Moving Critique Beyond 'Moses and the Prophets'

Notes for an Ecological Political Economy of Degrowth in

Advanced Capitalism
Eric Pineault,
Sociology and Institute of environmental sciences, UQAM
Corresponding address:
Eric Pineault
Dpartement de sociologie
Universit du Qubec Montral
Case postale 8888, succursale Centre-ville
Montral (Qubec) H3C 3P8
Phone 514 987 3000 3433
Email: pineault.eric@uqam.ca

Disclosure statement : I have no potential conflict of interest

Abstract
Degrowth, as a pluralistic ensemble of both theoretical perspective and social movements, is part of a
renewal of the critique of capitalism based on the ecological contradictions of this social order. It is
engaging with other more classical approaches that have examined the ecological contradictions of
capitalism and the material conditions for a future ecologically viable postcapitalist social order.
Degrowth's approach to capitalism has been ambiguous, just as marxian ecological political economy's
relation to growth as a central structure of modernity's economic imaginary is also highly ambiguous. I
will attempt in the following exploratory essay to bridge these ambiguities. I will do so by examining
the relation of capitalism and growth through two successive political economic perspectives, a first
grounded in Marx and a second drawing on the theory of overaccumulation in advanced capitalism. I
will argue that the economic growth associated with the historical period that environmental historians
call the Great Acceleration can be best explained as the articulation of capitalist overproduction to
overconsumption, and outline some analytical tools that such an explanation can provide to those
interested in understanding the specific growth drivers of contemporary capitalism and their social and
ecological consequences. The material presented here is the fruit of a provisional synthesis in an
ongoing research effort that is being pursued by many, I hope that by highlighting points of
convergence and useful concepts from both approaches, we can move towards an Ecological Political
Economy of Growth and Degrowth.

Keywords
Capitalism, Degrowth, Overaccumulation, Economic Growth, Surplus.

Introduction
Is capitalism compelled to grow ? Is growth a necessary or contingent feature of this social formation ?
Would a socialist society face the same compulsion ? To answer the above questions one has to define
growth and then examine the growth drivers of capitalism, which implies a theory of capital
accumulation that corresponds to the institutional and social structures of contemporary economic
systems (Pineault, 2008). A common approach to these questions takes the form of a study of the
presumably invariant core of economic determinations identified by Marx that define capitalism in the
abstract. My argument is that the restatement of these economic determinations: value, surplus value,
accumulation as the compulsion to reinvest the surplus into the expanded capacity to produce more
surplus, aptly summarized in the often used Moses and the prophets quote does provide an answer
to the above questions (see for example Smith 2010), but that these answers remain too general and
abstract to be of use for the construction of a critical theory of contemporary capitalist growth from an
ecological and degrowth perspective. We need a new ecological political economy of growth to give an
answer that is both scientifically and socially relevant to the above question, and with others, I tend to
see this answer coming out of critical synthesis of the bioeconomic approach to ecological economics
and the critical political economy of advanced capitalism, in particular those theories that have focused
on the problem of over-accumulation as a structural feature of economic systems in the last century.
This approach is being developed by the Monthly Review school, John Bellamy Foster (2014) in
particular, but also by Europeans such as Alf Hornborg (2011), Andreas Malm (2016), and it will be the
focus of the second part of this short exploratory essay. I will conclude with an excursus into the
relation between socialism and growth through a specific problem, the role of the distinction between
necessity and surplus in socialist economic thought, and how degrowth and feminist economics can
contribute to a renewal of the socialist project that moves beyond the ecological and social
contradictions raised by classical socialism growth problem.

Degrowth and Capitalism, a Differentia Specifica

One of Degrowth's distinctive contributions to the ecological renewal of the critical theory of
capitalism are its philosophical roots in Castoriadis's theory of society (Muraca, 2013). A theory which
recognizes the centrality of symbolic mediations of social relations, their capacity to give form and
content to the material plane of being, considers the dialectic of the instituted and the instituting as the
locus of production and reproduction of social relations and finally in the social imaginary a lieu of
productive representation, that one can oppose to the old marxist concept of purely reflexive
representation. In Marxian parlance the symbolic is the base on which societies build their larger
institutional superstructures, and among them the capitalist economy. In a nutshell, following
Castoriadis (1975), society does not directly experience metabolic relations on a biophysical plane,
these are experienced and acted on through meaning, on a symbolic plane, the economy is the
instituted structure that mediates modern societies metabolism all the while mediating relations of
power and dominance within society. As argued by Latouche (2005), the economy was invented by
modern societies as an instituted system of social relations, and capitalism is the real and concrete form
of this abstract social category. We can and do project this symbolic construct on other societies, and it
is often useful for social research to posit that each culture and society has its economy that organizes
its metabolism and produces structures of social power, the twentieth century is marked by such

