"The Future Is Degrowth" - 3. Critiques of Growth
Growth is still seen as the provider of good things, while degrowth requires much more dedicated engagement to understand its arguments.
Central to degrowth: seven distinct (and overlapping) critiques:
Ecological
Socio-Economic
Cultural
Anti-capitalist
Feminist
Anti-industrialist
South-North critique
All these critiques form a comprehensive degrowth perspective, and a global justice perspective.
Without a critique of capitalism, growth critique can focus on shortcuts (eg. "causes like population growth", "human nature", etc). Without feminist perspective, growth critique reproduce gender inequalities.
Only holistic approach of critique of growth can safeguard degrowth against right-wing appropriation.
Economic growth...
...destroys the ecological foundations of human life and cannot be transformed to become sustainable (Ecological critique)
...mismeasures our lives and thus stands in the way of well-being and equality of all (Socio-economic critique)
...produces alienating ways of working, living, and relating to each other and nature (Cultural critique)
...depends on and is driven by capitalist exploitation and accumulation (Critique of capitalism)
...is based on gendered over-exploitation and devalues reproduction (Feminist critique)
...gives rise to undemocratic productive forces and techniques (Critique of industrialism)
...relies on and reproduces relations of domination, extraction, and exploitation between capitalist centre and periphery (South-North critique)
1. Ecological critique
"Infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet."
- Growth is not sustainable or cannot be made sustainable (by technical progress, for example)
- The critique analyses reasons for this unsustainability: rebound effect, entropy, criticism of green economy and environment justice are keywords here.
Ecological economics and the law of entropy
Economy must obey laws of physics. Economy and society are both embedded in nature.
Entropy law states that in closed systems, potential benefits from source decrease over time. Technical progress and non-fossil energy sources cannot beat the entropy law, in the long term.
-> Growth tends to decrease until it reaches its material and thermodynamic limits.
Also, the more infrastructure around fossil fuel, the more "locked-in" a society is, away from renewable energy.
Social metabolism and the metabolic rift
Social metabolism: the material and energetic exchange that allows a society to reproduce itself, to stabilize and grow.
Marx: "Capitalist production disturb the metabolic interaction between man and the Earth" - this is the metabolic rift.
Social metabolism highlights how nature and society are not separate objects, but are connected.
Decoupling and rebound effect
This is about relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation: can they be decoupled?
Criticism of "green growth" is the central starting point for degrowth The rebound effect is part of this criticism.
-> What we would need is decoupling in all key sustainability indicators, absolute, permanent, fast enough, while taking global equity considerations into account. Highly unlikely, not really a case fitting this description.
-> For the Global North, economies to achieve annual emissions reductions of ~ 10% (necessary to avoid climate emergency) can only be achieved without economic growth and will result in reduction of GDP.
Significance for degrowth: avoiding apolitical ecology
Many degrowth authors criticize arguments of "overpopulation" as structurally racist (as rich countries - where population is stagnating - are mainly responsible for the ecological crises). Per-capita, consumption is much more important (ie. systemic drivers of growth).
-> Ecological argument is not only one of limits and renunciation. It's about building a world of sufficiency - enough for all - that satisfies human needs globally and planetary boundaries.
2. Socio-economic critique
This critique calls into question: "Growing GDP means that life gets better". Not true any longer in Global North. This critique sees end of growth not as threat but for opportunity for new forms of well-being.
Consumer criticism and positional goods
Critism from post-war directed against democratization of consumer practices (eg. mass tourism) against logics of acceleration that lead to more consumption.
"Positional goods": goods that derive from scarcity: the more people consume these goods, the less their value (eg. home in suburbs, tourism, etc). That leads to wasteful compoetition for position, where people aims for higher place in hierarchy.
The paradox of happiness and income (aka Easterlin paradox)
Although, to some extent, quality of life is directly related to income, it does increase on the long term if a country's income exceed a certain level. Relationship between GDP and quality of life only stable up to a certain level of prosperity. More is not always better.
There is a strong case for the developed nations to make room for growth in poorer countries becuase, in the latter, growth really does make a difference.
GDP is a poor measure of well-being, since it neglects non-market labour and inequality.
-> Politics cannot realistically rely on further economic growth in the rich countries in order to achieve gains in the quality of life. Other sources of well-being (not depending on economic growth) must move to the center of the discussion.
Significance for degrowth
Institutions of modern society (eg. economic, social infrastructures) are designed based on growth and accumulation. Lack of growth = crisis (eg. Covid19 recession). During recessions, declines in growth not paired with politics guaranteeing well-being and security.
-> It is necessary to overcome the social foundations of growth societies based on status competition and gainful employment. Quality of life depends on factors such as equality, prosperity, trust, social security, political participation and care work.
