ACFM - ACFM Trip 53: Growth

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Keir Starmer claims that growth is the only cure for a country in decline. But why is it the central obsession of modern capitalist economies? And can we think our way out of it before our planet runs out of resources? Nadia, Keir and Jem offer their weird-left take on growth, degrowth, radical abundance, ecomodernism […]

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird, and I'm joined, and I'm joined as well, and I'm joined as usual by my very dear friend. Nadia Idle. Hello. And my other very dear friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing growth. So why are we discussing growth? Is it in the news or something?

Well, for one thing, the Labour government for the past year has made its claim that it's delivering economic growth. It's central legitimating proposition. Their entire political project revolves around the idea that if they can create enough economic growth, they'll be able to deliver improvements to services out of tax receipts without having to significantly re-engineer the tax system in such a way to have an actually redistributive effect,

which was, of course, the new labour model. And it's obviously totally inappropriate to Britain in 2025, but that's one reason we're talking about growth. And then the whole concept of growth of economic growth, growth there's like the central aim of the of economic policy in a modern capitalist economies we're thinking about there but there's all these other ways in which the idea of growth or concept of growth function in our culture and in ways that are related to that or different from that so there's the idea of personal growth is really important we want to

think about the ways in which debates around degrowth as it's called have become really central Radical Economics. So we want to think about the way which these things sort of circulate and relate to each other, don't they? But initially this was Nadia's idea because she wanted to talk specifically about growing, actually physically growing stuff, like really, not metaphorically, actually. So Nadia, why don't you tell us about that for a minute? Okay, so to clarify on that, This was actually Rupert Alcott's idea in Bristol and Bath. Hello, Ruper. He's a grower.

I'm a grower. And we did a consciousness-raising workshop in Bath and Bristol last year. And many amongst us were growers. And so it almost felt like the discussion that we were having over the day-long workshop was there was some kind of synergy between conversations around growing as a practical exercise and an activity. people did and also like senses of mental health and community, etc. But then when we were preparing for the show, we decided that there was so much to talk about like physically growing and gardening that we would actually push that into its own microdose at the end. And it's from that that we have the discussion around, well, why don't we talk about economic growth as well as you point

out, Jeremy, with everything that you talked about as a really important subject to chat about because of all the reasons you said. I would add on to all of the interesting points that you raised, Jeremy. What I'm interested around like growth as a general subject point or concept is the kind of assumed positive value that we give to it. So whether we're talking about economics, like growing is good or with personal growth, like growing is good. And this got me thinking about like what happens if we kind of interrogate the opposite. So what happens if we think about, you know, stagnation or we think about stopping or we think about, in a sense, like conserving or holding back, like whether it comes, whether we're talking about this on a

personal psychological sense or like in a social sense, but also economically. And obviously we're going to talk about degrowth and we talk about degrowth. Degrowth doesn't have that kind of quote unquote negative connotation that something like stagnation or kind of like stopping or holding back does. kind of interested in what happens when these concepts interact with us kind of psychologically and how they play out in culture, but also I think specifically the economic stuff, like what are these models, how do they interact with capitalism, but also I think like what the limits, but also like some of the positive aspects of growth when we talk

about it in terms of, you know, like the quote-unquote personal, quote, sorry, personal growth industry. Like, what does that, how does that interface with left politics and what would we want to borrow from those models and what would we leave behind? And then obviously, also, I think you mentioned this as well, Jeremy, but like, like, where is this coming from, this, these assumptions around growth and that, even that language in culture. So interrogating some of those things, I think, will make for an interesting podcast episode. I hope. Kier, what about you? When we talk about growth and we think about economic growth, obviously that's applying some sort of natural metaphor to a social system. It's a relatively recent

trends to talk about economics in terms of growth. You know, what do we mean by growth? We normally mean rising GDP, gross domestic products. We're going to have to get into that. What are those statistics? How have those statistics taken on a life of their own? And just to give you an anecdote of how they've taken on a life of their own into a sort of like semi-religious sort of positioning society, when Gem was talking about Rachel Reeves and this mission to produce growth, etc. You know, one of the stories that got circulated that she went into a meeting of Labor Party backbenchers chanting, growth, growth, growth, growth.

Absolutely preposterous image, right? But there's, and Gem's right, like, there's a reason why, why government are desperate to get growth, is because without some notion of like a growing economy, then rising living standards become a sort of zero-sum game, if you like, you know what I mean? All politics becomes distributional. It's like if somebody's living standards are going up, somebody else's are going down, the sort of period people look to, as an alternative than that, there have been various periods for the history of capitalism.

The period people look to is like the post-war settlement, that sort of Keynesian settlement in which, you could have rising living standards without encroaching on profitability of capitalism, so without sort of restricting investment, if those living standards, you know, that rising living standards, if that growth comes out of rising productivity so that it's more being made by the same amount of workers. That was a sort of settlement that was created in the post-war period, and the unions had a really big role in that. They were the ones who were trying to negotiate rising productivity to rising wages, etc., that sort of idea. And they're desperate,

especially this government, is desperate to have a non-distributional politics. They're desperate not to have to take on the enormously rich element of society, basically, who hold an incredible amount of power. I think you're right about stagnation as well, Nadia. I think we're going to have to talk about that because one of the problems, particularly evidence since 2008, particularly evident in a country such as the UK, is that countries have found it very hard to get the levels of growth that we saw in the post-war period. In fact, they haven't found that they've got levels of growth to put it to the standard of the post-war period.

In fact, you know, we're suffering through lots of people make this analysis, and I'd probably agree with them that we're suffering from a period of secular stagnation, long-term, declining a rates of growth, and that's feeding through into like, you know, declining living standards or perception of declining living standards, etc. So we need to get into all of that stuff as well. And just the other thing we obviously need to talk. about is this, you know, if we think about growth as a natural thing, you just tend a little bit, tend the economy a little bit, like you're a garden, a tender, and a plant, and it will grow and

bloom. Of course, that's not how it works, right? It's not that the economy grows and then dies off in the winter and grows again. You know, we're talking about compound growth. And so if capitalism wants to get something like 3% growth every year, that means every eight years, the size of the economy doubles. That means by the end of the century, the size of the global economy will be eight times larger than the global economy now. And of course, if that is like, if that is eight times the amount of materials and energy needed to go through that, that seems pretty pretty impossible. And so like, it's this contradiction of infinite growth on a finite planet is one of the slogan. We've got, so growth is this huge thing we can talk about in all sorts of

different ways, I think. Before we get into that in any more detail, let's just do the parish notices, of course, you've got the newsletter. Why didn't you subscribe to that? Go to Navarra.media forward slash ACFM newsletter or little titbits and extra pieces from the ACFM crew. There's the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Of course, we want a five-star review. You can even leave some rave reviews and suggest topics that we could tackle on ACFM. And lastly, of course, you can support ACFM materially by supporting our host Navarra Media, just go to navara.media forward slash support. I believe 1,500 new supporters have signed up to support Navarra over the last few weeks,

so why don't you join in with that? Okay, an absolutely classic seminal statement of protest against anti-ecological industrialisation. They pave paradise and put up a parking lot. This is the famous chorus line. This is Joni Mitchell, big yellow taxi. They paid paradise, put up a parking lot with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paid paradise, put up a parking lot.