projections, which thereafter implied the imperative of development and its manifestation as growth
(Latouche 2001). But an economy is a historically contingent form of instituting metabolic relations
in society, and according to Latouche (2001) it is directly tied to the dominance of the advanced
capitalist core over the other peoples of the planet, moving beyond capitalism, in this sense means
moving beyond the institutions and categories of the economic, in particular the instituted mediation
of metabolism through the separation of a sphere of the necessary and a sphere of surplus (Freitag
2011). Where the existence of such a separation is taken for granted and is fundamental to the growth
imperative inherent to Marx's own conception of the economy, and still permeates much of the left's
vision of socialism, including variants of ecosocialism (Kallis 2015), Degrowth takes a step back and
questions the historical process that institutionalized this dichotomy and tries to imagine a postcapitalist
social order outside of this primal economic separation. It is in this very specific sense that Latouche
condemns marxisms' imprisonment in a growth imaginary, and calls for a decolonization of the
economic imaginary of the left.
These distinctive features of degrowth, all rooted in Castoradis's own complex relation to Marx and
Marxism, are probably where they will encounter resistance and critique from Marxists and
ecosocialists of marxian persuasion (Foster 2011a). They will certainly find that these theoretical
proposals hark back to pre-marxian idealism or they will consider them as part of the larger vogue of
depoliticized postmodern constructivism. And the focus of much of degrowth critique on neoliberalism
instead of capitalism, the dismissal of capitalism as 'just an idea' by a prominent panelist of the 2016
International Degrowth conference in Budapest, does show that marxian critics are on to something. On
the other hand degrowth theorists (Kallis 2015) will tend to see the marxian critique of the 'laws of
motion' of capitalism as a form of positivism and a naturalization of instituted and historically
contingent social relations, they will not accept a teleological conception of human history driven by
the development of the forces of production from a condition of scarcity to one of abundance, and
finally though sensitive to the presence in Marx's work of references to metabolism and ecological
contradictions, will consider these occurrences as very interesting side notes and digressions in an
analytical apparatus where biophysical foundations and ecological limits play no significant causal
role, though they have an important contextual role1. Again, these critics are probably on to something
also.
I will try and steer my argument between these pitfalls, hoping my answer can contribute to a needed
1

Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster have produced thorough and insightful studies of Marx's writings on ecology,
metabolism and nature, the most recent synthesis being Foster and Burkett 2016. They convincingly demonstrate the
'ecological' awareness of Marx, a sensibility that is grounded in the way he developed his materialist ontology and his
grasp of certain basic principles of biophysics that are today part of the corpus of bioeconomics. They also show that
one can be an ecologist and a marxist, that their is no inherent incompatibility between the two perspectives. Finally,
they highlight certain theoretical tools that can be found in Marx's writings and that can be useful for an ecologically
informed critique of capitalism. That being said, one must remember that developing an ecological critique of
capitalism was not Marx's project, that the systematic study of capitalism metabolic relations was not the objective of
Capital, nor of Marx's other writings and finally that Marx and Engels where men of the XIX century inquiring on the
contradictions of their times, not ours. Which also implies that they adhered to a form of progressivism which was
firmly rooted in the growth imaginary of modern society. During most of its history, twentieth century marxism
exacerbated this latter aspect of Marx's worldview. This legacy has conditioned the wariness of radical ecological
thought towards Marxism, and in this sense the research efforts of Foster and Burkett have had an immensely positive
effect, but reading ecology into Marx must not confused with the systematic development of an ecological critique of
contemporary capitalism, which is our problem, not Marx's. The development of such systematic critique can be found
in Foster 2011b.

synthesis2 of these critical theories around the project of a renewed ecological and political economy of
growth.

