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DEGROWTH

Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the


public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating
the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of
achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.
This overview of degrowth offers a comprehensive coverage of the main top-
ics and major challenges of degrowth in a succinct, simple and accessible manner.
In addition, it offers a set of keywords useful for intervening in current political
debates and for bringing about concrete degrowth-inspired proposals at different
levels [en] local, national and global.
The result is the most comprehensive coverage of the topic of degrowth in
English and serves as the definitive international reference.

Giacomo D’Alisa is Research Fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona,


Spain.
Federico Demaria is a PhD candidate at the Autonomous University of Barcelona,
Spain.
Giorgos Kallis is Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.
The three editors are members of Research & Degrowth, www.degrowth.org
More information at: vocabulary.degrowth.org
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

This book is an excellent introduction to the politics of ‘degrowth’ in its different mean-
ings and dimensions that are analyzed and catalogued in dozens of entries providing an
indispensable point of reference for anyone interested in joining the debates surrounding
this perspective. It is also an eye-opener to the evolution of the concept. For as the editors’
introduction demonstrates, ‘degrowth’ for many signifies a variety of initiatives [en] time
banks, local currencies, urban gardens, solidarity economies [en] proposing an alternative
to capitalist accumulation and the reconstruction of our reproduction on more cooperative
terms. This then is a volume that those committed to building non-exploitative relations
will need to consult as it offers a map to the world of alternatives to capitalisms.
Silvia Federici, Emeritus Professor at
Hofstra University, New York

At a time in history when political, economic and intellectual leaders assure us that noth-
ing fundamental can any longer be questioned, nothing could be more important than the
movement – of thought, and of action – that this volume on Degrowth represents. It raises
the prospect of finally ejecting the twin demons of productivism and consumerism that are
responsible for so many historical failures of the left as well as the right, and begins to set
about the real work of imagining and building a society fit for human beings to live in.
David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology,
London School of Economics, London

This book is one of the most thorough and insightful presentations and discussion of eco-
nomic theory and practice in the field of de-growth economics, a revolutionary attempt to
understand the economy as if humans and Nature matter.
Manuel Castells, Professor Emeritus of City And Regional
Planning, University of California, Berkeley

A thought-provoking, wide-ranging, spirited, and deeply original analysis; this book is a


must-read on degrowth debates.
Karen Bakker Professor and Canada Research Chair Director,
Program on Water Governance, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Degrowth takes the false coin of economic growth via capital accumulation and confronts it head
on: There is no wealth but life and to protect life on the planet and to ensure the future for all it
is necessary to exit the current system of production. This is the essential message for our time.
John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology
at the University of Oregon, Eugene
Breaking away from myths has always been difficult . . . But this is the spirit of the contribu-
tions of this book which ask: will it be possible to escape from the monster of growth? The
answer is simple. It is is not only possible, but indispensable. But is also not sufficient. We
also need to think new utopias to orient us. And these one can find in this book . . . Those
utopias imply a critique of perverse reality as well as the patient construction in solidar-
ity of new and diverse options. . . . Alternatives imagined collectively and implemented
democratically . . .
Alberto Acosta, Professor of Economics, FLACSO University and
ex-President of the National Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador

We really need to develop a vocabulary for a new era, and this timely book takes us a great
step forward by providing an impressive collection of concepts and ideas related to the
degrowth debate. It is a very useful resource for both newcomers and seasoned participants.
Everyone can find inspiration and new links between ideas by following one’s own personal
track through the entries – it is a pleasure.
Inge Røpke, Professor of Ecological
Economics Aalborg University, Copenhagen

This volume is indispensable for anybody interested in moving beyond mere retrofit solu-
tions to the most important economic and ecological conundrums of our time. This book
helps bury several oxymoron-constructs masquerading as solutions to the human predica-
ment. It achieves this by landing definitive intellectual and political blows to both the desir-
ability and possibility of unfettered economic growth as a panacea for all ills.
Deepak Malghan, Professor of Ecological Economics
at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

What a splendid vocabulary! A range of international authors brilliantly surveys the emerg-
ing field of an economics which bids farewell to the obsession of growth. The entries are
compact yet eloquent, learned yet action-oriented. In the new style of economic thought,
ideas like sharing, frugality, debt-free money, dematerialization, and digital commons play a
leading role. Whoever wants to know more about an economy of permanence for the 21th
century should reach for this book.
Wolfgang Sachs, Professor of Social Science
at the Wuppertal Institute, Berlin

This collection is an invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration for anyone interested
academically or politically in alternative ways of thinking and acting about the environment
and development. The collection is of interest to economists, political scientists, ecologists,
geographers, planners, environmentalists, activists, development scholars, anthropologists,
policy makers, and to anyone who wishes to think and act in ways that transcend the current
environmental and economic impasse.
Maria Kaika, Professor in Human Geography,
University of Manchester, Manchester

Degrowth thinking is a strategic meeting place for many trends in contemporary environ-
mental politics, and this encyclopaedic compendium, at once widely accessible and deeply
informative, will be invaluable in advancing the work of both academics and activists com-
mitted to building eco-sufficiency and global justice.
Ariel Salleh, Professor of Social Science
at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena
Degrowth is more than just an idea: it is a dream. Born in the 1970s, this recurrent, collective
dream has survived the neo-liberal hegemony and – as this book convincingly shows – has gone
more political (and more feminist) through collective thinking and social practices. Like it or not,
this persistence of the concept must be recognized, and credit given to its capacity of spurring
new debates and new forms of social mobilization, appealing to all those who continue to see
‘growth’ as a false solution to social problems and a true disaster for the environment.
Stefania Barca, Environmental Historian
at University of Coimbra, Coimbra

Degrowth illuminates diverse concepts for clear thinking, provides us with new languages
for political discourse, and outlines the many steps we can take to recreate our economy,
our lives, and our relations to planet Earth. Call it what you want: happiness, living within
limits, community, real democracy – Degrowth both calls and empowers us to bold action.
Richard Norgaard, Professor Emeritus of Energy
and Resources, University of California, Berkeley

In times marked by political stupor, it is refreshing to have such a light-footed guide through a universe
of anti-mainstream ideas ranging from conviviality to Ubuntu, and from urban gardening to entropy.
Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Professor of Social Ecology
at Alpen Adria University, Vienna

The editors invite the reader to make their own voyage through this book. It is sage advice,
for readers will wander through a wonderland of radical thoughts, intriguing observations
and bold visions for a different kind of world. It’s exciting and deeply subversive.
Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the
Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Melbourne

This dictionary is a vital resource for those who want to engage with the diverse networks
of ideas and traditions, analytical concepts and theories known as ‘Degrowth’. It is also one
indispensable compass to find orientation in the complex simplicity of alternatives.
Massimo De Angelis, Professor of Political Economy and
Development at the University of East London, London

For the poor to grow up to a steady-state economy that is sufficient for a good life and
sustainable for a long future, the rich must make ecological space by de-growing down to
the same sufficient (not luxurious) steady-state level. Essays in this collection recognize the
necessity to face this difficult convergent task of justly sharing our finite world.
Herman Daly, Professor Emeritus of Ecological
Economics, University of Maryland, Maryland

This exciting book is a pioneering exploration of the recently come-of-age field of degrowth
economics and policy. It will be landmark for all those who want to transcend the growth
fetish that has so many enthralled today.
James Gustave Speth, Professor of Law at
the Vermont Law School, Royalton

Degrowth is less a theory of development as it is a theory of societal change. This must-read


collection of thoughtful and accessible essays provides many contrasting perspectives that
will stimulate rethinking what kind of society we want and could have.
Nicholas A. Ashford, Professor of Technology
and Policy, at MIT, Massachusetts
DEGROWTH
A vocabulary for a new era

Edited by Giacomo D’Alisa,


Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2015 selection and editorial material, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico
Demaria and Giorgos Kallis; individual chapters, the contributors. The
Introduction, Epilogue and chapters 14 and 36 are subject to copyleft
licensing.
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era/edited by Giacomo D’Alisa,
Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Economic development—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Stagnation
(Economics) 3. Poverty. 4. Sustainable development. I. D’Alisa, Giacomo.
II. Demaria, Federico. III. Kallis, Giorgos.
HD75.D4375 2014
338.9—dc23
2014017043

ISBN: 978-1-138-00076-6 (hbk)


ISBN: 978-1-138-00077-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-79614-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

The cover image and the illustration on page xxiv were created
by Bàrbara Castro Urío, and appear with her permission.
© Bàrbara Castro Urío, labarbara.net 2014
CONTENTS

Notes on contributors xi
Preface by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis xx
Foreword by Fabrice Flipo and François Schneider xxiii

Introduction: degrowth 1
Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

PART 1
Lines of thought 19
1 Anti-utilitarianism 21
Onofrio Romano
2 Bioeconomics 25
Mauro Bonaiuti
3 Development, critiques of 29
Arturo Escobar
4 Environmental justice 33
Isabelle Anguelovski
5 Environmentalism, currents of 37
Joan Martinez-Alier
6 Metabolism, societal 41
Alevgül H. Şorman
viii Contents

7 Political ecology 45
Susan Paulson
8 Steady state economics 49
Joshua Farley

PART 2
The core 53
9 Autonomy 55
Marco Deriu
10 Capitalism 59
Diego Andreucci and Terrence McDonough
11 Care 63
Giacomo D’Alisa, Marco Deriu and Federico Demaria
12 Commodification 67
Erik Gómez-Baggethun
13 Commodity frontiers 71
Marta Conde and Mariana Walter
14 Commons 75
Silke Helfrich and David Bollier
15 Conviviality 79
Marco Deriu
16 Dematerialization 83
Sylvia Lorek
17 Dépense 86
Onofrio Romano
18 Depoliticization (‘the political’) 90
Erik Swyngedouw
19 Disaster, pedagogy of 94
Serge Latouche
20 Entropy 97
Sergio Ulgiati
21 Emergy 100
Sergio Ulgiati
22 Gross domestic product 103
Dan O’Neill
Contents ix

23 Growth 109
Peter A. Victor
24 Happiness 113
Filka Sekulova
25 Imaginary, decolonization of 117
Serge Latouche
26 Jevons’ paradox 121
Blake Alcott
27 Neo-Malthusians 125
Joan Martinez-Alier
28 Peak-oil 129
Christian Kerschner
29 Simplicity 133
Samuel Alexander
30 Social limits of growth 137
Giorgos Kallis

PART 3
The action 141
31 Back-to-the-landers 143
Rita Calvário and Iago Otero
32 Basic and maximum income 146
Samuel Alexander
33 Community currencies 149
Kristofer Dittmer
34 Co-operatives 152
Nadia Johanisova, Ruben Suriñach Padilla and Philippa Parry
35 Debt audit 156
Sergi Cutillas, David Llistar and Gemma Tarafa
36 Digital commons 159
Mayo Fuster Morell
37 Disobedience 162
Xavier Renou
38 Eco-communities 165
Claudio Cattaneo
x Contents

39 Indignados (Occupy) 169


Viviana Asara and Barbara Muraca
40 Job guarantee 172
B. J. Unti
41 Money, public 175
Mary Mellor
42 New economy 178
Tim Jackson
43 Nowtopians 182
Chris Carlsson
44 Post-normal science 185
Giacomo D’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis
45 Unions 189
Denis Bayon
46 Urban gardening 192
Isabelle Anguelovski
47 Work sharing 195
Juliet B. Schor

PART 4
Alliances 199
48 Buen Vivir 201
Eduardo Gudynas
49 Economy of permanence 205
Chiara Corazza and Solomon Victus
50 Feminist economics 208
Antonella Picchio
51 Ubuntu 212
Mogobe B. Ramose

Epilogue: from austerity to dépense 215


Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis and Federico Demaria
CONTRIBUTORS

Editors
Giacomo D’Alisa, PhD in Economics, is a young ecological economist and politi-
cal ecologist. Since 2012, he has been working as Assistant Coordinator of the
EU funded European Network of Political Ecology project at the Institute of
Environmental Science and Technology (Autonomous University of Barcelona). In
the last five years, his research focused on the waste mismanagement in Campania
(Italy) and the commons. He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of
Rome ‘La Sapienza’ working on the illegal waste trafficking in Europe. He is a
member of Research & Degrowth (Spain). For him a shift towards a degrowth
society implies a smooth change of the hypertrophic modern individual toward a
sober person committed to the social dépense. [email protected]
Federico Demaria is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Environmental Science
and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona with an affiliation at the
Center for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. He
works in ecological economics and political ecology with a focus on waste policy in
India and is part of EJOLT (www.ejolt.org), a global research project bringing sci-
ence and society together to catalogue and analyze ecological distribution conflicts
and confront environmental injustice. Since 2006 he has been part of the degrowth
movement and debate, first with the Italian Association for Degrowth and then as a
co-founder of Research & Degrowth (Spain). [email protected]
Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist coordinating the Marie Curie funded
European Network of Political Ecology. Before becoming a professor in Barcelona
he did a postdoc at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California
at Berkeley and a PhD in environmental policy and planning at the University of
the Aegean in Greece. He has a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu
Fabra in Barcelona, and a Masters in environmental engineering and a Bachelors
xii Contributors

in chemistry from Imperial College, London. He is a member of Research &


Degrowth (Spain). [email protected]

Contributors
Blake Alcott hails from Oklahoma and Connecticut and worked until 2001 in
Zürich as a cabinet-maker. He received his MPhil in environmental policy from
Cambridge University in 2006 and his PhD in sustainability strategies from the
University of East Anglia in 2013, and is now a retired ecological economist living
in Cambridge. www.blakealcott.org [email protected]

Samuel Alexander is co-director of the Simplicity Institute (www.simplicityinstit


ute.org) and teaches a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Paradigm’ for
the Masters of Environment at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also co-
founder of Transition Coburg and has recently published his second book, Entropia:
Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013). [email protected]

Diego Andreucci is a ‘Marie Curie’ predoctoral fellow of the European Network


of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project at the Institute of Environmental Science
and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona. He researches critical geog-
raphies of environment and development, with a focus on the politics of resource
extraction in Latin America. [email protected]

Isabelle Anguelovski is trained in urban studies and planning. Her research is situ-
ated at the intersection of urban inequality, environmental policy and planning
and development studies. She has just published Neighborhood as Refuge: Community
Reconstruction, Place Remaking, and Environmental Justice in the City (MIT Press,
2014). [email protected]

Viviana Asara is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Environmental Science and


Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona and is currently undertaking
research on degrowth and democracy and the political ecology of the indignados
movement. She is currently a visiting student at the European University Institute
(Florence). [email protected]

Denis Bayon is a member of Research & Degrowth.

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and independent scholar who has stud-
ied the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture for the past
15 years. He pursues this work primarily as co-founder of the Commons Strategies
Group. His most recent book is Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the
Life of the Commons. www.bollier.org

Mauro Bonaiuti has taught at the universities of Bologna, Modena, Parma, and is
currently teaching at the University of Turin. He has mostly worked on the relations
Contributors xiii

between economy, ecosystems and society, following a complex systems approach.


He is co-founder of the Italian Degrowth Association and promoter of the Italian
Solidarity Economy Network. He is the author of The Great Transition, (2014) and
the editor of From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen’s New Economics in Eight
Essays (2011), both published by Routledge. [email protected]

Rita Calvário is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Environmental Science and
Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and a
predoctoral Marie Curie fellow of the European Network for Political Ecology
(ENTITLE). She holds a BA in agronomic engineering, an MA in environmen-
tal and territorial planning (2010) and a MPhil in climate change and sustainable
development policies (2012). [email protected]

Chris Carlsson, co-directs the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco
(www.shapingsf.org), and is a writer, publisher, editor and community organizer.
He has written two books (After the Deluge, Nowtopia) and edited six books, (most
recently: Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20). He has given hundreds of public presenta-
tions based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, and his ‘Reclaiming
San Francisco’ history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of
times in radio, television and on the internet. www.chriscarlsson.com

Claudio Cattaneo did his PhD at the Institute of Environmental Science and
Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he remains a Research
Associate. His doctoral thesis explored the ecological economics of Barcelona
squatters. His research interests focus on alternative life-styles, urban and squatting
movements, do-it-yourself, human ecology and political ecological economics.
Claudio combines research with practical and social work as a squatter, a bicycle
mechanic and an olive farmer. [email protected]

Marta Conde is pursuing her PhD at the Institute of Environmental Science and
Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her research looks at social
reactions to the expansion of the extractive industries at the commodity frontiers.
[email protected]

Chiara Corazza graduated from Ca’Foscari University (Venice) with a thesis on


Kumarappa’s Economy, presented at the Venice Degrowh Conference (2012). She
is a member of the Editorial Board of «DEP» (Deportate, esuli, profughe) www.unive.
it/dep. [email protected]

Sergi Cutillas is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
His research focuses on the political economy of money and finance, with a special
interest in the nature and dynamics of credit money. Sergi also works as researcher
at the Observatory on Debt in the Globalization. He also participates in the citizen
debt audit campaign in the Spanish state (PACD), partner of the CADTM network
and part of the International Citizen Audit Network. [email protected]
xiv Contributors

Marco Deriu is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Political Communication at


the University of Parma (Italy). As a member of the Italian Degrowth Association
and Maschile Plurale Association, he was part of the Organizing Committee of the
3rd International Conference on Degrowth (Venice, 2012). [email protected]

Kristofer Dittmer is a PhD student in ecological economics at the Institute of


Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
[email protected]

Arturo Escobar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina,


Chapel Hill. His main interests are: political ecology, design, and the anthropol-
ogy of development, social movements and science and technology. Over the past
twenty years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements
in the Colombian Pacific, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN).
His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World (1995, 2nd ed. 2011). His most recent book is Territories of
Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008). [email protected]

Silke Helfrich is an author and independent researcher, networker and activist of


the commons. She is founding member of the Commons Strategies Group. She
blogs at www.commonsblog.de. [email protected]

Joshua Farley is an ecological economist and full Professor in Community


Development and Applied Economics and Public Administration. His broad
research interests focus on the design of an economy capable of balancing what is
biophysically possible with what is socially, psychologically and ethically desirable.
He is co-author with Herman Daly of Ecological Economics, Principles and Applications,
2nd ed. Island Press (2010). [email protected]

Fabrice Flipo is a social and political philosopher, he teaches at Telecom &


Management SudParis and is a member of the Laboratoire de Changement Social et
Politique at Paris 7 Diderot University. [email protected]

Mayo Fuster Morell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Government and


Public Policy, Autonomous University of Barcelona and fellow at the Berkman Center
for Internet and Society, Harvard University. In 2010, she concluded her PhD thesis
at the European University Institute on the governance of digital commons. She is
the principal investigator of IGOPnet for the European project P2Pvalue and of the
Spanish National Research programme Information, culture and knowledge: New
citizens’ practices, new public policies. [email protected]

Erik Gómez-Baggethun, PhD in ecology and the environment, is an environmen-


tal scientist working in the fields of ecological economics and political ecology. He
is a member of Research & Degrowth and a senior researcher at the Norwegian
Contributors xv

Institute for Nature Research and at the Institute of Environmental Science and
Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona. The focus of his research is on
ecosystem services and long term resilience. [email protected]

Eduardo Gudynas is a leading scholar on buen vivir. Gudynas is the executive


secretary of the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology in Uruguay and author
of over ten books and many academic articles. His expertise is on sustainable devel-
opment and alternatives to development. www.gudynas.com

Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey


and Director of RESOLVE. He also directs the follow-on project: the Sustainable
Lifestyles Research Group (SLRG). He authored the controversial report, later
published by Earthscan as Prosperity without Growth – Economics for a Finite Planet.
Tim’s current projects include – in collaboration with Professor Peter Victor (York
University, Toronto) – the development of the green economy macro-model and
accounts (GEMMA). [email protected]

Nadia Johanisova is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Studies,


Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic). She works in the fields of ecologi-
cal economics and degrowth. She has published a comparative study of Czech
and British social enterprises (Living in the Cracks, 2005). Her current interests lie
in ‘alternative economic practices’ (including social enterprises, co-operatives,
local food projects, community currency schemes, etc.) in the Global North and
South and their role in current and future degrowth economies. nadia.johaniso@
fss.muni.cz

Christian Kerschner holds a PhD in ecological economics from the Institute of


Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
His main area of interest are resource scarcities and general issues of economic
scale. Christian authored an influential article consolidating the steady-state econ-
omy with the newly emerging field of economic de-growth and provided insights
into the backgrounds of the Steady State Economy. [email protected]

Serge Latouche is a French Professor Emeritus in Economy at the University of Paris-


Sud. He is a specialist in North-South economic and cultural relations, and in social sci-
ences epistemology. He has developed a critical theory towards economic orthodoxy
and he is one of the leading thinkers and most renowned partisans of the degrowth
theory. He is the author of many books, among others Farewell to Growth (2009).

