A few weeks ago, Dean Dettloff and Matthew Bernico met with Catholic Re-Visions’ co-convener Samuel Huard for a discussion about their new book Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology. In Part 1, they talked about Christian faith, degrowth, and prophetism. Here, the conversation continues.
Samuel Huard: In your podcast, in the last months, you have talked a lot about the Book of Revelation. When you envision the end of capitalism—it will happen some day!—do you see that as an apocalyptic event?
Matthew Bernico: Over the last few months, we got really into reading about the Book of Revelation. I am so glad that that didn’t happen until we finished the book or else it would have brought lots of whacky rewrites, going back to shoehorn in one more theologian and one more book. Anyways, maybe that will be a future book. Who could say?
The book that I think has really shaped our thinking about apocalypticism is Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation. That book is particularly cool and helpful for thinking about capitalism, and especially the capitalist moment that we are living in, because what Richard draws out in that text is that for the community who is reading the Book of Revelation, the apocalypse is something that is happening concurrently, as they are reading. It is in the present moment. Richard points out time and time again that it’s a book that recognizes God in history suffering alongside humanity. I like this way of thinking about apocalypse, about the very present way that the world is ending now and the present way that something will happen afterwards. And the ways that God is struggling alongside us. Who knows how capitalism will end? It does seem like it is constantly ending other people’s lives all the time. It is an apocalyptic force in a very negative way, in the dragon-coming-out-of-the-ocean kind of way, where it is devouring people up left and right. It’s hard not to see some similarities I suppose. Dean, what do you think?
Dean Dettloff: Your question made me think: in some ways, the book may be a prophetic word insofar as we are trying to remind Christians that Christianity has a skepticism about growth that we have forgotten, and we are calling people back to that to some degree. That is the prophetic task: to say that we have forgotten a certain value and God is demanding that we recover it.
But what Richard says is the difference between prophetism and apocalypticism is that apocalyptic discourse is actually about the construction of a whole new kind of symbolic world. Because the old symbolic registers can’t really handle a description of what’s happening and a description of what comes after. To some degree, in that sense, maybe degrowth is more an apocalyptic kind of discourse than a prophetic one, because it is also trying to say that we need to invent new ways of being together, a post-capitalist understanding of what it means to think about production and consumption, abundance and lack, of how being in community multiplies the use and availability of goods rather than minimizes or subtracts them. That might be a step forward that is unprecedented.
We don’t have a degrowth society at this stage. We are calling for something that hasn’t been tried, but that nevertheless has seeds already existing. It is not a purely utopian sort of discourse in a negative way. I think that speaks to what Matt was just saying–that the apocalyptic discourse is happening now about the alternative for which we are still finding words to talk about. Degrowth is one word among many words that maybe gets us toward that more just apocalypse. What “degrowth” is trying to conjure up is a vision of a different world uncoupled from the drive for growth in and of itself as the final idol that should organize our societies.
S.H.: I like what you said about degrowth allowing us to get closer to a more just apocalypse. You’re both acknowledging that the apocalypse is happening right now and, as you say in the book: either we change things and then the symbolic world will be rewritten, we will be starting a new world, or we do nothing and then climate change will get rid of the system and of a lot of people, which will be painful, but the end of capitalism will also come. It’s good to think in those terms: saying that the apocalypse is here, that we are not getting out of it, but that there is a path that is more just, that is closer to God’s will and that will involve a lot less suffering.
M.B.: Yeah exactly, it’s like: do you want the soft off-ramp from capitalism towards a planned economy where people’s needs are met, or do you want the radical dissolution of the entire world and everything you know, and the barbarism that comes after? Like Dean was saying, apocalyptical language or literature is about reshaping the narratives, the mythology and so on. What else could reframing economic conversations away from growth be but a very boring version of that? (laughs) Getting people to realize that capitalist growth or a rising GDP is not a stand-in for societal health, that’s shifting a type of mythology.
S.H.: In addition to the critique of capitalism and the advocacy for degrowth that are very important in your book, two other themes that run throughout are the necessity to organize ourselves into an alternative community and movement, and the importance to remain hopeful. Organization and hope. Could you say more about the importance of these two elements in your own thinking and praxis? How do we stay hopeful and organize in what often feels like a hopeless world?
D.D.: To me, they are the same thing, organizing and being hopeful. I generate hope in organizing. That’s actually a bit that we take from Pope Francis in a speech to social movements where he says that they create hope where none can be found. That speaks to me a lot. I find it very hard to find hope in a world of total climate catastrophe and capitalism. But it strikes me as undeniable that when you start really working together with others in an organized social movement, hope just seems to get built or get created or get produced out of that process. I work full-time for a Catholic social movement, so it is not hard for me to find that kind of resource. I’m fortunate in that respect. So, there is that side to it: hope is the kind of thing generated through organizing.