I think we should talk a bit about the history of this idea of economic growth and what is meant by the term and why it's so important because I think we framed why it's so important and it's important to understand that really what we've never had in a capitalist country really is a government that was actually willing to redistribute out wealth and income resources outside the context of very steeply rising profits, which meant that those redistributed measures were basically acceptable to the rich and to capitalists.

So what's happened in the post-war period, there is real reduction of inequality. Like the rich do get poorer in relation to poor people. But in relation to how rich they were in the previous decades, they were still getting richer. And they were still getting richer quite fast because there was a very steep growth rate in places like Britain and the States. in the period from 19, really from the beginning of World War II, really, up until the crisis of the early 70s. But what's meant by growth there, I mean, we can talk about the specific ways in which it's measured, but basically what is meant is profits, it's corporate profits. That's what's really meant by growth. Of course, everybody will probably know there's this,

there's this standard measure of how you account for, like how much growth is going on in an economy at one time and it's the increase in what's called the gross domestic product, the GDP. And GDP is measured by really just counting all various kinds of activity that people engage in, basically activity in which money changes hands. And somehow adding it all up and saying, well, that measures all the economic activity. And I think, I mean, Kear, you probably better to explain this than I am. But as I understand it, it was Cousnets. Simon Cusnets was the American an economist who first coined the term in the 30s. But Kuznetz himself right from the beginning always said,

look, this is an arbitrary measure of sort of economic activity. He himself was really explicit. This is not like a measure of well-being. It doesn't even really tell you how efficient the economy is or how well it's developing. It's a really crude measure and should be understood as to like one data point. But then in the post-wall period,

it really came to be sort of fetishized as that the measure of how well industrial policy was doing, basically. Yeah, no, yeah, it's true, yeah. Well, the other important thing to put in that story is that does mean that this idea of GDP and growth being a measure of GDP, how much that the economic activity as measured in the monetary value of what's produced in a particular area, say a country over a year or something like that, that is the aim of government, etc. You know, that doesn't really get taken up until the sort of like, yeah, the Bretton-Woods era,

or the post-war era. But the important thing to add to that is that, like, that idea of, like, using GDP as a measure of a government's worth, increasing GDP is a measure of a government's worth. In some ways, it arose in a Cold War period when the Soviet Union also took on this idea of economic growth, GDP as legitimizing the way to legitimize the government, is what I'm trying to say.

But that makes it a really recent thing, you know, for such a fetishized thing. Sorry, Jim. Well, it is, but it's also, it's important to keep that in mind because indeed the Marxist tradition also has the idea of the development of the productive forces, the idea that there is some general expansion of economic capacity, which is sort of measurable, which is really central to understanding the way in which societies develop. And in that sense, you know, Marx is drawing really from the same

sources as economists in the 30s who developed the concept of GDP and they're all looking back to people like Adam Smith really who are really trying to understand at the end of the 18th century like well what is it this going on like first in Britain before anywhere else in the world really what is it this going on there that isn't quite going on anywhere else which means that well there's all this stuff that wasn't there before all this stuff being brawl from a brawl from colonies people can understand that but there's also all this stuff being made and all this stuff being bought and sold that just didn't really exist before.

I mean, when I stuff, I mean, like, just basic commodities, like, you know, industrially produced textiles, buttons, gloves, you know, food stuffs, you know, carriages, just all the sort of material culture of, like, early, modern, through to Victorian life. And so the people are trying to get their heads around, like, where is all this stuff coming from? And in a way, it seems to be like an objective measure

of the success of a society. Because, I mean, the other thing that's happening at the end of the 18th century, actually, is people are also, they're looking back and trying to make sense of the previous kind of thousand years or so, and they're sort of becoming aware of the fact that, like, if you look into the historical records, you look at the archaeology, which is starting to emerge by the end of the 18th century, you can look back at much earlier periods, like the height of the Roman Empire and say, oh, they had loads of stuff. They had more stuff than anyone else had for the next thousand years, and now suddenly we've got all this stuff. So this idea that what it meant to have a successful society was you have all this stuff and therefore what you need to be able to do is figure out how do you create the conditions for a society to have loads stuff. You know, that's all ways of kind of addressing all those questions, isn't it? Sure. And I think we need to think about like how this works psychologically with this concept of production. Because if you even think about produce or you think about like agriculture or you think about like agriculture or you. think about, you know, collecting, you know, hunting and gathering, like the more, the better because you need to build up those reserves. The interesting bit is how that becomes translated

into the accumulation of wealth, which of course is not the same as accumulating, you know, foodstuffs, because preserving foodstuffs is not happening on an industrial scale, right? And so there becomes a fundamental change in the way society is organized when the technology enables you to preserve stuff in a certain way, but then once you think about it in terms of capital, then it blows into a completely different dimension, which is very different to going, we want a good harvest. Of course we want more produce. Of course we want more growth. There is a point at which it tips over and it starts to mean something completely different under capitalism. It might be worth going back to GDP and like some of the criticisms of GDP.

And we could start by the person who actually developed GDP, as Jim said. Simon Cousnets was very critical. He said, like, you can't measure welfare that way. But his critiques were, like, partly it was like GDP can't measure the distributional stuff. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, if GDP is all going to the rich, then that is not an increase of welfare for the average person, right?

And then he says, you know, the reverse of that is, you know, an increase in GDP doesn't measure the intensity and the unpleasantness of the effort going into earning an income, he says, right? You know, you can have horrendous working conditions and living conditions and GDP can still rise, right? So that's one way into that, you know, we could develop that, couldn't we, right? Of like the intensity and unpleasantness of, you know, the environmental impacts of rising GDP. So GDP won't include the detrimental effects of producing of rising GDP, right? That would be thought of as an externality, a cost or a benefit, which isn't included in market

prices, therefore, is not going to be reflected in GDP. So that's one of the things it can't take into account, one of the reasons why it's not a good measure of general welfare. The other famous one, of course, is that it doesn't include voluntary work or housework or things which don't have a monetary value. Some of those things, they try to estimate them. For instance, if you live in your own house, there's some estimate of like the money you save, etc. goes into it, which makes it, you know, quite an inaccurate statistic, in fact. The famous sort of like economist joke, and all economists jokes you have to do your little inverted comments because none of them are funny, you know, is basically, if a man marries his housekeeper, his cleaner,

the GDP of the country declines because she's no longer getting a wage for that, right? So all of that housework, all of that stuff we talked about, a social reproduction, of course, all of the stuff that's not wage, doesn't get included. And some estimates, just to show how much that distorts the figure, some estimates of housework or household work, is that it's roughly about 30% of measured GDP. GDP would be 30% bigger if housework was involved in it. And then you've got other stuff such as like voluntary work or these sorts of things. These are the famous sorts of critiques of GDP. But then the other question is like, okay, so if GDP isn't a measure of, isn't a good measure of welfare than other measurements, etc. And people talk about

trying to measure happiness, you know, this famous paradox in economics called the Eastallin paradox. And it's after Richard Eastallin, who does this research in the 1970s, where he's trying to match up GDP, rising go-semestic product, rising GDP and rising incomes linked to self-declarations of happiness. And like self-declarations of happiness is all sorts of, you know, It's not going to be a very accurate estimation, but like what he says to that is that rising GDP does correlate with rising self-decorations of happiness, or increasing self-decorations of happiness, but just up to a certain point, basically, a certain point of, you know, minimum material needs being met. And after that, it delinks, right? So incomes and GDP can go up,