Growth and Accumulation in Marx's World

A commonplace point of departure and arrival of Marxian critiques of growth is to restate his 'general
formulae' of capital: M-C-M' and derive from this form a theory of the growth imperative of capitalism
as in Foster and Magdoff (2011). If one considers modern capitalism to be entirely determined by the
constraints of capital reproduction, as 'value that aspires to valorization', capital will accumulate on an
ever expanding scale and 'grow the economy'. The monetary profits that result from a given cycle of
capitalist production must be invested in a new cycle, on top of the already existing quantity of value in
motion, this valorization of the surplus3 implies the conversion of money into labour and means of
production, or variable and constant capital, in proportions that depend on historical and technical
factors. Behind the figures of variable and constant capital, we find material 'use values' that must be
extracted, used and disposed of after use, accumulation thus also implies growth of the material
throughput. In Marx's world investment is not an option, or a discretionary decision, it is an imperative
that constrains every capitalists' actions and governs the overall economy (Crotty 1993). A capitalist
that fails to invest will either loose market share to his competitors or see his productivity fall behind
that of the others, or both, and either way he will rapidly loose the economic basis of his class position.
A capitalist economy in which the investment rate grinds to a halt will see the aggregate level of profits
fall correspondingly and crisis will ensue, growth and profits are intimately intertwined in capitalism4.
The accumulation process can further be distinguished between extensive and intensive logics, each
with specific growth effects. The former refers to investment in pre-existing forms of production and
towards the production of pre-existing forms of use-values, the latter refers to an investment in
productivity enhancing means of production or the creation of new inexistent use values that must be
marketed to be sold. Both logics contribute to the expansion of the system, that is to growth. Though
intensive accumulation does have a more ambiguous growth effect, heightened productivity can imply
needing less of some throughput elements per unit of use-value produced, it introduces the possibility
of relative decoupling between the accumulation of capital and certain aspects of the throughput5, but
mostly between the volume of use values obtained and the amount of labour time expended. And thus
2

4
5

I see this synthesis as weaving together the radical biophysical approach to ecological economics, the postkaleckian
school of political economy of advanced capitalism and a general sociology of the symbolic and of institutions. The
latter approach has been built upon the work of Castoriadis, so also a cousin approach developed in Canada by Michel
Freitag (Ct and Dagenais 2002).
The surplus could also be used by capitalists for personal consumption purposes, this would imply its expenditure as
income instead of as capital. Marx's model of simple reproduction is based on such a scenario where capitalists do not
compete with one another through investment that enhances productivity, but simply reproduce the existing stock of
constant capital and of the labour force as is. This hypothetical situation though useful for the progression of Marx's
argument in Capital, does not in his mind reflect a possible self-perpetuating state of the economy given the compulsion
of competition.
For a more complex treatment, and an attempt to understand the current slow growth, high profit rate conjuncture see :
Baragar and Chernomas 2012.
It has been shown by ecological economists that the productivity gains that result from intensive accumulation are often
based on a biophysical throughput trade off, the fixed capital intensity implied on this logic of accumulation is in reality
a fossil fuel intensity, or more generally 'energy intensity'. For recent synthesis see Robert Ayres 2016 : Appendix
A: Energy in Growth Theory as well as Stern 2011 and Kummel 1989.