David Llistar is author of the book Anticooperación. Interferencias globales Norte-Sur


(2009). He is a co-founder of the Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización (ODG).
He is a physicist and has given classes on political ecology at different universities.
His main research interest regards the impacts of the Spanish economy upon coun-
tries in the South. [email protected]
xvi Contributors

Sylvia Lorek, head of the Sustainable Europe Research Institute, Germany, holds
a Ph.D. in consumer economics and diploma in household economics and nutri-
tion. She is engaged in CSO activities towards sustainable consumption at national,
European and global levels. [email protected]

Joan Martinez-Alier is Professor Emeritus at the Autonomous University of


Barcelona (Spain) and FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador. He is the author of Ecological
Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (1987) and The Environmentalism of
the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2002). joanmartinezalier@
gmail.com

Terrence McDonough is Professor of Economics at the National University of


Ireland, Galway. His primary interest is in Marxist approaches to stages in capi-
talist history. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social
Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century (2010). terrence.mcdonough@
nuigalway.ie

Mary Mellor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Social Science at Northumbria


University, UK. She is the author of The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public
Resource (2010). She has also published widely on ecofeminist political economy,
including a book entitled Feminism and Ecology (1997). She is currently working on a
book on public money. [email protected]

Barbara Muraca is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Sociology at


the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, with the German Research Foundation-
Advanced Research Group ‘Post-Growth-Societies’. Barbara works in the research
field of ethics, environmental philosophy and social philosophy. barbara.muraca@
uni-jena.de

Dan O’Neill is a lecturer in ecological economics at the University of Leeds, and


Chief Economist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
He is co-author (with Rob Dietz) of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable
Economy in a World of Finite Resources. [email protected]

Iago Otero, PhD in Environmental Science, is a postdoctoral researcher at IRI


THESys (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and works with the project groups
‘Changing rural-urban linkages across the world’ and ‘Transformations and uncer-
tainties of land-water systems’. He wrote his PhD thesis on the rural-to-urban
social-ecological transformation of Mediterranean mountain areas. iago.otero.
[email protected]

Philippa Parry is a graduate of the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Masters grad-
uate of Forum for the Future (London) in Leadership for Sustainable Development.
Her experience in The Ecology Building Society seeded an interest in co-operative
Contributors xvii

structures, leading to the setting up of a co-operatively-run organic cafe in Barcelona.


[email protected]

Susan Paulson explores interactions among gender, class, ethnicity and environ-
ment in diverse contexts in Latin America. Collaboration in research and theory
building on rural territory dynamics led to her 2013 book Masculinidades en mov-
imiento, transformación territorial and the 2005 volume Political Ecology Across Spaces,
Scales, and Social Groups. She teaches sustainability at the University of Florida.
[email protected]

Antonella Picchio is a feminist economist with a research interest on social repro-


duction and un-paid work. Her best-known book is Social Reproduction: the Political
Economy of the Labour Market (1992). Picchio has also edited Unpaid Work and the
Economy: A Gender Analysis of the Standards of Living (2003). She has been a militant
in the feminist movement since the 1970s. [email protected]

Mogobe B. Ramose is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of


South Africa, Pretoria. [email protected]

Xavier Renou is a former nuclear disarmament campaigner at Greenpeace France.


He initiated the activists’ network called “Les désobéissants” (“those who disobey”),
which trains people into civil disobedience tactics in a large number of countries
and provides help to those who struggle against injustice whatever its nature, be it
environmental, social or international. An activist and a trainer himself, he is also
the author of a dozen books and the editor of a series of handbooks, Desobeir (at Le
Passager clandestin, Paris). [email protected]

Onofrio Romano is professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Bari


(Dept. Political Sciences), Italy. His writings focus on post-modern cultures and
the Mediterranean societies. Among his recent books is The Sociology of Knowledge
in a Time of Crises (2014). [email protected]

François Schneider is a degrowth researcher, practitioner and activist. Since 2001,


he is active in the development of the degrowth concept and debate in France,
Spain and Europe. [email protected]

Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and author of Plenitude:


the New Economics of True Wealth. Previous books include The Overworked American
and The Overspent American. Schor is also the principal organizer of the Summer
Institute in New Economics, and a past recipient of the Herman Daly Award from
the US Society for Ecological Economics. [email protected]

Filka Sekulova is a researcher at Institute of Environmental Science and Technology,


Autonomous University of Barcelona, in transition studies and well-being. Having
xviii Contributors

a background in psychology and environmental economics, she wrote her PhD on


the economics of happiness and climate change. She has been writing on degrowth,
happiness and ecological economics. [email protected]

Alevgül H. Şorman is a researcher in the Integrated Assessment group at the


Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of
Barcelona. She focuses on the multi-scale integrated analysis of energy systems and
societal metabolism. [email protected]

Ruben Suriñach Padilla works at the Centre of Research and Information on


Consumption (CRIC) as a project manager and consultant on sustainable con-
sumption and new economies. Through Opcions magazine, he has developed
investigative research projects about cooperativism, social and community inno-
vation and sustainable lifestyles. He is an economist and has a Masters degree in
environmental studies, specialising in ecological economics. [email protected]

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester in


its School of Environment, Education and Development. Swyngedouw has pub-
lished several books and research papers in the fields of political economy, politi-
cal ecology and urban theory and culture. He focuses on politically explicit yet
theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice
of constructing a more genuinely humanizing geography. erik.swyngedouw@
manchester.ac.uk

Gemma Tarafa holds a PhD in molecular biology at the Universitat de Barcelona,


then she obtained a postdoctorate degree at the Yale University. She was a
researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncology and is currently a public health
researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in the Health Inequalities
Research Group (GREDS). She has been a researcher at the Observatory on Debt
in Globalisation (ODG) since its creation in 2000 and a member of the PACD
(Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana de la Deuda). [email protected]

Sergio Ulgiati is Professor of Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental


Certification at the Parthenope University of Napoli, Italy. His research inter-
ests are in the fields of environmental accounting and emergy synthesis, life cycle
assessment and energy analysis. [email protected]

B. J. Unti is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University


of Missouri-Kansas City and currently teaches at Bellevue College in Washington
state. [email protected]

Peter A. Victor is Professor in Environmental Studies at York University, Canada.


His teaching and research focus on ecological economics. He is now involved in
an ongoing collaboration with Professor Tim Jackson (UK) to develop ecological
Contributors xix

macroeconomics, in particular the construction of a simulation model of national


economies designed to explore alternatives to economic growth. petervictor@
sympatico.ca

Solomon Victus is a social analyst. He holds a PhD in religion and philosophy


from Madurai Kamaraj University and a Master of Theology (M.Th) in social
analysis from Serampore University. He has been senior theologian in Tamilnadu
Theological Seminary, Madurai. He is the author of seven books and hundreds of
articles in journals of national importance. [email protected]

Mariana Walter is a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and


Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona and at the International
Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She holds a PhD in
environmental studies. Her thesis addresses the political ecology of mining conflicts
in Latin America. She has taken part in research projects in Argentina (UNGS)
and Europe (ALARM, CEECEC), and currently works in the European-funded
ENGOV Project, aiming to develop a framework for sustainable and equitable
natural resource use. [email protected]
PREFACE

When the ordinary language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be


articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary.
We live in an era of stagnation, rapid impoverishment of a vast part of the popula-
tion, growing inequalities, and socio-ecological disasters - from Katrina, Haiti and
Philippines, to Fukushima, the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the burial of toxic
waste in Campania, to climate change and the continuous disaster of preventable
deaths by lack of access to land, water, and food.
There is a failure, even by radical thinkers, to come up with new responses that
are not articulated around the twin imperatives of growth and development. If the
desire for growth causes economic, social, and environmental crises, as the authors
in this volume argue it does, then growth cannot be the solution.
Fortunately, alternatives are springing up on the ground. They range from new
forms of living, producing, and consuming in common to new institutions that
can secure the livelihoods of all without growth. However, more comprehen-
sive counter-hegemonic narratives are necessary for articulating and connecting
these new alternatives. We hope this book offers keywords for constructing such
narratives.
Degrowth has multiple interpretations. Different people arrive at it from differ-
ent angles. Some, because they see that there are limits to growth. Others, because
they believe we are entering a period of economic stagnation and we should find
ways to maintain prosperity without growth. Yet others because they believe that
a truly egalitarian society can only be one that liberates itself from capitalism and
its insatiable pursuit of expansion, one that learns to collectively limit itself and
work without the calculus of self-interested utility. And yet others, simply because
“degrowth” sounds pretty much like the way they choose to live.
Contributions in this book come from different schools of thought, different dis-
ciplines, and different spheres of life: ecological (bio- and steady-state) economists,
Preface xxi

anti-utilitarianists, (neo)Marxians, political ecologists, cooperativists, nowtopians,


and various activists and practitioners. Each of our contributors sees degrowth
slightly differently. Not all of them necessarily share what is said in other entries.
Yet degrowth is what brings them together and connects them.
Degrowth defies a single definition. Like freedom or justice, degrowth expresses
an aspiration which cannot be pinned down to a simple sentence. Degrowth is a
frame, where different lines of thought, imaginaries, or courses of action come
together. We see this versatility as a strength. This is why we decided to represent
degrowth in a (loose) form of a dictionary. The vocabulary of degrowth is a net-
work of ideas and conversations, strongly rooted in the radical and critical tradi-
tions, but open-ended and amenable to multiple connections.
The book starts with an essay written by the three of us. It is longer than the other
entries in the book, not because we were more lenient with the word limit for our-
selves, but because it attempts to present “degrowth” linking this core keyword of this
book all the other keywords of this book. In this introductory chapter, we present the
history of the term degrowth and the various propositions and ideas that express it.
The remainder of the book is divided into four parts. The first part examines
intellectual roots that nourish degrowth, i.e. the epistemologies of degrowth. The
entries summarize in a few words entire schools of thought, explaining their rel-
evance for degrowth. The second part presents the concepts that are at the core of
degrowth’s critique to the pensée unique of growth. Each entry in this part represents
a different entry-point into degrowth. Together, these entries form the theory of
degrowth. The third part moves to action and focuses on concrete institutional
proposals and on living examples of how degrowth looks on the ground. The
entries span from state policies to activist projects and try to cover the whole range
of the post-capitalist imaginary of degrowth. Finally, the fourth and shortest part of
the book, looks at “alliances”; it presents schools of thought, actors, and concepts,
which share a lot with the degrowth project but which have only had loose con-
nections with degrowth up to now. It is there where the most fertile geographical
links and future extensions of degrowth are to be found and strengthened.
The reader may approach the book in the standard linear way, reading it entry
by entry. But, according to us, this will probably be the most boring way to engage
with it. An alternative would be to start from what seems as the most intriguing
entry and then wander through the cross-references (marked in bold) to other
entries. A meticulous reader might want to read one by one all entries mentioned
in a single entry, then move to the next unread entry and do the same, until he or
she has read the whole book. Readers are encouraged to make their own voyage
through the book and reach their own sense of what degrowth means to them.
At the end of this book, in an essay called “From austerity to depense,” we state what
degrowth has come to mean to us in the process of preparing this book and reading the
contributions. This is our own politically committed and selective take on the book.
The authors contributing to this volume were instructed to write as simply as
possible, but not simpler than that. The entries are written for a general public,
not for the specialist. They do not demand previous knowledge of the debates or
xxii Preface

the terminology. Still, they are framed and composed with the desirable rigor and
expertise of academic book chapters. At the end of each entry there is a references
list for those who want to delve deeper into each topic.
The book is a collective output, but with our own spin on the selection and arrange-
ment of entries and contributors. As with any intellectual product, our contributions
for this book are not only our own, but the output of accumulated work from the peo-
ple we have read and the people we have discussed with. It embodies and is embedded
in the social and familial work of reproduction. It is a result of commoning.
In the Monday reading group of Research & Degrowth in Barcelona we for-
mulated most of the ideas we express in this book. Many of the members of this
collective, some of them researchers also at the Institute of Environmental Science
and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, are also
contributors to this book. But let us acknowledge them also one by one: Filka,
Viviana, Claudio, Marta, Kristofer, Erik, Christian, Iago, Christos, Daniela, Diego,
Rita, Lucha, Aggelos, Marco, and the various occasional participants of the read-
ing group, too many to mention here. Our special thanks to Joan Martinez-Alier,
who created at ICTA a wonderful haven of radical thought without which we
would never have come together to work in common, and to François Schneider,
who brought to Barcelona his passion for degrowth and shared it with all of us.
Let us also thank all these people without whom this volume would have not been
completed. Jacques Grinevald who passed to us generously his knowledge of the
history of degrowth; our translators from French and Spanish, Bob Thompson and
Cormac De Brun; our editors at Routledge Robert Langham, Andy Humphries,
Lisa Thomson, Laura Johnson, and Natalie Tomlinson; and Valerie McGuire
(aided by Jason Badgley), who not only translated entries from Italian, but pains-
takingly read and edited all entries of the book, improving the English of non-
native speakers, and allowing this to be a truly international volume. We also thank
Bàrbara Castro Urío (labarbara.net), our graphic designer, who created the cover
and the illustrations of this book, because aesthetics matters too. We acknowledge
the financial support of the Spanish government through the project CSO2011-
28990 BEGISUD (Beyond GDP growth: Investigating the socio-economic condi-
tions for a Socially Sustainable Degrowth) and of the European Union through the
Marie Curie Action Initial Training Networks - FP7 – PEOPLE - 2011; contract
No 289374 — ENTITLE (European Network for Political Ecology).
This book has several chapters and authors. We are not the only ones who
worked on it, but we did work a lot on it. We would like to dedicate our contribu-
tions to those we most care for. Giacomo D’Alisa to his present and future: his wife
Stefania and his children Claudia Pilar and Nicolas Mayo. Federico Demaria to his
partner Veronica, his parents Maria and Mario, and his brother Daniele. Giorgos
Kallis to his wife Amalia, his parents Vassili and Maria, and his sister Iris. And last
but not least, to all our close friends and companions.
Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis
Barcelona, April 2014
vocabulary.degrowth.org
FOREWORD

The issue of economic degrowth and the prospect of a more sustainable and just
society entered the domain of scientific research in 2008 when we, the authors
of this foreword, co-organized the first international conference on the subject in
Paris. Success was immediate and a promising future opened up. The Paris confer-
ence was followed by conferences in Barcelona, Montreal, Venice, and Leipzig
(among a large array of local events). An international network is developing in
30 countries, research agendas and multi-dimensional political proposals are being
debated, and several scientific journals have been publishing the work of the bur-
geoning degrowth research community. Of course, when we convened the Paris
conference we were well aware that we were not the first to criticize the “growth
society.” The Club of Rome in the 1970s had already questioned the possibility of
continuous material growth, the basis of productivist societies (capitalist or social-
ist). This question has only become more insistent since then, due to six drivers:
the continuing degradation of the natural environment; resource depletion and the
challenge it poses to economic growth; exhaustion of the growth potential due
to the unsustainable contradictions that capitalism remains locked into; renewed
interest in seeking a path of civilization not based on utilitarian exchange with
ever-growing increasing returns; a growing counter-productivity of institutions,
namely their tendency to act as barriers with respect to users, rather than as tools;
and finally the “crisis of meaning” and the attempt by many to disconnect from
mass consumption and give new meaning to their lives (through frugality, Do-It-
Yourself, eco-communes, etc.).
These six forces will not weaken in the near future. To take the environmental
dimension, for example, even the International Energy Agency now recognizes that
we reached the peak of conventional oil in 2011.1 The coming oil shortage explains
the rush for unconventional energy sources, such as shale gas, economically attrac-
tive despite the environmental and social destruction they bring. The Millennium
xxiv Foreword

Ecosystem Assessment (2005) clearly established that ecosystems are increasingly


exploited, in many cases beyond their limits. The National Bureau of Economic
Research, where the “crème de la crème” of American economists sit, many of them
awardees of Nobel prizes, published an article in August 2012 that asked whether
the long period of continued US economic growth was coming to an end. Similarly,
in Europe, where the average rate of economic growth has been declining for four
decades, a “crisis of meaning” has become evident, manifested in the growing public
distrust of science and technology. Many conferences reflect on this “crisis of mean-
ing,” as do documents such as the recent “Convivialist Manifesto” – where several
important personalities dared to utter for the first time the word “degrowth.” There
is willingness from diverse political and economic actors to abandon their usual posi-
tions and radically question the present situation. Finally, there is a looming institu-
tional crisis. More and more people reject “democratic” processes. This rejection is
manifested not least in a growing electoral abstention and the electoral rise of extreme
right nationalists almost everywhere in Europe.
This multi-fold crisis relates to the unsustainability of the post-war consumption-
based economic model as well as the exclusion from it of individuals, whole
countries, or even continents. If we continue to uphold an unsustainable level
of consumption in privileged areas of the globe – and even worse, continue to
imagine that this level will grow in the future – we must also acknowledge that
this “growth” can only come by means of “closure,” of leaving out those for
whom “there is not enough.” Hence we witness the proliferation of gated com-
munities, national borders closed for the poor of the world (and opened for the
rich), and the internal closure of social groups with the development of essential-
ist or racist discourses. These closures sustain, for the selected few, the present
unsustainable ways of life that Western societies have grown accustomed to.
In the West, the idea of economic degrowth and of the construction of a
society of sharing, frugality and conviviality continue to strengthen. Yet the vast
majority still live in denial. This denial is reinforced by economists – the apostles
of industrial modernity – by whom the question of degrowth remains largely
ignored, if it is not a taboo. Witness the sharp reaction at the mention of the
word “degrowth” in front of economists. In economics, the degrowth perspec-
tive is scarcely present, even among those economists who oppose capitalism or
liberalism. Heterodox economics may distance themselves from the extremely
narrow vision defended by the liberal orthodoxy, but they often do not offer
original thinking as far as the question of the overall direction of an economy
is concerned. In fact many “heterodox” economists (but not all) simply defend
theoretical positions and public policies that have been held for decades, such as
stimulus to push demand, or tax reforms.
Like other scientists, economists adopt a strategy of willful blindness, reduc-
ing the object of their research to ensure the manageability and feasibility of their
investigation. This is not necessarily wrong. What is wrong is the fixation on
certain absolute rules, such as the growth objective, and the production of recom-
mendations that, if they were to be applied, would direct societies down the same
Foreword xxv

narrow path. With this global policy in place, we experience a societal lock-in,
continuously reproduced, which constrains genuine reflection on truly original
futures, commensurate with the challenges faced by our societies. These challenges
are great if one considers that an industrial society with an excessive productive
capacity is also a society with very strong social inequalities (exploitation of labor
power, expulsion of peasants from their subsistence lands, material misery of the
unemployed). Degrowth has nothing to do with a simple greening of existing
techniques, nor with a “democratization,” to make them accessible to all (assum-
ing they are wanted), or merely with the collective self-management of capitalist
techniques. Degrowth signals a radical critique of society: it challenges techniques,
rather than just calling for their control. Some technologies are to be rejected
(nuclear, GMOs, nanotechnologies) because they are not amenable to limits, oth-
ers are acceptable up to certain limits, which should be deliberated by the whole of
society. Degrowth is not an idea made to seduce. It is a revolutionary idea.
Today, degrowth faces two risks. The first is that it could lose its meaning
and become a new version of how to consume and produce differently, omit-
ting for example the inconvenient idea that degrowth is, also, about consuming
and producing less, much less, at least in the wealthy regions of the world. The
second risk is that degrowth could be put aside and its radical content watered
down if subsumed within vaguer notions such as “post-growth,” which, like
sustainable development before it, leaves tactically open the possibility of
“win-win” solutions. We are equally sceptical of the notion of the “steady-
state,” which focusses on the biophysical dimension and evades hard political
and social questions.
In this context, the vocabulary that this book offers is important in two ways.
On the one hand, it conveys the diversity of approaches and ideas co-existing
within the term “degrowth.” On the other, it manifests the great breadth of con-
cerns and proposals that degrowth thinkers and actors have put forward by being
involved in many areas (arts, science, activism) and working to develop imaginaries
and concrete practices that are alternative to productivism, both local and global,
in different places on the planet, within or outside the major knowledge producing
institutions. We stress here the importance of combining different political strate-
gies (opposition, building alternatives, but even some reformism) in order to bring
true social change in a degrowth direction.
Like or hate the term degrowth, you can’t deny that it opens up all sorts of
debates that were previously closed. The emotions it stirs mean it can never
become an issue of secondary importance. The valuable contribution of this vol-
ume, the first of its kind in English, is that it clarifies some of the most important
and difficult to comprehend concepts mobilized in the debates about degrowth.
Anti-utilitarianism, capitalism, environmentalism, conviviality, Illich’s critique of
big institutions, new forms of wealth or happiness, buen-vivir, and concrete aspects
of voluntary simplicity, co-operatives, civil disobedience. The entries in this book
are numerous and connected to one another, enabling the reader to become gradu-
ally more familiar with the key ideas associated with degrowth.
xxvi Foreword