The other thing we take from Pope Francis is that to lose our hope would be to consign the world’s most vulnerable to a foreshortened lifespan. It would be to our great guilt and detriment to do that. We shouldn’t have the moral luxury of losing hope, because it consigns the poorest to a grave that they don’t deserve. It’s a kind of condemnation to hope. That’s what Christianity demands, what we are forced to do even when we don’t want to or don’t like it. There is a struggle to create that hope, and hope is also built through a struggle; these things are recursive in that way. What do you think Matt? We never asked ourselves that question.
M.B.: I think what you are saying, Dean, about hope is really good, that it comes from organizing. Something we talk about in the book is an idea from Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse about the “long march through institutions,” about finding ways to intervene in the world through organizing. Sometimes that means inhabiting institutions that we know are not up to the task, but trying to make them up to the task, trying to wield them with another sort of power.
It also means finding the institutions that need to exist and then building them, both in denial of the other institutions and out of these gaps that we see. That work is, oftentimes, very bureaucratic and very boring. It is mostly getting people to fill out a form or show up to a meeting or have a Zoom call or answer a text message. It’s very difficult to do and it is also just not exciting. It’s not storming the barricades, it’s a lot of admin. But all that being said, there is a lot of joy, there is a lot of hope in doing that work when you see people start moving in ways that are counter to the ways that capitalism would have them move. We all get up and we go to our work; we do jobs for eight hours a day, sometimes more than that. We do all of that because we are motivated by the levers and pulleys of capitalism.
But when you can get people to actually show up to a meeting, to have a conversation about a data center or the conservation of an area, or a trade union at your work—something that capitalism is not motivating them to do—it is extremely joyful. It shows you that it is actually possible, that there is a real other world that is waiting to be born and that we can actually build. All that it takes is a lot of annoying admin work. I have found myself a lot of joy in doing those types of things and seeing the world change in small ways, because people will show up, because they are invested in changing the world as well. So, the long march through institutions that we talk about in the book is long and it is a march, because it is boring and tedious, but it has moments of joy in the beginning and lots of hope and joy at the end.
S.H.: In conclusion, if there was one thing that you would like the readers of your book and of this blog piece to take away, what would it be?
M.B.: The thing that really sticks with me through this book is that not only is capitalism the author of poverty in the world, hard, real, physical poverty that people experience in the Global North and the Global South, but it is also a really impoverished way of thinking about human relationships, about human spirituality, about what it means to be a person. It’s poverty all the way down. Yet there are so many very positive, uplifting, and constructive ways to reorient your life outside of capitalism. I hope that people who read this book or this blog start to think about that a little bit harder and pick up those things in their life.
D.D.: I like that. I’m going to do that after this call! Something I really hope, especially readers of a blog like this, would take away is that liberation theology still really matters. Not only because of the specific kinds of critiques that it offered to capitalism, but also because of the real practical and political experiments in which liberation theologians were willing to engage. That willingness is very important for people to take seriously. Sometimes, progressive Christians look at liberation theologians and they say that this is a 20th-century way of thinking, an old paradigm that is not really up to the task anymore, because the world has changed.
We track some of the changes in the book. But the fundamental ways through which global capitalism accumulates are really not any different, and the kinds of criticism made by those liberation theologians still matter. So does the willingness that they had to look at actually existing situations like in Chile in the early 1970s, in Cuba, in China, in the Soviet Union, in Brazil, in Tanzania, in so many very different situations where people were experimenting with different models of development. That willingness to actually get involved in the details of real political alternatives, real political experimentation: that is the kind of appetite that we, progressive Christians, sometimes are afraid to do with the seriousness and intelligence that it deserves.
I think that that is a left-over from anticommunism. It is also a left-over from the fact that we do live in the idolatrous world of capitalism, where all alternatives feel unrealistic or riddled with their own problems and therefore are probably not better; all these kinds of ways that capitalism convinces us not to challenge it.
Liberation theologians resisted that idol. They founded a material and theological imaginary that succeeded in actually producing revolutionary situations. I think that we have to find ways, without pretending to go back in time to the 1960s or 70s, to ask ourselves what it would mean to repeat that gesture in the 21st century under this version of global capitalism. That’s probably more than one thing, but that’s what I hope people take away from the book.
S.H.: Well, thank you both again for your insightful analysis and engagement for a better world. Much more can be found in your book Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology. People who want to hear more from the two of you can also tune in weekly to The Magnificast!