this form of capitalist exploitation has been celebrated as having the potential of driving the economy,
unbeknownst to each and every singular capitalist, from a general state of wealth scarcity or need, to a
utopian state of abundance, or post-scarcity. For many, it is the material pre-condition of socialism. In
the mean time, capitalists are coerced into investing in intensive accumulation by market forces that
reward more productive businesses and sanction higher cost producers.
The historical function of intensive accumulation is, for an economy's given capacity of productive
activity, to lower the amount of labour time expended to reproduce necessary use-values and thus to
raise the labour time available for the production of a surplus. Whereas the historical function of
extensive accumulation simply implies growing the surplus through the expansion of productive
activity in absolute terms, which translates into the social expansion of the system as more human
activity as labour is absorbed in a globalizing capitalist economy. The dialectic between these two
logics of accumulation are thus, if we limit ourselves to Marx's world, the drivers of growth in a
capitalist economy.
We can now return to the initial questions. Why growth? Because of the imperative of accumulation
which every capitalist faces and which through his interaction in competitive markets becomes a
collective imperative to invest the surplus. Is growth a necessary feature of capitalism ? If growth is
defined in monetary/value terms, yes. If growth stops, slows or breaks down, capitalists will be faced
with unrealized value, unsold commodities be they means of consumption or means of production
will cease to exist as bearers of exchange value and the variable and constant capital which produced
these commodities, which is actually fixed monetary profits of previous cycles - will be devalued. In
Marx's world, capitalism is a grow or die system, each singular capitalist must grow or join the ranks of
the non-capitalist classes, and the system as a whole must expand or crisis will ensue.
So growth in monetary terms is a necessary feature of this economy, with the ambiguity that there is no
formal and general theory in Marx6 of the relation between use value and biophysical throughput.
Which brings us back to are initial and prior question, what do we mean by growth ?
In Marxian terms, and following the above precisions, accumulation would mean growth as the
quantitative expansion of the economic system, more use values produced, meaning more commodified
means of production (constant capital) and more commodified means of subsistence (variable capital)
supporting a growing commodified labour force, and thus a growing population of labourers (unless
one makes the limit hypothesis of growing labour time in a fixed population), either through
demographics or through the internal or external colonization of societies by capitalist logic. It would
also mean qualitative expansion, capitalism ability to 'grow on itself' by constantly destroying given
production relations through productivity enhancing investments, which normally takes the form of a
rising ratio of constant capital to variable capital or in more common terms more machines and
better tools and materials for a given unit of labour. Another outcome is the destruction of given
consumption relations and the introduction of new use values, thus revolutionizing the subsistence
patterns of labourers. So while quantitative growth expands capitalist relations in society, qualitative
growth 'saves labour' but expands the stock of fixed capital, and most importantly draws on that which
animates this stock and enables it to absorb value producing labour: fossil fuels.
In Capital, fossil fuels are part of the ancillary materials that compose the circulating portion of
6

Again, of course, Marx acknowledges the existence and necessity of this material basis.

constant capital (as opposed to its fixed portion, the machines) and though Marx recognizes their
importance, they are not theorized in such a way that they could play a significant causal role in
accumulation. For the contemporary ecological critique of capitalist growth, this is very unsatisfying.
Serious attempts have been made to remedy this problem, and the most fruitful has been Andreas
Malm's study of fossil capital (2016). One could summarize the theoretical problem in this manner. For
Marx, large industry marks a historical breakthrough in the development of productive forces under the
aegis of capital. Before the emergence of the machine process, production rests on a unilateral process
where labourers actively engage in commodity production through the mobilization of tools and
materials, these labourers have lost their autonomy, their tasks might have been partialized in extremely
simple forms, reduced to accomplishing a single gesture, but insists Marx, it is still living labour that
uses the dead labour coalesced into means of production. The machine process typical of Large
Industry inverses this relation, its production process inverts the position of subject and object, it is now
the animated machine that absorbs or uses living labour power to perpetuate its productive process. The
condition of possibility of this inversion is the coupling of the machine to a 'prime mover', an external
source of energy independent of living labour. Marx is quick to remark that though wind and rivers are
possible sources of energy, it is fossil fuels, coal, that will become the dominant sources. As
demonstrated by Andreas Malm, the accumulation rate will thus become dependant on a burn rate, not
as an outcome of contingent consumption patterns, but as a condition of possibility of the valorization
process, capital fixed in the machine process can absorb labour time only if it is in movement, thus the
expression 'fossil capital'. Thereafter capitalist development will be inextricably tied to the extraction
and combustion of fossil fuels, growth will depend on ever greater absolute amounts of abstract energy
(Jones 2014, Pineault, 2016). It would be a mistake to understand this as a linear process, as capitalism
develops into the 20th century, the driver of abstract energy based growth will expand from the
production process to the consumptive process, households will become direct absorbers of ever greater
amounts of fossil fuel based abstract energy in the context of a new consumption norm7. The economic
construction of this consumption norm is an outcome of a new capitalist growth dynamic driven by
over-accumulation.

