Degrowth

Agenda Publishing

Contents

What is degrowth?

A ruthless critique

"I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks."

— Ursula Le Guin

Degrowth is a ruthless critique of the dogma of economic growth – a new keyword: a "pig on the tracks" of "a one-way future consisting only of growth" (Le Guin 1982).

Degrowth is, first, a critique of the ecological consequences of economic growth. The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we transform and damage the environment. There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet's life support systems, the global economy should slow down. We should extract, produce and consume less, and we should do it all differently. Growth economies collapse without growth. To prosper without growth we have to establish a radically different economic system and way of living.

Second, economic growth is no longer desirable. The costs of growth exceed its benefits. Growth is no longer "economic". Growth is a recent phenomenon of industrial capitalism. Economists first measured it in the 1930s, and its pursuit became universal only from the 1950s. Civilizations before industrialization flourished without growth and without caring about growth.

Third, growth has always been based on exploitation. Without a surplus, there is no investment and no growth. To have a surplus, capitalists or governments must exploit someone, somewhere. If they paid this someone the real value of her work, then they would not have a surplus and there would be no growth. First there were the slaves, and the natives of the colonies. Then there were the commoners, and the workers in the factories; and there were always the women at home. Growth cannot reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation.

These opening statements are bold. I ask patience from the reader who disagrees. The remainder of the book explains the theory and the facts that support these claims. But let us first look at where these contrarian ideas came from, and what their relationships to economics are.

A tree with deep roots

"Degrowth" sparked after the millennium, first in France and then elsewhere. The ideas that nourished it – from early environmentalism, to the bioeconomy of Georgescu-Roegen, the voluntary simplicity movement and the cultural critique of development and modernity – date further back. Degrowth is not the natural, or only, culmination of these streams. No one can ever know what some of the thinkers who have inspired degrowth would think of it. But starting from the tree that degrowth is today, and looking at its roots, we find the following ideas.

The first, and perhaps deepest, root is the radical Western environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s, which was fuelled by the work of two women: Rachel Carson and Donella Meadows. Carson, in her 1962 Silent Spring, documented how pesticides destroyed environments and poisoned people (Carson 1962). With her partner and colleagues at MIT, Meadows wrote The Limits to Growth, which was presented to the Club of Rome and showed how exponential growth – that is, growth at a constant compound rate – is bound to end with collapse because it will eventually exhaust the raw materials that fuel it and pollute the environments that it depends upon (Meadows et al. 1972). Carson and Meadows used science and facts to express a commonsensical truth that dated back at least to nineteenth-century Romantics: the growth of industry and the integrity of the natural world do not go together.

In the 1960s and 1970s, criticism of growth went beyond environmental questions. Amidst the wealth generated by the postwar boom, there was still poverty, wars and the ever-present threat of a nuclear holocaust. Herbert Marcuse, a German–American philosopher, described how industrial capitalism created false needs, producing "one-dimensional" humans (Marcuse 1964). The Harvard economist and president of the American Economic Association John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the paradox of the "affluent society": how the creation of false needs by advertising raised the demand for private goods and increased gross domestic product (GDP) while depriving authorities of vital resources for the provision of public goods (Galbraith 1958). Writing later, in 1976, in the midst of an economic crisis, Fred Hirsch (a Viennese emigre to Britain who was a professor at Warwick and formerly the financial editor of The Economist wrote about "the social limits to growth". Growth, he argued, can never make everyone middle class. The value of "positional goods" – an expensive car, the latest gadget or an expensive jewel – is what they signal about your position in society. If everyone had the good and the position, then the good would have no value. Growth cannot generalize access to goods if their essence is that only a few can have them – it can only inflate their prices and intensify frustration (Hirsch 1976).

Ecological economics – a new discipline that brought together ecologists, economists and social scientists dissatisfied with the way mainstream economists treated environmental issues – focused on the conflict between growth and the environment. The field's first international conference was held in Barcelona in 1987 and was organized by Catalan economist–historian Joan Martinez-Alier. Two years later, the International Society for Ecological Economics was founded. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian mathematician–economist who emigrated to the United States) argued in his 1971 masterpiece Entropy and the Economic Process, a thermodynamic rethinking of economics, that the economic process transforms – inevitably and irreversibly – low-entropy (high-order) resources into high-entropy (low-order) ones (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). Given that mineral stocks and fossil fuels are exhaustible, human activity will in the long run have to "decrease" to a scale that is supportable by the rate of flow of solar energy (Georgescu-Roegen 1975). Georgescu-Roegen supported the models of The Limits to Growth with physics and economics. His disciple Herman Daly in turn argued that in the long term, only a stationary (steady) state of economic activity is sustainable (Daly 1991). The economy, he claimed, must have a constant "throughput" of energy and materials.

