Larry Alan Busk “Degrowth and the future of capitalism”

Busk, Larry Alan 2023. Degrowth and the future of capitalism: A critical review of recent literature. Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 2(1), article 10. https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/emancipations/vol2/iss1/10

When it comes to diagnosing the problem, the primary cause is the treadmill of production necessitated by market competition; when solutions are offered, the nature of the problem shifts to how democratic and participatory the market economy is. The what of production suddenly shifts to the who. That a market democracy would equate to less material throughput than the present market oligarchy is a proposition that is never defended or explained. Schmelzer et al. claim that worker cooperatives and smaller companies would “not be forced to accumulate and compete by investors and shareholders” (219), but this either needs clarification or is false. Such organizations would still have investors and shareholders, albeit in a diffused egalitarian form, and so could still choose to accumulate if they decided—and why assume that they would not? In any case, as long as they still face the possibility of being undersold by competing firms, there is still the incentive—rather, the necessity—of producing and selling as much as possible as cheaply as possible. All three books make allusions to heavy government incentives and regulations to push businesses toward sustainable production (Hickel 249, Schmelzer et al. 2202-221, Stuart et al. 63). But if the volume and kind of material throughput of each given worker cooperative will have to be strictly limited and delimited, what meaning can ‘competition’ really have? And what is the significance of ‘worker control’? (6-7)

After decades of liberal individualist triumphalism, it seems, even an idea as radical as degrowth must pay lip service to the broad anti-statism that more properly belongs to the socioeconomic system ostensibly being challenged (see Stuart et al. 51). Schmelzer et al. in particular double down on appeals to democracy and autonomy (215-224), even as they admit that “certain industries” will have to be “expropriated” (243). (7)

The key point for the degrowth literature (not to mention ecological Marxists) is not that capitalist firms have a callous personal disregard for the environment, but that a compound rate of growth is materially incompatible with reducing greenhouse gas emissions or preserving biodiversity. (9)

Even in the best degrowth literature, however, the logical consequence of this diagnosis—the specter of a non-market economic system—is avoided in favor of a pivot to economic democracy which, however attractive a possibility, has little chance of addressing the core problem identified by the degrowth movement itself. We must then ask if the hope of a habitable climate future depends not only on going beyond neoliberalism, inequality, and class division, but on going beyond markets, liberalism, and democracy as well. (14)

What does this mean for the project of ecological Marxism? As long as it refuses to confront the critical problem of material throughput, the ecosocialist imaginary remains as idealistic as the models of “sustainable capitalism” offered by Henderson and Dondi. Ecological Marxism cannot simply dismiss the degrowth movement (as some have recently done),8 but must incorporate its material concepts (in terms of brute physical stuff) into a materialist analysis (in terms of the struggle over resources and means of production). Unlike the degrowth movement, however, it must recognize what would actually be necessary to effect a reduced throughput, i.e., centralized economic planning and control. (14)

Irene Skovgaard Smith & Alison Hirst “Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time”

Skovgaard-Smith, Irene; Hirst, Alison 2023. Marcel Mauss and the magical agents of our time. Journal of Classical Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X2311517

As Hanegraaff (2016) argues, we cannot assume that certain modes of thought and action are magical per se, while others are not. Instead, we must ask how the extraordinary powers that imbue symbolic acts with social efficacy are collectively imagined and recognised in specific social contexts. (2)

To explore the contemporary relevance of Mauss’s conception of magic, we focus in this article on collective imaginings of supernormal human powers for ‘value-creation’ and solving problems to fulfil the neoliberal promise of contemporary capitalism. (2)

Capitalist technologies ‘generate their own magicalities’ (Pels, 2003: 31) and many aspects of business, finance, advertising, cultural production and consumption ‘operate according to magical premises’ (Moeran and Malefyt, 2018: 1). Yet, social theory has tended to approach magic as modernity’s antithesis, as Pels (2003) notes, calling instead for examination of the magic of modernity itself. (3)

Mauss approached magic as a social phenomenon and held that there are, in every age and every kind of society, collective ideas that endow specialised agents and their symbolic actions with a special kind of power and efficacy to transform, whether for good or evil. The key proposition is that the powers of magicians and the social efficacy of their symbolic acts are derived from collective beliefs. What Mauss was suggesting, although not systematically developing, is that magic is socially constructed and as such is real in its effects. (3)

Although Mauss was not consistent in breaking with the evolutionary model, he took important steps towards liberating magic as an analytical category from its association with ‘primitive’ beliefs in the supernatural and challenging the reified distinction between magic, religion and science. Mauss also did not see magic as necessarily separate from technical means, suggesting instead that many activities are simultaneously both technical and magical, and that ‘the greater part of the human race has always had difficulty in distinguishing techniques from rites’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 24). Magic contributed to the growth of techniques, as Mauss showed, and was similarly closely linked with the development of astronomical, physical and natural sciences in different parts of the world (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (4)