Growth, Acceleration and Overaccumulation in Advanced

Capitalism
Any discussion of the relationhip between capitalist accumulation, growth and the planet cannot today
escape the Anthropocene debate. Have we or not entered a geological era where we as a species
can and have transformed the global biogeochemical cycles that make the earth the ecosystem it is.
Initiated by a group of environmental and natural scientists, the Anthropocene concept was
immediately received in radically divergent ways by social scientists. Some such as Chakrabarty (2009)
have celebrated the new perspectives for cultural and social reflexion that the concept opened, others
7

This is of course an oblique reference to Fordism , I don't have the space here to engage in a thorough discussion of
this literature's relevance to degrowth. A good point of departure would be Durand, C., & Lege, P. (2013). Regulation
beyond growth. Capital & Class, 37(1), 111126. There is one sociological paradox worth mentioning. If on the one
hand the machine process implies an 'ontological' inversion between subject and object, where through fossil fuels dead
labour activates and drives living labour, this process is reinverted in the sphere of consumption, as machines present
themselves as docile tools exosomatic objects able to objectify and materialize human intentions through fossil fuel
consumption. Regulation school inspired sociology has made much of this fordist trade off between an alienating labour
process and the capacity of self realization in the consumptive process, without paying attention to the metabolic
condition of possibility and ecological consequences, an exception is Gendron 2014.

criticized the severely reductionist implications of explaining socioecological relations based on the
agency of humanity as a biological species (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). This was followed by the
attempt to find a more appropriate surrogate concept such as 'capitalocene' (Moore, 2016). As is usual
in such circumstances, the war of words was lost by the critical theorists and we are stuck with the
initial category. It is not my intention to enter into this debate here - though I would side with Ian
Angus (2015)- but I am interested in what the emergence of the Anthropocene category among
geologists signifies for our society's understanding of its ecological trajectory, whether or not we have
entered into a new geological era, whether or not it is legitimate for earth scientists to wade into the
domain of the social sciences with their categories and theories, is of secondary interest here.
The group of scientists mandated by International Commission on Stratigraphy to prepare a formal
definition of the 'Anthropocene' as a distinctive geological age8, have chosen as their 'golden spike'
1950. This signifies that from their perspective the period after 1950 is a distinct era according to the
stratigraphers in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered
by human activities9. It is highly significant that 1950 shows up in the stratigraphical record whereas
the various other golden spikes proposed: the advent of the industrial age circa 1800, the colonization
of the Americas circa 1500, the Neolithic agricultural revolution circa 10000 BC, don't, or at least not
convincingly for a stratigrapher. This dividing line has important consequences for an ecological
understanding of capitalist growth. Before 1950 'human activities' had altered ecological conditions at
various scales and environmental historians painstakingly documented these transformations, but after
the 1950's, if we are to believe the geologists, this growth process entered a new and qualitatively
distinct phase of unprecedented intensity. Environmental historians have named this phase of growth
the 'great acceleration'10. The challenge for a critical theory of capitalist driven growth is to explain this
new distinctive phase, or put another way, what are the measurements measuring ?11
The answer seems to be that the 'great acceleration' is the product of new and distinctive growth drivers
of economic activity, it is my argument that the theory of 'over-accumulation' proposes a series of
categories and an analysis of these new drivers in a social formation we can distinguish from Marx's
world as 'advanced capitalism'. There is a long tradition of analysis of the structures, institutions and
dynamics of advanced capitalism in twentieth century political economy, a common thread binds
together Veblen, Baran and Sweezy as well as Kaleckians such as Joseph Steindl and Sylos Labini
(Foster 2014), today political economists of the Monthly Review School (Foster and Burkett, 2016),
but also a much larger community of heterodox economists (Gowdy 1991, Kronenberg 2010, Lavoie
2014) and critical sociologists (Perrow 2002, Freitag 1986, Meszaros 2000, Pineault 2008) continue to
study the distinctive dynamics of this social formation through the lens of the structural problem of
'over-accumulation'. Over-accumulation is here understood not as a conjunctural/cyclical problem that
8