Of course such work cannot be exhaustive: degrowth is more of an explora-


tory avenue than a completed and sealed doctrine. This is what makes it a living
and dynamic set of ideas. Let us hope that it remains this way for a long time to
come and that new reflections arise to enrich, criticize, and transform the thoughts
presented here.
Fabrice Flipo and François Schneider
Founders and members of Research & Degrowth

Note
1 AIE, World Energy Outlnteook, 2010.
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The elephant and the snail
INTRODUCTION
Degrowth

Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

1. The twists and turns of degrowth


The term ‘décroissance’ (French for degrowth) was used for the first time by French
intellectual André Gorz in 1972. Gorz posed a question that remains at the cen-
tre of today’s degrowth debate: ‘Is the earth’s balance, for which no-growth – or
even degrowth - of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with
the survival of the capitalist system?’ (Gorz, 1972: iv). Other Francophone authors
then used the term in the follow-up to ‘The Limits to Growth’ report (Meadows
et al. 1972). Philosopher André Amar (1973) for example, wrote on La croissance et le
problème moral1 for an issue on ‘Les objecteurs de croissance’ of the journal NEF Cahiers.
A few years later, André Gorz advocated explicitly degrowth in his book Ecology
and Freedom, writing:

[O]nly one economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, has had the common


sense to point out that, even at zero growth, the continued consumption of
scarce resources will inevitably result in exhausting them completely. The
point is not to refrain from consuming more and more, but to consume less
and less – there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future
generations. This is what ecological realism is about. [ . . . .] Radicals who
refuse to examine the question of equality without growth merely demonstrate
that “socialism”, for them, is nothing but the continuation of capitalism by
other means – an extension of middle class values, lifestyles, and social patterns
[ . . . ]. Today a lack of realism no longer consists in advocating greater well-
being through degrowth2 and the subversion of the prevailing way of life. Lack
of realism consists in imagining that economic growth can still bring about
increased human welfare, and indeed that it is still physically possible.
(Gorz, 1980[1977]: 13)
2 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

Gorz was a precursor of political ecology. For him ecology was part and parcel
of a radical political transformation. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who inspired
Gorz, was the intellectual pioneer of ecological economics and bioeconomics.
In 1971 he published his magnus opus ‘Entropy Law and the Economic Process’.
In 1979, Jacques Grinevald and Ivo Rens, professors at the University of Geneva,
edited a collection of the articles of Georgescu-Roegen with the title Demain la
décroissance (interestingly without prior knowledge of Gorz also using the term).
Grinevald chose the book title with Georgescu-Roegen’s agreement, translating as
décroissance the word ‘descent’ from G-R’s article on a ‘Minimal Bio-economic
Programme’ (Grinevald 1974).
With the end of the oil crisis and the advent of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and
1990s, the interest on limits to growth and degrowth waned; even though in the
1990s the debate thrived again in French. In 1993, the Lyon-based environmental and
non-violence activist Michel Bernard got in touch with Grinevald and invited him to
write an article for his magazine Silence on ‘Georgescu-Roegen: Bioeconomics and
Biosphere’. The article explicitly referred to degrowth. Later on, in July 2001, Bruno
Clémentin and Vincent Cheynet, also based in Lyon, the latter an ex-advertiser and
founders with Randall Ghent of the magazine Casseurs de pub (the French equivalent
of the Canadian Adbusters), launched the term ‘sustainable degrowth’. Clémentin and
Cheynet registered the term as an intellectual property to mark the date of its inven-
tion and playfully warned against its future misuse and conventionalization. The public
debate on degrowth in France took off in 2002 with a special issue of Silence edited
by the two in tribute to Georgescu-Roegen. The issue sold 5,000 copies and was
reprinted twice. This was probably the starting point for today’s degrowth movement.
In the first phase of the degrowth debate in the 1970s, the emphasis was on
resource limits. In the second phase, starting in 2001, the driving force was the
criticism of the hegemonic idea of ‘sustainable development’. For economic
anthropologist Serge Latouche, sustainable development was an oxymoron, as he
argued in ‘A bas le développement durable! Vive la décroissance conviviale!’ In
2002 the conference ‘Défaire le développement, refaire le monde’ took place in
Paris at the premises of UNESCO with 800 participants. The conference marked
an alliance between Lyon-based environmental activists, like Bernard, Clémentin
and Cheynet, and the post-development academic community to which Latouche
belonged (see development). In 2002, the Institute for Economic and Social
Studies on Sustainable Degrowth was founded in Lyon. A year afterwards, it organ-
ized in the city the first international colloquium on sustainable degrowth. The
event gathered over 300 participants from France, Switzerland and Italy. Speakers
included those who were to become the most prolific authors on degrowth,
such as Serge Latouche, Mauro Bonaiuti, Paul Ariès, Jacques Grinevald, François
Schneider and Pierre Rabhi. The same year, Bernard, Clémentin and Cheynet
edited the book Objectif décroissance; this sold 8,000 copies and was re-printed three
times and also translated into Italian, Spanish and Catalan.
Décroissance, as a movement of activists, flourished in Lyon in the early 2000s
in the wake of protests for car-free cities, communal meals in the streets, food
Introduction: degrowth 3

cooperatives and campaigns against advertising. Spreading from France, it became


a slogan mobilized by green and anti-globalization activists in Italy in 2004 (as
‘decrescita’) and Catalonia and Spain in 2006 (as ‘decreixement’ and ‘decrecimiento’).
In 2004, degrowth reached a larger audience in France with conferences, direct
actions and initiatives like the magazine La Décroissance, le journal de la joie de vivre,
which today sells 30,000 copies each month. In the same year, researcher-activist
François Schneider undertook a year-long walking tour on a donkey to dissemi-
nate degrowth through France, receiving widespread media coverage. In 2007,
Schneider founded in France the academic collective Research & Degrowth, with
Denis Bayon and, later on, Fabrice Flipo, and promoted a series of international
conferences. The first was in Paris in 2008 and the second in Barcelona in 2010.
The English term ‘degrowth’ was ‘officially’ used for the first time at the Paris
conference, marking the birth of an international research community. As the
Barcelona group from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology
(ICTA) joined the movement by hosting the second conference, the degrowth
research community extended beyond its initial strongholds in France and Italy.
ICTA provided links to the academic community of ecological economics as well
as to Latin American networks of political ecology and environmental justice.
Following the success of the Paris and Barcelona conferences, more conferences
were held in Montreal (2011), Venice (2012) and Leipzig (2014), with degrowth
spreading to groups and activities in Flanders, Switzerland, Finland, Poland,
Greece, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Czech Republic, Mexico, Brazil,
Puerto Rico, Canada, Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere.
Since 2008, the English term has entered academic journals with over 100 pub-
lished articles and at least seven Special Issues in peer-reviewed journals (Kallis
et al. 2010; Cattaneo et al. 2012; Saed 2012; Kallis et al. 2012; Sekulova et al.
2013; Whitehead 2013; Kosoy 2013). Degrowth is taught at universities around
the world, including prestigious schools such as SciencePo in Paris. It has been used
and misused by French and Italian politicians and has received coverage in many
renowned newspapers, including Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, El Pais, The
Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.
But what precisely is the meaning of degrowth?

2. Degrowth today
Degrowth signifies, first and foremost, a critique of growth. It calls for the decolo-
nization of public debate from the idiom of economism and for the abolishment
of economic growth as a social objective. Beyond that, degrowth signifies also a
desired direction, one in which societies will use fewer natural resources and will
organize and live differently than today. ‘Sharing’, ‘simplicity’, ‘conviviality’,
‘care’ and the ‘commons’ are primary significations of what this society might
look like.
Usually, degrowth is associated with the idea that smaller can be beautiful.
Ecological economists define degrowth as an equitable downscaling of production
4 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materi-
als (Schneider et al. 2010). However, our emphasis here is on different, not only less.
Degrowth signifies a society with a smaller metabolism, but more importantly, a
society with a metabolism which has a different structure and serves new func-
tions. Degrowth does not call for doing less of the same. The objective is not to
make an elephant leaner, but to turn an elephant into a snail. In a degrowth society
everything will be different: different activities, different forms and uses of energy,
different relations, different gender roles, different allocations of time between paid
and non-paid work, different relations with the non-human world.
Degrowth offers a frame that connects diverse ideas, concepts and proposals
(Demaria et al. 2013). However, there are some centres of gravity within this frame
(Figure 1). The first is the criticism of growth. Next is the criticism of capitalism,
a social system that requires and perpetuates growth. Two other strong currents in
the degrowth literature are, first, the criticism of GDP, and second, the criticism
of commodification, the process of conversion of social products and socio-
ecological services and relations into commodities with a monetary value.
However, degrowth is not limited only to criticism. On the constructive side,
the degrowth imaginary centres around the reproductive economy of care, and
the reclaiming of old – and the creation of new – commons. Caring in common
is embodied in new forms of living and producing, such as eco-communities
and cooperatives and can be supported by new government institutions, such
as work-sharing or a basic and maximum income, institutions which can
liberate time from paid work and make it available for unpaid communal and
caring activities.
Degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth. Still, a reduction of GDP,
as currently counted, is a likely outcome of actions promoted in the name of
degrowth. A green, caring and communal economy is likely to secure the good
life, but unlikely to increase gross domestic activity two or three per cent per year.

FIGURE 1 The keywords of degrowth (size illustrates frequency of appearance of an


entry in other entries in this book)
Introduction: degrowth 5

Advocates of degrowth ask how the inevitable and desirable decrease of GDP can
become socially sustainable, given that under capitalism, economies tend to either
grow or collapse.
In the minds of most people, growth is still associated with an improvement,
or well-being. Because of this some progressive intellectuals take issue with the use
of the word degrowth. It is inappropriate, they claim, to use a ‘negative word’ to
signify desired changes. However, the use of a negation for a positive project aims
precisely to decolonise an imaginary dominated by a one-way future consisting
only of growth. It is the automatic association of growth with better that the word
‘degrowth’ wants to dismantle. For degrowthers it is the unquestionable desir-
ability of growth in the common sense that needs to be confronted if a discussion
for a different future is to open up (Latouche 2009). Degrowth is a deliberately
subversive slogan.
Of course some sectors, such as education, medical care, or renewable energy,
will need to flourish in the future, while others, such as dirty industries or the
financial sector shrink. The aggregate result will be degrowth. We prefer also to
use words such as ‘flourishing’ when we talk about health or education, rather than
‘growing’ or ‘developing’. The desired change is qualitative, like in the flourishing
of the arts. It is not quantitative, like in the growth of industrial output.
‘Development’, even if it were to be cleaned of its heavy historical mean-
ing, or beautified with adjectives such as balanced, local or sustainable, is a
problematic keyword. The word suggests an unfolding towards a predeter-
mined end. An embryo ‘develops’ into a mature adult, who then ages and
dies. A premise of modern liberal societies, however, is the denial of any ulti-
mate collective end as well as the denial of anything but ascent. Development
becomes self-referential: development for the sake of development, the unfold-
ing of a predetermined, not-to-be-questioned arrow of progress with no end
in sight (Castoriadis 1985).
A frequent criticism to the degrowth proposal is that it is applicable only to
the overdeveloped economies of the Global North. The poorer countries of the
Global South still need to grow to satisfy basic needs. Indeed, degrowth in the
North will liberate ecological space for growth in the South. Poverty in the South
is the outcome of the exploitation of its natural and human resources at low cost by
the North. Degrowth in the North will reduce the demand for, and the prices of,
natural resources and industrial goods, making them more accessible to the devel-
oping South. However, degrowth should be pursued in the North, not in order to
allow the South to follow the same path, but first and foremost in order to liber-
ate conceptual space for countries there to find their own trajectories to what they
define as the good life. In the South there is a wealth of alternative cosmovisions
and political projects such as Buen Vivir in Latin America (or Sumak Kawsay in
Ecuador); Ubuntu in South Africa; or the Gandhian Economy of Permanence
in India. These visions express alternatives to development, alternative trajectories
of socio-economic system. They often put forward claims for global environ-
mental justice. They only stand to flourish by a retreat of the growth imaginary
6 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

in the Northern countries that have promoted it, if not forced it to the rest of
the world.

3. The panorama of degrowth


In what follows, we organize the (old and new) degrowth literature into five themes:
the limits of – and the limits to – growth; degrowth and autonomy; degrowth as
repoliticization; degrowth and capitalism; and proposals for a degrowth transition.

3.1 The limits of growth


The foundational theses of degrowth are that growth is uneconomic and unjust,
that it is ecologically unsustainable and that it will never be enough. Moreover,
growth is likely to be coming to an end as it encounters external and internal limits.
Growth is uneconomic because, at least in developed economies, “illth” increases
faster than wealth (Daly 1996). The costs of growth include bad psychological
health, long working hours, congestion and pollution (Mishan 1967). GDP counts
costs, such as the building of a prison or the clean-up of a river, as benefits3. As a
result, GDP may still increase, but in most developed economies welfare indicators
such as the Genuine Progress Index or the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
have stagnated after the 1970s. Above a certain level of national income, it is equality
and not growth that improves social well-being (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).
Growth is unjust, first, because it is subsidized and sustained by invisible repro-
ductive work in the household (see Care). Feminist economics has shown that
this work is gendered, with women doing most of it. Second, growth is unjust
because it benefits from an unequal exchange of resources between core and
periphery among, and within, nations. The energy and materials that fuel growth
are extracted from commodity frontiers, often in indigenous or underdeveloped
territories that suffer the impacts of extraction. Waste and pollutants end up in
marginalized territories, communities or neighbourhoods of lower class or of dif-
ferent colour or ethnicity than the majority of the population (see environmental
justice). However, although growth is uneconomic and unjust, it may as well be
sustained precisely because the benefits accrue to those who hold power and the
costs are shifted to those who are marginalized.
Commodification, which is part and parcel of growth, is eroding social-
ity and mores. Care, hospitality, love, public duty, nature conservation, spiritual
contemplation; traditionally, these relations or ‘services’ did not obey a logic of
personal profit (see anti-utilitarianism). Nowadays they increasingly become
objects of market exchange, valued and paid for in the formal GDP economy.
Profit motivations crowd out moral or altruistic behaviours and social wellbeing
diminishes as a result (Hirsch 1976).
Above a certain level, growth does not increase happiness. This is because
once basic material needs are satisfied, extra incomes are devoted increasingly to
positional goods (e.g. a house bigger than the neighbour’s). Relative, and not
Introduction: degrowth 7

absolute, wealth determines access to positional goods. Everyone wants growth in


order to raise his or her position, but as everyone rises together, no one gets better.
This is a zero-sum game. Worse, growth makes positional goods more expen-
sive. These are the social limits of growth: growth can never satisfy positional
competition; it can only make it worse. Growth therefore will never produce
“enough” for everyone (Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012).
Growth is also ecologically unsustainable. With continuous global growth most
planet ecosystem boundaries will be surpassed. There is a strong and direct correla-
tion between GDP and the carbon emissions that change the climate (Anderson and
Bows, 2011). The economy could in theory be decarbonized with the advancement of
cleaner or more efficient technologies, or by a structural shift to services. However with
2 to 3 per cent global growth per year, the degree of decarbonization required is next to
impossible. Global carbon intensity (C/$) by 2050 should be 20–130 times lower than
today, when the reduction from 1980 to 2007 was just 23 per cent (Jackson 2008). To
date, there are hardly any countries which can claim an absolute reduction in material
use or carbon emissions while growing. When they do, this is because they outsourced
dirty industrial activities to the developing world. Absolute reductions in energy and
material use (see dematerialization) are unlikely to come through technological pro-
gress: the more technologically advanced and efficient an economy becomes, the more
resources it consumes because resources get cheaper (see Jevons’ Paradox). Service
economies also are not materially light. Services have high emergy (embodied energy).
Computers or the Internet embody lots of rare materials and energy, as well as knowl-
edge and labour also ‘produced’ with energy and materials (Odum and Odum 2001).
Growth in the developed economies might be coming to an end. This might be
due to diminishing marginal returns (Bonaiuti, 2014), the exhaustion of technolog-
ical innovations (Gordon 2012) or limits in creating effective demand and invest-
ment outlets for capital accumulating at a compound interest rate (Harvey 2010).
Natural resources also pose a limit to growth. Economic growth degrades high-
order (low entropy) energy stocks, turning them into low-order (high entropy)
heat and emissions. Peak oil, peaks in the extraction rates of essential stocks such
as phosphorous, and climate change from carbon emissions, may already restrict
growth. The new stocks that substitute oil are also exhaustible, such as shale gas,
and often dirtier, such as coal or tar sands, accelerating climate change. Renewable
energy from solar or wind flows is cleaner, but renewable sources yield lower
energy surpluses (energy returns to energy investment – EROI), given the exist-
ing technology, compared to fossil fuels. A lot of conventional energy will have to
be expended in the transition to renewables. A solar civilization can only support
smaller economies, given the low EROI of renewable energies compared to fossil
fuels. A transition to renewables will inevitably be a degrowth transition.
From a degrowth perspective, the current economic crisis is the result of sys-
temic limits to growth. It is not a cyclical crisis or fault in the credit system. First,
the crisis in the U.S. was triggered by the hike in oil prices; domestic trade suffered
and workers’ mobility from the suburbs became unaffordable, leading to the house
foreclosures that precipitated the subprime mortgage crisis. Second, the fictitious
8 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

(bubble) economy of finance and personal loans grew because there was no other
source of growth and no other way to sustain demand from falling. Private and
public debt sustained an otherwise unsustainable rate of growth (Kallis et al.
2009). Stagnation was delayed, but only temporarily.