The aim was to show that no matter how magic is constituted in a specific society, it involves the same basic elements and ‘is on the whole everywhere the same’ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 19). Mauss defined these sociological elements as actions (symbolic acts/rites), officers (the agents who perform them) and representations (the ideas and beliefs involved). These elements are not inherently magical, but they become so as and when they are given a meaning that attributes them with out-ofthe-ordinary efficacy. No act, agent or idea is in itself magical, and any act, agent or idea can become so if attributed with ‘a dose of strangeness’ (Moscovici, 2014: 764). ‘The slightest return of the ordinary, on the other hand, tends to weaken that power’ as Moscovici (2014: 764) inferred. (5)

„The magician. . . is a kind of official, vested by society with authority, and it is incumbent upon the society to believe in him . . . He assumes the spirit of his function, the gravity of a magistrate. He is serious about it because he is taken seriously, and he is taken seriously because people have need of him. Thus, what a magician believes and what the public believes are two sides of the same coin“ (Mauss, 2001 [1950]: 119). (6)

Mythologies of ‘transformational’, ‘visionary’ and ‘charismatic’ superhero leaders abound in business, politics, professional sports, culture, and other domains. Variations of such representations are also evident in the ‘Great Man’ theories of business leadership literature (for critical reviews, see Ford et al., 2022; Robinson and Kerr, 2009), New Age inspired leadership training (Heelas, 1999), and media and political discourse. In the context of cultural organisations for instance, Nisbett and Walmsley (2016) show how arts managers, policymakers, and audiences idealise popular leaders as ‘clever’, ‘charismatic’, and ‘enthusiastic’ and exalt the possibilities and extraordinary effects of their leadership. Such tales are not simply exercises of the imagination or an expression of fantasies. Their constant repetition turns them into social facts as objects of collective confirmation (Mauss, 2001 [1950]). (8)

Related imaginaries of the powers of personhood are embedded in mythologies of creative potential and genius. Ekman (2015) for instance shows how ‘talent’ and ‘passion’ are perceived to enable creative knowledge workers to innovate and create ‘endless wealth out of nothing’, in the same way as ‘alchemy promises to transform lead into gold’ (p. 589). (8)

The figure of the expert consultant is increasingly important in shaping social life in profound ways through calculative practices, as Prince (2014) shows in the context of the cultural sector. Stein (2017) explores how management consultants perform the ‘abstract labour’ of ‘selling speed’, namely capitalist acceleration, altering corporate life and social relations using representations that refer to ‘entities and activities that lay far beyond’ the concretely observable (p. 5). (9)

In a Maussian perspective, magical action cannot however be reduced to deception or manipulation at the hand of skilled ‘mana workers’ such as marketeers or consultants. Magic is collectively produced to imagine a transformative social efficacy that exceeds and overflows, to embody that ‘something more’ at the heart of any given social order, which is ‘both instrumentally and symbolically indispensable’, as Mazzarella (2017: 4) writes. Notions of extraordinary powers attributed to specialised agents are generic and vague, representing an ‘indeterminate value of signification’ to use Lévi-Strauss’s (2002 [1950]: 55) expression, and it is by virtue of this quality that they can operate despite the contradictions inherent in them. (10)

Leo Singer “Time out of Joint”

Singer, Leo (2022, March 8). Time out of Joint: Capitalism takes a dysrhythmic toll on nature’s clocks and human lives [Online]. The Sociological Review Magazine. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.imat5896

There are two opposing concepts of desynchronisation. According to sociologist Michael Young, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas around rhythm as an eternal return prompted attempts by his followers to appropriate and defend the cyclical, natural rhythms, while emancipating or fleeing from the linear, mechanical ordering of time. On the other hand, Karl Marx saw capitalist production and nature as separate, but brought together and mediated by the labour process. Marx’s solution was a society of associated producers who would govern our rhythmic metabolism with nature in a rational way.

The concept of dysrhythmia (from the Greek, meaning bad or difficult rhythm) was proposed in 2020 by geographers Elspeth Oppermann, Gordon Walker and Matt Brearley to describe potentially disruptive rhythms acting within larger, polyrhythmic wholes. Dysrhythmia expresses latency and duration, which sets it apart from Lefebvre’s concept of arrhythmia, a sudden state of rhythmic break-up.

Automata never sleep, but workers do. The dysrhythmic tension inherent in this polyrhythmia (which today manifests itself in just-in-time production and the gig economy) arises out of the biological aspects of labour power. While the algorithmic chain of command carries capital’s tendency to push gig workers from the day over into the night and back again, the biological limits and responses of human bodies are well known. According to researchers such as Nor Amira Syahira Mohd Azmi, desynchronisation of our circadian rhythm can lead to a range of health problems, such as cancers, metabolic, cardio-vascular, psychological and inflammatory diseases.

