Economic Growth is a Psy-op; Degrowth Now!
From Slingshot, Issue #141, Winter 2024
By Sirkka and Antonio
You’ve likely heard the phrase ‘economic growth.’ It’s possible you might even understand it to be, generally, a good thing – if a bit abstract. It seems to have some correlation with the popularity of current political leaders, or something… the rent is still too high, though, and, man, groceries are so expensive these days! Wait, what is economic growth again?
Well, as it turns out, economic growth – a buzzword that seems to be taken for granted as ‘good’ and ‘correct’ by both blue and red professional politicians – is a bad deal for most of the people of the world. [Don’t just take our word for it: see the resource list at the end of this article.] But we are in luck! There is an emerging framework and movement that explicitly critiques and condemns the cult of infinite growth: this is the idea of degrowth.
‘Degrowth’ is a term that is gaining traction in certain academic and economic policy circles, but the usefulness of the degrowth framework transcends these somewhat insular conversations. Degrowth is both an economic framework which challenges the idea of infinite growth, and also a critique of the ways of lifeencouraged by growth-obsessed capitalism – as such, it presents an opportunity for each of us to reflect and, perhaps, feel empowered to live differently.
Those in favor of degrowth seek to challenge the notion that economic growth (basically defined as an increase in the rate of production of goods and services in an economy, normally measured as “Gross Domestic Product” or GDP) is inherently positive or, frankly, necessary. Do we need more stuff always and forever? Or is there such a thing as enough? Importantly, degrowth also points to the way that the enrichment of wealthy countries (as evidenced in such countries’ GDP) historically and today is the result of a capitalist-colonial pillaging of the world’s resources and the deliberate impoverishment of the global South. Degrowth is also, ultimately, an ecological critique. It points out that a frenzied pursuit of infinite growth isn’t a sane approach to sustaining life on a finite planet. In fact, this logic of ever-increasing extraction in the name of profit has directly caused the ecological crises we are now experiencing. Human society, if it is to be sustainable, needs to exist within the material limits of the biosphere.
Building upon these critiques, the degrowth perspective argues that we must reject economic “growth” as a societal goal and think differently about measuring the health of an economy. Further, we must address the inequalities created by historic and contemporary imperialism. In the face of an evident ecological crisis, with the many social and political crises that it spawns, degrowth helps us chart a path forward that actually takes the history of colonial inequality into consideration – that assesses the root of the problem. It is an analysis of the environmental crisis that brings capitalism and imperialism into the crosshairs.
Wealthy countries in the global North, such as the so-called united states, have contributed the most to the climate crisis and environmental degradation and owe a debt to the global South. Calls for debt repayment have been made for decades by movements and scholars of the South, from Guyanese activist Walter Rodney calling out Europe’s “underdevelopment” of Africa, to the 2010 “Cochabamba agreement,” an assertion of climate justice that emerged as the result of 30,000 people from over 100 countries taking part in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia.
Degrowth is one way to conceptualize the payment of that debt. By degrowing the harmful parts of its own economies, while providing funding, technologies, and other resources to the South as reparations or repayment of that debt, the North can free up ‘ecological space’ so that countries in the global South can adequately respond to the climate crisis. This may look like a self-directed infrastructural, economic, and cultural development to adapt to this new ‘normal.’
While some may advocate for this shift through existing policy avenues, we believe, at this point, it would require an end to the u.s. war machine and the economic domination that it upholds. Truthfully, a tall order. But given what we’ve been seeing with the u.s.-israel genocide in Gaza – a deadly demonstration of the u.s.’s stranglehold on global politics – we need to fucking end the u.s. war machine. It is realistically a safer bet for life on earth than waiting for change to come through electoralism or minor policy reforms. Now is not the time to languish within the ‘politically feasible,’ as dictated by our capitalist overlords.
While the ‘ecological debt’ aspect of degrowth might feel systemic and global, the solutions that degrowth offers at the local scale to reorient economic activity away from extraction and treadmills of consumption are also communal, grassroots, and in many ways anarchistic in orientation. As readers of Slingshot, you are likely already familiar with some of these practices. For instance, degrowth proposes worker cooperatives, urban farming, “sharing” (or “library”) economies, and other things that anarchists already participate in, as a way to slow down commodity-consumption and rethink our economic priorities.
But what, ultimately, is the economy? It can feel so abstract, but Movement Generation’s “Just Transition” zine provides this grounded definition: “eco” comes from the Greek word oikos meaning home, so “eco-nomy,” they write, “means management of home. How we organize our relationships in a place, ideally, to take care of the place and each other. But “management of home” can be good or bad, depending on how you do it and to what ends. The purpose of our economy could be turning land, life and labor into property for a few, or returning land, life and labor into a balanced web of stable relationships.”1
We wonder: what would life look like in a degrowth world? How can we imagine our economy differently? How could we tend to our “home” and manage our “resources”? Those in favor of growth-based economics would argue that degrowth would mean a life of sacrifice and self-denial. This is a very unimaginative view, and is based first of all on ignoring the fact that existing wealth and resources are currently hoarded by those at the top, so economic growth doesn’t inherently mean growth for you. But the view also relies on the fallacy that infinite material affluence (more stuff) means infinite happiness, when we know that, past the point of comfortably meeting your life needs, money and happiness decouple. (This has been studied extensively since it was first discussed in the 1970s, for more information look up the “Easterlin Paradox.”2) You don’t need to be an economist or a policy-maker to be knowledgeable about degrowth, or to take action in alignment with this philosophy. If you do things like garden, share meals with friends, dumpster dive, borrow things from the library, host clothing swaps, commute via bike, or even buy furniture secondhand, what you are practicing is part of a degrowth world. Even further, if you suspect that the point of your existence isn’t to work a random job, but instead to pursue a meaningful connection to your community, or get to know the ecological network you live within, or even to have enough time to develop your craft or vocation… degrowth might provide an economic framework to support you in that endeavor.
As this essay hopefully illustrates, degrowth is a theoretical insight that is encouragingly disruptive. But, ultimately, degrowth has its basis in a fairly common-sense idea: that the endless accumulation of commodity-products isn’t the best or most fulfilling way to live a life. And it reminds us that (at the societal scale) economies don’t necessarily need to be set up in a way that encourages corporations to maximize profit, undercut workers, and destroy the environment. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests that we can act now and in many small ways to build a degrowth world, even if that world’s full achievement would also require a larger social revolution. Let’s try for both!
Resources:
Article: “Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist” by Nishikant Sheorey, in Protean Magazine
Book: “The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism” by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter
Book: “Slow Down” by Kohei Saito
1 movementgeneration.org/justtransition/
2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox