The aff’s austerity politics of degrowth centralizes revolutionary energy on a “politics of less” that neglects the working class.

In sum, both lifestyle and its offshoot, livelihood environmentalism, have emerged in the very period in which the environmental crisis has only worsened and private capital’s capacity to harm the environment has vastly expanded. Their political strategies are ineffective. We now turn to diagnose this ineffectiveness in more explicit historical and class terms.

Part 2. “Overshoot”: The Class Basis of Environmentalism

The environmental movement emerged during a period of crisis and restructuring in the 1960s and 1970s. While the politics of anticapitalism historically railed against the system’s inequality and poverty, by the 1970s commentators on both the Left and Right agreed capitalism faced a new problem: affluence. We simply had too much.

Rising consumption levels — themselves the product of working-class victories — were now a problem. In the mid-seventies, a young Alan Greenspan argued economic crisis was rooted in overly “ambitious” societal expectations: “ . . .  governments strongly committed themselves to ameliorate social inequalities at home and abroad and to achieve an ever-rising standard of living.

However morally and socially commendable, these commitments proved to be too ambitious in economic terms — both in what they actually attempted to achieve as well as in the expectations they raised among the public.”

He went on to suggest this public must adjust to new “realistic goals” and that “levels of income will be lower and the possible growth in standards of living will be reduced.” Society had “overshot” reasonable expectations. The solution? Austerity, or a politics of less.

From a much different political perspective, much of the “New Left” also turned its critique toward the problems of an affluent commodity society. Herbert Marcuse defined “pure domination . . . as administration, and in the overdeveloped areas of mass consumption, the administered life becomes the good life for the whole . . . ”

Guy Debord asserted, “The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of commodities” and that the commodity has “succeeded in totally colonizing social life.”

Critical theorist William Leiss argued consumer lifestyles did not satisfy fundamental human needs: “This setting promotes a lifestyle that is dependent upon an endlessly rising level of consumption of material goods . . . [in which] individuals are led to misinterpret the nature of their needs.”

Christopher Lasch lampooned the American “cult of consumption” and the “propaganda of commodities” in ways that directly influenced President Jimmy Carter’s so-called malaise speech in which he claimed Americans “tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Most agree the speech admonishing Americans to scale down paved the way for Reagan.

These critiques of affluence came at an odd time during a decade in which American workers were under attack. As historian Daniel Horowitz explains, “most Americans experienced [the 1970s] as one of economic pain . . . the vast majority of the nation’s families experienced diminishing real incomes.”

Polls reported the rising cost of living was the number one concern for Americans (in a decade with no shortage of concerns). In a context where the working class struggled to afford the basics of life, many on the Left and Right told them they already had too much.

As the Greenspans of the world won out, it became common sense that it was time to “do more with less”; it was time to cut — government spending, union benefits, and household budgets alike.

The critique of affluence and “overconsumption” overlapped perfectly with the rise of the ecology movement at precisely the same moment. Much like Greenspan, the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth announced a new reality to which society had to adjust: “man is forced to take account of the limited dimensions of his planet.”

Paul Ehrlich initially trumpeted the crudest Malthusianism in The Population Bomb, but a few years later, in 1974, he and his wife published The End of Affluence, arguing that the mass consumer society had overshot its material base.

One of the most influential texts was William Catton’s Overshoot, which explained how human resource use had “overshot” the carrying capacity of the Earth and mass die-off was imminent. Environmental politics rose and expanded precisely during the period of neoliberal restraint. It subscribed to what Leigh Phillips terms an “austerity ecology” — a politics of limits, reducing consumption, and lessening our impact — reduce, reuse, recycle.

It is in this context where the strange division between a “class” and “environmental” politics is rooted. A “new social movement,” environmentalism rejected a politics rooted in material interests as hopelessly linked to the hollow materialism of the commodity society.

Whereas a class politics was always about offering a vision of increased overall welfare, ecological politics became a politics of less. André Gorz developed an explicitly eco-socialist standpoint centered on less: “The only way to live better is to produce less, to consume less, to work less, to live differently.”

Over the years, class and environmental politics were constantly at odds in the “jobs versus environment” debate. It was working-class loggers who opposed the protection of the spotted owl or the restoration of salmon runs in the Columbia River.

As Richard White recounts, the bumper sticker “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” became popular among rural working-class communities.

While many working-class people were indeed hostile to elite environmentalism, this went both ways. Green politicians also blamed privileged workers for their consumption. Rudolph Baro, of the Green Party in Germany, plainly said: “The working class here [in the West] is the richest lower class in the world. . . . I must say that the metropolitan working class is the worst exploiting class in history.”

Many parts of the eco-left today still call for a politics of less. In 2018, the New Left Review published a piece by Troy Vettese that argued for austerity — or what he called “egalitarian eco-austerity” that aims to divide the less stuff equally. The article advocates, among other things, turning over half the planet to wild nature — an idea he takes from the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson — universal veganism, and an abstract plan for global per-capita energy rationing.

Perhaps the most popular strand on the eco-left today is the program of “degrowth” defined in a recent compilation as “an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materials.”

Degrowth proponents are quick to insist they don’t want this to appear like a politics of “less” because they are calling for the redistribution of less stuff more equally and calling for more immaterial resources like time, community, and relationships.

Yet, this program’s obsession with overall material throughput and GDP growth — itself a statistical construction that obscures precisely who benefits from growth in a capitalist economy — fails to take into account that the vast majority of people in capitalist societies also need more material stuff.

The experience of the neoliberal period has been defined for most by stagnant incomes/wages, increasing debt, eroding job security, and longer working hours. By centering its entire political program on the prefix of “de” and talk of “reductions,” degrowth has little capacity to speak to the needs of the vast majority of workers ravaged by neoliberal austerity.

A class analysis would always be premised on not the aggregate of society (and whether or not it needs to grow or degrow), but rather conflictual class divisions where a few have way too much and the majority have too little.