It is the idea that since the birth of industrial capitalism, an invariant feature of modernity has been the contradictory coexistence of two major master clocks (or Zeitgebers, as they are known in chronobiology) – the Earth’s cycle around its axis on the one hand and the rhythm of the movement of capital on the other.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen & Jens Bjering “Ecology, capitalism and waste”

Frantzen, Mikkel Krause; Bjering, Jens 2020. Ecology, capitalism and waste: From hyperobject to hyperabject. Theory, Culture & Society 37(6): 87–109.

We want to suggest that calling global warming a hyperobject, for instance, risks obfuscating what is undoubtedly the most pressing problem today, while also rendering any question of responsibility and agency impossible to begin with. (88)

Tentatively, the hyperabject can be defined as a planetary infrastructure of waste. What defines the hyperabject is not only extension but inertness and the clogging of economic and ecological circulations produced by this inertness. […] we are not only dealing with or using the hyperabject as a name for the concrete object(s) – the ships – but with a global infrastructure of capitalist production and circulation, pertaining to the oil industry in the form of barrels that used to be on board the ships, the polluting effects of the ships’ past trajectories across the oceans, etc. (89)

Our point, contra the rapid extension of agency found in these schools of thought, is, again, that the hyperabject not only has no agency but is nothing but lack of agency – the dumbness of the decommissioned ship, the eternity of a scrap of plastic – and that this non-agential particularity can and should be referred back to specific historical conditions and thoroughly human, capitalist enterprises. (90)

While in the latter’s [Kristeva’s] illuminating book, the abject is precisely that which can and will react with other phenomena through natural processes of biodegradation (shit turning to dirt, dead bodies decomposing, etc.), the hyperabject borders on the unrecyclable and has no other qualities than its own stubborn inertness. And while humans have always shat and died, humans have not always produced hyperabjects, which means that the hyperabject is historical through and through. (90)

Our general argument is, in other words, that the hyperabject has a desublimating effect on the hyperobject, literally bringing it down to earth and reinserting it in history and into a proper political realm. (90)

So: critique of Kant and his correlationist descendants; claim of trans-historical onto-epistemological democracy; quasi-scientific style brimming with lists and factoids – this is speculative realism and its subdivisions in a reduced and schematic but, we believe, accurate nutshell. (96)

[…] capitalism and the waste, garbage and toxins it spawns are to be seen in connection with an abjected subject’s violent return to the self, even, or especially, when the same subject’s sense of self is on the brink of destruction. (98)

The hyperabject cannot be recycled, it simply eludes the cycle of recycling, while the other waste we experience daily partakes in a huge circulation of objects that are never pure waste but exist on a finely tuned continuum of commodification. The soda can is recycled to build airplanes, the cardboard box turned into toilet paper, our faeces burned as biofuel, etc. (99)

Yet the hyperabject is an infrastructure produced by that which falls permanently out of the infinite chain of commodification, which means, perhaps paradoxically, that it mostly resembles Heidegger’s notion of the work of art: inert, non-productive, non-translatable, non-assimilable. The only difference – but it’s a world of difference – between van Gogh’s boots and the hyperabject is that the latter is so preternaturally inert that cannot even be fetishized. (99)

However global in scope, the hyperabject is always also local. But it is never democratic – whether we are talking about cause or effect. Within an ecological framework ‘we’ are precisely not in the same proverbial boat, nor is humankind to blame for global warming (this is why the Anthropocene is a problematic concept, in much the same way as the hyperobject is). (100)

[…] if ever we find ourselves to be part of the hyperabject, we are no longer invited to the Deleuzian, Whiteheadian or Lucretian party: we are trash, unusable, unsellable, outside any process. When dealing with waste and waste populations, it is therefore imperative to recognize that some people have already brutally been marginalized and disenfranchised and thus forced to flee their homes because of global warming. These environmental migrants are themselves part of the hyperabject, included through processes of exclusion as unrecyclable waste in the global ecosystem. (100)

‘Some Greenland natives have such high quantities of industrial chemicals in their bodies – including those used in plastics – that they can be classified as toxic waste when they die’ (Liboiron 2013: 134). When those Greenlanders die, their bodies might decompose (partaking in the constantly morphing cycles of death and rebirth, ‘the circle of life’), yet the chemicals in their bodies do not partake in any transformative or productive cycle; they merely extend the reach of the hyperabjective infrastructure, of the filling up the globe with stuff that merely fills and does nothing else. (101)

The hyperabject, then, is the limit case of capitalist animism, a ‘dead’ object in a world of vivified objects (it’s the Everest-sized mountains of garbage that Eve overflies in Wall-E). The operations and axioms of capitalist animism demand instant re-animation and re-integration through the gift of vivification, but against the hyperabject the magician’s wand is powerless: life will not come to these parts, not even as the ‘zombie’, the ‘spectral’, or the ‘undead’. The hyperabject is like a noble gas – it reacts with nothing, but it is not, as object-oriented ontologists perhaps would phrase it, ‘withdrawn’. What makes the hyperabject stand out is its inertness and nothing else. (103)

This, therefore, is the source of the hyperabject’s historicity: waste always existed, but the hyperabject did not. (103)