but happiness, self-decurations of happiness doesn't go up. and aside all of the all of the caution you need to have both around the measure of GDP and perhaps a more subjective measure of like of happiness you know that indicates that perhaps that you know the consumption that's taking place you know that might be driven by something else basically it might be driven by by you know status consumption that sort of stuff so that you know we're not measuring we're not increasing our happiness by by having more stuff in fact if everybody's income is going up at the same time. If yours, you're looking around, you think, well, I've got more stuff, but everybody else has got more stuff. So, you know, I'm not that happy. It's one of the,

one of the other things that people introduce around this concept of GDP. You know, is there another measure? And, you know, what do the correlation between these other measures sort of tell us about what's going on with consumption and growth and that sort of stuff? Right. Today, we are playing tracks that have the themes of growth or growing or gardens in their titles because we're talking about the idea of growth and growing today. We're going to be doing a microdose about gardening. Let's hear the first track ever played on BBC Radio 1. This is from 1967, I think. This is the move flowers in the rain. Let a rose is scattered all around.

The time was still approaching for I can stand here anymore. So there he goes upon my eye to cloud. I'm just sitting watching flowers in the way, feel the power of the way, making the garden road. I'm just sitting watching flowers in the way, feel the power of the way. Let's hear a really recent piece of experimental jazz from the United States. from the United States on the immortal, the fantastic, the globe-besriding international anthem records. This is Alabaster de Plume. That was my garden. that was not recycling

there was my garden I think we should think a bit more than about what's at stake in specifically the term growth like referring to this stuff because obviously as we've already alluded to that has its roots in the horticulture and agriculture being the sources for the metaphors that people draw on

and the idea of the economy and the industrial economy gets come to be thought of in a way which is basically analogous to a plant growing based economy basically and that is because obviously agriculture is the main source, the main means by which essential stuff gets produced

for thousands of years and then like in the early modern period like in the 17th century very early thinkers about ideas of economic development really try to put forward the idea that somehow the whole concept of property like legitimate property rights is connected to the act of cultivating land

this is John Locke's like notorious justification for colonialism and slavery basically that if you find a bit of land out there lying around outside and you just hunt on it and pick stuff, like you don't have any moral claim to it. But if you start cultivating it and turning it into agricultural land,

that gives you a moral claim on it. So that's why it's okay to genocide and expropriate or the indigenous hunter-gatherers in North America. According to John Locke, the father of liberalism. So this idea of like cultivation and growing is like somehow an essential human activity and a sort of source of legitimate property actually is really tied to that history of colonialism as well

to a certain extent. But it's also in tied to the whole history of agriculture in many parts of the world. And the logic for appropriation. You know, I think that's just really important to start unpick the assumed logic and the assumed good behind some of these concepts because it is taken for granted

when we come to the 20th and the 21st century. And of course, there is no reason why this needs to be taken for granted. And so, like, it's really important to interrogate the logic behind it, because it is really interesting, this idea, as you said, Jeremy, that, like, you know, sharing, like having kind of a symbiotic relationship with nature is not good enough. That's, in a way, a waste, which is almost an inversion of what actually happens in the natural world. Because, of course, when you grow crops and they get too old, they die and go into the earth. They don't start growing exponentially at like, you know,

cumulative, producing cumulative growth and profit. That is not how the natural world works. And yet we've created, not we, but, you know, capitalists have created this kind of, this conception, which sits in a lot of people's, you know, assumed logic of how this stuff needs to work to create healthful, dignified lives, which is, of course, what we're trying to get to, when, of course, what it is really about is about greed. Yeah, it's not even about wealth,

and I think it's important to make that distinction. It's not even about wealth, because we can have a discussion around wealth and what wealth is and, you know, what wealth can be in an equitable way. But this is about growth specifically being an end in itself. So it is really important to have this discussion about where this comes from. Just going back to John Locke as well. I mean, notoriously, he's got this, like, really infantilizing conception of Native Americans.

I don't know you wouldn't have called it that, of course. They're like sort of children, so that's why, you know, they can't be left with this land because they can't develop that land. And it's like development is the other way in which we talk about. Economic development is the other way in which we sort of talk about this, isn't it? It's another sort of form of talking about growth. I think economic development is probably more linked to, you know, increasing the productive capacities or something like that than GDP is,

which is slightly to the side of that. But development as well is one of those, you know, it's got a similar thing, similar sort of like natural conception as growth. Do you know what I mean? Development means you move along a predetermined path of development. And so we still use that phrase of developed and developing countries, even though we might have noticed by now that, you know,

that the post-colonial so-called developing countries, most of them just haven't developed, basically, because it got a subordinate place in a global economy. That raises a really interesting set of philosophical questions, though, because the concept of the developing country and the concept of economic development has partly been mobilised over the past few decades as a way in which people in countries that were mostly former colonies,

or they were highly subjugated by the imperial system like China, have made a claim on the global community or a claim on their own right to organise their economies in the name of development. I mean, this is even during China, it's really central to the Chinese government's conception of their whole political project is they're asserting that China is a developing country.

Like even though it has a massively successful economy, it's a developing economy, it should be judged as a developing economy, it should be allowed to behave like a developing economy. And so the idea of development as sort of a right and as something from which, you know, neo-colonialism tries to exclude countries or which it tries to deprive them of. Like it's been an important basis for making certain kinds of moral claims

and certain kind of political claims and political projects. And then so there's that side of things. But the other side of things is, indeed, the recognition by anthropologists, by some historians, what have you, that, well, to some extent, there's obviously something quite arbitrary about the whole, a whole assumption that what all people want is to live in an urbanised society with like sanitation systems and industrial manufacturing that maybe a lot of people would just be happy and kind of living like living as a nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Pacific Northwest in

North America or something like that and I mean it's something we come back to on the show before really it's sort of the quite it's the agriculture question it's like was agriculture just a big mistake like should we just not have done it Shouldn't have even gone down that route of creating territory in a division of labour, because it's just been, like, deleterious. The position taken by Marx and Engels, the position taken by communist, it may well have been, but that horse-bolted like thousands of years ago. So we're not going to go back to conditions which would allow the planet Earth to support

and to gather a populations, not without some terrible apocalyptic depopulation event. on a global scale. So the only way we're ever going to get to the sort of quality of life that we like to imagine care-free hunter-gatherers in resource-rich environments as possibly having is through an intensive process of development, actually, but also development organized along socialist lines at the same time. I mean, one of the great historic claims of Marxism, which we don't tend to talk about as much these days a lot of the time, is the idea that, well, the reason for socialism, the thing that would make socialism both inevitable and necessary and that would morally legitimise it was the fact that capitalism itself ultimately could not generate the

level of development that socialism would eventually be able to. I mean, here, we talked about this a bit in our microdose about the Communist Manifesto, but here you get into some real tensions or paradoxes within Marxist theory and within different readings of Marxist's own writings. such that, well, on some readings of Marx and Engels's writing, really the story of human history and even prehistory is a story of the development of productive forces. The story according to which people come up with new technologies, new ways of producing and distributing things, which are more efficient and more productive than the ones that supersede them. And you get these periodic moments of historic crisis when the way in which society is organized, its institutions,

