Caracol DSA

“Full human development requires the all-around development of our capacities and powers for work and for enjoyment of our intellectual and physical potential.” — Martha E. Gimenez, 1999

“In some cases, a social group that emerges to take leadership in a society has not only to have economic and political power… they actually have to begin to conform — [Gramsci’s] word there — the society to their ideas, to win consent in that sense.” — Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci, 2023

“[This is] the central argument of degrowth: standards of living can improve without growth by redistributing and sharing wealth, doing away with artificial desires and the superfluous goods and appropriation of our time destined to the making of profit, and by shifting from valuing material goods to valuing relations. There is already enough for everyone to have a decent share – if the pie cannot grow, then it is time to share it more evenly.” — Timothée Parrique and Giorgos Kallis

“[Yet] ecosocialist degrowth… is much more than a change of property forms, it is a civilizational transformation, a new “way of life” based on values of solidarity, democracy, equaliberty, and respect for Earth… Ecosocialist degrowth can only win through a confrontation with the fossil oligarchy and the ruling classes who control political and economic power.” — Lowy, Kallis, Fernandes, and Akbulut, 2022

“The first rule of an emergency is that you do what it takes to end the emergency and get to safety.” — Naomi Klein

We are thrilled to introduce Caracol DSA, the Degrowth Ecosocialist Caucus. We have formed at a critical juncture in human history. The decade of the Green New Deal is upon us, characterized by a rapidly closing window for sufficient climate action, a resurgent Left in the U.S. and a growing eco-fascist movement globally. Our caucus is based on the idea that the Left should integrate degrowth into its politics for several important reasons, including to hit the climate targets socialists have embraced as vital political goals (Schmelzer et al., 2022; Lowy et al., 2022; Pedregal and Bordera, 2022). We believe that being vocal and explicit about the need for degrowth can help rather than hurt the socialist movement, as well as help birth the new culture we need to manage without growth. However, we realize that the dialogue between degrowth and ecosocialism is a work in progress.

Caracol DSA endorses the overall goals of the degrowth movement, as summarized below and elaborated on in our points of unity:

1. Reduce the material and energy throughput (production, consumption, and waste) of the Global North, globally wealthy individuals, and capitalist class so that ecosystems can recover; and the Global South has the ecological space to grow its energy and material use for the satisfaction of human needs.

2. Redistribute resources and wealth within and between countries, from the wealthy and capitalist classes to the working class in payment of climate reparations; to fortify societies against worsening climate impacts; to increase quality of life, well-being, health, and human flourishing through universal public services and green infrastructure; to reduce the purchasing power and consumption among the rich who are most responsible for ecological overshoot; and to shift from private luxury to public abundance and sufficiency.

3. Transition equitably from a fossil fuel-based, growth-dependent capitalist economy to a regenerative, steady-state, ecosocialist one.

4. Maximize humanity’s chances of keeping global heating within 1.5 degrees Celsius (C) — not 2C — below pre-industrial levels.

5. Increase and improve the working class’s free time to achieve greater health and human development, including better actualization of our physical, intellectual, artistic, scientific, and social potential.

6. Decolonize our growth-indoctrinated imaginaries to redefine prosperity not just in quantitative material but also qualitative terms.

Caracol DSA is thus dedicated to the following:

Conduct political education within DSA on what degrowth is and why we believe the socialist project cannot do without it.
Produce socialist analysis from a degrowth perspective.
Endorse, support, and seek candidates and proposals for DSA elections that understand and are aligned with degrowth ecosocialist principles.
Develop messaging and campaigns centering or otherwise incorporating degrowth ideas, policies, and approaches for building working-class power.

Points of Unity:

1. Degrowth is necessary to stop and reverse the planetary ecological crises that capitalism and its intrinsic dependency on endless growth have caused.

Capitalism is a political and economic world-system that derives value from the exploitation of labor and natural resources. Its dynamic of exploitation (the profit motive) drives the endless accumulation, or growth, of capital wealth by externalizing its social and ecological costs. In turn, these costs have endlessly accumulated, resulting in a planetary crisis, of which climate change is a part.