3.2 Degrowth and autonomy


The fact that there are limits and growth is coming to an end is not necessarily
bad. For many degrowthers, degrowth is not an adaptation to inevitable limits,
but a desirable project to be pursued for its own sake in the search for autonomy.
Autonomy was a keyword for thinkers such as Illich, Gorz and Castoriadis, but
it meant something slightly different to each. Illich (1973) meant freedom from
large techno-infrastructures and the centralized bureaucratic institutions, public or
private, that manage them. For Gorz (1982) autonomy is freedom from wage-
labour. Autonomous is the sphere of non-paid work where individuals and collec-
tives enjoy leisure and produce for their own use, instead of money. For Castoriadis
(1987) instead, autonomy means the ability of a collective to decide its future in
common, freed from external (‘heteronomous’) imperatives and givens, such as the
law of God (religion), or the laws of the economy (economics).
Following Illich, degrowthers take issue with fossil fuels not only because of
peak oil or climate change, but because a high use of energy supports complex
technological systems. Complex systems call for specialized experts and bureau-
cracies to manage them. They unavoidably lead to non-egalitarian and undemo-
cratic hierarchies. Autonomy instead requires convivial tools, i.e. tools which are
understandable, manageable and controllable by their users. An urban garden, a
bicycle or a Do-It-Yourself Adobe house are convivial and autonomous. A weed-
resistant GMO field, a high-speed train or an energy-efficient ‘smart building’ are
not. Degrowthers are critical of such high-tech projects of ecological moderniza-
tion and green growth not only because they might not turn out to be sustainable,
but because they reduce autonomy. Projects that signify a degrowth imaginary –
vacant lot gardening, pirate programming or bicycle repair shops – are convivial,
they involve voluntary work and they are governed and shaped directly by their
participants (see nowtopians).
Rather than limits to growth, the literature on autonomy emphasizes collective
self-limitations. Limits, or rather self-limitations, are not invoked for the good of
nature or to avoid an impeding disaster, but because living simply, and limiting
our footprint upon the non-human world that we happen to live in, is how the
good life is conceived. Not least, limits also liberate from the paralysis of unlimited
choice. And only systems with limited scale can become genuinely egalitarian and
democratic, as only they can be governed directly by their users. Limits are there-
fore ‘a social choice . . . and not . . . an external imperative for environmental
or other reasons’ (Schneider et al. 2010, 513). Environmental or social bads and
risks – climate change, peak oil or uneconomic growth - simply make the case for
collective self-limitations stronger.
Introduction: degrowth 9

It is not a coincidence that degrowthers are inspired by the Neo-Malthusians


anarcho-feminists of Emma Goldman and not by Malthus. Goldman and her com-
panions advocated conscious procreation not in the name of a population bomb
but as part of a struggle against the exploitation by capitalism of female bodies to
produce soldiers and cheap labour. The distinction here is subtle, but crucial. The
Neo-Malthusians chose consciously to limit their reproduction as part of a pro-
ject of social and political change. They did not do it for moral reasons, or because
‘they had to’. They did not do it to avert a disaster. Their act was political. It was
pre-figuring the world they wanted to produce and inhabit.

3.3 Degrowth as repoliticization


Degrowth was thrown explicitly as a ‘missile word’ to re-politicize environmental-
ism and end the depoliticizing consensus on sustainable development (Ariès 2005).
Sustainable development depoliticizes genuine political antagonisms about the kind
of future one wants to inhabit; it renders environmental problems technical, prom-
ising win-win solutions and the (impossible) goal of perpetuating development
without harming the environment. The ecological modernization promised by
sustainable development evades the core contemporary dilemma, which accord-
ing to Bruno Latour (1998) is whether ‘to modernize or to ecologize’. Degrowth
takes sides. Ecologizing society, degrowthers argue, is not about implementing an
alternative, better, or greener development. It is about imagining and enacting
alternative visions to modern development.
In relation, degrowth calls for the politicization of science and technology,
against the increasing technocratization of politics. A neat distinction between sci-
ence and politics is impossible to sustain when dealing with questions about the
global economy or climate change, where ‘wars of truth’ are waged and values
shape the knowledge claims that different actors stake. New models of democra-
tized knowledge production are necessary. Post-normal science proposes the
extension of the peer-review community that ensures the quality of scientific
inputs into decision-making to include all those with a stake, including not least
lay people. Post-normal science calls for a shift of decisions from ‘communities
of experts’, like scientific committees and advisory councils, to decisions by ‘expert
communities’ (D’Alisa et al. 2010).
The apolitical, technocratic discourse of sustainable development is a manifesta-
tion of a broader process of depoliticization of public debate in liberal democra-
cies, whereby politics have been reduced to the search for technocratic solutions to
pre-framed problems instead of a genuinely antagonistic struggle between alternative
visions. Political ecology attributes this depoliticization to the rise of neo-liber-
alism and the Washington consensus. These subjugated sovereign political choice to
the needs of unregulated capital and liberalised markets. Degrowth scholars agree, but
trace the origins of depoliticization further back in time. Neo-liberal reforms were
– and are – justified in the name of growth, itself justified in terms of develop-
ment. This development consensus, which spans across the left and right political
10 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

spectrum, and even across the Iron Curtain, evacuated the political before neo-
liberalism: socialist economies ended up resembling state capitalism, because they
remained trapped in the pursuit of growth and development.
A distinguishing feature of modern, capitalist and socialist economies has been the
(institutionalized) investment of a significant part of the social surplus into new pro-
duction. The consequence of this is the disavowal of what was the exercise par excellence
of political sovereignty in older civilizations: the decision for the destination of surplus
(see theory of dépense). In older civilizations, often surplus was dedicated to ‘waste-
ful’ expenditures that did not serve a utilitarian purpose (see anti-utilitarianism).
Expenditures in pyramids, churches, festivals, celebratory fires or potlatch were
pursued because they were what ‘the good life’ was for these civilizations, not
because they contributed to production or growth. In modern industrial civiliza-
tion, such acts of wasteful dépense have been commodified and individualized.
In modernity, the meaning of life is to be found by each individual alone. The
premise is that each individual has the right to mobilize all resources necessary for
this pursuit. At the societal level this translates into a non-negotiable demand for
growth: only with growth can the demands of all not-to-be-limited individuals be
satisfied. However, as individuals search elusively for sense on their own, the genu-
inely ‘political’ sphere, where sense could be constructed socially through collec-
tive acts of dépense, is evacuated and subordinated to the imperative of growth.

3.4 Degrowth and capitalism


As the late Eric Hobsbawm (2011: 12) put it very late in his long life, ‘there is a patent
conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our econ-
omy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum growth
in search for profit’. Two premises underlie this statement. The first was defended
in Section 3.1: economic growth unavoidably increases throughput and negatively
impacts the biosphere (against the argument of proponents of green growth or green
capitalism that it is possible to both grow and reduce environmental impact). The
second is that growth is an imperative under capitalism.
In theory, capitalism could survive without growth. Indeed, capitalist economies
pass involuntary through periods of little, zero or negative growth. However, these
have to be temporary periods. Indeed, under capitalism the lack of growth leads to
an increase in the rate of workforce exploitation, if the rate of profit is to be sustained
(Blauwhof 2012; Harvey 2010). But, intensifying exploitation cannot be sustained
for too long without violence and counter-violence. Lack of growth therefore desta-
bilizes capitalism and liberal democracy. A historical example is the rise of fascism
after the Great Depression, or of communism in Russia before, political projects
that aspired to change or end capitalism. Growth avoids redistributive conflict and
sustains capitalism politically. It is in this concrete sense that growth is imperative
for capitalism, not in the abstract.
History suggests that is highly unlikely that nations with capitalist economies would
voluntary choose not to grow. In theory, however, one could imagine a scenario under
Introduction: degrowth 11

which political forces come democratically in power and enforce resource caps and
social minima (e.g. a job guarantee for the unemployed), restricting the operation
of capitalism within environmental and social limits (Lawn, 2005). However for
this to happen a radical redistribution of political power would be necessary. Caps,
new taxes or income/job security programs harm economically powerful interests
with privileged access to governments. Blauwhof (2012) argues that nothing short of
a revolution will bring about these institutional reforms. Would a system with such
dramatic political and institutional changes be still capitalist? Jackson (2009) responds
that it could still be capitalism, but a very different one; he declares his disinterest
to semantic debates about the name of the system in a prosperous future without
growth. But as Skidelsky and Skidelsky (2012: 6) put it, the end of growth ‘chal-
lenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like; for an economic
system in which capital no longer accumulates is no longer capitalism, whatever
one might want to call it’.
Degrowth of course is not only about reduced throughput. It is about imagining
and constructing a different society – a society that manages to convince itself that
it has enough and that it no longer has to accumulate. Capitalism is an ensemble
of institutions – private property, the corporation, wage labour and private credit
and money at an interest rate – whose end result is a dynamic of profit in search of
more profit (‘accumulation’). The alternatives, projects and policies that signify a
degrowth imaginary are essentially non-capitalist: they diminish the importance of
core capitalist institutions of property, money etc, replacing them with institutions
imbued with different values and logics. Degrowth therefore signifies a transition
beyond capitalism.

3.5 The degrowth transition


A degrowth transition is not a sustained trajectory of descent, but a transition to
convivial societies who live simply, in common and with less. There are several
ideas about the practices and institutions that can facilitate such a transition and the
processes that can bring them together and allow them to flourish.

Grassroots economic practices


Eco-communities, online communities (see digital commons), communi-
ties of back-to-the-landers, cooperatives, urban gardens, community
currencies, time banks, barter markets, associations of child or health care.
In the context of the crisis and as conventional institutions fail to secure the
basic needs of people, there is a spontaneous proliferation of new non-capitalist
practices and institutions, in places like Argentina, Greece, or Catalonia (Conill
et al 2012).
These grassroots practices share five features. First, there is a shift from production
for exchange to production for use. Second, there is a substitution of wage labour
with voluntary activity, meaning a decommodification and de-professionalization of
12 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

work. Third, they follow a logic whereby the circulation of goods is set in motion,
at least partly by an exchange of reciprocal ‘gifts’ rather than in search of profit (see
anti-utilitarianism). Fourth, unlike capitalist enterprise, they do not have a built-in
dynamic to accumulate and expand. Fifth, they are outcomes of processes of ‘com-
moning’; connections and relations between participants carry an intrinsic value in
and for themselves. These practices are non-capitalist: they diminish the role of pri-
vate property and wage labour. They are new forms of commons.
They are also examples of degrowth in a more restricted sense. They have less
carbon content and material throughput when compared to the State or market
systems offering the same services. True, per unit of product they might be more
inefficient due to a lower degree of specialization and division of labour. An alter-
native organic food network, for example, might require more workers per unit of
product than an agri-business (though also less fertilizers, pesticides and fossil fuels).
This is not necessarily bad as far as unemployment is concerned. Decentralized
cooperative systems of water or energy production might provide less water or
energy output per unit of labour and resource input. However, they are likely to
be more environmentally benign precisely because their unproductiveness limits
their scale (an inverse Jevons’ effect): less efficient per unit, smaller as a whole.
Alternative practices of commoning are a source of innovation for renewing
public services, averting their privatization. Cooperative health or school systems
need not replace public health or education. The otherwise escalating costs of
public education and health can be reduced by involving parents in the education
of the children, or by developing neighbourhood networks of doctors and patients
offering preventive health checks and basic first aid. Preventative health care based
on intimate knowledge of the patient is much cheaper than high-tech diagno-
ses and treatments (these can be reserved for special cases). User-involvement is
generally cheaper and more democratic than the expensive outsourcing of public
services to private, for-profit providers. Degrowth therefore can bring an improve-
ment, not a deterioration, of public services.

Welfare institutions without growth


In the absence of growth, unemployment increases. In a degrowth transition, new
welfare institutions will be needed to decouple paid employment from growth, or
else decouple well-being from paid employment. An example of the first is the job
guarantee scheme, which proposes to make the State an employer of last resort
reducing de facto unemployment to zero. Another example is the proposal for an
unconditional basic income granted to all citizens, financed by progressive taxa-
tion on wages and profits (while taxation for high incomes can set a maximum
income) and taxes on consumption. This can secure a basic level of subsistence
and security for all without access to paid work. Worksharing, i.e. a redistribution
of work between the employed and the unemployed via a reduction of working
hours in the paid sector, can also reduce unemployment, and redistribute wealth,
if hours are reduced without loss of income.
Introduction: degrowth 13

The autonomous sphere voluntary and convivial activity stands to expand if


a basic income secures the satisfaction of basic needs or if worksharing liberates
time from paid work. A job guarantee can finance activities in the autonomous
sphere, such as care and education services, work in urban food gardens, coop-
eratives or free software production. New welfare institutions and grassroots eco-
nomic practices are therefore complementary.
Care, education, health or environmental restoration services have high social
value and provide meaningful employment; they can form the backbone of a new
economy, prosperous without growth. Such an economy will face less of an
unemployment problem, since it will be a labour-intensive economy.

Money and credit institutions


Community currencies, time banks and local exchange trading systems can
contribute to downscaling and relocalizing economic activity, constraining cir-
culation within a community. Community currencies have served as com-
plements in periods of crisis, allowing continued access to vital services by
people who were otherwise left out of the market economy. State money,
however, remains the most important locus of intervention in a degrowth
transition: first, because taxes, a large part of total circulation, are paid in it;
and second, because community currencies cannot satisfy the requirements
for inter-communal and international trade, which is inevitable in complex
economies such as ours.
A transitional degrowth proposal is for the State to take back the control of
the creation of new of money from private banks (public money). Private banks
in effect create new money by issuing loans. While private banks can only issue
money as debt through loans, the state could also issue money free of debt to meet
public needs. For example, States could issue money to finance a basic income or
a job guarantee or to subsidise cooperatives, care services, environmental con-
servation or renewable energy. Public money would improve public finances,
as states would reclaim seigniorage (the difference between the nominal value of
money and the cost of producing it), and as they will no longer borrow from pri-
vate banks to finance public expenditures.
Money issued as debt creates a growth dynamic. Debts are repaid with an
interest, and interest calls for growth. Economies cannot be expected to con-
tinue growing at the rate necessary to pay a debt itself accumulated in the past to
sustain a fictitious growth (Kallis et al. 2009). Debt is a social relation. History is
full of examples of societies that excused debts and started afresh. Western socie-
ties have maintained a materially affluent lifestyle by shifting promises of payment
to the future. A debt jubilee will inevitably cause a decline in the living standards
of small creditors and savers. From a degrowth perspective, the goal is not how
to re-launch growth and pay off debts, but how to distribute fairly the costs of a
jubilee adjustment. Citizen-run debt audits are essential for determining which
debts are legitimate and which are not. It may be legitimate, for example, to
14 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

excuse the debts of those whose basic standard of living is threatened, but not pay
back debts to those who lent for high profit.

The politics of a degrowth transition


There is no agreement in the degrowth literature about the politics and the political strat-
egies through which alternative institutions, imbued with the values of degrowth, could
come to replace the current institutions of capitalism. Preferred strategies and political
subjects range from non-wage labour nowtopians, who share a quasi-class experience
of autonomous living and producing, to existing social movements, political parties, or
even Unions. If there is a consensus in the degrowth community, this is that a transi-
tion can only be the outcome of multiple strategies and multiple actors; a movement of
movements changing both everyday practices and state institutions (Demaria et al. 2013).
D’Alisa et al. (2013) classify degrowth strategies and actors into civil and
‘uncivil’, uncivil defined as those who refuse to be ‘governmentalized’. Organized
disobedience features in the repertoire of degrowth activists. This spans from the
occupation of abandoned houses (‘squats’) to sit-ins against mega-projects and coal
plants. This could include land occupations by unemployed landless or poor peas-
ants. Financial disobedience includes acts such as that of Enric Duran, a promi-
nent degrowth activist in Barcelona who ‘expropriated’ 492,000 Euros via loans
from 39 banks just before the crisis in 2008, to denounce the speculative credit
system dedicating the money to alternative projects.
Latouche (2009) instead sees change coming mainly through parliamentary poli-
tics and grassroots action. He posits degrowth as an agenda for parties of the Left,
though he is against a ‘degrowth party’ as such. Others put more faith in social move-
ments such as the Indignados (Occupy) to change the parliamentary system into a
more direct form of democracy, such as that signified by the assemblies in the occu-
pied squares. And yet others emphasize the transformative potential of non-capitalist
grassroots economic practices of education, care, food provision, living and produc-
ing which are deemed political, even if they don’t take place in the traditional arenas
associated with politics, such as political parties, elections or parliaments. They are
political because they challenge and develop concrete alternatives to the dominant
institutions of capitalism, and which can universalised. Interestingly, the practices of
the Indignados (Occupy) movement – sit-ins, square orchards, communal kitch-
ens, barter exchanges – prefigure the values expressed by alternative projects; the
movement may be the incipient political expression of the nowtopians.
A hypothesis is that systemic change in the direction of degrowth will follow a
similar dynamic with other systemic changes in the past. Capitalism emerged out
of feudalism, as connections were forged, first between new economic practices
(firms, corporations, trade contracts, banks, investments), and then with institu-
tions that emerged through social struggles to support these practices (abolition
of monarchies and feudal privileges, enclosure of the commons, liberal democ-
racy, laws protecting private property). The grassroots practices and the welfare
and monetary institutions reviewed in this section might be the seeds of a new
Introduction: degrowth 15

transformation emerging from within the system, in the latest crisis of capitalism
and as the period of growth and expansion comes to an end.

4. The future of degrowth


The future of degrowth is open. Research is still necessary to support foundational
degrowth claims, claims that are firmly established within the degrowth community,
providing its shared premises although they are far from being accepted by aca-
demia and society at large. Such claims include: the impossibility of dematerialization
through technological advance and the inevitability of disastrous climate change if
growth is to continue; the entry of developed economies into a period of systemic
stagnation, partly due to resource limits; or the hypothesis that an abandonment of
growth will revive politics and nourish democracy, rather than animate catastrophic
passions. More research can help us understand how people and nations adapt to the
lack of growth, why some grassroots practices succeed while others collapse or get
incorporated into the mainstream, or how, and under what conditions, new welfare
institutions will produce the outcomes their advocates claim they will.
The political question concerns the social dynamic, the actors, the alliances and
the processes that will create a degrowth transition. This question is not just intel-
lectual. Social change is a process of creation, impossible to predict in advance.
What academic studies of degrowth can offer are arguments and narratives to ani-
mate the politics of transition. The ideas outlined in this entry have already done
that. However if degrowth is to remain a concept that is alive and does not stale,
there is no reason for these to remain the only narratives. We can use the ‘raw
material’ of the degrowth vocabulary, and constantly create new imaginaries and
arguments that escape false dilemmas such as ‘austerity versus spending’. This is
what we attempt in the last chapter of this book where we frame a new thesis,
grounding degrowth in dépense.

Notes
1 In this entry we leave the original titles in French, not only for reasons of language pluralism
or practicality but also because many of the words involved sound more inspiring in French!
2 In the original translation of the text Ecologie et liberté (1977) to English in 1980, the mis-
leading term ‘inversion of growth’ was used to translate décroissance.We replace it here with
‘degrowth’.
3 In this chapter, when we do not provide references for the statements we make, this means
that the support for the argument can be found in the relevant entry (identified in bold).

References
Amar, A. (1973) ‘La croissance et le problème moral’. Cahiers de la Nef, « Les objecteurs de
croissance », 52: 133.
Anderson, K. and Bows, A. (2011) ‘Beyond “dangerous” climate change: Emission scenarios
for a new world’. Philosophical Transitions of the Royal Society, 369: 2–44.
16 Giorgos Kallis, Federico Demaria and Giacomo D’Alisa

Ariès, P. (2005) Décroissance ou Barbarie, Lyon: Golias.