its cultural norms, just aren't appropriate to the leading edge of the productive forces. And that's really why you get revolutions. You get revolutions because somehow the new, more productive and dynamic society is trying to burst out from the shell of the old one. And that is arguably, and many critics have argued,

well, that is a view of human history which is quite different from the view which says all history is a history of class struggle. And that really it's the struggle between different social groups for access to resources and to, you know, to ways of organ, and it's a struggle between different ways of organising things representing different sets of material interests, which really drives history along. I mean, I think, you know, I think, as lots of people have suggested, you can, you can sort of make those different theories of history work

together to a certain extent. But, you know, it's a criticism that people have been making since the late 19th century, that at least one version of that Marxist theory of history seems to be quite teleological, as you were alluding to you, Keir, and, well, both of you were actually, it sort of implied that there is, there's one path of development the societies ought to go through, and it goes through these different stages, and the stage after capitalism is going to be socialism, and it's going to be socialism, and because socialism is ultimately going to be more productive, more efficient, and allow for more continuous growth than capitalism will because capitalism is inefficient because too much of the surplus

that it produces really gets wasted on profits rather than being properly kind of redeployed for the benefit of the whole species. So it's a really interesting, and I think it is, it is a really sort of interesting issue to think about. And it is something that has, it's something that has come back a little bit in debates around the relationship between Marxism and ecology, for example. poor. So there's a particular strand of kind of developmentalists or modernist, pro-industrial Marxism, which does want to hang on to this idea that, look, the point of Marxism and the point, the point of socialism is actually to build a society which does all

the productive growing stuff that capitalism does, but does it better. It doesn't just do it more fairly. It doesn't just redistribute stuff in a more efficient way. It actually produces more stuff more dynamically. And then there's an ecological critique of that that says, well, you know, actually we can't just keep producing more stuff, like whether by socialist means or capitalism means if we keep producing more stuff, we're going to keep burning up resources and we're going to mess the planet up. And then there's people trying to argue actually, well, Marx never meant that. Marx was always an eco-sophilist. He didn't mean we just should keep producing more and more commodities. He obviously envisaged a society, which would be in some sense

post-materialist because people's needs would be met by societies. a whole, so they wouldn't have to keep accumulating wealth and commodities just to have their basic material needs met. And then there's other people saying, well, he may have meant that, but he didn't say that. So, and these debates have got quite fractious recently between advocates, so broadly speaking, advocates of a sort of ecological perspective on economics who have rallied around the concept of degrowth, the idea that actually what we need is to move towards an economy which isn't growing, even though it might still be improving people's material conditions of life and people's happiness. And people who see that as a sort

of anti-Marxian, anti-communist perspective, which can never really be popular with people, because it can only appear to most people as if it's advocating for some sort of post-industrial austerity. I fully understand the debates. I'm never quite sure if I think that people are just, if they're actually having a debate, if they're really understanding each other's positions or really disagreeing, like, the people who are having those arguments. I was just going to say, like, based on, like, whether people think they're in the Oxford debating society

when they're making arguments around economics, like whether it is actually based on the material reality of the 21st century or not. And it's not just climate change that needs to be taken into consideration. It's like, you know, like, what are you trying to achieve here? And I think for people who are kind of trying to make the argument that like socialism is productive. It's like I don't understand like what you're trying to make that argument for when the reality of like waste and climate change and like the apocalypse is round

the corner, that is not going to progress a model that is going to get us anywhere. I don't understand the function of it. Like I can understand, you know, the, I can understand the exercise, but not the function. Yeah, I mean, it's a very fractious debate and probably, and it's just quite stale. But there's a theorist from New York. A.J. Chowdray wrote a book The Exhausted of the Earth. He calls this sort of ecomodonist or perhaps left-productionist version of Marxism.

He calls it climate Lysenkoism, which is quite harsh. You've got to explain that. Well, Lysenko was like a theorist of evolution or the idea, in fact, anti-evolutionary theorists, in fact, that perhaps drafts have got long necks because they're always stretching it, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's a calumny against Lysenko. The debate, Lysenko is a Soviet geneticist, and all he said that the strict Darwinians reject

is that acquired characteristics might be heritable, which now is not even considered by all geneticists to be necessarily totally mad, actually. But it was a strict principle of Darwinian genetics all through the 20th century, that no, no, no, it couldn't possibly, be the case, that acquired characteristics, that characteristics that if you stretch your neck during your lifetime,

that can't possibly mean that your giraffe kids might have longer next two. It can only be the result of random mutate, it can only be the fact that you will have more kids than people with shorter necks because you get more food that can produce that outcome. But, and that was considered a really strict principle of Darwinian, genetics all through the 20th century and Lysenko was considered this crank but my understanding is that's not not all geneticists now think that's definitely true they think well actually in the same way that we understand like neuroplasticity in the way in which external factors are forever changing people's

brain chemistry like it might be that are the sort of sub-molecular level or the molecular level there are aspects of genetic material and cellular life that are kind of changing during some lifetime in response to circumstances, and it might be possible for those to be passed on. It's a minority view, but it's not considered like a hundred percent totally crank view that it was all through the 20th century. I didn't expect to be visited by Lysenko Gilbert today, but look, Lysenko was also, let's be clear, he was a Soviet working under, you know, working during the era of dialectical materialism and, and Comrade Stalin. And it was regarding, Lisenkoism was regarded as like a socialist perspective, a more socialistic perspective than classical Darwinism, because it recognized the direct consequences of the potentially direct consequences on evolution of social and exterior circumstances, rather than seeing it is this totally randomised process.

So, yeah, indeed, Tanky Gilbert. Tankie Gilbert does indeed, like, does indeed have some sympathy with Comrade Lysenko. I mean, in this metaphor of climate Lysenkoism, it's meant to represent the idea that, you know... He's a total crank. It's not that he's a total crank, but it's like Lysenkoism became this sort of like valorized form of environmentalism, not because of its scientific efficacy or efficacy at the time, but because it fitted with the political necessity of what Stalinism wanted to do at that moment, basically. That's the metaphor that Chowdre is trying to apply, you know,

so it's like this thing of like, you know, people want this, they don't want to give up on this idea that we can just have, that basically the route to socialism or communism lies through the productive, increasing productive capacities via capitalism. basically the sort of stages idea, you know. So basically it's like, like environmental science can go hang basically because we don't like the consequences. And so there's obviously a left, there's left and right climate's Lysenkoism. Yeah, there's a kind of volunteerism implied, isn't there? Yeah. There's a sort of technological volunteerism. So Lysenkoism

was partly tied to the idea that Stalinist socialism would be able to basically perfect the human species very quickly through its direct interventions and its and its population management. And it's this sort of volunteerism, I think, is implied there. So the idea of climate Lysenkoism is partly this idea that, well, we can just wish away. We, socialists can definitely find a technological solution to climate change that capitalists haven't been able or willing to find if they really want to. And if they're, and if they're not having their minds clouded by the power of Saudi gold. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Yes, and it's definitely that left productivism, there is a sort of faith in technology that

if we strip the fetters imposed by capitalism off technology, then we will be able to find technological solutions to like ecological problems, etc. And normally that's just reduced to nuclear energy and all that sort of stuff. Let's hear a great piece of early 21st century indie folk. This is Joanna Newsom, I think her first hit really from her first album, The Sprout and the bean. I slept all day. I woke with this taste. And I raved.

