism. That’s what’s behind all the recently proposed legislation aimed at regulating Americans back into the dark ages.
Take, for example, Biden’s war on household appliances (gas stoves, air conditioners, thermostats, etc.) and the great push to demonize gas-powered vehicles while subsidizing expensive electric vehicles that have hardly lived up to their billing as better for the environment.
The WEF and Biden have Kohei Saito to thank for making the ever-present underlying Marxist part of the degrowth movement more obvious by proudly rebranding it as degrowth communism. Saito is an avowed Marxist philosopher, author and professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo.
In 2020, at the height of the global pandemic, Saito released a book called “Capital in the Anthropocene” that became a bestseller in his home country of Japan. It then became an international bestseller after the English-language version was released this year under the title “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.”
Like all Marxists before him, Saito blames inequity and inequality on capitalism and its drive to grow and generate wealth.
He insists the climate crisis is another facet of the capitalist problem. Thus, if we stop producing so-called planet-destroying stuff, people can’t buy the stuff, and the planet will stop suffering the consequences and eventually heal.
He believes people will heal, too, and be far happier with their simpler “slowed down” lifestyles. All we need do to bring about this utopia is stop consuming and agree to government-imposed draconian regulations and enforcement.
Saito no doubt arrived at his philosophy by way of his left-wing alma mater, Wesleyan University, followed by time spent in Germany studying the works of Karl Marx, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto.” Marx further substantiated in Saito’s mind how the planet’s woes could be pinned on capitalism.
Saito believes that Marx had it right when he said catastrophe can come from disrupting the delicate balance between humans and nature. Called the “metabolic rift,” this theory blames human interactions with nature for creating “an irreparable disruption that threatens all life,” as Wesleyan Magazine described it.
The notion is as naïve now as it was in Marx’s day — and wildly dangerous in application, as it provides power-hungry globalists with the cover of a feel-good green movement. It’s easy to demand that everyone else do without their stoves and air conditioners, be confined to 15-minute cities and eat the bugs while the world’s authoritarian elites enjoy their luxuries and move about freely and protected.
It’s worth noting that even while Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochel championed Biden’s campaign against gas stoves as part of his degrowth initiatives, both were roasted last year after being caught in front of their own expensive gas ranges.
For her part, degrowth supporter and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi spent $500,000 between October 2020 and February 2022 on private jet travel, according to the New York Post.
All of that makes clear a basic tenet of communism: There are rules for thee, but not for me.
If the degrowth communists have their way, it’s safe to assume that objections or outright defiance of the authoritarian dictates will lead to punishment. After all, all laws require enforcement — especially draconian ones. That’s the truth Saito, Schwab, Biden and their ilk conveniently fail to mention, and what the unsuspecting eco-religious greenies may not yet realize.
In sum, degrowth communism is an old and dangerous ideology that’s been adapted and rebranded to take advantage of the green movement’s momentum. But it’s nothing more than an authoritarian power grab that’s based on pseudo-science that seeks to pass itself off as an urgent and moral necessity.
Tragically, it’s expanding rapidly via relentless and sophisticated global propaganda.
Our gas stoves, therefore, represent far more than just an efficient and convenient way to make dinner. They represent freedom. And that means we must defiantly hold onto them for as long as we can — for this generation and the next.