3. Cultural critique
Suburbia, shopping malls, branding, mass consumption.
Central concept of cultural criticism is "alienation". This critique asks the question: what does it mean to be a human being?
Ecological humanism and the critique of modern society
"Ecological humanism": embrace of the diversity, uniqueness, and connectedness of the human experience, within critique of modernity, and advocacy of ecological awareness. This pushes against the idea of the individual as an isolated being. However, ecological humanism lacks critique of capital and colonial relations.
"Alienation" as a key term
Marx: "work is alienating because workers neither command the work process nor the fruits of their labour (they're more like a 'cog in the machine')".
Alienation happens in workplaces, a most people don't see their job as useful or productive ("Bullshit jobs").
Alienation is the silencing of self and world relationship. It also exists in the field of consumption (eg. "shopping").
Adbusting and culture jamming
Adbusting: practice of intervening in, or playing with advertisement in public space to change their meaning. Example: "décroissance durable" (2002) satirical expression of "développement durable". -> Degrowth has roots in counter-culture, it is still central concept behind adbusting movement.
People as complex relationship
Neoclassical economy theory; that the human being rationally maximizes their own utility. Far from being scientific knowledge, this is an ideological construct.
So in consumer society, people are treated as "growth subjects". Three characteristics:
- being apparently independent individual.
- maximize one's own "world reach" (through travel, consumption).
- strive for personal assertiveness.
-> This is a limited understanding of human being. In contrast, degrowth sees human beings as part of complex system of relationships with manifold interests.
Logics of intensification, acceleration and alienation
World is in permanent change, moving faster, forcing every person to permanently intensify their relation and their world reach in order not to be left behind. There's technological acceleration, acceleration of social change, and pace of life (enlargement of one world's reach).
-> Intensification is necessary to maintain the status quo.
Subjective limits to growth
Individual limits. Refers to burnout.
Significance for degrowth: interdependence as the human condition
Cultural criticism integrated in many countries (with André Gorz, E.F. Schumacher). Critique is fruitful when built in various international roots, and when it does not appears as one-sided bourgeois critique of "the modern way of life".
-> This critique highlights the fact that consumption and culture themselves should be seen as a site of capitalist domination that must be addressed collectively.
4. Critique of capitalism
Accumulation: continuous process pf adding value to capital. Value is created through the metabolic interaction with nature in the form of work, and then exploited by the property-owning classes who can extract surplus value by selling commodity. This surplus value must largely be reinvested as capital. And cycle continues.
-> Capitalism is dependent an appropriation and continuous colonization of the non-capitalist "outside".
-> Crisis resulting from exploitation and appropriation inherent to process of economic growth cannot be overcome without undoing social relation of domination and exploitation of capitalist accumulation.
Continuous accumulation process
Because of market competition, the productive forces moving forward through technological improvements, and the competitive need to accumulate capital, part of profits must be reinvested into acquiring more capital. This creates a continuous accumulation process (which is also based on inequality, domination and various forms of social rules).
Growth is the materialization of accumulation
Economic Growth is the consequence of then compulsion to make a profit, a process resulting from accumulation. The economy is thus driven by the pursuit of profits.
Growth as perpetual crisis
Due to the extreme concentration of increasingly larger amounts of capital, it becomes more and more difficult to invest that capital profitably: over-accumulation.
Incorporation of non-capitalist forms of life also plays an important role in the expansion of markets: without unpaid input - both from people (unpaid domestic work, neo-colonial exploitation, public bailout) and the raw materials and energy of nature - production costs would rise, profits would fall.
Thus commidification of nature means that capitalist destroys more than it can creates or reorganize.
Dépense
"Dépense" describes practice, in non-capitalist societies, of spending the socially produced surplus as unproductive expenditure (eg. a feast). In capitalist societies, there is be a productive reinvestment of added value - this is a historical exception.
Critique of growth: "dépense" is abundance to be spent collectively, not reinvestment. We should democratically decide how to dispense societal surplus, as a common good. That would remove money and resources from circulation, which means that capital would be removed from the accumulation process. This process would be needed to undo endless accumulation that drives growth.
Capitalism and scarcity
First, capitalism brought scarcity through enclosure. Today, it's impossible not to rely solely on capitalist production.
Scarcity, as well as the social hierarchies that limit autonomy and self-determination, are imposed by a capitalist system of production.
-> Degrowth is about regaining autonomy to collectively create public abundance (= collective reappropriation and dépense of collective surplus).
Significance for degrowth: the role of capitalism in growth
Many of today's proposals for socialism or post-capitalism fall short of an emancipatory growth critique.
-> Tendency to focus mainly on consumption, alternative to GDP, or policy reforms loses sight of the role that capitalist accumulation has in driving the growth process: growth comes from the realization of capital.
