Energy Climate and Sustainability

14a: Individual vs collective action

work@mishavelthuis.nl

Mon 12 May 2025

Today

Finish degrowth

Individual vs systemic action

Overview

Finish degrowth

Recap and summarize

The unsustainable minority

Take power back from minority …

Do not push growth

Push against inequality

Does not produce wellbeing

It destroys the planet

Not just for the sake of fairness, but literally to save the planet from the unsustainable minority

… to step out of capitalism

It is the artificial scarcity (produced through primitive accumulation, and reproduced until this day) that made/makes us depend on the means of production owned by capital.

Reduce dependence on the need to sell your labour to earn the money to buy from capital.

This requires a simultaneous redistribution of resources and a reconfiguration of how we produce and consume.

Individually: build and nurture the means of production that make you more self-sufficient. (Nurture an interest in reading and forest walks over an addiction to Netflix).
Publicly: build and nurture, together the means of production that you can't build and nurture by yourself: from a public swimming pool to free, high quality public transport.

A version of the latter (publicly take back control): cooperatives.

Workers and sometimes consumers together own and run the means of production.

Socialism vs communism

Socialism

Communism

Market

Consumers spend money

Cooperatives respond to price signal

No market

Consumers do not spend money

Cooperatives respond to other cues

Socialism

There still is an open market. Consumers still decide where to spend money, try to get best product for lowest price.

Cooperatives' respond to market prices: their success (existence?) still depends on their ability to produce what the market wants, for a price that is more or less common in the market.

Still some systemic pressure to exploit nature and for workers to self-exploit? Still part of the collective action problem? Potentially addressed with more consumer-involvement in the cooperatives? See for example the Co-operative Group.

Communism

There is no open market. Consumers do not spend money in the market.

The community (?) decides (in some way) what will be produced. That is what is consumed.

Benefit: no market competition. True solution to collective action problem.

Disadvantage: as long as (undeserved?) inequality is reigned in, the market price is a very efficient way of "measuring" society's demand. To replace it with meetings, conversations, surveys etc. would be very daunting.

Degrowth
=
giving up control

Giving up the ability to help

Expecting unprecedent forgiveness?

The nazi in the mirror

"Zoals de waard is vertrouwt hij zijn gasten" (Klein: the nazi in the mirror").

The far-right supports genocide. So they are convinced that if their enemies would be in power, they would themselves be massacred.

Expecting unprecedented forgiveness

Then again: the analysis that "giving up control would be suicidal" gets more convincing, the more monstrous your behaviour.

We can only hope that the decolonial revenge will be "just", as in, targeting the people directly responsible for the violence, and requiring the most direct beneficiaries of the colonial injustice to give up unjustly acquired wealth.

But look at how Israel is (supposedly) "taking revenge" for the 7th of October.

Imagine former colonies in Africa taking revenge in a similar way.

Imagine indigenous communities in the Americas taking revenge in a similar way.

Degrowth advocates seem to be expecting a level of justness and forgiveness from the oppressed that we have never been able to organize.

I wrote a blog post about this (through a review of the movie "Coherence"): link

Degrowth in a dangerous world

Way out?

Strategies for action

Today

Thursday

Individual vs collective action

Violent vs non-violent resistance

Overview

Possible futures

Individual
vs
collective
action

Conceptual start

Responsibility

Backward looking:

For the current state of things.

Forward looking:

For what you ought to do.

Who/what is responsible
for whom/what?

By the way …

Human

Nature

Man

Woman

Colonizer

Colonized

Example #1: of how our answers matter politically:

(Slide from lecture on colonial legacies).

"Women/natives" are more "natural"

"Women/natives" are more driven by hormones, urges, reflexes

What is "natural" can be used as a tool. A tool doesn't have righs. A hammer does not have rights.

Sure, you can train a dog, and /discipline a woman or a native. But in the end it remains nature.

Some nature cannot be trained. WILD nature. This is the nature that you have to exterminate.

Men are more rational: they are aware, they reason, they add their free will, and they act: which all together gives them control.

The judgement of men is not clouded by who they are. Men are neutral, objective. The judgement of "woman and natives" on the other hand, is morphed/shaped by how they feel, their customs, their ways.

What responsibility do we have?

Marxist degrowth analysis

Screenshot is from this video (if it is slow, or does not work: YouTube).

Marx/Hickel: the system needs to change.

We need to overcome the mother of collective action problems, which requires unprecedented solidarity.

Who is going to lead this? Not the people who have never depended on solidarity to get their way. The working class has cultivated the values we need.

Also:

We need a large-scale reconfiguration of power and resources.

Power has the power to retain power.

What part of this positive feedback loop is most susceptible to "flipping"?

You cannot convince a bar of gold to switch sides. Or a tank. But you can try to win people over.

The elite is the minority. That is their main weakness.

Conclusion: the world will be saved by the working class. By coordinated action of "the poor".

Critical open questions

Discussion

Postition 1:

"Find the discipline to do the right thing as an individual".

Position 2:

"Contribute to collective action to push for systemic change"