They must justifiy in geological terms why such an age can be distinguished from a previous era, and furthermore
define the boundary that marks the transition to this period. See the working groups web page here :
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/
9 Working group on the Anthropocene, http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/, accessed
september 27th 2016.
10 All the metrics mustered by ecological economists to highlight the form and consequences of economic growth show a
distinctive kinked shape that sets the marks a stark division between the evolution of variables before and after the
1950's, before progression is regular but slow, after progression accelerates and the slope becomes almost vertical. See
Steffen et al 2015. See also the work done by the now closed 'International Geosphere Biosphere Programme' :
http://www.igbp.net/about.4.6285fa5a12be4b403968000417.html.
11 And this is more fruitful a programme then fighting a rearguard battle to replace the anthropocene concept with another
seemingly more appropriate term.

emerges in capitalist development and nourishes the creation of speculative asset bubbles such as in
Harvey (2010). It is rather a structural feature of a monopolistic corporation dominated economy where
surplus absorption instead of surplus creation is a distinctive feature and central contradiction. I cannot
in this short essay develop a complete analysis of the growth drivers of advanced capitalism, but will
identify the categories necessary for the development of such as theory. What follows should thus be
read as a preliminary excursus towards an eventual theoretical synthesis.
This distinctive form of capital accumulation, and distinctive phase of human history could be summed
up in the following boutade:
In all historical formations of exploitation known until now, the subordinate classes are
mobilized by the dominant class in a process of surplus extraction, a surplus appropriated
and accumulated by the dominant group in forms necessary for the reproduction of its
social power and of the overall structure of exploitation.
Advanced capitalism is the first social formation that imposes on its subordinate classes not
only the constraint to produce an extractable surplus, but also the imperative that a
significant segment of these classes then absorb, consume and waste the very surplus they
produced12.
Of course this surplus is not directly absorbed by its producers, that would resemble some form of
socialist economy, it is absorbed rather through a process of mediation that reproduces the
organizational capacity to generate, extract and manage this growing surplus. The surplus is here
defined classically as that part of productive activity that can be invested, above and beyond what is
required for the current reproduction of production and consumption relations (Baran 1957), this
investment, as argued above, will take an extensive and/or an intensive form, and includes the active
shaping of consumption patterns as well as of the labour process13. The thesis that the surplus tends to
rise (Baran and Sweezy, 1966) central to over-accumulation theory is not an outcome, but a planned
objective in advanced capitalism and a source of its central economic and ecological contradictions.
Overproduction has always been a problem for capitalists, in advanced capitalism this contradiction is
displaced by the organization on a massive scale of overconsumption, and this displacement becomes
the new central growth driving mechanism in capitalism, it redefines both extensive and intensive
forms of accumulation, it results in what environmental historians and earth scientists capture as the
great acceleration and attribute to various factors (population, culture, technology) other then capital.
Overconsumption is not the result of gluttonous, gullible and narrowly materialistic spendthrift subjects
alienated by the 'sales effort' of advanced capitalism, subjects who should just try and shop less and
buy better - more ecological and ethical commodities and services, this moral conception often present
in ecological critiques of overconsumption misses the deeper social determinations that actually drive
12 For a more thorough sociological exploration of this class dynamic see Pineault 2017.
13 The surplus concept would require a much more in-depth examination then what is possible in this short essay. Surplus
here is a social concept, not a biophysical one. It refers to the accumulation of social activity mobilized as labour that
has potential productive capacity in a capitalist framework (there is no surplus in abstracto). Ex ante it ignores the
biophysical condition of possibility of this potential, but takes into account the ex post ecological effects of the
mobilization of this potential. I find Alf Hornborg's (2014) idea of unequal ecological exchange very compelling, and
thus all surplus can be analyzed as biophysical displacement on a material plane. I can't engage here in a discussion of
the implications of Hornborg's argument, I've overtly evacuated the material dimension of growth from this paper to
keep it manageable lenghtwise, but in no way does this imply that the issue is not central.