Ecological economists after Daly and Georgescu-Roegen criticized growth but did not go as far as advocating "degrowth" (not until more recently). The term "degrowth" was coined in French. In a 1972 debate between Andre Gorz, Herbert Marcuse and Sicco Mansholt (then president of the European Commission) published by Nouvelle Observateur, Gorz, who had read The Limits to Growth, wondered whether capitalism was compatible with a "decroissance" (degrowth) in material production, which was necessary to restore earth's balance. In 1977, reading Georgescu-Roegen, Gorz argued that perpetual growth was physically impossible, and that ecological realism demands that we consume less (Gorz 1977).

Gorz was part of what was called the movement for "political ecology" in Europe at the time. Petra Kelly and the German Greens were criticizing industrialism and the pursuit of growth in the affluent West. For them, the issue was not only that there are limits to growth, but that people should organize politically to end a capitalist system that is geared to either grow or die. Gorz, Kelly and the Greens, however, were equally critical of existing socialist economies, calling them "the continuation of capitalism by other means", advocating instead for "well-being through degrowth" with "a subversion of the prevailing way of life" (Gorz 1977).

When, in 1979, Jacques Grinevald and Ivo Rens, professors in Geneva, published a French translation of a collection of Georgescu-Roegen's essays, they titled it Tomorrow Degrowth ("Demain la Decroissance") after Georgescu-Roegen's "decrease", who consented to the title. "Decroissance" assumed a new meaning in the French lexicon, becoming a slogan for radical ecologists. In the late 1990s and early 2000s activists like Bertille Darragon, Sophie Divry, Bruno Clementin and Vincent Cheynet in Lyon published a widely read weekly, Décroissance, and carried out direct action against advertising and in favour of a car-free city. Right from its birth in France, the degrowth community has been an amalgam of research and action – a mixture of researchers, professors, activists and downshifters, who lived as they professed.

No academic did more to popularize degrowth than Serge Latouche, a French economist and anthropologist at Université Paris-Sud. In his fieldwork Latouche showed how development programmes Westernized Africa and South-East Asia (Latouche 1996). Together with Wolfgang Sachs and Maria Mies (both German), Arturo Escobar (Colombian), Vandana Shiva (Indian) and many others, Latouche was part of a "post-development" school of thought that criticized Western ideas of development documenting how these destroyed indigenous modes of living. International development was colonialism with a different face, they argued (Sachs et al. 1997).

Unlike ecological economists, Latouche drew from the work of Karl Polanyi to develop a critique of "economism": the expansion under capitalism of the logic of commodity and market exchange to realms of life from which they were previously omitted. What is understood today as the "market economy", Latouche (2012a) argued, is a modern – politically and socially constructed – invention.

Latouche talked of "autonomy", a term used by Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis fled to Paris in 1945 on board the boat Mataroa, which rescued intellectuals who were persecuted during the Greek civil war. He worked as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) until 1970 but he wrote under pseudonyms ("Pierre Chaulieu" and many others) for the revolutionary "Socialism or Barbarism" group, which he helped to found. He studied psychoanalysis and philosophy, combining them with a deep understanding of Marxism and economics. "Autonomy" meant an awareness by people that it is they themselves that make their own laws ("nomos") and history, freed from the delusion that these are given by an external authority, be that God and the Church or, after them, markets, the economy and their experts. For Castoriadis the future is essentially indeterminable: there are no laws of history, since human beings can always come up with new, unpredictable ways of seeing and changing the world. Castoriadis criticized growth-based development as a new source of "heteronomy": a new religion of a sort – a universal imperative the pursuit of which all societies must devote themselves (Castoriadis 1997).

Castoriadis's ideas developed in dialogue with those of Hannah Arendt, one of the most remarkable philosophers of the postwar era, who also dealt with autonomy but in relation to work. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguished between work, labour and "action", the latter referring to political and contemplative activity beyond the realm of necessity or utility (Arendt 1959) – what Gorz (1982, 1994) would classify as the domain of autonomy.