Blauwhof, F. B. (2012) ‘Overcoming Accumulation: Is a Capitalist Steady-State Economy
Possible?’ Ecological Economics, 84: 254–61.
Bonaiuti, M. (2014) The Great Transition, London: Routledge.
Castoriadis, C. (1985) ‘Reflections on “Rationality” and “Development”’, Thesis, 10/11,
18–35.
Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cattaneo, C., D’Alisa, G., Kallis, G. and Zografos, C. (eds) (2012) ‘Degrowth Futures and
Democracy’, Special Issue, Futures, 44 (6): 515–23.
Conill, J., Cardenas, A., Castells, M., Hlebik, S. and Servon, L. (2012) Otra vida es posible:
prácticas alternativas durante la crisis, Barcelona: Ediciones UOC Press.
D’Alisa, G., Burgalassi, D., Healy, H. and Walter, M. (2010) ‘Conflict in Campania: Waste
Emergency or Crisis of Democracy’, Ecological Economics, 70: 239–49.
D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F. and Cattaneo, C. (2013) ‘Civil and Uncivil Actors for a Degrowth
Society’, Journal of Civil Society, 9 (2): 212–24.
Daly, H. (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston: Beacon
Press.
Demaria, F., Schneider, F., Sekulova, F. and Martinez-Alier, J. (2013) ‘What is Degrowth?
From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement’, Environmental Values, 22 (2): 191–215.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Gordon, R. J. (2012) ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts
the Six Headwinds’, The National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18315.
Gorz, A., (1980) Ecology as Politics, Montréal: Black Rosa Books. First published in 1977 as
Écologie et liberté, Paris: Galilée.
Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, London:
Pluto Press.
Gorz, A. (M. Bosquet) (1972) Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 397, 19 June. Proceedings from a
public debate organized in Paris by the Club du Nouvel Observateur.
Grinevald, J. (1974) L’économiste Georgescu-Roegen: intégrer l’économie dans la problématique
énergétique et écologique, Geneva: Uni information, Service de presse et d’information de
l’Université de Genève.
Grinevald, J. and Rens, I. (1979) Demain la décroissance: entropie-écologie-économie, Lausanne:
Pierre-Marcel Favre.
Harvey, D. (2010) The Enigma of Capital, London: Profile Books.
Hirsch, F. (1976) Social Limits to Growth, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. (2011) How To Change The World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, London:
Little, Brown.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, New York: Harper & Row.
Jackson, T. (2009) Prosperity without Growth, London: Earthscan.
Kallis, G., Martinez-Alier, J. and Norgaard, R. B. (2009) ‘Paper Assets, Real Debts: An
Ecological-Economic Exploration of the Global Economic Crisis’, Critical Perspectives on
International Business, 5 (1/2): 14–25.
Kallis, G., Schneider, F. and Martinez-Alier, J. (eds.) (2010) ‘Growth, Recession or
Degrowth for Sustainability and Equity?’, Special Issue, Journal of Cleaner Production, 6
(18): 511–606.
Kallis, G, Kerschner, C. and Martinez-Alier, J. (eds) (2012) ‘The Economics of Degrowth’,
Ecological Economics, 84: 172–80.
Kallis, G., Kalush, M., O’Flynn, M., Rossiter, J. and Ashford, N. (2013) ‘“Friday off”:
Reducing Working Hours in Europe’, Sustainability, 5 (4): 1, 545–67.
Introduction: degrowth 17

Kosoy, N. (ed.) (2013) ‘Degrowth: The Economic Alternative for the Anthropocene’, Special
Issue, Sustainability, 5. Available online at www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/
special_issues/degrowth (accessed 3 October 2013).
Latouche, S. (2009) Farewell to Growth, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latouche, S. (2011) Vers une société d’abondance frugale: Contresens et controverses de la décroissance,
Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits.
Latour, B. (1998) ‘To Modernize or to Ecologize? That’s the Question’, In: Castree, N. and
Willems-Braun, B. (Eds) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium, London: Routledge.
Lawn, P. (2005) ‘Is a democratic–capitalist system compatible with a low-growth or steady-
state economy?’ Socio-economic Review, 3 (2): 209-232.
Martinez-Alier, J., Kallis, J., Veuthey, S., Walter, M. and Temper, L. (2010) ‘Social
Metabolism, Ecological Distribution Conflicts, and Valuation Languages’, Ecological
Economics, 70 (2): 153–158.
Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L. and Randers, J. (1972) Limits to growth. New York:
Universe books.
Mishan, E.J. (1967) The costs of economic growth, London: Staples Press.
Odum, H.T., and Odum, E. C. (2001) A prosperous way down, Boulder: University Press of
Colorado.
Saed (2012) ‘Introduction to the Degrowth Symposium’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 23 (1):
26–29.
Schneider, F., Kallis, G. and Martinez-Alier, J. (2010) ‘Crisis or opportunity? Economic
degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability’, Special issue, Journal of Cleaner
Production, 18(6): 511–518.
Sekulova, F., Kallis, G., Rodríguez-Labajos, B. and Schneider, F. (2013) ‘Degrowth: From
theory to practice’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 28: 1–6.
Skidelsky, R. and Skidelsky, E. (2012) How Much is Enough? New York: Other Press.
Whitehead, M. (2013) ‘Degrowth or regrowth?’ Environmental Values, 22 (2): 141–145.
Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger. New York, Berlin, London: Bloomsbury Press.
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PART 1
Lines of thought
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1
ANTI-UTILITARIANISM
Onofrio Romano
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BARI “A. MORO”

Anti-utilitarianism is a school of thought that critiques the hegemony of the


epistemological postulates of economics in the humanities and social sciences.
Anti-utilitarians assert the crucial importance of the social bond when compared
to self-interest. They outline a gift exchange paradigm that aims to overstep two
major frameworks of the social sciences: holism and methodological individualism.
In 1981, the French sociologist, Alain Caillé, and the Swiss anthropologist, Gérald
Berthoud, gave birth to MAUSS – Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales
(Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences). This brilliant acronym repro-
duces the surname of the author of The Gift (1924), Marcel Mauss. Mauss, together
with Karl Polanyi, inspired the work of the group. The two founders made the deci-
sion to start up the intellectual venture after having participated the year before in
an interdisciplinary debate with philosophers, economists, and psychoanalysts on the
topic of “gift exchange”. On that occasion they shared the same frustration towards
the other participants, who expressed obstinacy in their profound belief that behind
every human action, including gift practices and demonstrations of generosity, we
must recognize the strategy of egotistical calculation, and nothing more.
The movement was led from the beginning by Alain Caillé and gathered
intellectuals from different fields of knowledge: Serge Latouche (economist and
philosopher), Ahmet Insel (economist and political scientist), Jean-Luc Boilleau
(sociologist and philosopher), Jacques Godbout (anthropologist), Philippe Rospabé
(economist and anthropologist) etc. They first created the Bulletin du Mauss and, in
1988, the Revue du Mauss, printed by the prestigious French publisher La Découverte
(initially quarterly and, since 1993, half-yearly).
MAUSS is today configured as a large network of researchers located in Europe,
North America, North Africa and the Middle East. It is characterized by a wide
22 Onofrio Romano

variety of approaches, subjects, and application fields. Its main theoretical aim is to
establish a new epistemological basis for universalism and democracy. This effort –
more systematic and accomplished in the works of Alain Caillé – has developed
around three main reflection axes: the individual, the social bond, and politics.
Anti-utilitarians challenge the theoretical approaches that interpret any human
action as departing from the pivotal axis of the “individual” and thus oriented
towards self-satisfaction:

we qualify as utilitarian any doctrine based on the claim that human subjects
are governed by the logic of selfish calculation of pleasures and pains, by
their interest only, or by their preferences only; and that this is good because
there is no other possible foundation of ethical norms other than the law of
happiness for individuals and their communities.
(Caillé 1989: 13)

The object of criticism of anti-utilitarians is an ideological matrix that cuts across


thought and the wider culture:

utilitarianism is not a philosophical system or a component among others of


the dominant ideology in modern societies. Rather it has become that same
ideology; to the point that, for modern people, it is largely incomprehensible
and unacceptable that what can not be translated in terms of usefulness and
instrumental effectiveness.
(Caillé 1989: 4-5)

Anti-utilitarians criticize utilitarianism because it reduces the human being. The


battle to be waged, they claim, should insist on the recognition of the complexity
and the plurality of forms of life. Anti-utilitarianism, far from qualifying itself
as anti-modern thought, aims at rediscovering the true meaning of modernity,
restoring the scientific spirit against scientism, reason against rationalism, democracy
against technocracy. Caillé resumes, in this sense, the Brahmanic classification
of man’s goals (purus․aˉrtha): pleasure (kama), interest (artha), duty (dharma), and
dissipative liberation from all aims (moksha) (Caillé 1989: 89 ff.). According to
Caillé, utilitarianism has reduced a multiplicity of goals into the sole kingdom of
artha. But he also criticizes other schools of thought that translate the ontological
multiplicity into one of the three sacrificed motives: the Freudian school devoted
to the kama, the holistic school pointing to dharma, or the existentialist mood (à la
Bataille) in search of moksa. The counter-project proposed by anti-utilitarians is a
contemporary citizenship to all Brahmanic levels of existence, i.e. to all “multiple
states of the subject.” This claim is articulated on both an analytical level (the
multi-teleology of the human being has an ontological connotation) and, as we
shall see later, on a political level.
The second pole of reflection, the social bond, coincides with the re-evaluation
of gift logic. Following Mauss, the gift is here understood as a “total social fact.”
Anti-utilitarianism 23

Just like the “underlying unconscious structure” envisioned by Lévi-Strauss, the


gift becomes the archetypal performer or the universal symbolic matrix of the
alliance between individuals and groups. It acts on a micro-sociological level by
the device of the triple obligation – “to give, to receive, and to return” – but it
can be extended to the meso-sociological scale of the “association” and, finally, to
“politics,” i.e. the macro-sociological frame. “Each one of these three terms – gift,
association and politics – is a metaphor, a symbol and a tool for interpreting the
others” (Caillé 1998: 236).
In the second half of the 1990s, the political inclination of the movement gets
more accentuated, starting from the “thirty theses for a new and universalist left”
(discussed in various issues of the Revue du Mauss, starting from n. 9/1, 1997). On
the political side, anti-utilitarianism identifies with the project of “democracy for
democracy”: the democratic ideal can be revitalized only by doing away with any
aims or interests, especially egotistic, from the collective discussion. According to
Caillé, the main obstacle to democracy, and the main reason for the decline of
politics, is a lack of alternate social life patterns so that, for instance, even discus-
sion or selection of said preferences is precluded by the utilitarian ideology (see
depoliticization). Democracy must enhance diversity by offering a variety of
lifestyles, increasing public space for discussion, and pluralizing the possibilities of
self-realization. One key proposal in this would be a basic income that would
become “radically unconditional.” It is necessary to decouple income from specific
social benefits, as this coupling limits the freedom of citizens to experience the
irreducible plurality of human aims. Instead, the largest number of citizens possible
should have the chance to realize themselves, and to express who they are and what
they want to be.
Due to Serge Latouche, the so-called Anti-Pope of MAUSS (given his differ-
ences with Caillé) the anti-utilitarian movement also produced one of the main
strands of degrowth. Latouche is less indulgent toward Western capitalism, which
he approaches mainly through the lens of criticism to development. While Caillé
aimed to restore the “true” meaning of modernity against its perversions, Latouche
pleads for a radical re-thinking of modernity, in order to cut off its genetic link
with utilitarianism.
Degrowth is fully part of an anti-utilitarian framework insofar as it pursues the
ideal of a society decolonized of the ideology of unlimited growth, an ideology
that supposes a direct correlation between an increase in GDP and collective hap-
piness. According to Latouche, there is an explicit inverse correlation between
well-having and well-being. Nevertheless degrowth does not mean a deliberate
decrease of GDP, but merely a-growth, i.e. the liberation from a productivist
obsession, in order to re-discover other human dimensions, first and foremost the
relational one.
Most anti-utilitarians reproach Latouche for the choice of the term “degrowth”:
the reference to the productive sphere of social life (evoked by the term “growth”) –
even if reversed (“de-growth”) – implicitly embeds the alternative into the eco-
nomic imaginary. So, similar to the ethical discipline that characterizes Western
24 Onofrio Romano

capitalism as Weber first noted, all alternatives inspired by degrowth entail, in the
end, a sober lifestyle and economic restraint. Many anti-utilitarians call, instead,
for a “political” critique of boundlessness and excess (Dzimira 2007), uprooting
the discourse from an ethical level. Rather, they advocate a political project that
metabolizes the principles of “reversibility” (i.e., against the externalities of pro-
gress that threaten collective existence) and of “reciprocity” (i.e., against the power
of most developed societies, which limits and threatens the chances for life and
action of less developed societies and future generations). The risk they see in the
degrowth discourse is that the emphasis on the imperative of the preservation of
life stands as yet another translation of the “neutralitarian” root of utilitarian politi-
cal philosophy: politics becomes a mere function for preserving citizens’ “biologi-
cal” life (“life for life’s sake”). To them, this does not differ too much from the
main goal of the development age, i.e. fertilizing life (“growth for growth’s sake”).
In both cases, assuming that it is the exclusive domain of individuals and their
networks, the political and collective construction of the meaning of life is not on
the agenda. The strategy changes but the goal is always the same: life, without any
political meaning.
Mutual charges between anti-utilitarians and their degrowther descendants are
all well-grounded. Both may fail, but for different reasons, in their attempt to
produce an epistemological discontinuity with the utilitarian foundations of our
society. A more solid path towards anti-utilitarianism and degrowth might be built,
on the one hand, by integrating the theoretical stream opened by Bataille with his
notion of dépense, and, on the other hand, by a wider look on the numerous and
unnoticed anti-utilitarianist practices and experiences that go on inside and outside
Western societies (Romano 2012).

References
Caillé, A. (1989) Critique de la raison utilitaire. Manifeste du MAUSS, Paris: La Découverte.
Caillé, A. (1998) Il terzo paradigma. Antropologia filosofica del dono, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Dzimira, S. (2007) «Décroissance et anti-utilitarisme», Revue du Mauss permanente, 26
mai. Available online at www.journaldumauss.net/./?Antiutilitarisme-et-decroissance
(accessed October 4 2013).
Mauss, M. (1954) The gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, London: Cohen
and West.
Romano, O. (2012) “How to rebuild democracy, re-thinking degrowth,” Futures, 44(6):
582–9.
2
BIOECONOMICS
Mauro Bonaiuti
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF TURIN

Bioeconomics is a field of study mainly connected to the figure of Nicholas


Georgescu-Roegen (hereafter G-R), who first and most radically enquired into
the consequences of an integration of the physical and biological sciences into
economics (Bonaiuti 2011: 1–48). As far as its field of studies is concerned, bioeco-
nomics is no different from ecological economics, although some of the preanalytic
premises that characterise G-R’s bioeconomics are significantly different from those
that prompted the founders of ecological economics (Daly, Costanza etc.). These
premises explain the considerable differences between G-R’s standpoint and that
of most ecological economists, particularly as far as the paradigm of sustainable
development is concerned his statements against the new formula are so forceful
that there can be no doubt about what he thought: “sustainable development is one
of the most toxic recipes” (Bonaiuti 2011: 42).
His sharp criticism to sustainable development explain also why G-R’s bio-
economics was taken from the very outset as a pillar of the basis for degrowth.
Opposing this neoclassical reductionist approach, in the second half of the 1960s,
G-R opened up economics to twentieth-century developments in physics and
natural sciences, starting with the thermodynamic revolution (Georgescu-Roegen
1971).
The term ‘bioeconomics’ was used for the first time at the end of the 1960s by
Jirì Zeman, of the Czechoslovakian Academy, who adopted this expression in a
letter to mean a ‘new economics’ in which precisely ‘the biological substance of
the economic process in almost every respect’ should be adequately acknowledged
(Bonaiuti 2011: 158). Georgescu liked the term and, from the early 1970s made
it the banner summing up the most important conclusions he had come to in a
lifetime of research.
26 Mauro Bonaiuti

The first insight is that the economic process, having physical and biological
roots, cannot ignore the limitations imposed by the laws of physics: in particular,
the law of entropy. This leads to the consideration that the fundamental aim of
economic activity, unlimited growth of production and consumption, being based
on finite sources of matter/energy, is not compatible with the fundamental laws
of nature. The community of ecological economists today accepts this conclusion,
however shocking it may have been at the time when it was first announced.
The second insight concerns methodology: the circular, reversible representation
of the economic process, presented at the beginning of any textbook on economics,
showing how demand stimulates production, which in its turn provides the income
necessary to feed new demand, in a reversible process apparently capable of repro-
ducing itself indefinitely. This must be replaced by an evolutionary representation, in
which the economic process interacts with its biophysical roots, on the one hand, and
with values and institutional frames, on the other. The latter aspect must be stressed: the
reciprocal interactions that the economic process sets up with ‘socio-cultural organisa-
tions’ and the qualitative transformations (emergence) connected to leaps in scale in the
process of growth explain some of the fundamental differences that characterise G-R’s
standpoint compared to that of the founders of steady-state economics. For G-R
development is not (as it is for Daly) an abstract process that merely implies ‘more util-
ity’ but a concrete historical process that cannot ‘be separated from economic growth’
(Bonaiuti 2011: 46). The inevitable reduction in matter and energy consumption (oil,
etc.), the related urgency to move towards renouncing all luxury goods, the decrease
in population and the social control over technological innovations that constitute the
core of the ‘minimal bioeconomic programme’, indeed, cannot be attained simply
through policies of governance (as most ecological economists suggest): the entire insti-
tutional framework of today’s economies must be questioned.
Although Georgescu did not use the term ‘degrowth’ in his works, he authorised
the use of this expression in the French translation of his works on bioeconomics,
edited by Jacques Grinevald in 1979 and entitled Demain la Décroissance. The slogan
‘degrowth’ was revived in 2002, in the monograph issue of the review Silence, and
in the international conference Défaire le développement, refaire le monde held in Paris in
the same year. It immediately became evident that two lines of thought were unified
under the new slogan: that of the ‘cultural/institutional’ criticism of the society of
growth, supported throughout the years in particular by Ivan Illich (1973), Cornelius
Castoriadis (2010) and Serge Latouche; and that of the bioeconomic criticism.
The former, taking the failure of development policies in the southern
hemisphere, in particular in Africa, as a starting point, came to radically criticise
the very concept of development, both in its imaginary presuppositions (anti-
utilitarianism etc.) and in its historical and social manifestations. The two lines of
thought met, and to a certain extent felt as if they already knew each other, in their
criticism of sustainable development (Latouche, Foreword to Bonaiuti 2014: xiv).
Ten years later, it might be interesting to ask what the reasons for the suc-
cess of this union may have been. The fundamental reason for this may be the
fact that bioeconomics and cultural criticisms of development share similar
Bioeconomics 27

(pre-analytical) premises. In particular, even before he developed his bioeco-


nomic theory, Georgescu became convinced that ‘economic laws – far from
having a natural and universal foundation’ take shape within specific cultural
premises and institutional frameworks. In his works of 1960-6 on overpopulated
peasant economies, undoubtedly inspired by his memories of Romania, and then
corroborated by his stays in India (1963) Brazil (1964, 1966 and 1971) and Ghana
(1972), Georgescu had already become lucidly aware that prescriptions valid for
capitalist economies can be devastating when applied, for example, to peasant
economies. In other words, Georgescu’s bioeconomics was open to the idea,
developed more rigorously by critics of development (Illich 1973; Castoriadis
2010), that the fundamental reasons for the social and ecological unsustainability
of the Western model must, in the final analysis, be attributed to cultural prem-
ises and their corresponding institutional mantle. For this reason, Georgescu was
vehemently opposed to the paradigm of sustainable development, which, like
that of the steady state, does not radically question the anthropological and
institutional foundations of the market economy. After attempting a criticism
of the dominant model on a purely phisical and rational basis (the ‘fourth law
of thermodynamics’) in the last years of his life, G-R intuited that ecological
unsustainability was only the final consequence of the cultural and institutional
premises that characterise growth economies.
It is not hard to imagine that if Georgescu had read the works of Marcel
Mauss and Karl Polanyi or, perhaps, met Ivan Illich in Mexico in the 1970s,
the main outline of a degrowth society might have been formulated 30 years
earlier. However, the silence that in the final 25 years of the last century sur-
rounded Georgescu’s ‘minimal bioeconomic programme’, like the proposals of
André Gorz (who actually did meet Illich in Cuernavaca), reveal that the time
was not yet ripe.
What has changed? From the 1970s onwards, with the oil crisis and the transi-
tion from the Keynesian-Fordist system of accumulation to that of flexible accu-
mulation, founded on the tertiary sector, the rates of growth and productivity
in advanced capitalist societies have gradually decreased. In contrast, social and
ecological costs, connected to the hyper-complexification of the bureaucratic and
economic-financial ‘mégamachine’ increased. The crisis of the 1970s marked the
passage to a second phase of an S shaped cycle of accumulation: the phase of ‘declin-
ing marginal returns’ (Bonaiuti, 2014). This phase is accompanied by a reduction in
social well-being, which has become even more acute with the 2007 financial crisis.