And I raved that the difference between The sprout and a bean It is a golden ring It is a twisted string When people talk about degrowth communism Or just degrowth politics as well

There are various different kinds of those But there's a sort of degrowth communism sort of wing of that which says that like you basically need to reduce the amount of energy and material throughput in global north countries in order to create room for development in the global south basically right that's the sort of that's the sort of idea behind that degrowth is a terrible sort of term for that because of this sort of always quasi religious raising of this term growth basically um they they tend to talk passage of a quite right gem in those debates because you

you know, when you get the more sympathetic versions of both of those, they're both basically talking about where we need some sort of like planning, basically. You know, if you're not, you know, if you just, like the real problem is that capitalist GDP is unplanned growth or growth targeted at profitability and comparative profitability rather than at human need. And so there are huge sort of inefficiencies there. I think this is the point, is that it's very difficult to get people to have a discussion about growth, okay, where we're speaking, it's not just that people are speaking past each other, which is a very important point and one we definitely should press. But it's also not that people are not agreeing on the end point. And nobody wants to have the discussion about the end point because you then have a discussion at the level of ideology and people don't want to have a discussion at the level of ideology because they want to present or like mainstream economics wants to present itself as some kind of, like technocratic, like mathematical equation that if only we do more of this, then everything

will be fine. But we're not agreed on what the end point we want is. So, right, those are the terms in which if you're going to have a real discussion around issues of growth, you have to be like, well, well, what do we, what do we want? And as, you know, like socialists or progressives in the way that we view ourselves, like we actually want something different because, you know, a planet that we can live on and, you know, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is like our priority with this kind of like disgusting level of wealth and exploitation and, you know, colonialism and wars that we're living under. But that is not going to be the terms. It's not the terms of the debate that the right, you know, the mainstream, which sees itself a centre, which is actually right wing, are willing to have a discussion on that level. They will not utter those words. So you will not have that conversation in a public. sphere in the far space. So then you cycle back to this situation where Rachel Reeves and like others are shouting growth, growth, growth, growth, because what it actually ends up being is it's a smokescreen to not have to actually have a discussion about what we're trying to achieve.

I mean, that's one of the moves we're making this. So me, Bertie Russell and Kai Heron have written a book which is coming out in September called Radical Abundance, How to Win Green Democratic Future, Pre-order Now from Pluto books, and both you two and the listeners. I'm not paying for a copy. You're kidding me. What kind of growth argument is that? We need growth in pre-orders of... Anyway, we make this move where we're, where, you know,

we're going to claim this idea of abundance, basically. What we want is abundance, but like, you know, we don't, we need to, you know, abandon conceptions of GDP and the sort of, and the sort of dynamics that lie beneath that, you know, as a way in which we can think about abundance. And so we make this move where we sort of say, we make a distinction between what we call bullshit abundance and radical abundance. And the bullshit abundance is, we sort of take it a little bit from Graber's, David Graber's bullshit jobs argument, basically, although we have criticisms of that book, obviously. And like we say, you know, that bullshit abundance

is the kind of abundance you get when production and reproduction is oriented to profit, comparative profitability, basically, the highest comparative profitability. What you get with bulleted abundance is artificial scarcity. It's like a binary, basically. And so we go through different sectors in which you sort of point out how this works. And one of the useful ones to go through is the pharmaceutical sector, right, which is something people would say, you know, we can't live without the pharmaceutical sector. and one of the great arguments against moments of rupture is like, well, who's going to produce the insulin, you know, on the day after the revolution or whatever.

And if you go through the pharmaceutical industry, you'll see this incredible misallocation of resources towards research. R&D goes towards new forms of Viagra or what they call evergreening drugs. And evergreening drugs is when you have a drug which is coming towards the end of its intellectual process, property life. Companies spend billions trying to find a new formula which will reproduce the effects of that drug that's going out of intellectual property. Sometimes it'll do the same things. Sometimes it'll do it worse. But what is the important point is that they'll have an intellectual property claim on that and then they can get like 16% profitability, etc. What goes along with that sort of bullshit abundance of these things that we don't particularly

need, right? Are these distortions of directions where capitalist dynamics push away from human and non-human need. What you get along with that is artificial scarcity in the UK as well, but particularly in continental Europe and countries such as Germany and France, there are huge shortages of just everyday drugs such as paracetamol. And why? Because you can only get like, perhaps you can get five or six percent from making paracetamil and they don't want that. They want 16% by making a new Viagra or getting some new drug that they can ration the sources of that out of basically. The radical abundance part of that is this argument that, you know, we have to stop coordinating economic activity using that logic. Or we have to expand the area

of the economy that isn't being run on that logic. You know, we need to expand that. And the only way in which you can determine economic activity, which isn't following that logic, is by some form of planning. Obviously, we want democratic economic planning, and we, you know, we make proposals for exactly how you would do that in the pharmaceutical sector, etc., that sort of arguments, basically. And in a way, it's a way to try to kept through that degrowth, eco-modernism argument. You know, it's in some ways that that bit in particular, it's like an almost like rhetorical sort of way to cut through that. With an analysis that, you know, part of what people are disagreeing with on that, I'm like aesthetic,

to some degree. Anyway, it's going to be well worth getting that book, I'll tell you. I think it is worth observing there that that, like, classically Marxian, almost kind of technological determinist argument, according to which part of the problem with capitalism is it actually doesn't deliver the productivity and the growth that it claims it's going to a lot of the time. I mean, that is a powerful argument. The example you were just giving here around pharmaceuticals, I think, is pretty significant.

you can make a really good case that the pharmaceutical industries waste huge amounts of resources in the pursuit of profit. And you can look at the example of the development of the COVID vaccines and say, well, this is what happens when actually this is what I say, this is the productive capacity of a plan like socialistic economy is this. So it is really powerful. And I think part of the problem is that we want to be able to hold on to those insights without seeming to reproduce a sort of naive 19th century industrial teleology,

a kind of narrative of history according to which turning the whole world into Manchester is the inevitable destiny of humanity. And on the other hand, and also we want to take account of the environmental crisis and we want to take account of all the critiques of sort of productivist consumerism. I think, I mean, I think what Nardi was saying is true insofar as there isn't agreement amongst the broad range of economists across the political spectrum as to what the destination is that we want. I think if we're talking about this specific debate

between the de-growth people and the ecomodernists, I think they are largely agreed on what the destination would be. The destination for everyone would be some sort of socialism, which is not destroying the planet, and is giving everybody a very high standard of living. And then the issue is that, well, I think, Part of the issue I think is the fact that, well, there certainly is a tradition of radical green economics, which really does think, look, people have to just accept, you know, people have to rethink what they mean by like comfort and standard of living. But, you know, you just couldn't have a situation where everyone on the planet gets to live like an average person in Britain today. So actually, if we're going to achieve global social justice and save the planet, people are actually going to have to experience some sort of reduction in their material standard of living. Maybe they're also increase, you know, they'll decrease their workloads or have a kind of comfortable life,

they won't mind so much, the fact that they have to work in a community garden growing food a few hours every week, but they're going to have to. That's what's going to have to happen. There's that tradition. And it is extreme end that runs into things like the sort of earth-first politics of the 80s, which really did want to drastically reduce the global population because it thought that was the only way you were going to save the planet. And then, But the thing, now, those kind of positions are a really convenient target if you are basically a sort of traditional communist. You're saying, oh, no, no, we don't want all that stupid hippie stuff, which is actually telling people they're going to have to be poorer and less comfortable. We're socialists in the ground tradition of Marx.