the 'acceleration process'. Overconsumption is a structural feature in advanced capitalism, it is based on

the nature of the material objects on which rests subsistence in this economy, on their churn rate, on the
abstract energy, organic and inorganic matter embedded in their production and circulation that acts as
a surplus absorption mechanism. It is also based on the radical separation, for each and every wageearner, of the productive sphere and the consumptive sphere, radical separation in the sense that each
sphere of activity is not only estranged from the other, but the relation of the individual to each of these
spheres is mediated by corporate capital in such as way as to deepen and strengthen the dependence on
this mediation, this is the social 'condition of possibility' of the accumulation by capitalist corporations
of the ' organizational capacity to generate, extract and manage a growing surplus' . Growth of
production and growth of consumption become self-finalized autonomous processes on which depends
growth of corporate capital as the capacity to organize both and to organize their separation as well as
the mediation of this separation, this is what Baran and Sweezy (1966) understood as interpenetration
of circulation and production.
Waste was the category adopted by Baran and Sweezy and others of the overa-ccumulation school to
highlight this defining aspect of the reproduction of advanced capitalism, it replaced the a-critical
category of affluence developed by Keynesian economists such as Galbraith and central to many
perspectives in ecological economics. Waste of labour, waste of productive capacity, waste of
throughput and we could add, waste of abstract energy, and waste of life and world, are the means by
which the contradiction of overproduction is displaced in advanced capitalism. Each and every
monopolistic corporation seeks to protect its highly complex fixed capital assets from devaluation, each
and every monopolistic corporation will seek to maximize the production rate of its machines and
labour processes, each and every monopolistic corporations seeks to expand its market share, and each
and every will manage the surplus by investing in the expansion or change of existing of production
and consumptive patterns, and finally each and every monopolistic corporation will also invest a
considerable portion of the surplus under its control to protect its past investments that are fixed in long
lasting tangible and intangible assets through the creation of new organizational capacity (Kronenberg
2010, Lavoie 2014).
The end point of these investments is the 'object world' of advanced capitalism, populated by what John
Bellamy Foster (2011) calls 'specifically capitalist use-values', and populated by subjects socialized to
'need' and not only 'want' these commodities, willing and able to loose vernacular skills based on the
direct mediation of production by consumption and of consumption by production (cooking, cleaning,
building, growing and caring) to acquire the skills needed in the operation of these new energy and
material intensive commodities. Objects be they simple (overwrapped microwavable popcorn) or
complex (smart phone) which are specifically designed to waste the surplus through form and life
cycle. Again, the mediation of daily life by these objects and more widely the mediation of daily life by
an 'object relation' based on disposability, newness, machine fetichism is not a question of choice, it is a
collectively produced and reproduced structure of necessity.
These are the new determinants of accumulation that organize and modulate the biophysical throughput
necessary for the reproduction of contemporary societies. The ecological and social limits of an
advanced capitalism based on overconsumption, of its accelerated growth pattern, are where the
contradictions of overproduction have been displaced. The wooden spoon I use to stir during cooking is
a use-value created according to the rules of commodity production outlined by Marx. Yes is carries
exchange value and results from a process of exploitation, but there is no need for built-in
obsolescence, the branding is discretely present, using it reproduces a set of gestures, skills and

knowledge that capitalist production absorbed as it was and had been for millennia, the spoon itself is
carved out of organic material. I've been using this same spoon for almost a decade. The smartphone I
use is an incredibly complex and delicate as well as energy and material intensive object, it is
celebrated as one of this economies highest technical achievements 14, but it was built to last 2 to 3
years at the most and will not be properly recycled (Suckling and Lee 2015), it channels an
unfathomable amount of the surplus generated by the advanced capitalist economy and also has the
potential to channel the non-labouring time I dispose of towards unimaginable but capitalistically
designed activities, activities which are themselves forms that have ever shortened spans of existence
(Horta et al. 2016, Martin 2016).
Six decades after the publication of Paul Baran's Political Economy of Growth, degrowth is
rekindling the debate concerning the material and social trajectory of advanced capitalism as growth.
I have tried to show that many of the concepts developed by the analysis of over-accumulation are
relevant and necessary to a critical understand contemporary economic growth from an ecological
perspective, more so then limiting ourselves to Marx, Moses and the Prophets. If we return to the initial
questions that motivated this essay: Is capitalism compelled to grow ? Is growth a necessary or
contingent feature of this social formation ? Would a socialist society face the same compulsion ? We
can now answer the following.
Growth of the monetary production economy is the outcome of capitalist investment in a situation of
overproduction. The intensive and extensive forms of accumulation that follow from investment
decisions are regulated by the constraint of surplus absorption which is the means through which the
contradictions of overproduction are displaced through managed overconsumption. A significant
component of this displacement has taken the form of the construction of abstract energy intensive
modes of life in the advanced capitalist core over the twentieth century (Huber 2009), the machine
principle that entirely transformed productive relations served as a model for a new overconsumption
norm. Waste either in the form of excess capacity or in the form of the design and production of
capitalist use-values is, with the ever growing colonization of social relations by commodity mediated
practices, objects and processes, the dominant means by which monopolistic corporations grow and
prosper. This materializes as the accumulation of organizational capacity of the corporate sector over
state and society. For Degrowth an important aspect of this capacity is the mediation of the separation
and unity of the development of productive and consumptive norms that culturally and socially embed
a capitalist growth constraint. The metabolic biophysical trajectory of this economy is determined by
this surplus absorption imperative. Advanced capitalism will and has faced its ecological
contradictions, but it will do so from the specific standpoint of this imperative.

