Reflections on 'Beyond Growth' | Frankly #31
from Nate Hagens, Great Simplification Podcast -- & a question to Nate from James
Video / audio:
Reflections on 'Beyond Growth' | Frankly #31 - YouTube ← Click here for YouTube Video.
Episode description:
On this Frankly, Nate reflects on the Beyond Growth Conference held at the European Parliament, including the stunning public acknowledgement by EU President that a growth model based on fossil fuels is now obsolete. In the context of this growing and relevant conversation, Nate unpacks what the degrowth movement is getting right, but also what is missing from the conversation. Is it possible to purposely navigate from our current system to one with lower energy and material wealth? How does a large and growing global debt overhang impact this possibility? Is a transfer of wealth between nations feasible or even desirable based on realistic outcomes? In any case, as to the inevitability of a post-growth world, the degrowth conversation needs to be expanded. It’s the primary movement mapping out what a desirable destination might look like as we move through a Great Simplification.
James R. Martin’s question to Nate Hagens:
Hey, Nate!
I know you love the phrase, “bend, don’t break” as a way to describe succinctly your preferred pathway into a more desirable future. But surely you must realize by now that the system dynamics for the capitalist-industrial-technological-consumerist economy was built in such a way that “bending” isn’t really an option for those who created, own, control and continue to maintain it? In other words, I’m saying that bending, rather than breaking, is not an option it (the Megamachine) will entertain or pursue. And this is why it is rendering the world — economically, socially, politically and ecologically — an ever more fragile (break-tending) system. Right?
My view is that the globalized luxury economy, described here — Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy - resilience — is both the good news and the bad news of our present situation. It’s bad news because it can’t continue much longer and is enormously “break-prone”.
This is good news (only just barely) because if we can shift our politics from a centripetal (concentrative) to a centrifugal (distributive) direction of movement (these designating basic power dynamics) we can bend without breaking. But the key to what I’m saying is that doing so would put an end to the luxury-dependent mode of economy, which is the present global growth economy of capitalist-industrial-technological-consumerism. (We have to analyze this in a radically holistic context to make sense of my claim.)
To hint at what I’m getting at here, you’d probably have to take what Chris Smaje (among a few others) has been saying rather seriously—, and have a look into it. He’s the author of A Small Farm Future (book and blog). He’s basically saying that in some not-too-distant future — whether by bending or by breaking, vast numbers of humans will have to return to a way of life which centers on what I call a “needs based economy” rather than a “wants based (or ‘luxury’) economy. To do so, many or most who would be ejected by the old mode of economy will require land access for the purposes of setting up a subsistence based, and needs based, means of access to livelihood.
Obviously, I think we should build the Small Farm Future well ahead of its catastrophic necessity. (Right?)
I’m attempting to hint at something here, which is to say that we will soon have vastly (many millions) more people needing access to a needs-based economy as the wants / luxury-based economy either bends or breaks. I’m brazen enough to say it will almost certainly bend or break very soon, and that it would be ever so much better if we choose which it will be and act accordingly insofar as politics goes. And by “politics” I simply mean “decision making in groups” — and I certainly do not constrain “groups” to those which are constrained by the pseudo-democratic institutions of municipalities, counties, states, nations, etc. When bends tend toward break, the people will arrange their own affairs, like it or not.
Like yourself, I like to center economic thinking on the biophysical, which has real limits. But the present mode of politics — guided by deluded fools and the otherwise ignorant and deranged — has no interest in bending in this direction. This means we’re in a break-prone system—a very fragile one at that.
Your presentation in this video doesn’t quite fully acknowledge the near certainty of a near term break, or a refusal to bend, on the part of “the political class”. So I’d like you to get ahold of Chris Smaje and talk with him about what we might do about this fragility and risk. How are we to begin to bend — despite what “the political class” has in store for us?
Surely you must know the Megamachine is bent on destruction—breaking rather than bending? The Megamachine doesn’t give a flying fork about us — right? The “political class” is the mindless, mechanical instrument of breaking sh*t. That’s what it does.
Let’s begin to bend before they do, eh?
Hey James, there is definitely a crew forming around the world you envisage. I include Douglas Rushkoff and Simon Michaux, as of course Vandana Shiva, the matriarch of the outfit, who Nate has interviewed. That interview was revealing and I can see your point that there is a very fertile prospect to the cross pollinating of these perspectives.
We are working up a plan under the aegis of what we call inter-sufficiency. Physically about 200 or so acres with a care home at its centre, unretirement homes, about 20 families each with an acre and warehouse style living for around 60 young people - about 150 in all. We looking at about 30 businesses all providing for each other the means of happy life based on the 3 Fs of permaculture, food, fibre, fuel (we're interested in the fibre and textile farming) and to which we're adding the 4th (and possibly most important!) F, festival!!!
We'll send you spread sheet if your interested!
I didn't understand a lot of this, the principles that supposedly prove degrowth won't work. But--I want to put in another vote for Hagens interviewing Smaje.