Podcast 28: Austerity Ecology w/ Leigh Phillips

This podcast was recorded as part of the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art Practice and Research Group’s fortnightly meetings. If you would like to join these sessions please visit: The Exploding Appendix Avant-Garde Art and Research Group + Related Events – Exploding Appendix

In a 2019 article for Open Democracy, science writer Leigh Phillips tells us that “Thatcherism doesn’t feel any better just because it’s green.” Here Phillips argues against both market and degrowth solutions to climate change. On the one hand, with market-based solutions “there will continue to be an incentive to produce any commodity so long as it is profitable, regardless of what we know of the harm that good or service may inflict.” On the other hand, degrowth solutions “would be an imposition of austerity on the Western working class far beyond anything a Thatcher, Cameron or May could imagine, this time in the name of the planet”(The Degrowth Delusion). Responding to deep-ecologist David Orton’s assertion that “trade unions are generally environmental enemies, not allies, of environmental and green movements”, Phillips notes that “Such “checking of the privilege” of trade unions must be music to the ears of employers” (Austerity Ecology, p.37). Instead of suggesting that we simply “consume less”, Phillips attempts to revitalize a modernist left that takes economic planning as its starting point. He notes how “A Green New Deal is, in principle, precisely that. It is an industrial policy on a grand scale in service of full employment and raising living standards. It just happens to achieve this via the technology-switching and infrastructure buildout needed to decarbonize the economy.” (The Degrowth Delusion).

Leigh Phillips is a science and EU affairs journalist, who has written books such as Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defense of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (Zer0 Books, 2014), and, with Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the world’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (Verso Books, 2019).