5. Feminist critique
Critique: in capitalist economy, vital reproductive work of society (largely carried out by women) remains fundamentally unacknowledged, invisible, devalued and precarious: economic system is a patriarchal one.
In patriarchal system, reproductive and care work is in permanent crisis. This can only be overcome by different economic system that values and promotes care work (prerequisite and goal of gender justice).
Eco-feminism and feminist economics
Feminist arguments are more and more integrated into degrowth discussion. Eco-feminism and feminist economics are two currents that are central to degrowth.
- Eco-feminism: clarifies connection between capitalism, patriarchy and exploitation of nature on systemic level.
- Feminist economics: critics of construction of the genderless "Home economicus" as a central figure of economics and rejects the calculation of GDP (which does not include unpaid domestic work)
The iceberg model
"The economy" (commodities, labour, investments) is the tip of iceberg. What's underneath: reproducing and sustaining life (which makes the market economy possible in the first place).
GDP only measures the top of the iceberg, denying dependence of economic activities upon sphere of reproduction.
A gender-equitable society would need to promote non-capitalist economic activity ("community economy")
Gendered exploitation
Capitalists must constantly appropriate ever more free resources, among which unpaid reproductive work. Unpaid reproductive work forms the continuous free basis of capitalist production. But there's also commercialization of care and reproductive work (eg. privatization of nursing home): "reproductive" activities are subordinated to "productive" activities.
Within patriarchal society, it seems as if wage labour is the actually important work, while subsistence and care work are unimportant.
-> We need to to transform our idea of work: a good life does not involve overcoming work, but rather overcoming and eradicating alienation in work.
Ways out: Queer ecologies and caring economies.
Queer ecologies seek to reframe given relationships between nature, gender and labour:
- queer ecologies interrogate whos is able to produce and reproduce.
- within patriarchy, nature and care are used to justify exploitation and inequality. They're the basis for functioning growth-based economies: queer ecologies calls into question this binary, that it is socially and ecologically co-constructed.
-> We need to dissolve the binary between "productive" and "reproductive" spheres ("queering" of the economy).
The construction of the man as person who does not care ("Homo-economicus") is linked to the rise of growthism, privileging of wage labour at the expense of subsistence labour.
Significance for degrowth: foundational and requires more engagement
Degrowth can be seen as an approach that integrates feminist positions. But feminist participants have repeatedly pointed out that feminist voices were marginalized in degrowth discussion. That said, it is starting to change.
-> Feminist perspectives are crucial to prevent degrowth policies from reproducing gendered division of labour.
6. Critique of industrialism
Critique: no matter the kind of ownership or social organization, the development of productive forces and tech in modern societies have become authoritarian, alienating, and restrictive of self-determination and therefore cannot automatically be regarded as desirable for an emancipatory society.
Tech development and associated increase in productivity act as growth drivers. Increasing mechanization hampers people's self-determination.
-> One aim of degrowth is to go towards post-industrial society with different kind of tech, bringing transformation and democratization of the means of production.
The different strands of the critique of industrialism
Many authors (eg. E.F Schumacher, Ellul, Gorz) formulated their critique of technology on a Marxist basis and broke with the classic socialist belief in progress, according to which capitalism develops the productive forces of a liberated society.
Technology is not neutral
Complex technologies are not neutral. They demand power structures in production or use. It cannot be democratized.
Innovation or experimentation is not bad in itself. We just need to take repercussions and externalities into consideration. Today, science and technology are seen as solution to many crisis (the left buys that also).
Tech has tendency to extend masculine control over nature and people, as they are designed through hegemonically masculine lens.
-> We can develop tech that support caring and convivial relationship
Technosphere as driver of growth
Tech systems and infrastructure enable growth. They also create decades / centuries of dependencies as they shape how we organize societies (roads, motorized private transports). These dependencies breeds more complexity and therefore, more dependencies.
The radical monopoly and the counter-productive threshold
Socio-technical systems like cars, computers, smartphones become a "radical monopoly", which undermines self-determination of people to live life according to their idea.
-> Degrowth must aim at democratizing and overcoming these radical monopolies embedded in productive forces of capitalist societies.
"counter-productive threshold": when something beneficial is used too much, it becomes counter-productive (too many cars = traffic)
-> Degrowth determines which tech does not fall in that trap.
Social ecology
Theory that explains how relationships of domination and oppression between humans (along lines of class, race, gender, age, etc) in turn shape our relationships to the natural world. Domination of nature is "reflected" in the domination between people.
Alienation through industrial labour
Atomized, mechanized and accelerated work processes (necessary for increase in productivity) lead to alienation of people from their activities.
-> We need to gain democratic control over technological developments.