References
Bonaiuti M. (ed.) (2011) From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen’s ‘New Economics’
in Eight Essays, London, New York: Routledge.
Bonaiuti, M. (2014) The Great Transition, London, New York: Routledge.
Castoriadis, C. (2010) A Society Adrift – Interviews and Debates 1974–1997, New York:
Fordham University Press.
28 Mauro Bonaiuti

Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1979). Demain la décroissance: entropie-écologie-économie, preface and
translation by Ivo Rens and Jacques Grinevald. Lausanne: PierreMarcel Favre.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, New York: Harper & Row.
3
DEVELOPMENT, CRITIQUES OF
Arturo Escobar
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

It is impossible to provide a single definition of development. For many, devel-


opment is the ineluctable strategy by which poor countries need to modernize;
for others, it is an imperial imposition by the rich capitalist countries on the poor
ones, and as such it should be opposed; for yet others, it is a discourse invented
by the West for the cultural domination of non-Western societies that needs to be
denounced as such, beyond its economic effects; for many common people the
world over, finally, development has become either a reflection of their aspirations
to a dignified life, or an utterly destructive process with which they have to coexist,
and not infrequently both at the same time. Taken as a whole, it can be said that
development is a recent historical process that involves social, economic, political,
and cultural aspects.
The concept of development did not exist in its current connotation until the
late 1940s, when “economic development” became associated with the process
to pave the way for the replication in “under-developed areas” of the conditions
characterizing industrialized nations (broadly, agricultural technification, urbani-
zation, industrialization, and the adoption of modern values). The genesis of the
concept can be traced back to the late colonial period in some contexts (as in the
British Colonial Development Act of 1929 and some “community development”
schemes in Southern Africa in the 1930s), as an explicit and often planned process
for the eradication of poverty. However, the concept of development was a prod-
uct of the great realignments that took place at the end of the Second World War
and the creation of the vast institutional apparatus that included the Bretton Woods
Institutions and planning agencies in most Third World capitals. “Development”
and the “Third World” were thus the product of the same historical conjuncture,
with development as the strategy par excellence to bring about the modernization
of the so-called Third World (Escobar 1995; Rist 1997). The resurgence of the
30 Arturo Escobar

classical concern with capital accumulation in the late 1940s with the growth eco-
nomics of Harrod and Domar relating growth to savings and investment (through
the so-called capital-output ratio) was another important pillar of the process by
which development became firmly established and associated with growth ever
since. For a handful of philosophers such as Vatimo or Dussel, development and
progress are pivotal aspects of modernity, whether in the form of the inevitable
privilege accorded to “the new” or the “developmentalist fallacy” that asserts that
all countries have to travel the same historical stages, if necessary by force.
Over the past six decades, the conceptualization of development in the social
sciences has seen three main moments, corresponding to three contrasting theo-
retical orientations: modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, with its allied
theories of growth; Marxist-inspired dependency theory and related perspectives
in the 1960s and 1970s; and critiques of development as a cultural discourse in
the 1990s and 2000s. Modernization theory inaugurated a period of certainty in
the minds of many theorists and world elites, premised on the beneficial effects of
capital, science, and technology. This certainty suffered a first blow with depend-
ency theory, which argued that the roots of underdevelopment were to be found
in the connection between external dependence of poor countries on the rich
ones, and internal exploitation of the poor by the rich within countries, not in any
alleged lack of capital, technology, or modern values. For dependency theorists,
the problem was not so much with development as with capitalism, and they thus
advocated for socialist forms of development, while maintaining the assumption of
growth intact. Starting in the 1980s, a growing number of cultural critics in many
parts of the world questioned the very idea of development. They analyzed devel-
opment as a discourse of Western origin that operated as a powerful mechanism
for the cultural, social, and economic production of the Third World (Escobar
1995; Rist 1997). These three moments may be classified according to the root
paradigms from which they emerged: liberal, Marxist, and poststructuralist theo-
ries, respectively. It is fair to say that despite overlaps and eclectic combinations,
some version of the modernization paradigm continues to inform most positions
at present. This is the case of the overarching framework of neoliberal globaliza-
tion, with its continued core assumptions of growth, progress, modern values,
and rational policy action, even if of course the market has become more central
than in previous development decades. Marxist and culturalist perspectives have
by no means disappeared; this is clearly the case in Latin America, where debates
on twenty-first century socialism (for the Marxist-inspired perspectives), and buen
vivir (for the culturally oriented perspectives) pose veritable challenges to liberal
and neoliberal frameworks.
While the poststructuralist analyses were less known than the Marxist critiques,
it is important to highlight them here, given that they entailed a radical questioning
of the core cultural assumptions of development, including growth, and as such
were important in early degrowth theories in Italy and France. These critiques came
of age with the publication in 1992 of a collective volume edited by Wolfgang
Sachs, The Development Dictionary. The book started by making the startling and
Development, critiques of 31

controversial claim, “The last forty years can be called the age of development.
This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary” (Sachs, ed.
1992: 1). If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk
about a “post-development era” in response to this question, and a second col-
lective work, The Post-development Reader, launched the project of giving content
to this notion (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). Some degrowth theorists, notably
Latouche, contributed to disseminate this perspective in the North. Reactions on
all sides of the scholarly-political spectrum have continued since, resulting in a
vibrant, albeit at times somewhat acrimonious, debate, bringing together practi-
tioners and academics from many disciplines and fields.
Postdevelopment was generally meant as an era in which development would
no longer be the central organizing principle of social life. In this way, it is related
to two other emerging imaginaries, that of postcapitalism (questioning capital-
ism’s ability to fully and naturally occupy the economy, with the concomitant
visualization of an array of diverse economic practices) and post- or degrowth
(decentring growth from the definition of both the economy and social life).
There is a certain geographical unevenness, however, in how these frameworks are
seen and cultivated in the Global North versus the Global South. Whereas in the
Global North the scholarly and political debate on degrowth is receiving increasing
attention, in the Global South this is not the case yet. On the one hand, some argue
that at least some sectors need to grow (e.g., health, education, even livelihoods).
On the other, critical debates in the South are more directly concerned with rede-
fining development. To this extent, there has been a significant reactivation of the
debate over development, particularly in Latin America, over the past five years.
The current mood is “to search for alternatives in a deeper sense, that is, aiming to
break away from the cultural and ideological bases of development, bringing forth
other imaginaries, goals, and practices” (Gudynas and Acosta 2011: 75). Whereas
the wave of progressive regimes in Latin America over the past decade created a
context conducive to these debates, the main impetus behind them have been
social movements. Two key areas of debate and activism are the notions of buen
vivir (collective well-being) and the Rights of Nature. This debate parallels dis-
cussions on change of civilization model and transitions to postextractivist models.
It seems a good moment to build more explicit bridges between degrowth and
transitions narratives in the North and alternatives to development, civilizational
change, and transitions to postextractivism in the South. In building these bridges,
however, it is important to resist falling into the trap of thinking that while the
North needs to degrow, the South needs “development.” There is an important
synergy to be gained from discussing degrowth and alternatives to development in
tandem, while respecting their geopolitical and epistemic specificities.
World-wide, economic globalization has taken on a tremendous force (espe-
cially in Asia), seemingly relegating critical debates over “development” to the
back burner. These debates are also carefully domesticated within the discourses
of the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs]) and, after 2015 when the MDGs
expire, the “sustainable development goals.” However, global movements and the
32 Arturo Escobar

deepening of poverty and environmental destruction continue to keep critical con-


versations alive, connecting development debates to questions of epistemic decolo-
nization, social and environmental justice, the defense of cultural difference, and
transition to postcapitalist and postgrowth frameworks. For most of these move-
ments, it is clear that conventional development of the kind offered by neoliberal-
ism is not an option. In this context, the return of the alternatives to development
discussions in Latin America is a beacon of hope. At the very least, it is becoming
clear that if “Another World is Possible,” to appeal to the slogan of the World
Social Forum, then alternatives to development should also be possible. At least
for many social movements and for transition advocates, whatever form “develop-
ment” or alternatives to development take will have to involve more radical ques-
tionings of growth, extractivism, and even modernity than ever before.

References
Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gudynas, E. and Acosta, A. (2011) ‘La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir
como alternativa’, Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 16 (53), 71–83. Available online at
www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasAcostaCriticaDesarrolloBVivirUtopia11.pdf
(accessed February 12 2014).
Rahnema, M. and Bawtree, V. (eds.) (1997) The Post-Development Reader, London: Zed
Books.
Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development, London: Zed Books.
Sachs, W. (ed.) (1992) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London:
Zed Books.
4
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Isabelle Anguelovski
ICTA (INSTITUTE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY),
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Environmental justice is about the right to remain in one’s place and environment
and be protected from uncontrolled investment and growth, pollution, land grab-
bing, speculation, disinvestment, and decay and abandonment.
In the late 1970s, the first visible and widely reported environmental justice
(EJ) mobilizations emerged and took place in the US: Love Canal, NY (1978)
and Warren County, NC (1982). They had clear targets: environmental con-
tamination and its impacts on human health. Love Canal embodied the struggles
of white working-class residents fighting against 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals
sitting underneath homes and schools and winning the relocation of 833 house-
holds. Warren County added a racial dimension to environmental burden impact-
ing historically marginalized groups, as African American residents became the
target of 10,000 truckloads of contaminated soil to be spread in a landfill that
the Environmental Protection Agency had authorized. Their resistance brought to
light the disproportionate exposure and harm that populations of color suffer from
toxic waste sites, hence the close relationship between environmental inequalities
and environmental racism.
Since the 1980s, an extensive literature in sociology, environmental policy, and
environmental health has examined inequities between groups in exposure to con-
tamination and health risks from waste sites, incinerators, refineries, transportation,
and small-area sources (Sze 2007). Exposure to harm and risk also exists in the
workplace as farm or chain employees, for instance, are obliged to be in close con-
tact with pesticides and hazardous waste. Similarly, in the Global South, mercury
spills from gold mines, open cast copper and coal mining, oil and timber extraction,
deforestation and erosion from mono-cultural farming, and hydroelectric dams are
devastating millions of hectares and disrupting poor residents’ health. In addition,
tons of toxic waste from industry, agriculture and electronic products, and ships to
34 Isabelle Anguelovski

be dismantled, are also being exported to poorer countries (Carmin and Agyeman
2011).
Activism around environmental injustices has been strong in the Global North,
particularly in the US. Residents, accompanied by environmental NGOs, commu-
nity organizations, scientists, and lawyers, have organized against refineries, waste
sites, recycling facilities, basically against locally unwanted land uses (LULUs).
Demands to address environmental racism were initially rooted in a civil rights
framework before becoming framed through a human rights perspective and even
gender lens. The EJ movement in the US became global in the mid-1990s. From
their Northern origin, the words “environmental justice” spread to the world,
and especially to the Global South, linking to what has been called the environ-
mentalism of the poor and to the conflicts that were already taking place in Latin
America, for instance, around land struggles and environmental disasters. Robert
Bullard, a scholar and founder of the Environmental Justice movement in the US,
was influential in Brazil in the 1990s and also in South Africa, pushing national EJ
movements. Today, conflicts around natural resources explode every week around
the world, in which poor and indigenous residents defend their land from natu-
ral resource extraction and contamination. In the many resource extraction and
waste disposal conflicts, the poor defend their interests, their livelihoods, and their
cultural values and sense of territorial identity against a dominating economic lan-
guage of valuation.
Environmental inequalities exist not only in the distribution of environmental
bads and in the extraction of natural resources, but also in the allocation of envi-
ronmental goods and services, which is particularly manifest in cities. Deprived
communities have generally poor environmental services such as green spaces,
street cleaning, and waste collection, while wealthier and white ones enjoy envi-
ronmental privileges – parks, coasts, open space – in a racially exclusive way (Park
and Pellow 2011). These conditions are often combined with neighborhood decay.
Similarly, in the South, mega cities such as Mumbai or Djarkata present drastic
inequalities – between lush secluded communities that benefit from environmental
amenities and unauthorized slums that are not connected to city services such as
waste collection or water provision.
Consequently, over the past ten years, the environmental justice agenda has
expanded, become more multi-faceted, and also includes just sustainability dimen-
sions (Agyeman et al. 2003). Today, urban EJ groups in the North mobilize for
well-connected, affordable, and clean transit systems in cities, for healthy, fresh,
local, and affordable food, for green, affordable, and healthy housing, along with
recycling practices and green spaces inside housing structures, and for training and
jobs in the green economy. Environmental initiatives, such as urban gardening,
in marginalized neighborhoods are often a direct response to years of direct or indi-
rect destruction and decay, to what residents perceive as urban war and environ-
mental violence. Beyond offering a medium for socializing and building stronger
ties, projects such as community farms help repair fragmented communities and
overcome environmental trauma. For instance, in the 1980s the neighbourhood of
Environmental justice 35

Dudley in Boston was ravaged by arson and abandonment, and had 1,500 empty
lots. Today, projects such as community gardens, farms, and parks and playgrounds
remediate the insecurity that residents have experienced from being exposed to
neglect, environmental degradation, and poverty. Residents can regain a sense of
home and place. Some of these EJ initiatives are also part of degrowth because they
foster a smaller, simpler, and alternative form of economy based on the commons.
Scholars such as Logan and Molotch have used the image of the growth machine
to point to elites, rentiers, and the economic and political coalition around them
as being the motor of unregulated capitalism, private capital accumulation, and
spatial inequalities. The argument is that because investments move from place to
place in cycles of growth, devaluation, destruction, reinvestment, and mobiliza-
tion, development ends up being uneven throughout the city. In other words,
the treadmill of production benefits investors, elites and decision-makers while
negatively impacting those at the bottom of the social pyramid (Schnaiberg et al.
2002). Wealthier groups live in neighborhoods with resources, and are able to reap
the benefits from environmental goods and amenities while shifting environmental
burdens to marginalized neighborhoods. In rural areas, the growth in resource
extraction conflicts is largely explained by increasing social metabolism and the
need for new supplies and resources by corporations, which must be obtained from
the expansion of commodity frontiers.
In other words, in cities and rural regions, in the North and South, land is a
matter of private appropriation, speculation, and exploitation. Growth is thus part
of the process that creates injustices. As progress in technology drives the expan-
sion of production and consumption in a synergetic way, and since states, inves-
tors, and workers are dependent on economic growth to achieve job creation and
revenues, cycles of unstopped production, extraction of material resources, waste
accumulation, and uneven spatial development perpetuate. Thus, today the most
recent aspect of EJ mobilization – and maybe, its most fundamental one – is the
defense of the right to place. In rural areas, poor farmers resist land grabbing for
agrofuel production, mining, or oil and gas extraction and value their land and
also their water as commons to preserve. In Northern cities, many EJ groups have
moved their work from waste sites and degraded spaces’ rehabilitation to fights for
housing affordability and ensuring that residents can afford living in their revital-
ized space. In Southern cities such as Bangalore or Mexico City, many mount
resistance to protest as airports and highways or gated communities because they
affect their territory. Others, such as the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers (AIW),
organize to secure a living collecting, sorting, recycling, and selling materials that
individuals and industries have discarded, and they protest that incinerators that
would take away their source of income.
As a result, many EJ activists are involved in fights around the right to the city,
which is connected to degrowth discourses. Using Lefebvre’s discourses about the
right to the city and the importance of not only controlling spaces of produc-
tion but also of using and shaping the city, coalitions such as the “Right to the
City Alliance” in the US demand economic and environmental justice and greater
36 Isabelle Anguelovski

democracy, together with the end of real estate speculation, community space
privatization, and gentrification. As they resist the replacement of their commu-
nity space and gardens by luxury housing, they question projects that maximize
exchange value while beautifying and sanitizing the city. In the South, resistance
against displacement is often connected to land rights movements such as Via
Campesina (International), Landless Workers’ Movement (Brazil), or the Bhumi
Uchhed Pratirodh Committee (India).
From an organizing and political standpoint, such movements frame transform-
ative claims – the need to remain autonomous from the state and construct more
spontaneous and direct forms of democracy and decision-making. From an out-
come standpoint, EJ movements are split between some groups demanding a more
radical transformation of the economic system and a move away from a fixation
on economic growth (i.e., indigenous groups pushing for the concept of Sumak
Kawsay in Ecuador, Buen Vivir), and those who want to improve free-market
capitalism without proposing a true alternative to the current system – they do not
make the link with the long-term and broader implications of increased production
and consumption, resource extraction, and unequal environmental siting.
In sum, environmental justice movements act as a reminder that consuming
and producing less is not enough per se. The “less” needs to be distributed more
equally, with people controlling production processes so that cities and rural spaces
become more equal.