We want to modernise. We want to create a shiny new socialist economy, which everyone is going to have more stuff and better stuff and be happier. I mean, the problem is actually, you know, most of the so-called de-growth economists, they're not really talking about. that they're not talking about a kind of earth first, primitivist agenda, it's convenient if you want to promote quite a very old-fashioned Marxist position as somehow like really cool and radical

to imagine that they are saying that. So, and that's how you get this process, I think, indeed, of them sort of talking past each other. So I feel like we should, I feel like we should mention a few of the names of the people we're talking about. If you're talking about the eco-modernists, who are the people who've,

it's the ecomodonists who've really started the fight with the de-growth people actually. I mean, the de-growth people mainly see themselves as engaged in a sort of polemic against mainstream economics. They're not concerned immediately with a polemic against, like, communists. They see themselves as trying to critique ideas like GDP, you know, and there's loads of people. I mean, loads of radical economists have been making those critiques going about decades. There's a really good article about all these debates by Kier's co-author, Kai Heron, actually, was on the Versa Books blog a year or two ago.

It's called, I think it's called Forget Eco-Modernism. And that sort of goes to, and that refers to some contemporaries of de-grate economists, people like Jason Hickle, people like that who were kind of, you know, pro-third-world, pro-developmentalist economists. And amongst the ecomodernists, who are engaged in this sort of polemic

against those guys for their supposed primitivism and their desire to reduce growth and therefore reduce people's standards of living and bring a new age of austerity to working class people. I'd say the key figures in the English-speaking world really are Matthew Hubert and Lee Phillips, who are Lee Phillips is Canadian. Matthew Phillips is American,

and they both sort of present themselves as these advocates for kind of modernising socialism or communism. And I would really recommend people read Kai's article, actually. It's a really good kind of summary of the debates and where they're all coming from. Although, I would say, an awful lot of this stuff is not new. A lot of these debates were going on in the 80s when people like Ted Benton were writing about the relationship

to Marxism and ecology. They were going on when Raymond Williams was writing about the relationship to Marxism and ecology with his book, The Country and the City. I can point to work by people like the British philosopher Kate Soper, who I think should be much better known by listeners of ACFM, Kate Soper, has done some brilliant work in her time about the idea of alternatives of hedonism, like rethinking hedonism, so that, you know, you would promote a green politics on the basis

that, yes, it would actually involve producing less stuff sometimes, but you would have better stuff and, like, nicer stuff. So, like, you would have, you know, you would have better quality clothes that are less disposable. you wouldn't have to it's not that everybody would have to go around like spinning their own spinning and making their own clothes at home again like people did hundreds of years ago but you're not just going to have more and more disposability like the whole world turning into primate you're going to have something actually most people would would find preferable aesthetically preferable and more pleasurable yeah if you're going to arrive at some sort of a green socialism

and for me I think that's a really useful way of framing it but I think what's a bit frustrating about that that de-growth debate. Well, I don't think Lee Phillips or Matthew Huber would actually disagree with any of that. And I don't think, you know, I don't think people like Hickle or certainly people like Kai Heron would disagree with it either. So I think in a way everybody does want to, all those people do want to get to the same place. It's a question of really how you conceptualise that place. What sort of years are we talking? What's the time frame? Because I'm trying to think about some of what you guys are talking about in the frame of like development and, and anti-development and post-development theory,

which is also, of course, happening at the same time on a kind of global scale in a response to the anti-globalization, like, as part of the anti-globalization movement. Most of this stuff is really recent. This is just like in the past 10, 15 years, basically. And a lot of it is, like, I mean, from my point of view,

it is a lot of it is sort of reinventing wheels that people were already spinning around in those developmental economics debates in the late 19th century and debates around green Marxism. And of course, hardly any of these people ever read Murray Butchin, who I still think wrote one of the best books on the relationship between socialism and Marxism and ideas of nature. A track I'm really fond of, quite rare track from sometime in the 70s.

This is Seven Samurai, kind of American sort of funk, stroke, disco, stroke R&B group. This is their track Modernization. The chorus is Modernization is messing up our lives. And it's a sort of early eke piece of eco-funk, Seven Samu-Sammer. Maroy, modernisation. One of the other people we should probably mention is the Japanese Marxist, or Deacon of Communists as well, I suppose we should put it, Kohei Saito.

So Keo Saito is a Japanese Marxist, whose book that sold like half a million copies in Japan, I think, is sort of like a work of Marxology, so it's quite a strange bestseller. Just to return back to how we started this, where we were trying to cite it in the tradition of Marxism and Marxist writings. And, you know, he says, you know, that if you read Marx's later writings, he sort of comes to the conclusion there isn't just one path to socialism or communism.

You know, Marx writes about the Russian communes and these sorts of things as a possible path, etc. And perhaps a less stages conception of Marx and Marxism. Marx probably contains all of these things. And one of the concepts that get sort of derived from that is Marx's discussions of social metabolism, which is sort of like the relationship between, you know, human activity and the environment, you know, is the benefit of thinking about that in terms of this conception of social metabolism is that, you know, that social metabolism, that relationship between

human activity and the environmental sort of, air system processes is what Rockstrom and his colleagues at the Resilient Centre in Stockholm call it. You know, that's a trans-historical thing. is something that, you know, that relationship has to be mediated in some way through every period of history. And sometimes it's gone disastrously wrong, you know, that there's all sorts of stories about over-exploitation of nature and collapse of civilizations, etc. Not all of those stories hold true. There's a one about Easter Island that they cut down all the trees and then the civilization collapsed that they now think that's probably not true. That is a relationship that has to be mediated by some logic. And so at the moment it's mediated by,

capitalist logic, right? And by separating it off, you can say, well, there could there be another logic by which you mediate that, basically? Some of the difficulties of that, if you get into sort of like, how do you coordinate via economic planning or democratic economic planning, etc, is that there's a role for expertise in that, do you know what I mean? There's all sorts of things that have to be negotiated. And so one of the problems of transitioning to a society in which more and more economic activity is decided through democratic processes, the problem expanding the democratic economy, if you want to put it that way, relates to this other topic, which is like personal growth is one way people put about money. One way is that people have

to develop their democratic capacities. They have to be able to engage in these sort of complex decisions, being able to work out what the best thing to do, etc. In fact, you know, when people have studied citizens assemblies and these sorts of these sorts of deliberative democratic processes in fact there's a it has a really really good rate coming people have a very very good rate of coming to really quite sensible decisions etc but there's a process of transition from where you know this is the classic process of the problem of revelry's transition which you can find in in lenin etc which is this problem of you know we live in live in a society in which we don't have to make those decisions or we tend not to have to make those decisions

too often because we just let the market mediate them. And there's a process of learning to become active democratic citizens, basically. I'm trying to make some sort of link to this problem of personal growth and personal development. Yeah, I mean, I think I think there is, I think I'd go one way farther than that. There is an active process of like keeping people their brains as like occupied and like dumbed down as as possible so that they cannot be active citizens. I mean, I know there is a left-wing critique and, you know, perhaps like one that we've discussed on the show of like this concept of being an active citizen, but I'm quite pro it. And if you look at addiction on various different levels, like what's happening

to people's minds like collectively and like how that serves society. and the late capitalism as it is. Like, it's not conspiracy theory. It's like people do not have the mental capacity because of all sorts of different process to, like, engage in that democratic process, to be able to start to think about how you can live those kind of participatory, healthful, dignified lives.