(this critique is not against automation per se - as it can liberate from dangerous work)
Significance for degrowth: beyond appropriating technology
From a degrowth point of view, we need to develop different, non-authoritarian technologies.
Critique of industrialism and tech, along with feminist critique, most opposes post-capitalist projects that uncritically advocate for accelerating technological innovation. Emphasis on "convivial technology" instead.
7. South-North critique
Critique that examines social and ecological consequences of development and growth from global justice perspective: "growth" and "development" are 20th century inventions that create and maintain (neo-)colonial dependencies between regions and enforce capitalist lifestyles in the Global South.
Critique argues that the processes of appropriation and externalization are fundamental to growth dynamics or rich societies. From ecological point of view, this way of life causes systemic crisis because it cannot be generalized.
3 important streams of discourse criticizing spread of colonialism, imperialism, Western development policy and globalization.
1) Post-development vs Western ideology of progress.
"Development" is a construct of the west, a guiding political concept to promote in the "under-developed" regions integration into capitalist world economy + improvements in living standards. -> Not possible because of ecological limitation, undesirable as it undermines livelihood of many.
Post-development scholars: prosperity of Global North cannot be understood without colonialism, exploitation and dispossession of the South. Historical context: Enlightenment, which wanted to "improve" colonized areas and the people characterized as "primitive".
-> Post-development says that alternatives to development are found primarily in traditions and practices of subsistence of local communities and in movements of the Global South (which degrowth discussions support to build international solidarity against growth regime).
2) "Buen vivir" and post-extractivism
Originated in the Andes, formulated as a political framework based on traditional knowledge.
"Buen vivir" criticizes both capitalist and socialist forms of development because of their social ecological destruction. It criticizes capitalist civilization (ie with concepts of progress, competition, improvements, etc).
Extractivism: economic model where a country is dependent on extraction of its resources to the Global North, while creating social and ecological impacts.
-> Post-Extractivism: vision that seeks to push for the conditions for a good life, without continuing relations of extraction. It's a critique relevant in thinking about resource needs for solar panels, batteries, etc, all of which are sourced from the Global South.
Also growing critique of "green capitalism". For example: "carbon offset" in the Global South (eg. planting no culture forests) contributes to perpetuating neo-colonial inequalities and driving people out of their territories. So "green economy" = project of domination that does not overcome inequality and extractivism.
-> Capitalism can be overcome through multiple alliances between actors from the North and the South.
3) From uneven development to the imperial mode of living
For capitalist development to occur, it must rely on structural under-development elsewhere. Also, uneven development driven by financial institutions, which lend to poor nations at higher interest rates. So Global South have to cut on essential services and are systematically under-developed.
-> Capital accumulation and economic growth in the Global North require unequal exchange with the Global South (eg. dispossession of Indigenous people, imperial wars).
Debate on climate justice has integrated critique of uneven development with ecological approaches.
Externalization of social and ecological costs made lifestyles based on "freedom" possible ("Living well at others' expanse"). Externalization is based on exclusiveness, and thus on enclosing public wealth.
Way of life in Global North: driving car, flying on vacation, eating a lot of meat, etc. This is made possible through violent shaping of socio-ecological relations with Global South (eg. labour power, natural resources).
Significance for degrowth: global solidarity and interdependence
Degrowth can be understood as a project for global ecological justice. But pitfall to avoid: uncritical attitude towards post-development discourse could legitimize traditional forms of rule, sometimes hierarchical and oppressive (similar criticism could be made of degrowth as a whole). So it's important to highlight shared commitments to diversity, tolerance of difference, interdependence.
Necessary fundamental changes are driven primarly by: - global democratization processes - alliances with social movements from the Global South - search for / demand for the right not to be living at the expense of others.
8. Growth critique outside the degrowth debate
Conservative critiques of growth
Because of aging population, lifestyle environmental damage, etc, reduction of economy is inevitable in industrialized countries.
Conservative critique calls for volunteerism, charity, renewed emphasis on family ,through culture of modesty and ecology (see Meinhard Miegel): this is just recycled argument for austerity, it does not challenge existing social order, this is not degrowth.
Green fascism
White supremacist belief that says that "white" land should be saved from immigrants. This thinking wish to maintain present hierarchies between men and women, white and persons of colours, North and South. The very opposite that degrowth want to achieve.
Anti-modernism
Degrowth is not anti-modern or anti-civilizational. Degrowth seeks to move beyond capitalist modernity through reconfiguring current power relations, rather than escaping it.
Environmentalism of the rich
This blames unsustainable growth on over-consumption, and either advocates for individual lifestyle changes or for tech solutions.
In this way, it fails to see collective political action as an option, nor does it offer any kind of alternatives for working-class people.
Degrowth does not accept this critique of growth because it advocates for an ecological society that includes everyone, and stresses need for collective and political action.