In the face of climate crisis the "degrowth" movement is ascendant
But a close look at what happened in the 1970s might sober us up a little
As the new world disorder becomes ever more chaotic, and climate concerns are increasingly turning into nightmares for the younger generation in particular, a new word blip has suddenly popped up on the radar of trendy politics – degrowth.
What is “degrowth”?
The meaning of the word is self-evident on the face of it. What remains maddening and murky are its broader implications.
The buzz surrounding its sudden injection into the contemporary discursive mainstream can be explained straightaway by a recent racheting up in anxiety among the Western intelligentsia and progressive commentariat about the planet overheating.
Such fears are exacerbated by a recent report from the United Nations Environmental Programme that earlier targets for reducing greenhouse gases compatible with a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature by 2030 are not only unachievable, but that emissions worldwide persist at twice the intended level.
This past weekend author Jessi Stevens writing in the prestigious international publication Foreign Policy escorted what had until recently been a sectarian and somewhat esoteric debate among certain economists and policy wonks out of the shadows and gave the conversation a full airing.
Noting that the “degrowth” movement is “gaining momentum among academics, youth activists, and, increasingly, policymakers”, especially in the European parliament, Stevens gushes that it “is bent on challenging the central tenet of postwar economics: that further increases in GDP—strongly correlated with increases in carbon emissions—translate to further advances in social and individual well-being”.
Degrowth advocates by and large are long on rhetoric and short on details. A semi-anonymous website with the URL degrowth.info that simply refers to itself as a “political collective” delineates the concept as follows:
Degrowth is an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy. Degrowth means transforming societies to ensure environmental justice and a good life for all within planetary boundaries.
In an article last August in Forbes Nils Rokke, executive vice-president of a Norwegian research institute, puts it this way:
Degrowth" is a term that advocates for a deliberate, socially just, and equitable reduction in the scale of production and consumption. The goal of degrowth is to achieve better well-being and improved ecological conditions, reducing the size of the global economy to fit within the planet's biophysical limits.
Degrowth clams to be an alternative to current economic theory. But if it sounds much more like utopian socialism, well, it is.
One of the essential precepts of the degrowth advocates is that both free market mechanisms and even state allocation of goods and services along with setting “production goals” that defined old-style “command economies” when Communism was an actual thing back in the previous century are considered unworkable, if the planet is to forestall catastrophe.
Instead the degrowth collective calls for “an extension of democratic decision-making to allow for real political participation”. It envisions “the creation of open, connected and localized economies” that do not rely on advanced technologies and minimize the input of all natural resources, not just fossil fuels.
Their manifesto challenges the entire notion that the current global economy can be retrofitted with “green” investments and “clean” energy transitions. In essence, it imagines a world where people everywhere go back to a standard of living shared by the vast majority of the global population in the eighteenth century before the industrial revolution, and where they do it voluntarily and joyfully.
Ironically, this particular scenario uncannily resembles in almost every particular a picture of the future limned by the Club of Rome and the “limits to growth” acolytes who garnered a lot of public attention in the mid-1970s during the Middle Eastern oil embargoes and when inflation skyrocketed for almost a decade. It is not coincidental that the degrowth crowd routinely cites the Club of Rome literature from fifty years ago.
I remember this period very well, because I myself was an acolyte for such a vision. I even became one of the local leaders for the now defunct Citizens Party led by famed environmentalist Barry Commoner, who ran for President in 1980.
I also plumped extensively in both academic articles and in the popular press for the core idea of the Citizens Party, which was something known as “economic democracy”, a now retro label for what we call “democratic socialism”, or even “eco-socialism”.
Commoner, the Citizens Party, and its true believers were all scions of the Sixties counterculture which, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not engaged only in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but also the kind of grassroots political organizing which at the time was called “participatory democracy”.
Yet the sharp difference between then and now center on the historical context in which the aims of the degrowth, no-growth, or limits-to-growth ideology have flourished.
Today the context is the threat of global warming.
Back in the Seventies, however, all the hullabaloo arose from a shared intellectual conviction that overpopulation and the exhaustion of natural resources spelled doom for industrial civilization, and that “Great Inflation” of that decade was a harbinger of even worse things to come.
The celebrated economist Robert Heilbroner in a 1974 best-seller entitled An Inquiry into the Human Prospect became the Jeremiah of the age of disco and bell bottoms. Heilbroner predicted the inevitable collapse of economic growth leading to “a serious deterioration in the quality of life” and “a disastrous decline in the material conditions of existence”.
Heilbroner even bemoaned a growing civilizational “malaise” – a term that Jimmy Carter would unfortunately invoke in a July 1979 political speech that many historians would argue resulted in his loss to Ronald Reagan in the Presidential election the following year.
Such a malaise, Heilbroner argued, “reflects the inability of a civilization directed to material improvement – higher incomes, better diets, miracles of medicine, triumphs of applied physics, and chemistry – to satisfy the human spirit.”
Heilbroner and the 1970s anti-growth doomsayers, of course, were dead wrong about what would transpire over the next half century. In the Eighties inflation abated, growth took off, and with the end of the Cold War at the climax of that decade capitalism and consumerism with a few exceptions flourished in every cleft and crevice of the planet.
Interestingly, at the very moment Heilbroner was composing his book, a certain nerd and Harvard dropout named Bill Gates was plotting the personal computer revolution that would totally transform the economy in unprecedented and unanticipated ways.
China morphed Cinderalla-like from an impoverished economic backwater exemplifying the very future Heilbroner had forecast to a global economic and military superpower. The limits-to-growth prospectus, which interestingly was certified almost exclusively through computer simulations like climate change catastrophes nowadays, turned out to be a mass delusion of the Western cognoscenti who have conveniently forgotten all the hype that actually wasn’t.
None of the foregoing is intended to belittle the serious challenge of climate change, or to dismiss out of hand the vision of a less “productivist” and “extractivist” post-industrial society that the degrowthers have in mind.
We would all be better off if we consumed less, ate less, or were less dependent on non-renewable forms of energy and the methods of transportation that have burgeoned around them from the start of the industrial era.
But, as I’ve emphasized to my students over the years, “economics” and “ecology” – the two signature locutions in this debate – both derive from the Greek word oikos, which means “household”, or the sphere of family life.
As in all families what how we think and how we behave are the outgrowth of complex developmental, emotional, and perceptual processes that are rooted in both human biology and socialization.
Depending on parenting skills and the lottery of our genetic makeup, let alone our relationship with siblings and peer group members as well as the influence over time of role models and mentors, these factors do not determine whether we will succeed in life or become derelicts, criminals, addicts, etc.
Leo Tolstoy wrote that “all human families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That pretty much describes the human condition.
The “human family” has been a dysfunctional one since the advent of our species, whatever that implies. Consider the menagerie of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel..
Moreover, this dysfunctionality for millennia was correlated with the persistence of scarcity and the competition for meager resources manifesting in the violence of human history.
The degrowth movement is a colossal and seductive intellectual scam, just as it proved to be fifty years ago. If it is no longer plausible that we as an entire species must be forced into a condition of permanent austerity by resource scarcity, as the limits-to-growth cabal almost persuaded us once upon a time, then the only plausible means to reach that destination is through force itself, that is, the coercive power of the state rather than the fantasy of “participatory democracy”.
According to economist Wim Naudé, “given that a democracy is unlikely to choose degrowth voluntarily, the degrowth movement may set the west on a dangerous path towards rejecting democracy and reverting to an authoritarian collective.”
North Korea is a luminous example of such a degrowth Shangri-la.
As the old saw goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. It is time to start thinking about our planetary crisis in genuinely unthought ways.