Assumes freedom is tied to wealth – only socialism raises overall freedom

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

Degrowth is incompatible with personal freedom

This point is developed in 8 lines, which gives you a fair assessment of its depth (all of Terzi’s critiques span a few paragraphs at best), but let us play with it nonetheless. “Ecosocialism is incompatible with personal freedom […] and a strong, intrusive, paternalistic, and possibility illiberal government would be required to make it operational” (p. 70). It is “a model of simple living imposed top down” (p. 21).

I would be curious to hear Terzi’s definition of freedom (to read mine, see The political economy of degrowth, pp. 252-259). It doesn’t take a sociologist to realise that power – and therefore freedom – is relational. As Max Weber writes, “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.” I have power over someone if I can get them to act or think something they would not otherwise do. If I have a lot of money and you don’t, I can get you to do something you would not otherwise do, like clean my house or cut down a forest. If I have a lot of wealth, I lead businesses (and sometime governments) in doing something they would not otherwise do, like take the risk of burning 18,000 cows alive or cut taxes for the wealthiest.

The problem is that freedom today is too strongly dependent on wealth and income. Certain freedoms are auctioned through purchasing power, giving a minority of the population disproportionate access rights to scarce resources. For example, the 10% richest individuals on Earth (only 780 million people) have access to 48% of the world carbon budget. If anything, it should be the opposite: whatever we have left of burnable fossil energy should be made available in priority to these whose needs remain unmet, namely the poorest half of humanity (3.9 billion people) who currently only access 12% of global emissions. The personal freedom to travel the world on a private jet, emitting more than a thousand tons of CO2eq per year is achieved at the expense of someone else not being able to access their fair share of the global carbon budget. In the zero-sum game of ecological economics, the freedom for someone to emit more is the unfreedom for someone else to do so.

Let us not here fall into false dilemmas again. Freedom is always socially framed. Even the most deregulated forms of capitalism would not tolerate heroin, murder, and child pornography. Regardless of my desires, I am denied certain freedoms who are politically considered harmful to others. Ecosocialists defend the right for species and ecosystems not to be degraded, protecting them from ecocide (a crime that might soon become condemnable under EU law), not only for their intrinsic sake, but also protecting other humans whose livelihood depends on them (as in the case of ensuring an equitable split of the remaining carbon budget). This doesn’t mean an absolute loss of freedom but simply a redefinition of access rights. High-emitters will lose certain consumption rights while low-emitters will gain new ones; our overall freedom to use natural resources may go down, but our overall freedom to live in an unpolluted environment will go up.