The Political Economic Ecology of Monopoly Finance Capital in the United States and its Relevance for the Degrowth Debate

Academics, science writers, and environmental journalists are presently engaged in fierce debates on the merits of degrowth. These debates usually conceptualize capitalism as centered around a growth machine. Scholars then debate the nature of this machine, particularly its capacity to generate sustainable outcomes and, relatedly, more socially just futures. Building upon the oft-overlooked monopoly capital school, I argue that this conception of modern capitalism as a “growth machine” is somewhat detrimental to our understanding of contemporary political economy. Using the U.S. as a case study, I illustrate how a modern, affluent nation’s economy has trended toward secular stagnation and become dependent upon the real estate subsector to maintain capital accumulation in an era of patterned low growth. This dependency on finance and, particularly, real estate contains socioecological obstacles to sustainable change that scholars of growth, capitalism, and the environment should heed. I conclude by arguing that we should emphasize a ‘treadmill of accumulation’ alongside appropriate criticisms of growth in order to fully understand and respond to the socioecological irrationalities of monopoly finance capital