Several major trends constitute this crisis: the sixth mass extinction and biodiversity loss, reversible and irreversible destruction of life-support ecosystems, plastic and toxin accumulation in all biomass and organisms, habitat destruction due to mining and industrial agriculture, and dispossession of Indigenous land protectors from their sovereign territories, among others. We affirm what scientists have already observed: biophysical, planetary limits to economic growth exist (Steffen et al., 2015). Taking ecological pressure off humanity’s life-support ecosystems is a central goal of degrowth.

2. Caracol DSA affirms the need for a radical Green New Deal—without growth.

We endorse DSA’s Green New Deal Principles and seek to expand upon them with our work, as they omit points that are critical to addressing the climate and broader ecological crisis. Transitioning to 100% renewable energy sources and shoring up infrastructure for climate resilience and sustainability will require massive public investments of financial and material resources. However, we can reduce the material intensity of the global energy transition as much as possible through energy demand reduction and prioritizing electrified mass transit instead of private automobiles, among other tactics. Selective economic expansion to advance social and ecological goals is necessary and important to degrow toward a just, ecologically regenerative economy.

A Green New Deal without growth would primarily entail two things. On the one hand, it would entail a robust program of decommodification (of at least basic services such as nutrition, public transit, healthcare, education, and housing), undermining from its very inception the capitalist measure of value— its profit motive and concomitant growth imperative. On the other hand, it must do this while downscaling the overall material throughput in countries like the U.S., whose material footprints are over four times their global fair share.

Substantial localization is necessary from a climate mitigation perspective because it reduces energy use. We would support empowering regional and local economies to produce their own essential goods and services to the maximum extent possible. Importation of luxury items, commodities, and products regional economies cannot produce themselves within democratically established guardrails will likely be called for.

Moreover, degrowth is interested in the materiality of supply chains, unequal ecological exchange, and the social reproduction of everyday life that, as it stands, relies on immense amounts of land, energy, and materials.
The transformation to an ecologically stable society requires more than merely transforming energy systems. For example, the meat-and-monocrop food system must also be transformed to supply far more plant-based foods.

An ecosocialist food system requires that we switch to ecologically coherent forms of food cultivation, namely worker-owned agroecology and agroforestry systems.

We support ecosocialist dépense – the democratic expenditure of society’s productive surplus. Dépense answers the problem of what to do with overproduction under ecosocialist degrowth. Dépense shows how scarcity logic under capitalism is historically specific, not a universal truth (Schmelzer et al. 2022, 127).

3. Degrowth is necessary in the Global North for humanity to maximize our chances of limiting the worst effects of the climate crisis.

The scientific literature overwhelmingly fails to provide evidence for absolute decoupling of material use, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy use from economic growth. Therefore, we are aligned with the best available science in rejecting arguments that so-called “green growth” is a viable way to avert climate catastrophe. Instead we contend that we can only keep global heating at or below an increase of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels this century by degrowing the North.

Climate change is best understood as a global cataclysm in the making because it is causing fundamental, widespread, drastic, and lasting changes to Earth systems over extremely fast timescales in terms of Earth’s history. While climate change is not fully reversible, some if not all of the worst effects of it are still likely preventable (IPCC, 2022).

As degrowth ecosocialists, we center the crucial understanding that shifting economies in the Global North to run on much lower levels of energy and resource use makes it easier for humanity to decarbonize our energy systems and meet climate targets in the short time we have left.

4. Degrowth is necessary to realize global justice for all human beings and communities.

As internationalists, we stand firmly against imperialism, racial capitalism, and for decolonizing the global economy. Full decolonization requires a thorough application of equity. Contraction and convergence—where the Global North’s energy and material use contracts so that societies in the Global South can increase their energy and material use—is necessary to achieve a globally fair material foundation for human flourishing within biophysical boundaries.

We acknowledge the ways that colonial history has shaped capitalism and the international political economic order. To be effective, degrowth must be an internationalist ecosocialist project. Therefore, it must address this colonial history in its proposals and political strategies. To do this, we have to transform the international economic and financial architecture that maintains Northern power through coercion and oppression of Southern nations, peoples, and popular movements. Instruments of such oppression, including debt strangulation, sanctions, corporate domination, and political disenfranchisement must end.