References
Agyeman, J., Bullard, D. and Evans, B. (2003) Just sustainabilities: development in an unequal
world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carmin, J. and Agyeman, J. (2011) Environmental inequalities beyond borders: local perspectives on
global injustices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Park, L. S.-H. and Pellow, D. (2011) The slums of Aspen: immigrants vs. the environment in
America’s Eden. New York: New York University Press.
Schnaiberg, A., Pellow, D., and Weinberg, A. (2002) “The treadmill of production and the
environmental state.” In Mol, A. and Buttel, F. (eds.) Research in social problems and public
policy. Greenwich, CT: Emerald.
Size, J. (2007) Noxious New York: the racial politics of urban health and environmental justice,
environmental justice in America: A new paradigm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5
ENVIRONMENTALISM,
CURRENTS OF
Joan Martinez-Alier
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

There are three main currents of environmentalism. These three currents could
be named as, first, the Cult of Wilderness, second, the Gospel of Eco-Efficiency,
and third, the Mantra of environmental justice or the Environmentalism of the
Poor. They are as three big branches of a single tree or three crosscutting streams
of the same river.
In the United States, the Cult of Wilderness has its origin in the work of Scottish-
American naturalist John Muir and the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone
National Parks. There were similar movements in Europe and other continents.
Even in India, where the doctrine of the “environmentalism of the poor” was
put forward in the 1980s in opposition to the “cult of wilderness,” there are great
local traditions of bird watching and other forms of upper and middle class nature
conservation.
In terms of the human and economic resources available, this movement is
indeed large. Its main concern was historically, since the nineteenth century, the
preservation of pristine nature by setting aside natural areas from where humans
would be excluded, and the active protection of wildlife for its ecological and
aesthetic values and not for any economic or human livelihood value. The world
conservation movement has been increasingly drawn to an economic language.
Although many of its members claim to believe in “deep ecology” (the intrinsic
value of nature) and revere nature as sacred, the mainstream movement decided
to join the economists. The TEEB reports (“The Economics of Ecosystems and
Biodiversity”, a project supported by the World Wildlife Fund [WWF] and indeed
the whole IUCN) in 2008–11, published under the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP)’s auspices, follows this leitmotiv: to make the loss of biodi-
versity visible, we need to focus not on single species but on ecosystems, and then
on ecosystem services to humans, and finally we must give economic valuations
38 Joan Martinez-Alier

to such services because this is what will attract the attention of politicians and
business leaders towards conservation. The TEEB enthusiastically praises mining
corporation Rio Tinto’s principle of “net positive impact.” This principle suggests
that nation-states or corporations can engage in open cast mining anywhere pro-
vided that the state or business support a natural park there or replant a mangrove
yonder. John Muir would have been horrified by such proposals.
The second current of environmentalism is perhaps, then, the most power-
ful today. Its name recalls Samuel Hays’ 1959 book Conservation and the Gospel of
Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920, which explains the
early efforts of federal environmental policy in the United States to reduce waste,
and also to conserve forests (or turn them into tree plantations). One main public
figure of eco-efficiency was Gifford Pinchot, who trained in forestry in Europe.
The concept of “sustainability” (Nachhaltigkeit) had been introduced in nineteenth
century forest management in Germany, not to denote respect for pristine nature
but, on the contrary, to indicate how monetary profits could be made from nature
by obtaining optimum sustainable yields from tree plantations. This idea can be seen
in today’s panoply of recipes on sustainable technologies, environmental economic
policies (taxes, tradable fishing quotas, markets in pollution permits), optimal rates
of resource extraction, substitution of manufactured capital for lost “natural capital,”
valuation and payment for environmental services, dematerialization of the economy,
habitat and carbon trading, and, in summary, sustainable development. The “Gospel
of Eco-efficiency” goes together with doctrines of “ecological modernization” and
belief in so-called “environmental Kuznets curves.” The words “sustainable develop-
ment” became widely known in 1987 with the publication of the Brundtland report.
Degrowthers are against “sustainable development” on two counts. First, they
do not believe that economic growth is or can be environmentally sustainable.
Second, many of them are also against the very idea of development, because as
Arturo Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, and others explained in the 1980s, it has meant a
pattern of uniform change towards an American way of life which is very different
from today’s emphasis, in some countries of the South, of a Buen Vivir or Sumak
Kawsay (Vanhulst and Beling 2014).
The degrowth movement often emphasizes that the benefits of increased eco-
efficiency can easily be nullified through the operation of the Jevons’ Paradox
or rebound effect. Nevertheless, most governments and the United Nations align
themselves with the “Gospel of Eco-Efficiency.” Meanwhile, the environmental
justice movement (which is certainly not as well organized as the IUCN) is an
assortment of local resistance movements and networks. These movements combine
livelihood, social, cultural, economic, and environmental issues (Martinez-Alier
et al. 2014). They set their “moral economy” in opposition to the logic of extrac-
tion of oil, minerals, wood, or agrofuels at the “commodity frontiers,” defend-
ing biodiversity and their own livelihood. This includes claims for climate justice
and for water justice.
In mounting resistance to environmental injustices, there are many people
around the world who are killed while defending the environment.
Environmentalism, currents of 39

Poor people do not always think and behave as environmentalists. To believe


this would be blatant nonsense. The environmentalism of the poor arises from the
fact that the world economy is based on fossil fuels and other exhaustible resources,
going to the ends of the earth to get them, disrupting and polluting both pristine
nature and human livelihoods, encountering resistance by poor and indigenous
peoples who are often led by women. Poor and indigenous peoples sometimes
appeal for economic compensation but more often they appeal to other languages
of valuation such as human rights, indigenous territorial rights, human livelihoods,
and the sacredness of endangered mountains or rivers.
The conservation movement has ignored the environmentalism of the poor.
But also the degrowth movement (and the steady state economics movement),
with their European or North American roots, have downplayed until recently
the intensity of the fight for resources around the world. However, one main
hypothesis in political ecology is that there are more and more resource extraction
conflicts and waste disposal conflicts because of the increase in the global societal
metabolism. Many such environmental conflicts around the world, classified by
country and commodity, are gathered in an open access database by the EJOLT
project (www.ejatlas.org, accessed September 15 2014).
There have been attempts to bring the conservation movement closer to the
environmentalism of the poor and indigenous people who fight against deforesta-
tion, agrofuels, mining, tree plantations, and dams. For instance, mangroves can be
defended against shrimp aquaculture because of the livelihood needs of women and
men living there, but also because of their biodiversity and their beauty. Despite
opportunities for bringing together the conservation movement with environmen-
tal justice, this is often difficult not only because the conservation movement,
consorts too closely with the second current, the engineers and economists, but
also because the conservation movement has sold its soul to companies like Shell
and Rio Tinto.
On the other hand, the degrowth movement could easily connect to the move-
ment for environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor. However,
the political left (e.g. presidents Lula and Roussef in Brazil, the Communist Party
in West Bengal in India, or presidents Evo Morales in Bolivia or Rafael Correa
in Ecuador) does not like the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous
that explicitly fights against the inroads of the generalized market system and the
growth of societal metabolism, in order to have an economy that sustainably
fulfills the food, health, education, and housing needs for everybody.
Despite the deep cleavages we have noticed between the three main currents of
environmentalism, there is hope of a confluence among conservationists concerned
with the loss of biodiversity, the many people concerned with the injustices of
climate change who push for repayment of ecological debts and promote changes
in technology towards solar energy, eco-feminists, some socialists and trade union-
ists concerned about health at work and who moreover know that one cannot
adjourn economic justice through promises of economic growth forever. There
is also hope of confluence between urban squatters who preach “autonomy” from
40 Joan Martinez-Alier

the market, agro-ecologists, neo-rurals or back-to-the-landers, the degrowthers


and the partisans of “prosperity without growth” in some rich countries, the large
international peasant movements like Via Campesina, the pessimists (or realists) on
the risks and uncertainties of technical change, the indigenous populations who
demand the preservation of the environment at the commodity frontiers, and
the world environmental justice movement.
In terms of policies, the degrowth movement often advocates “resource caps.”
This already exists in some countries as limits to emissions of carbon dioxide (and
therefore on the burning of fossil fuels). It could be extended to minerals and to
the use of biomass. Proposals such as the Yasuni ITT initiative from Ecuador and
similar attempts in Nigeria to leave “oil in the soil” fit perfectly with the degrowth
perspective (Martinez-Alier, 2012).
The environmental justice movement including the environmentalism of the
poor coincides with another main platform of the degrowth movement, which is
to downgrade the social relevance of the economy (in the sense of chrematistics).
This means to take the generalized market system out of the collective imagina-
tion as a principle of social organization, by showing that many people around
the world defend their right of access to natural resources for livelihood through
systems of communal management i.e. commons.

References
Hays, S. (1959) Conservation and the gospel of efficiency: the progressive conservation movement,
1890–1920, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Martinez-Alier, J. (2002) The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and
valuation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Martinez-Alier, J. (2012) “Environmental justice and economic degrowth: an alliance
between two movements,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 23/n.1, pp. 51–73.
Martinez-Alier, J., Anguelovski, I., Bond, P., Del Bene, D., Demaria, F., Gerber, J. F.,
Greyl, L., Haas, W., Healy, H., Marín-Burgos, V., Ojo, G., Porto, M., Rijnhout, L.,
Rodríguez-Labajos, B., Spangenberg, J., Temper, L., Warlenius, R., and Yánez, I.
(2014) Between activism and science: grassroots concepts for sustainability coined by
environmental justice organizations, Journal of Political Ecology, 21: 19–60.
Vanhulst, J. and Beling, A. E. (2014) “Buen vivir: emergent discourse whithin or beyond
sustainable development,” Ecological Economics, 101: 54–63.
6
METABOLISM, SOCIETAL
Alevgül H. Şorman
ICTA (INSTITUTE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY)
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Societies metabolize energy and material flows in order to remain operational. This
process is referred to as societal metabolism. Similar to that of living organisms,
which require a certain series of complex chemical reactions within their systems
to function, societal metabolism is used to characterize the pattern of energy and
material flows that can be associated with the expression of functions and repro-
duction of structures of human societies. The metabolism of human societies is
based on exosomatic energy use (energy metabolized under human control, out-
side the human body), an extended form of endosomatic energy (energy metabo-
lized inside the human body).
The concept of “metabolism” arose in the nineteenth century in the writings
of Moleschott, von Liebig, Boussingault, Arrhenius, and Podolinski, denoting the
exchange of energy and substances between organisms and the environment, and
the totality of biochemical reactions in living systems. To give examples, these
systems could be: a biological cell, a legal system, and/or the capitalist state. They
are referred to as autopoietic systems, meaning that they are capable of reproducing
and maintaining themselves. Marx and Engels were among the first to utilize the
term “metabolism” to grapple with the dynamics of socio-environmental change
and evolution. Today, there are various perceptions of the term metabolism. The
Vienna school of social metabolism conducts material and energy flow analyses
(MEFA) of economies, focusing on historical transitions between agricultural and
industrial economies and the quantification of such flows (Fischer-Kowalski and
Haberl 2007). In political ecology, the notion of metabolism has been invoked
to signal the “rift” between humans and nature under capitalism, the social power
relations that govern the flow of materials and resources in the production of urban
spaces, or the increase in the global flows of energy and materials that cause conflict
in the world´s commodity frontiers. This entry however focuses on a different
42 Alevgül H. Şorman

approach, called “societal” metabolism, developed by Mario Giampietro and Kozo


Mayumi (Giampietro et al., 2012, 2013).
Societal metabolism does not focus only on the quantification of flows but in
establishing a relation between flows and the agents that transform input flows into
outflows, while maintaining and preserving their own identity (these elements are
referred to as fund elements originating from the definition of bioeconomics
of Georgescu-Roegen [1971]). So, for example, in the production of automo-
biles, the materials (aluminium, steel), energy (consumed in assemblage and in
the extraction of the raw materials) and the water used in these process would be
the “flows,” whereas the human activity (the workers), the land, and the capital
machinery would be the “funds.” Societal metabolism, therefore, connects funds
(the agents and transformers of a process) and flows (the elements that are utilized
and dissipated), to generate indicators characterizing specific features of the system.
Examples of such metabolic indicators are: energy input per hour of labor or water
consumed per hectare of land in production.
Societal metabolism focuses on the biophysical processes that guarantee the
production and consumption of goods and services: what is produced, how it is
produced, the purpose for which it is produced, and by whom it is consumed.
This is then linked to the analysis of the production of added value (in relation to
the investments of production factors). Hence, the analysis marks an approach that
establishes a link between monetary representations of the economic process and
a representation of the biophysical transformations associated with the production
and consumption of goods and services. This is an integrated analysis, taking into
account multiple dimensions such as demographic factors and the issue of multiple-
scales (co-existence of different space and time scales) of the economies analyzed.
The characterization of the societal metabolism of a country, for instance, is
based on typical quantitative indicators used as points of reference called “bench-
marks” against which the biophysical or economic performance of a system may
be assessed. Depending on their organization and the specific functions that they
carry out, different societies exhibit different metabolic profiles. Such benchmarks
may refer to the socio-economic side (e.g., energy consumption per hour of activ-
ity in the service sector) or to the ecological side (e.g., consumption of water in the
agricultural sector per hectare) of sustainability.
There is great variation among the metabolism of European countries in
terms of energy flow rates per hour of work in the productive sectors. For
example, in the energy, mining, construction, and manufacturing sectors,
energy throughput per hour can range from 130 to 1,000 MJ/hour. Likewise,
there is a great variation of labour productivity in these sectors ranging from 10
to 50 €/hour (Giampietro et al., 2012, 2013). Accordingly, the metabolic pro-
files of economies with a well-developed extractive industry, such as Finland
and Sweden, generally show higher rates of energetic throughput with higher
labour productivity in the productive sectors. These differences originate from
a combination of external and internal constraints and manifest the historic
pathways of different countries.
Metabolism, societal 43

Societal metabolism has had a long history in the literature of energetics since
the 1970s, focusing on the analysis of biophysical constraints acting upon societies.
However, it was left aside in the discussions over sustainability, mostly due to the
abundance of cheap oil and the loss of interest in the limits of growth and energy.
Energetics and the analysis of societal metabolism have regained momentum in the
last decade as academics once again seek for innovative conceptual tools capable of
analyzing society-environment interactions from a biophysical perspective.
In light of degrowth, analysis of societal metabolism comes as an approach useful
for assessing the feasibility and desirability of proposed alternative modes of devel-
opment and the viability of economic downscaling from an energetic and material
perspective. From a metabolic standpoint, there are several challenges that remain
to be addressed within degrowth proposals (Sorman and Giampietro, 2013).
Primarily, it is important to note that current societal functions (service and
government, production of food etc.) and their associated metabolic patterns
(joules of fossil fuels used for the maintenance of the health system, the hours of
human activity used for producing a certain quantity of food) are based on the
exploitation of fossil fuels as a principal energy source. Fossil fuels are a source with
a high output yield and quality. The advent of fossil fuels has dramatically reduced
the amount of energy, labour, and technical capital going into the actual produc-
tion of useful energy itself. Thus, modern societies have been able to achieve their
current level of complexity with the surplus of time that cheap sources of energy
yield. However, as we reach peak oil, a switch to lower quality energy alterna-
tives directly implies a dramatic requirement for and increase in the amount of
energy, labor, and technical capital diverted to energy production itself (renewable
or other) in order to sustain the metabolic patterns of societies and the complex
structures they have attained. To meet the requirements of socio-economic sys-
tems such as the contemporary ones in the Global North, which operate with high
economic diversity, high dependency ratios (due to a rising proportion of elderly
persons and a higher average age of schooling) and high percentage-wise contri-
bution of the service sector in the economy, it is likely that more workers and
more working hours will be required to maintain the current metabolic patterns of
societies as fossil fuels dwindle. This points to a contradiction with the degrowth
proposal, which calls for reducing work hours (worksharing). In a future scarce
in energy we will have to work more, not less.
Additionally, even if voluntary reductions of affluence are achieved, as
degrowthers want, there are no robust studies showing that this will lead to a global
reduction in energy or material consumption, given a rising global population and
their affiliated levels of growing consumption patterns. As countries such as China,
India, and Brazil and their populations acquire a higher level of prosperity, their
material and energetic requirements will increase considerably, possibly outpacing
the gains from energy efficiencies or voluntary reductions of consumption in the
Global North.
Moreover, the phenomenon of the Jevons’ Paradox challenges the efficacy
of the voluntary reductions that degrowthers espouse. A voluntary reduction of
44 Alevgül H. Şorman

energy consumption in some activities or by some people will tend to be com-


pensated by an (voluntary or involuntary) increase in energy consumption in other
activities or other people. The biophysical view of societal metabolism warns
about the limitations of degrowth strategies based on voluntarily consuming fewer
resources, less energy, or less capital. These will not suffice on their own.

References
Fischer-Kowalski, M. and Haberl, H. (2007) Socioecological Transitions and Global Change:
Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Giampietro, M., Mayumi, K., and Sorman, A. H. (2012) The Metabolic Pattern of Societies:
Where Economists Fall Short, London: Routledge.
Giampietro, M., Mayumi, K., and Sorman, A. H. (2013) Energy Analysis for a Sustainable
Future: Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism, London:
Routledge.
Sorman, A. H. and Giampietro, M. (2013) “The Energetic Metabolism of Societies and the
Degrowth Paradigm: Analyzing Biophysical Constraints and Realities,” Journal of Cleaner
Production, 38, 80–93.
7
POLITICAL ECOLOGY
Susan Paulson
CENTRE FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

This entry focuses on an approach to research and practice that is applied through-
out the world and identified in Anglophone literature as ‘political ecology’.
The number of researchers and practitioners engaging in political ecology has
increased exponentially since the 1980s, broadening the field and opening new
possibilities. Little energy goes into establishing orthodoxy or debating who should
be labeled ‘political ecologist’, a term used here to refer to all participants in what
Paul Robbins (2011: xix) describes as a community of practice advancing the field
‘as an intellectual investigation of the human–environment interaction, and as a
political exercise for greater social and ecological justice’. In contrast to certain
‘isms’ and ‘ists’, political ecologists share with degrowth advocates an eagerness
to explore a plurality of knowledges and a diversity of practical actions, including
those of non-dominant groups.
Geographers Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield (1987: 17) marked political
ecology as an approach that combines ecology and political economy to address
relations between society and land-based resources, and between social groups
and classes with differing access to and use of those resources. Theirs and other
rural studies in the Global South were later complemented by studies in northern
contexts and in cities, conceived as ‘dense networks of interwoven sociospatial
processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, cultural
and organic’ (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003: 899). In their 2011 volume Global
Political Ecology, Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts integrate these
strands into an environmental politics of production, consumption and conserva-
tion world-wide.
While degrowth and political ecology both address the destruction of specific
socioecologies, the latter has pushed further to explore the ongoing production of
natures and cultures. Arturo Escobar (2010: 92) describes the field as evolving in
46 Susan Paulson

three overlapping stages: the first analyses political economic factors in environ-
mental degradation; the second explores epistemological processes through which
cultural, scientific and political conceptualizations and discourses impact human-
nature relations; and the third raises ontological questions about processes through
which a multiplicity of socionatural worlds are produced and reproduced.
These epistemological and ontological explorations can help degrowth scholars
to think in new ways about the concept ‘mode of production’, not conceptual-
izing natural resources as finite givens (in danger of being exhausted), but as aspects
of socioecological environments that are continually constructed through cultural
and historical processes. In this view, humans manufacture not only food, shelter
and clothing, but also biophysical landscapes, together with regimes of production,
consumption and environmental knowledge and governance. Most amazingly, we
humans produce ourselves: human bodies socialized with skills, visions and desires,
including appetites for consumption. This leads to more sophisticated understand-
ings of consumption that do not separate putative ‘physical necessities’ from ‘cul-
tural choices’. For humans, all aspects of life are inseparably material and mean-
ingful: the most basic ‘physical’ desires, such as eating and sex, are always imbued
with symbolic meaning and value, while even our subjective fantasies and political
visions depend on the biochemical character and physical size of the human brain.
One of degrowth’s biggest challenges is the narrow cultural scope and shal-
low historical depth that circumscribe contemporary environmental discourse,
constraining our potential to visualize alternatives to currently dominant human-
environment relations. In response to this challenge, political ecologists have
drawn on research documenting arrangements not based on growth, some of
which endured over centuries, even millennia. Anthropologists, archaeologists and
geographers working in the Andes and Amazon, for example, have shown how
surprisingly large populations have been sustained through raised field agriculture,
terracing, swidden, vertical archipelagos and other strategies based on elaborate
systems for organizing reciprocity and managing the commons. They have also
asked what disturbed certain systems in given periods. Political ecologists, such as
Bina Agarwal, working in South Asia, and Anna Tsing in Indonesia, continue to
ask these questions with attention to the production and maintenance of common
wealth such as forests.
Challenges to ethnocentric parameters of economic science are vital. Starting
in the 1970s, for example, critical interpretation of data from a range of ‘primitive’
societies enabled Marshall Sahlins to argue in Stone Age Economics that hunter-
gatherers conceive and achieve affluence in different ways from Western societies:
the former by desiring little and enjoying leisure, the latter by producing and con-
suming much. Hunter-gatherer systems have endured for 150,000 years of human
history and agriculture-based ones for around 8,000; in contrast, industrial/fossil
fuel economies seem to be in jeopardy after only a few centuries. The purpose
of deeply historical approaches to political ecology, like those compiled by Alf
Hornborg, Brett Clark and Kenneth Hermele (2012), is not to promote a return to
primitive life. On the contrary, cross cultural and (pre)historical knowledge helps
Political ecology 47

to relativize currently dominant systems among many possible modes of human


existence, and to widen horizons for imagining unprecedented futures in answer
to questions like: ‘How can non-expanding economies sustain human societies?’
and ‘How can humans live without the motivation and joy provided by consumer
culture?’
Environmental scientists and policy makers need more powerful ways of concep-
tualizing and operationalizing multi-scale analysis, social differentiation and, most
vitally, power. How do we link together phenomena ranging in scale from indi-
vidual voluntary simplicity to global markets, national economies, socio-political
institutions, and biophysical characteristics of local ecosystems? By locating envi-
ronmental phenomena at the crossroads of multiple relations of power, political
ecologists have expanded the scale of environmental analysis to transcend geo-
graphic locales and local populations. It is now recognized that transnational
factors ranging from climate change and fish-stock depletion to markets and media
affect even the most isolated socioecologies. Also, new awareness is dawning that
people involved in local environmental struggles engage global forces and ideas in
innovative and sometimes transformative ways, such as the concept of Buen Vivir
expressed at the People’s Climate Summit in Bolivia.
From the start, political ecology was grounded in analysis of socioeconomic and spa-
tial inequalities, and early on it foregrounded the environmental interests, knowledge
and practices of diverse actors. With time, political ecologists like Juanita Sundberg and
Dianne Rocheleau developed deeper analyses of the ways in which ethnoracial, gender
and other social systems interact with environment, moving beyond a focus on the
identities of marginalized people to study identity systems that work through time and
space to engineer and justify inequitable access to and exchange of resources. A more
systemic grasp of the role that hierarchical identity systems play in the constitution of
economies, landscapes and environmental governance is needed to deepen dialogue
among degrowth, political ecology, ecofeminism, environmental justice and related
movements, and to strengthen the impact of their work.
How do power and politics function in the production of commodities, dis-
courses and socioecologies? During a tumultuous period in intellectual history,
political ecology developed in tandem with critical explorations of colonialism,
international development, environmental history, race, ethnicity and gender.
These new areas of study interrogated key foundations of Western academia: the
dichotomy between nature and culture, the universality of reason (and of homo
economicus), the adequacy of conventional disciplines and the neutrality of Western
scientific categories and findings. Their investigations of power in unanticipated
places, notably in the production of knowledge, provoked considerable strife in
academia. It also enabled political ecologists such as Alf Hornborg to theorize
power as both material and meaningful, expressed through unequal control of
resources, including human labour and energy, and exercised in the formation of
social systems through which these inequalities are maintained, notably via cultural
mystifications that naturalize social constructs such as the power of the machine
and the representation of labour and nature as commodities.
48 Susan Paulson