Like, what we get is we get people's participation in those processes is when we have bursts of activity because of protest or because of, you know, crisis, etc. And as we know, like, we've been experiencing crisis after crisis, after crisis. But it's very difficult for people to, like, find the mental capacity and to find the time unless their material and social and relational realities are catered for, which is not that many people. Like, the terms in which we're even able to have these conversations about how can we start to, like, build those models is like I'm not even interested in like when people say well this is the kind of thing we need it's like people are massively fucked right now you know and there's a

deliberate process to keep it um that way so so without even you know going back to this thing that we come back to again and again like speaking we've spoken about Marxist and Marxian thinking a lot today like coming back again to this idea of time like when do we own our own time and when can we own our own brains to be able to even get to the point where our sociality enables us to have that kind of democratic thinking processes

to be able to participate in them. I think that's a really good point, yeah. I mean, partly what we're talking about here is, you know, consciousness deflation and consciousness inflation, isn't it? As Mark put it in that very useful formulation, but your point, of course, is that the principal means

of consciousness deflation is simply the colonisation of people's time by capitalism, which is one of the basic insight of Marxism. Yeah, whether it's the gig economy or it's scrolling, like both of those things. You know, obviously they interact with each other. But, you know, like, I can't wait until these fucking phones are banned. Like, it all goes analog again, which will happen, which will happen. I called on ACFM.

People are probably listening to us on a phone right now in all probability, so we don't want them completely banned. The thing is that it's not like there's ever been a time when people had most people had loads of free time, like to be active citizens in anyway, you know, your sort of pre-industrial peasant was having a work like all hours, like most of the year. They had these days off for holidays, but when they weren't having a day off, they didn't have a lot of free time to, and they didn't have a lot of capacity to learn to read, to get themselves of educating and cultivated. That's not our comparator, right? What about just 20 years ago?

Like, that's the level that I'm talking about. Yeah, you're right. I'm saying in terms of, like, people's capacity to be able to, like, focus on, like, to behave as, you know, intellectual beings. Like, we have to work really hard to etch out this space. And I think the fact that we're able to, you know, is to do with the fact that we're from the 20th century. Like, it's much easier for us because we're coming from the 20th century. I think, you know, this is really difficult things that we're asking for to be. able to build the model that is alternative to, going back to our subject, like that

that is built on economic growth with all of these assumptions on economic growth. And how it links to talk about growth as Keir was starting to open this space about how this relates to growth in the kind of quote unquote, again, like personal growth space. I think what is really important there, like what the link is is agency. we can make comparators there with like concept of like runaway capitalism and again coming back to the to the metaphor of like economic growth coming from produce and production and then also thinking about it in terms of a spiritual level like enlightenment are you able to reach a point where like does personal growth go on forever and these are kind of like really interesting

conceptions to talk about when you're trying to talk about some of this stuff in in late capitalism because it then interfaces with other concepts like, you know, self-responsibilization. And, you know, my own argument, that there is a happy space between a kind of very crude left argument, which is, you know, everything is structured, sorry, everything's about structures, everything is kind of like predetermined, like you don't have any control over your own life. So in a way, you've got to kind of accept your lot depending on like where your class position is and kind of fight from that position to a completely extreme, like, hyper-capitalist, individualist position,

which is that everything is your individual responsibility. It is in your hands. You know, there's nothing called, like, structures or processes or history. And you have to take it upon yourself to be, you know, successful, whether on a kind of spiritual or, like, economic or, you know, social or relational sense. And I think there's a happy medium in between, which addresses this fact that human beings want agency, they want to be able to change.

Like a lot of us have a lot of trauma in our lives from various different things that happened. And to be able to have some kind of agency to work through that stuff is important without completely capitulating to this fact that I don't actually need other people. This is a personal journey, which is also something I don't believe in as well.

So I do think there is that happy medium and yeah, that's a different way of also understanding like this obsession with growth and like how it exists in culture and one which, you know, is also important to think about. If we're coming back to understand where does it come from, this kind of specific capitalist iteration of growth and growth as something that is cumulative and like endless, I think that is missing like a female aspect. to that. I think it's hyper-masculinist rather. Rather than talk about the female, I think it's hyper-masculinous, which is this kind of like endless accumulation. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting, yeah. You know, we should play Le Fleur by Minnie Riperton. Minnie Riperton is a soul singer from the US. Le Fleur is from her first album in 1970, come to my garden. Minnie Rippinson's story is quite tragic, actually. She died really young of breast cancer. The song is,

the song is like sang from a perspective of a flower, and in some ways it's about life cycles, but then it's also a sort of personal development, personal growth story, perhaps, or something like that. Because in the lyrics, in the chorus, basically, there are lyrics which go like this. Inside every man lives the seed of a flower. If he looks within, he finds beauty and power.

There ends the sermon for today. where all of these things are much more a flower is born it moves to spread love and draw to people follow inside of him live the seed of a flower if he loves with him

he finds beauty an idea with a kind of attitude to ideas of of personal growth. I think you're saying as you often do an idea, aren't you, that we can't just discard an idea like personal growth altogether because it partly speaks to something that people genuinely want out of life and that people and that is involved with people's sense of agency and that it is one of the things that capitalism does as it sort of makes people feel like they can't experience growth. I mean, it's interesting to think about that just in relation to the ideas of adulthood, ideas of growing up, isn't it?