A degrowth transition in the Global North must be democratic or it is not degrowth. We are committed to creating a post-growth, ecosocialist world democratically. We acknowledge that the international economy has structured uneven patterns of ecological theft from land bases in the South to the North for production of high-value goods (Dorninger et al., 2021). Second, the North has unfairly taken up more than its fair share of the “atmospheric commons” with its greenhouse gas pollution. We perforce acknowledge that our country, the United States, owes a massive ecological and climate debt to Southern countries, whose social movements have long called for climate reparations to ameliorate that debt. Degrowth locates front and center the imperative to pay this debt back in the form of grants and technological transfers, inter alia. Furthermore, global justice requires that the global economy transition from an unjust imperial mode of living to a just, post-carbon, ecologically coherent and solidary mode that facilitates human flourishing (Brand and Wissen, 2017).

Global ecological justice in the degrowth ecosocialist sense means, unequivocally, the total elimination of world poverty and electrification of all households everywhere, along with establishing other material standards for well-being. Envisioning what an equitable standard of living for every human being would look like is a prerequisite for achieving ecological justice and grasping its large-scale requirements. We believe all people have a right to a basic minimum of material goods and electricity so that they can lead the healthiest, most fulfilled life possible despite a destabilizing biosphere; these are the material requirements for human flourishing.

Two concepts we lift up from the scientific literature are decent living energy (DLE) and decent living standards (DLS) (Figure 1) (Millward-Hopkins, 2020; Rao and Min, 2017). DLE describes the minimum amount of energy needed to live well, while DLS traces the material requisites of a good life. Aspects of DLS include access to durable, modern, affordable, energy efficient and climate resilient housing; ready access to day-to-day technologies that improve well-being, including refrigeration, washing machines, and multi-modal transportation, especially electrified public transit, among other things. As Millward-Hopkins et al. (2020) elaborate, “sufficiency is far more materially generous than many” degrowth opponents assume.

5. Degrowth is ecofeminist, centering the safe reproduction of life on Earth in perpetuity.

For capitalism, reproductive labor is valued only insofar as it is exploitable in market exchange. Socialist feminism highlights that reproductive labor is never valuable in itself for capitalism. We believe that many forms of labor are intrinsically valuable and ought to be socially recognizable as such. No socially appropriate form of value is compatible with the accumulation of capital wealth. Reproductivity requires an end to the arbitrary bifurcation between reproductive, unpaid, women-dominated labor and conventional, paid, male-dominated, and privileged labor that depends on the former to exist. Degrowth valorizes care as socially necessary labor but also recognizes the extent to which care work has historically been a definitive expectation of women. Thus, whereas care work must be expanded within a regenerative political economy, it must be ungendered and equitably distributed as well.

6. Caracol DSA recognizes the roles of different forms of technology in a degrowth transition.

There can be no question whether modern technologies will be deployed in service of a degrowth transition. Instead, the question is which ones and at what scales. While one and the same technology can be used for various ends, different technologies are nevertheless conditioned by, and condition further, different historical trajectories—a fact that socialists cannot stand to ignore. The status quo whereby tech capitalists innovate first and let society deal with the consequences second has produced a particular image of modern technology that is both unsustainable and oppressive to the working class. One timely example of this is greenwashing by corporations and captured governments promoting false solutions in the form of growth-enabling technologies, including forms of carbon capture and storage (CCS) such as direct air capture (DACCS) and bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) (CIEL, 2021). Thus, we call for democratic control over technological research, development, manufacturing, and rollout. Technologies ought to be contextually appropriate. Factors of appropriateness include use value relative to social necessity, energy demand and pollution for production relative to maintenance, and durability relative to recyclability, among others.
We support a philosophy of convivial technology, that is, technologies that facilitate interpersonal connection, can be easily replicated by different people under different conditions, and can be managed democratically rather than technocratically (Vetter, 2018). Furthermore, we do not oppose but embrace certain high technologies, especially those essential for modern material comforts and a high quality of life. Some such examples are the Internet, laptops, mobile phones, high-speed rail, GPS systems and satellites, refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines, rechargeable batteries, and so forth. Nevertheless, they must be developed to satisfy requirements of appropriateness, as above. For example, until viable alternatives to high-speed air travel are available, we support the limited use of conventional jets for emergency/humanitarian aid, political uses, and equitably rationed overseas travel. See our fact sheet on technology for more context here. We recognize the critical role of technology in empowering Global Southern countries to meet their needs, and call for extensive technology transfers and releasing of intellectual property.

