as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i'll clarify that i'm talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.
an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn't rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that's already been done?
i'd really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone's thoughts
Are you talking about email jobs? Because those don't produce much carbon when done at home
scammers, speculators, rentiers, consultants, crypto, ai, marketing, propagandists, surveillance, weapons development... i feel like we could go on for an hour
ooth 'email jobs' just describe an environment work takes place in, some people in cubicle email jobs are involved in pro-social work, i assume.
My concern is that this kind of labor doesn't generate huge carbon emissions (sans ML, weapons, and commutes) and the majority of jobs that need to go are industrialized or logistics jobs that are critical. I didn't think getting rid of marketing would save much carbon.
on the contrary, liquidating marketers would net the largest decrease in hot air ever seen
emissions are half the equation tho, GDP counts these things and decoupling the idea GDP & the per capita to actual living standards is important for a degrowth conversation. no humans would hurt from the billions lost in 'value' in marketing
Western labor rarely has large emissions because most emission heavy industries have been dumped in other countries
Yeah so how do you deindustrialize those without too much harm? The vast majority of socialism in practice has involved mass industrialization to benefit the working class so how do you keep the benefits without the industry in countries like China?
You would still have industry, just not wholly reliant on fossil fuels and perpetual growth. And you'd need considerably more industry at first
That's my concern. Industry, even when electricity is clean, generates a ton of carbon.
This is a diagram of current US manufacturing production emissions
Just addressing combustion would radically reduce industrial carbon output without needing to address carbon capture for cement or green hydrogen for steel
Jesus, I thought steel and concrete were significantly worse than they are. That is a really good graph. What is most chemical production for?
Ammonia and methanol (ammonia is like, half of non-combustion emissions even though we can readily produce 'green' ammonia)
Eliminating completely useless sectors frees those people to do things that are actually beneficial to society
But they also don't produce rail, solar panels, food, housing, or clean water. They're completely bullshit jobs that exist to keep the proletariat from having the time and energy to revolt.
You're average marketer probably isn't fit to start building train tracks. Most people in white collar jobs would be unwilling to do blue collar labor and construction of all of those goods is incredibly expensive and emissions producing. A very large portion of Marxist thought is about industrialization and has been applied to China and the USSR, but when deindustrialization is needed the road is less clear.
Most people in white collar jobs could be relatively easy to transition to white collar industrial jobs, assuming they have some underlying skills.
Even the marketers would have a role in internal communications and knowledge translation.