Conclusion: Degrowth and Socialism, or Doing Without the

Surplus....
To conclude this short essay on growth and advanced capitalism I will mention some of the
consequences of my above argument for a theory of an ecological socialism and its relation to growth.
Though it is a truism, we must constantly remind ourselves that socialism and liberalism as
worldviews, ideologies and social alternatives, developed out of the same modern progressivist
14 Furthemore, this material and energy intensive object is the necessary biophysical mediation through which something
like immaterial accumulation or at least commodities can exist, and thus though the latter can be celebrated as
postmaterial it exists in reality only through the growing churn rate of production and consumption of the latter. The
illusion is that the fleetingness of the immaterial is not directly reflected in the fleetingness of the material.

imaginary, even though they where projects carried by opposed social classes and groups (Castoriadis,
1975). Where on the one hand with Adam Smith, we had prosperity redefined as the growth of the
division of labour tied to the expansion of the market, we had on the other hand with Marx, the
constantly developing forces of production coming up against the fetters of antiquated property
relations, both worldviews implied a form of historicity based on the tension between a 'realm of
necessity' and a 'realm of freedom', and the passage from one to another was through economic growth.
In both cases growth was built on a separation of socially productive activities between the 'necessary'
and a 'surplus', and the capacity to move from the 'realm of necessity' to the 'realm of freedom', was
through a process of economic growth that compressed the necessary and expanded the surplus. For
Smith this meant cheap corn, for Marx productivity gains in the consumer goods section of the
economy. For there to be growth, there must be a prior symbolically objective separation in social
activity between the necessary and the surplus, this separation is instituted in social relations of
production, consumption and accumulation (Latouche 2001, Freitag 1986). Socialist strategy during
most of the nineteenth and twentieth century rested on the premise that a rational harnessing and
mobilization of the surplus was possible under socialism, whereas under capitalism this surplus was
wasted irrationally (Baran 1957). Socialism could plan the surplus and direct it towards the freeing of
humanity from poverty, want and drudge.
This optimism contrasts with the more pessimistic view elaborated by ecological economists pointing
out that not only the 'affluence' enjoyed by the western wage-earning middle class could in no way be
generalized to all peoples under the current biophysical limits imposed by the planet's ecosystems and
inorganic resources (Sorman and Giampetro 2013, York et al. 2003), but that the continuation of this
mode of life was coming up against unsurpassable barriers. The socialists it would seem where not
materialistic enough and their analysis and solutions ignored the metabolic constraints engendered by
the biophysical base of our economies (Honrborg 2016).
Degrowth, being a child of both traditions can maybe point towards a solution to this conundrum. What
if, instead of focusing on the tension between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, we peer
into a realm of socioecological practice that exists outside of this duality ? What would an economic
sphere constructed outside of the tension between necessity and surplus look like ? Degrowth being
also a child of the late twentieth century can turn to a third tradition on which it is based, feminism
(McMahon 1997, Mellor 2006). There, in the theory and practice of that movement we can find a realm
of economic activity that was in practice marginalized, - invisibilized - by the institution of the duality
of necessary and surplus in the modern monetary production economy, and we can also find the
concepts and theories needed to reflect and speculate on a future society built around this realm of
reproduction (Bauhardt 2014 ). Moving beyond growth based 'surplus socialism' is probably a central
aspect of Latouche's project to decolonize the left's economic imaginary.

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