Ivan Illich was another great theoretician of autonomy and "conviviality". A radical catholic priest and academic born in Vienna, Illich lived and worked in Cuernavaca in Mexico. For Illich, autonomy requires simple ("convivial") technologies and decentralized, community-led energy, education or health infrastructures. Illich criticized the "radical monopoly" of some technologies, such as the car, whose physical and social infrastructure leaves people with few options but to use it if they want to participate in social life. Only small-scale systems can be governed directly by people without the mediation of experts, Illich argued. Large systems divide society into experts and laypeople. Experts accumulate power at the expense of people. Illich's slogan was that socialism can then only arrive by bicycle. A complex technological system cannot be democratic or egalitarian (Illich 1973, 1974).

Latouche brought together the ecological economics of Georgescu-Roegen, the political ecology of Gorz and Illich, the philosophies of Castoriadis and Arendt and the concerns of post-development (Latouche 2009). He integrated the ecological, economic and sociological critique of limits to growth with the postcolonial critique of development and the Polanyian thesis against the expansion of market relations. Latouche called for an "exit" from the economy in the name of autonomy and democracy. With "degrowth", he married a critique of development programmes in Africa to a critique of so-called sustainable development in Europe.

In 2008 "Research & Degrowth", a collective founded by Francois Schneider, Fabrice Flippo and Denis Bayon, organized the first international conference on degrowth in Paris. Schneider, a doctor of industrial ecology, became the public face of degrowth in France after a long march with a donkey, discussing degrowth with bewildered passers-by. The conference marked the birth of an international community of researcher–activists. The International Society for Ecological Economics supported it, with a strong contingent from ICTA in Barcelona, the group of Joan Martinez-Alier. Serge Latouche and the Francophone school on degrowth met again with ecological economics, discovering their shared origins in the work of Georgescu-Roegen. The conference and the publications that followed it brought "degrowth" to English-speaking academia (Schneider et al. 2010). The 1970s "limits to growth" debate and radical 1980s green ideas were back with a vengeance. In somewhat separate, but related, developments in the UK, Tim Jackson's (a participant in the Paris conference) Prosperity Without Growth became a best-seller. The book claimed that it was impossible to both avoid climate change and grow the economy (Jackson 2008). In the United States, an intellectual movement for a "new economy" emerged around the work of economist–sociologist Juliet Schor on overworking and the wealth of a sharing economy (Schor 2010).

The international degrowth community grew, holding conferences every two years, with 4,000 people attending the 2012 meeting in Leipzig. New scholars joined, new debates opened and the accumulated knowledge of larger movements fertilized degrowth debates. Feminist economists like monetary theorist Mary Mellor (see Mellor 2010) and Antonella Picchio brought attention to care work, social reproduction and the gendered division of labour (see also Perez-Orozco 2016). Anthropologists like Susan Paulson and Lisa Gezon looked at rooted ethnographies of Western and non-Western peoples living without growth (Paulson 2017). Historians deconstructed the origins and hidden ideology of growth (Borowy & Schmelzer 2017). And environmental justice activists, from both the Global North and the Global South, brought their experience from direct action against extractive or infrastructure projects pursued in the name of growth (Martinez-Alier 2012). Academics articulated a critical perspective embodied by social movements, most notably in environmental justice struggles, reconstructing the term "degrowth" analytically. But the flow of ideas was multidirectional. It was activists, who learn from each other and read the work of academics, who came up with the term "degrowth", only for the term to travel back to academia (Martinez-Alier et al. 2014).

Degrowth is a burgeoning research agenda. The ambition is not only to understand the world, but to change it. So what is the role of economics in all this?

Degrowth and economics

Economic growth is a concept developed by economists. From the beginning the discipline set its mission to be the study of the origins of wealth. Economists advise governments on how best to pursue growth. The term "degrowth" would consequently naturally make one think that it pertains to the realm of economics. This, though, would be partly wrong.

Degrowth evolved as much as a critique of economic reasoning as a critique, within economics, of the limits and costs of growth. The first line, prominent in the work of Latouche, criticizes how economists frame reality. The problem is not only that the economy cannot or should not grow. Our very ideas of what an economy is are wrong. "Exiting the economy" means exiting existing economics, mobilizing different forms of knowledge, models and representations of reality to engage with the phenomena economists classify as "economic". The objective is to decentre the economy as a unit of analysis and as a focus of political action.

Heterodox – ecological and political – economists like Daly, Victor, Jackson or Mellor instead develop a critique within the field of economics. They accept some aspects of neoclassical or Keynesian models and reject others. Unlike those who develop non-economic theory about the economy, they work with economic theories, models or data to investigate conditions under which economic stability could be maintained without growth. Or they propose labour, taxation or monetary policies that can reduce material and energy flows while stabilizing a contracting economy. They aspire to a "new" economics – but an economics nonetheless.