7. Caracol DSA acknowledges that—concomitant with the Left’s immediate task of building a multiracial, mass, working class movement to transform capitalism—the Left must help birth a new, post-carbon cultural hegemony as soon as possible.

We must dare to imagine and agitate for the post-carbon, post-capitalist systems we want now, embarking on political education projects while implementing DSA’s theory of change to build a mass movement for a radical Green New Deal (Aronoff et al. 2019, Ajl 2021, DSA Ecosocialist Working Group 2019). The Left’s tasks are to transform the political economy for socio-ecological justice and help the multiracial working class understand and desire the new society we must urgently build, in order to transform the U.S. way of life so that it values personal well-being and high quality public services rather than the pursuit of private wealth. We need to pattern lower carbon forms of consumption and lifeways, prioritizing well-being for all through public provisioning. We can do this in large part by creating landscapes of public luxury, robust climate resilient infrastructure, and universal public services. The Left must spearhead a counter-hegemonic cultural transformation based on cooperation and commoning, respecting planetary boundaries, and promoting sustainable and fair allocation of resources within countries and between the global North and South.
We recognize that degrowth is a “big tent” movement of movements and that ideological diversity is one of its strengths. Several notable movements fall under the umbrella of degrowth, including ecofeminism, Buen vivir/Sumak Kawsay, ecoswaraj/radical ecological democracy, ubuntu, social ecology, the rights of nature, right to repair, solidarity economies, anti-imperialism, and increasingly, ecosocialism. Degrowth is utopian precisely because the crises we face are so overwhelming that they demand a utopian response, a clarion call for a better world.

8. A synthesis of ecosocialism and degrowth is necessary to create a just and sustainable world.

Any future political economic system, including an ecosocialist one, cannot bring human activities to within sustainable planetary boundaries in perpetuity unless it purges endless economic growth as an economic policy goal and achieves physical equilibrium with its life-support ecosystems (LSEs). Degrowth combines an empirically sound body of theory with a policy program for a sustainable future ecosocialist economy that is not reliant on the growth imperative. However, degrowth lacks a robust theory of class struggle and socio-political change. Therefore, securing a livable planet for the future generations necessitates integrating degrowth and ecosocialism. In short, each without the other is sure to fail.
Degrowth is ecosocialist and centers ecological justice. The degrowth ecosocialism we espouse is class struggle-oriented because we know that sustainable degrowth is only possible by defeating the capitalist class with organized people power. Moreover, as degrowth ecosocialists we seek to abolish unjust systems of economic violence, incarceration, and the systemic racism inherent in racial capitalism. We affirm the need to replace institutions and concepts that legitimize overproduction and wealth hoarding for the rich with egalitarian, ecosocialist institutions and ecologically coherent social relations that can operate without economic growth.

Degrowth is part of a necessary response to capitalism’s unresolvable internal contradictions, some of which have breached Earth’s ecological limits. Politicizing our social metabolism is necessary at a time of impending, global ecological collapse and climate breakdown. Degrowth is materialist in its alignment with the eco-Marxist analysis of the biosphere. Ecological Marxists understand that the planet’s biophysical boundaries constitute humanity’s ultimate set of material conditions, with their physical constraints and ecological dynamics.

In sum, degrowth uniquely makes possible an ecologically coherent and socially just ecosocialist economy. Such an economy would: be oriented around use values instead of exchange values; be based on democratic ecological planning; organize production through worker and community ownership and management; regulate consumption to prioritize and equalize sufficiency emissions; democratically allocate surplus; and protect and expand access to all types of commons. It would also be smaller in its total energy and material consumption than the current capitalist economy. Crucially, to the degree that ecomodernist ideologies and narratives of so-called “green growth” ignore or run counter to the necessary reduction of economic throughput in accordance with planetary boundaries, they must be rejected as incompatible with the degrowth ecosocialist project we seek to further.

These Points of Unity may be amended through the process specified in Article IX of our Caucus by-laws.