I mean, I'm sure this is something we've referred to on the show before. I haven't seen as much of it recently. It would be interesting to think even why that might be, but there was quite a lot of discourse around about this in the late 90s, and then it cropped up again sort of 10, 15 years later for much the same reasons, which is as successive cohorts of people have found that entering the labour market

and trying to enter the property market didn't prove to be the easy route to like settled, familial, like domestic, you know, maturity that it had been like for the boomers, basically. People have experienced that quite often as the whole possibility of like living like an adult or how they should think an adult should be living being blocked. I mean, this is something people were already talking about in the 90s. People, you know, when I was like in my mid-20s, people were talking about the fact that, well, it just it felt like like adolescence to seem to carry on like into your late 20s now or into your 30s because we're comparing ourselves to our like parents generation who all like bought flats

when they were 20 and that you know had kids really young but historically really young not not historically normal age really and then of course that's become much more exacerbated in the 21st century it's like millennials and even younger people have found it harder and harder to acquire the traditional accoutrements or really traditional just to sort of 20th century imaginary accoutrements of adulthood. So on the one hand, like you want to acknowledge all this, you want to say, yeah, it's true. Like the way in which capitalism has developed has made it impossible for people to have those things. On the other hand, you want to retain a critical perspective and say, well, actually, we should never have really accepted. We shouldn't accept

a normalising and normative discourse and ideology that says, well, what it means to be a successful adult is like to be a property owner and to live in a nuclear family. So, you know, you sort of want to do both those things at the same time. I think it's the same around issues of the ideas like personal growth. You want to at the same time say, yeah, capitalism really does block people's ability to develop, to develop themselves in the ways that they want to. On the other hand, we don't want to impose, we don't want to buy into a sort of normative discourse of self-optimization. Because I'm saying all this partly, because I think I do, I think I totally do in my, if you do a sort of Marx-O-Froidian and now,

of Jeremy. I spend most of my time all, every day, with my super ego, torturing me for not having achieved enough that day. I didn't spend long enough for my yoga. I didn't get up early enough. I haven't written enough today. I haven't got enough done. I'm not doing enough as an academic. I'm not doing enough as a dad. I'm not definitely not doing enough as a revolutionary socialist. I'm not even doing enough as a podcast. You know, I'm not. And I'm taught, and that is just, that is my neurotic monologue most of the day. Not all day. Like, while we're actually recording the show, we're having a good time. Well, me and Kira are playing a game together. I'm having

a good time. I'm doing DJing, having a good time. And when I'm spending quality time with the kids, I'm having a good time. But in all the gaps in between, that buzzing noise are like, you're not, you're not doing enough, you're not doing enough. Like, it's always there. And I think I'm, and I'm sure that I myself,

like, I am sort of a bit trapped by this discourse of self-optimization, according to which I really should have, I really should have successfully developed myself into a like fitter, like more successful, like cleverer person. It's a happier, a more productive person. And like, but like all those things are true.

That's kind of the point you're always making, I feel like Nadia, which is sort of all true. Like there's no point pretending it isn't true. There's no point pretending like, well, if I didn't get distracted by like social media and stuff so much, I would have got more written in the past six months and probably would have been better really. It was quite fun, but it would have been more useful to have written more. Like that is true.

And it's also true that, well, if you just let you just let you. If you let your super ego beat up on you all the time, you're just never going to be happy. So, well, those things are all true at the same time. And surviving, like, advanced capitalism is partly about striking a balance between keeping, trying, keeping going, like, keeping, actually keeping trying to sort of develop yourself and be successful. And, you know, not allowing yourself to just, you know, take loads of drugs and spend 30 hours at a time on the Xbox. Because then you really will just get sick and die and go mad. What you've raised there is really interesting, Jeremy, because it comes then, if we talk about the point that you came to a couple of minutes ago, which is talking about growth as in growing and being a grown-up and what makes a grown-up. My question is, who's doing the infantilizing here? Is it capitalism or is it a defense mechanism against capitalism? This is a question I'm really interested in. If we're talking about the moment we are now, we are recording in June 2025, right? Because I observing in culture in the UK that there is self-infantilisation as a defence mechanism

against the self-responsibisation agenda, right, which is often coming from the right of what it is to progress as a human being. At the same time, capitalism is also infantilising us by not giving us the resources to be able to like grow, quote unquote grow up, whether it's in the vision of kind of like a 20th century, like a boomer generation of what that is, but also like to self-actualise in a kind of, in a simpler sense, right? To be able to make decisions for ourselves, which is why I come back to this idea of agency. But also what you were just talking about, Jeremy, in terms of like your own struggles with the various different voices there in a kind of semi-Froidian sense.

is like, I think that's mostly talking about work, and I want to bring it back to, I don't even like calling it mental health anymore, I'll just like calling it what I call it, which is like going fucking mad. It's like, what are the tools that are necessary when for people, I'm one of them who came to like a really, really low point in your life because you've had certain traumatic experiences and how do you get out of that rut with some kind of tools of self-actualization? And I have found that certain personal development spaces, which are not at all left-wing spaces, were very helpful to give me the tools to get me out of that rut. It doesn't mean that I'm unable to have a critique of some of the effects of those spaces, but I'm not just talking about work and productivity

here. I'm talking about feeling absolutely completely stuck in a mental, you know, in a space of like self-loathing or unable to feel like you have, again, I'm going to come back to the word, any agency in your life, to be able to make decisions to change things, either about your material conditions or about basic questions. Like, what do I want to do? Like, what do I want to do in the future, despite capitalism, right? What do I want to change? Even if they're little things, like what do I want to learn? How do I want to, in a more spiritual sense, grow? What are the things that I want to explore? And how do I achieve that emotional and psychological self-control? And I think that is a big question, not just for me, but for many people.

Like, how do you achieve that self-control when a lot of, you know, the conditions around you don't make it fruitful for you to be able to make those decisions? So those are the kind of questions that I'm thinking about. And then I'll go back to saying this and, you know, leave it with you guys and what you think about this, about this question of infantilization. Like, how does that interface? And that's the question that I'm still thinking about when I think about these things. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in there, basically. And it's incredibly hard to pick a part, you know, part of what we're talking about is this, it is contemporary society and contemporary capitalist society, you know,

it gives us a huge sense of responsibility, a huge sense that we are responsible for things. And yet it limits and channels that the agency that weaks and exercise it, you know, it individualizes it and it channels it, you know, through all sorts of ways for the technology we interact with, you know, for the limited potential for like collective political, you know, thinking and acting and all that sort of stuff. But there's another sort of, there's another dilemma, I think, that runs through our podcast all the time, which is this, which is the dilemma of like, you know, how, and what Jim brought up earlier, which is like, you know, in some level, we just, we just need

to survive. It's incredibly hard to survive under contemporary circumstances, you know, for all sorts of reasons, but partly because a political situation is so bad, because of things such as climate change, et cetera, because of this sense of, and reality that comes with the fact that we just don't seem to be able to collectively, collectively deal with it, etc. So there's this, this, this is pressure to like, well, do we just do the things that we need to survive, given the tools and the space that we have now, which is determined by all sorts of, like, social things, etc. You know, versus that is how much are we able to try to act in some way or act collectively to expand that space.

And in some ways, just to tie that back into the whole debate around economic growth and, et cetera, et cetera, you know, is that question of like, do we want more of what's available, or do we want something different, basically? I think we want something different by that, you know, how we mediate that, that's just a difficulty of surviving in contemporary capitalist conditions,

versus that how do we create the space where we can raise our horizons and flake consciousness is just basically widened what seems possible to do, do you know what I mean? Because that, that second part will really change the answer to the first bit, basically. It's just a tension that runs through politics, and it's a tension that we're always trying to grapple with on this podcast. Ideally, we would have more regular consciousness raising, and we need something like a sort of, we need something like a socialist political cultural movement, which create spaces for people to think about these issues more systematically, I think. I think that would be really useful for addressing

a lot of the things that you're talking about here and that Nadia's raised. There should be some sort of semi-institutionalised, movement-oriented, sort of institutions or spaces, wherein people can think about these issues and get the kind of benefits that Nadia was talking about getting from sort of personal growth institutions or practices but and we would like we would go about launching that movement if we had the time if we had the resources or the resources this is See far out