Essays by Eric Worrall
These people teach our children: Swedish researchers Timothée Parrique sing the praises of a malicious new academic Communist ideology.
Economic growth is driving climate change – a new book proposes ‘recession communism’ as the solution
Timothée Parrique
Researcher in Ecological Economics, University of Lund
March 3, 2023 5:09 pm AEDTI am often told that recession, the plan to scale back production and consumption to reduce pressure on Earth’s ecosystems, is a hard sell. But a 36-year-old associate professor at the University of Tokyo has made a name for myself argued that “recession communism” could prevent the climate emergency from escalating.
Kohei Saito, bestselling author of Capital in the Anthropocene, is back with a new book: Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degenerate Communism. The book is dense, especially for those not well versed in Marxist terminology, who I suspect have little interest in whether Karl Marx began to worry about nature in his later years.
And yet, Saito’s way of mobilizing Marxist theory to make his justification for the “abundance of wealth in decaying communism” (the title of the last chapter of his book) is both accurate and compelling. . This is what caught my attention as an economist work on the recession: Saito’s efforts to reconcile Marxism with newer ideas around alternatives to economic growth may have made criticisms of capitalism unprecedentedly widespread.
Economic growth creates scarcity
Saito flipped the concept of economic growth. Many people think that growth makes us richer, but what if it does the opposite?
I used to think communism, with its famine, purges, and abuses, was perhaps the worst system of government that could do to its people.
Now I know better.
Before you dismiss the idea that Recession Communism is too absurd to gain traction, consider that it has the potential to mediate some of the salient political contradictions of the leftist elite. advance in politics.
We all laugh about green vegetables being Watermelons, but the Communist labor movement of the Soviet era, with its focus on industrial production and the material welfare of workers (at least according to the promotional material), fox), never had a completely happy marriage with the green movement.
You can see that tensions unfolding in Australian politics todaythe struggle between the Australian Labor Government, which wants to keep the jobs of union supporters in the coal mines, and its junior Green Party coalition partners, who want to shut down industries. mining industry that they believe contributes to climate change.
The Greens have long toyed with the idea of medieval feudalism disguised as village-scale socialismbut they failed to develop a solid connection, one that clearly inherited from the leftist ideals of the 20th century. Such a connection may have provided the green with strength. strongly vote to realize their vision.
Decline Communism might be the missing link they were looking for, the bridge that could connect young green progressives to their radical leftist union activist parents. The core claim, that economic growth is a deception that has impoverished ordinary people, is designed to appeal to people of all ages, to arouse feelings of resentment in those who believe that they do not receive a fair reward from society.
Advocates of Recession Communism claim that they are building on some of Karl Marx’s later writings, in which Marx clearly expressed frustration at the ecological damage caused by Capitalism. causes, and expressed the hope that Communism could be kinder to nature – which provides the path of succession, the ideal bridge connecting the green movement of the 21st century with the lower-class Labor movements. progress of the 20th century.
Hoping to hear more about “Communism in Recession” in the years to come, I don’t think the idea will ever go away. If the advocates of Recession Communism succeed in eliminating their reproduction of the left, if they succeed in innovating the radical left by reconciling high-level industrial activism, advance with green communism, they can become even stronger.
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