Climate Change, Capitalism and Degrowth Trajectories to a Global Steady-State Economy

Abstract

Climate change (CC) is one of the major and most encompassing threats in the world today. While the facts and high-consensus predictions among natural scientists are increasingly well-known, the understanding of CC as a socio-ecological issue is much less clear and uncontroversial. This paper summarizes the available climate science expertise and then discusses the genesis of CC as a socio-ecological issue highlighting its parallel development with capitalism. It moves on to review institutional approaches to study the link between capitalist diversity and greenhouse gas emissions and outlines future research directions with emphasis on a possible reconciliation of Marxian and “degrowth” thought. Due to the lacking evidence for absolute decoupling of economic growth, material resource use and carbon emissions it is argued that all societies, whether socialist or capitalist, will need to deprioritize economic growth as policy goal in the course of the twenty-first century. International critical thought should be dedicated towards analyzing the structural challenges and opportunities in building a global steady-state economy as well as associated post-growth societies.

Keywords:

• climate change
• capitalism
• steady-state economy
• degrowth
• post-growth society

Notes on Contributor

Max Koch is a professor in social policy at Lund University, Sweden. An on-going theme of his research has been the ways in which political and economic restructuring are reflected in the social structure with an emphasis on welfare and employment relations and in comparative perspective. More recently, he has started to combine these research interests with issues of ecological sustainability, particularly climate change, sustainable welfare and post-growth societies.

Notes

¹ The IPCC scenarios consider potential “technological solutions” such as carbon-sequestration as well as a possible future expansion of the use of renewable energy sources.

² See Boyer (2005) and Koch (2006) for regulation theoretical approaches.

³ On the one hand, Lenin scathingly characterized Taylorism as “a combination of the subtle brutality of bourgeois exploitation”; yet, on the other hand, he praised the “greatest scientific achievements [to date] in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the working out of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control” (Lenin 1947, 327).

⁴ Hughes (2004) demonstrates that the Soviet Union's embracement of Fordism and Taylorism went so far that American experts were imported and American engineering firms were commissioned to build parts of the new industrial infrastructure.