Among all the creatures interacting in the earth’s ecosystems, humans are unique
in their use of politics in attempts to meet their needs and to assure their descend-
ants’ survival. These politics influence how power circulates in particular regimes
of knowledge, technology and representation, and how those dynamics influence
social and biophysical outcomes. Political ecology’s multi-scale analysis of power
and politics, together with its awareness of the magnitude of variation in human-
environment relations, are vital arms in the struggle to decolonize imaginations
confined to business as usual.
Degrowth evolved out of the multidimensional philosophical and sociopolitical
Franco-European movement called ‘l’ecologíe politique’, which has debated the rela-
tions between politics and ecology since the 1970s and included the likes of André
Gorz, Ivan Illich and Bernard Charbonneau, all foundational degrowth thinkers.
Degrowth today flourishes further through its alliance with the second variant of
political ecology described here. Both degrowth and political ecology challenge
dominant interpretations of the causes of environmental problems. Both contest
the prevalent technocratic and economistic responses. Both are critical of sustain-
able development, and the promotion of commodification in its name. And
both motivate political and practical action toward more equitable distribution of
economic and ecological resources and risks.

References
Blaikie, P.M. and Brookfield, H. (1987) Land Degradation and Society. London: Methuen.
Escobar, A. (2010) ‘Postconstructivist Political Ecologies’. In M. Redclift and G. Woodgate
(eds) International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Second Edition. Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar.
Hornborg, A., Clark, B. and Hermele, K. (2012) Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and
Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future. London and New York: Routledge.
Peet, R., Robbins, P. and Watts, M. (eds) (2011) Global Political Ecology. London and New
York: Routledge.
Robbins, P. (2011) Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) ‘Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of
Scale’. Antipode 35(5): 898–18.
8
STEADY STATE ECONOMICS
Joshua Farley
COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT

A stable human population and a constant rate of throughput characterize a steady


state economy, where throughput is defined as the extraction of raw materials
from nature and their return to nature as waste (see metabolism). For any given
set of technologies, a steady state economy will imply a constant stock of human
made artefacts maintained by a constant flow of throughput. The laws of physics
make it impossible to create something from nothing or nothing from something.
The economic process is a matter of bioeconomics. It transforms energy and
raw materials provided by nature into economic products that generate service
to humans before eventually returning to nature as waste. Durable capital stocks,
such as factories, houses, and other infrastructure require a steady flow of mainten-
ance throughput to counteract the forces of entropy and decay. Finite stocks of
non-renewable fossil fuels account for 86 percent of the energy used in economic
processes, and consumption dramatically exceeds new discoveries (see peak oil);
finite flows of renewable energy account for 2 percent, less than the annual growth
rate of total energy use. Fossil fuel combustion is a one-way process that transforms
useful energy into dispersed energy and waste by-products, such as carbon dioxide
and particulate matter. In summary, the economy is a physical sub-system of a
finite planetary system, so endless economic growth is impossible.
Humans, like all species, depend for their survival on life support functions of
ecosystems, including their capacity to sustain the flow of renewable raw materials
required for economic production and to absorb wastes.
A steady state economy must obey five rules. First, renewable resource extrac-
tion cannot exceed regeneration rates without eventually driving resource stocks
to zero. Second, waste emissions cannot exceed waste absorption capacity, or else
waste stocks and the harm they cause will continuously increase. Third, with cur-
rent technologies it would likely be impossible to meet the basic needs of current
50 Joshua Farley

populations without certain non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels. The rate
at which society consumes these resources therefore cannot exceed the rate at
which it develops renewable substitutes. Fourth, neither resource extraction nor
waste emissions can threaten the ecosystem functions essential to human survival.
Finally, human populations must be stable. The most obvious approach to achiev-
ing the first four of these goals is to mandate limits on throughput. How to achieve
a stable human population is more controversial (see neo-malthusianism).
These rules describe what is possible, but do not specify what is desirable: we
might achieve a steady state economy with large human populations, low but stable
stocks of renewable resources, and subsistence levels of consumption, or with a
much small population, larger resources stocks, and higher levels of per capita con-
sumption. A basic premise in economic analysis is that the more one has of some-
thing, the less an additional unit is worth. The marginal benefits from economic
growth are declining, and the marginal ecological costs are rising. Growth should
stop before marginal costs exceed marginal benefits, or it becomes uneconomical.
This is true even if we cannot precisely or objectively measure costs and benefits.
Many advocates of a steady state economy argue that society must achieve a
stable Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most common measure of economic
activity. But increases in GDP are not inextricably linked to increases in through-
put. For example, imposing caps on throughput then auctioning off access could
potentially increase the number of economic transactions and hence GDP while
simultaneously reducing throughput. Alternatively, many economists believe that
the dematerialization of the economy is possible, breaking the link between
GDP and throughput. Though GDP is arguably the best proxy for throughput,
targeting steady state throughput is less controversial and more important than
ending growth in GDP.
For most of human history, growth of the economy and of human populations
were scarcely measurable from one generation to the next, and the steady state
economy was the accepted status quo. This changed dramatically with the emer-
gence of the fossil fuel powered market economy during the eigteenth century.
Since then, several distinct views have emerged on the steady state economy.
Early philosophers such as Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith equated growth
with progress, but recognized that growth could not continue indefinitely on
a finite planet. From this perspective, the steady state economy is inevitable but
unfortunate. Later economists, including John Stuart Mill and John Maynard
Keynes, viewed the eventual end of economic growth as a desirable state that
would allow society to focus on mental, moral, and social progress, rather than
simply amassing more material wealth at the expense of nature. These philosophers
focused more on the desirability of a steady state economy than its inevitability.
The dramatic increase in population growth and per capita consumption begin-
ning in the 1950s, followed by growing awareness of its environmental impacts,
generated considerable research on the limits to growth. Ecologists, environment-
alists, systems thinkers, and ecology-minded economists sounded alarms about
the potentially catastrophic impacts of resource depletion, waste emissions, and
Steady state economics 51

population growth. Applying the laws of thermodynamics to the field of econom-


ics, Georgescu Roegen concluded that even a steady state economy was not viable
on a finite planet (see bioeconomics). Herman Daly more optimistically called
for a transition to a steady state economy in which quantitative growth in through-
put must end, but qualitative improvements in human welfare could continue.
Working with like-minded academics, Daly helped found the field of ecological
economics in the 1980s, which prioritizes a steady state economy as a central goal.
The need for a steady state economy forces attention to the issue of distribution
as well. The primary beneficiaries of a steady state economy are likely to be future
generations who otherwise might have insufficient resources to meet their basic
needs. From an ethical perspective, it makes little sense to care about the needs of
the unborn while ignoring the basic needs of those alive today. Furthermore, if we
must limit throughput, we must consider who is entitled to use it, and the starting
point of the ethical debate should be equal distribution of our shared inheritance.
From a practical viewpoint, those who have a hard time meeting basic needs today
will not further reduce their consumption to meet the needs of future generations.
We cannot grow our way out of poverty, and must therefore accept redistribution.
Conventional economists continue to reject the need for a steady state econ-
omy however, assuming that technological progress will allow growth to continue
indefinitely. An end to growth would result in misery, poverty, and unemploy-
ment. As a result, exponential economic growth remains the dominant goal in
virtually all countries and among almost all politicians, regardless of political and
economic ideology.
Advocates of a steady state economy however increasingly call for a period of
degrowth in the transition to a steady state.
A growing number of studies now suggest that the global economy has
exceeded critical planetary boundaries, ranging from biodiversity loss to climate
change. Throughput currently exceeds all the limits compatible with a steady state
economy. Humanity is no longer living off the regenerative capacity of the global
ecosystem, but is actively reducing natural capital stocks and future capacity to sus-
tain economic activity. The question is no longer when to stop economic growth,
but rather how much degrowth is necessary before we transition to a steady state.
The longer we delay the transition, the greater the level of degrowth that will be
required.
While degrowth is essential for the planet as a whole, there are nearly a billion
people living in dire poverty, unable to meet basic human needs. The marginal
benefits of growth to the poor are immense. Within developed nations, there is
little evidence that doubling per capita income in recent decades has improved life
satisfaction, but abundant evidence that the world’s poorest regions will suffer the
most from climate change and other unintended but inevitable consequences of
that income doubling. Furthermore, the rich and poor compete for finite resources
in an economy that weights preferences by purchasing power, resulting in simul-
taneous crises of obesity and malnutrition. Greater equality is strongly correlated
with a reduction in social and health problems. This empirical evidence suggests
52 Joshua Farley

that it would be possible to dramatically reduce consumption in the wealthiest


countries without reducing quality of life, freeing up the resources required to
meet basic human needs in the poorest nations.
A failed growth economy results in misery, poverty, and unemployment now,
while endless growth threatens ecological catastrophe accompanied by misery and
poverty in the future. These are unacceptable trade-offs. The solution is a carefully
planned transition to a steady state economy via a process of socially equitable and
environmentally sustainable degrowth.

References
Czech, B. (2013) Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution,
Gabriola, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers.
Daly, H. E. (1991) Steady State Economics: 2nd Edition with New Essays, Washington, DC:
Island Press.
Dietz, R. and O’Neill, D. (2013) Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy, San
Francisco: Berret-Koehler and London: Routledge.
Farley, J., Burke, M., Flomenhoft, G., Kelly, B., Murray, D. F., Posner, S., Putnam, M.,
Scanlan, A., and Witham, A. (2013) “Monetary and Fiscal Policies for a Finite Planet.”
Sustainability, 5: 2, 802–26.
Victor, P. (2008) Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster, Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar Publishing.
PART 2

The core
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9
AUTONOMY
Marco Deriu
DEPARTMENT OF ARTS, LITERATURE, HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF PARMA

Cornelius Castoriadis defines autonomy as the ability to give laws and rules to
ourselves independently and conciously. Heteronomy, on the other hand, refers
to conditions in which laws and rules are imposed by others (mainly meant as the
discourse and the imaginary of the others inside of us). Addressing the distinction
between autonomy and heteronomy, Castoriadis makes clear that the Other (or
Others) should not be understood, as is often done, as an external obstacle, or as a
curse suffered, but as constitutive of the subject, because “human existence is an exist-
ence with others” (Castoriadis 1987: 108). His clarification is especially important
given that, in the philosophical tradition, men generally tend to hide, minimize, or
devalue the care and services given them by other people – especially by women –
so as to present as part of their image, autonomy, and independence.
By projecting the image of “the independent man” in the public realm, we obfus-
cate a large area of care and service in the domestic sector. We also ignore care and ser-
vice received in the work “back office,” or public office. In this light, autonomy should
not be seen as a synonymous with independence. Autonomy opposes closure and fear
of the Other, but here it can also be said to oppose symbiotic relationships that stifle
distance and difference. To clarify, and for the sake of definition, autonomy should
necessarily promote a sense of self that includes a conscious recognition of the relation-
ships that bind us to life. Human existence is not simply inter-subjective, it is social
and historical, as well. Autonomy, for Castoriadis, remains both interconnected and in
tension with society’s institutions. It can only be conceived of as a collective project.
Reflecting on the expansion of Nazism in Europe and the inertia of the popula-
tions threatened by Hitler’s roundups, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim noted
that people were slowed in their efforts to escape by the difficulty of abandoning
their goods. Bettelheim points to a conflict central to our times. Contemporary
human beings suffer from the inability to choose between basic alternatives.
56 Marco Deriu

Freedom and individual subjectivity appear at odds with material comforts offered
by modern technology and a consumer society:

[N]obody wishes to give up freedom. But the issue is much more complex
when the decision is: how many possession am I willing to risk to remain
free, and how radical a change in the conditions of my life will I make to
preserve autonomy.
(Bettelheim 1991: 268).

Bettelheim’s reflections indicate a basic operation of the growth society. Capitalism


and consumer culture produce an acceptant populace, uncritical of elements and
decisions made by others. This concerns initially trivial things – material aspects,
organizational, and technical – but gradually it involves the acceptance of patterns
of behavior and social meanings that underlie the materialism. In theory, our
society produces technologically and economically powerful individuals. But
reality is exactly the opposite. The more powerful a society is – in its facilities and
its technological means – the more an individual feels powerless and experiences
anxiety about his condition and therefore has to find someone, or better yet
something, to lend himself to.
Bettelheim, in the early 1960s, had already detected this change of mentality:

[W]hat is so new in the hopes and fears of the machine age are that savior
and destroyer are no longer clothed in the image of man; no longer are the
figures that we imagine can save and destroy us direct projections of our
human image. What we now hope will save us, and what in our delusions
we fear will destroy us, is something that no longer has human qualities.
(Bettelheim1991: 53–4)

Even today, many believe that the only answer to the socio-ecological crisis lies in
technology. Yet the more we rely on external tools for solutions, the less we trust
changes we implement independently as part of our subjective choices adherent
to our values.
Modern society threatens individual autonomy through addiction and depend-
ence on goods and convenience. It also threatens autonomy in two other key ways:
it reduces the possibility of action and creation by imposing market conditions, and
it limits our personal ability to make decisions.
With regard to the first aspect, Ivan Illich has developed the concept of radi-
cal monopoly: “I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production
process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need and
excludes non-industrial activities from competition” (Illich 1975: 69). Personal
responses and personal production are systematically being replaced with stand-
ardized industrial products. Eventually, even the simplest needs cannot be met
outside of the market: “Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and
thereby restricts personal autonomy” (Illich 1975: 67). Radical monopoly restricts
Autonomy 57

autonomous organization and self-determination, and in the medium-term, it


results in a net loss of practical skills because these can no longer be exercised.
The second issue is a progressive disinclination to make autonomous decisions
in the face of concrete problems. The fact of the matter is that, as Bettelheim notes
about the contemporary individual:

scientific and technical progress has relieved him of having to solve so many
problems that he once had to solve by himself if he meant to survive, while
the modern horizon presents so many more choices than it used to. So there
is both: less need to develop autonomy because he can survive without it,
and more need for it if he prefers not to have others making decisions for
him. The fewer meaningful decisions he needs for survival, the less he may
feel the need, or the tendency to develop his decision making abilities.
(Bettelheim 1991: 71)

This trend does, however, have an end. If the logic of capitalist growth is based
on the need to create and continuously meet new needs and aspirations, the fact
remains that such a dream is also an illusion. Its underpinnings ironically relieve us
of the right to determine for ourselves the content of our own needs and desires.
It postulates the extreme dream of retaining the consumer from the cradle to the
grave. Beyond a certain limit of productivism and consumerism, frustration begins
to exceed gratification. According to Illich, our need for autonomous initiative
limits industrial expansion with its requirement for mandatory consumption.
From this point of view, we now understand how autonomy and degrowth are
deeply entangled. On one hand, degrowth is an attempt to adopt new rules and
values in a society that is otherwise dependent on the rules and priorities dictated
by finance, the market and techno-science. On the other hand, it is hard to imag-
ine any real form of autonomy and self-government without questioning the cen-
tral imperative of economic growth. For Serge Latouche, the project of degrowth
society effectively completes Castoriadis’ vision of a society that is self-instituted
or self-regulating (Latouche 2010). Conviviality and autonomy complement one
another; the pleasure of conviviality is an alternative to the enjoyment sought in
consumerism or the subjugation and exploitation of other people. There is not
only manipulation on a large scale (which also happens), but, above all, a voluntary
submission to a certain kind of lifestyle.
The path toward degrowth can be thought of as a journey of integration to
restore autonomy as well as a process of liberation from dependence on alienat-
ing and heteronomous systems. It is as important that we discuss this transition
process as it is we achieve the objective of degrowth; and, the process must be
convivial and based on a call for autonomy. Illich is extremely opposed to the
idea of entrusting experts with the task of setting limits to growth: “Faced with
these impending disasters, society can stand in wait of survival within limits set and
enforced by bureaucratic dictatorship. Or it can engage in a political process by the
use of legal and political procedures” (Illich 1975: 115). According to Illich, the
58 Marco Deriu

(heteronomous) bureaucratic management of human survival would not only be


unacceptable; more importantly, it would be unnecessary. Delegating the multi-
valent task to technocrats would imply an attempt to keep the industrial system at
the highest level of sustainable productivity in order to force down the threshold
of tolerance by any means available. As Illich writes, “only an active majority in
which all individuals and groups insist, for their own reasons, on their own rights,
and whose members share the same convivial procedures, can recover the rights
of men against corporations” (Illich 1975: 114). In this light, it would be safe to
assume that Illich would claim only an active majority could strip the power of the
leviathan that frames growth as the only means to survive.
The proposal of degrowth is therefore a political objective and an example
of what Castoriadis called new “social imaginaries and meanings.” This change
produces and is produced (in a circular logic) through a revolution in technologies
that are more convivial, and through the transformation of individuals and forms
of social organization. The project for a society of degrowth is a proposal of self-
limitation, one sought consciously and democratically organized. It is the establish-
ment of a common world that foregrounds the ideals of autonomy, conviviality,
and regeneration, and that rejects the ideology of limitless economic growth.

References
Bettelheim, B. (1991) The Informed Heart, London: Penguin Books.
Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Illich, I. (1975) Tools for Conviviality, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.
Latouche, S. (2010) Pour sortir de la société de consommation. Voix et voies de la décroissance, Paris:
Les liens qui liberent Editions.
10
CAPITALISM
Diego Andreucci¹ and Terrence McDonough²
¹RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA;
²DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND

Capitalism is a historically specific mode of social and economic organisation.


There is disagreement as to the date of its origin, depending on whether one places
capitalism’s distinctiveness in the sphere of exchange or in the sphere of produc-
tion. Most commentators, however, following Marx, have identified its emergence
in the qualitative changes in the productive system and associated social relations
which emerged in England in the latter half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
century and were ultimately consolidated in the Industrial Revolution.
Capitalism is distinguished from other socio-economic systems, such as feudal-
ism or socialism by five essential features. First, a capitalist system must concentrate
the means of production into relatively few hands. Second, ‘freed’ of the means to
make their own living, a substantial portion of the population must be forced to
exchange their labour in return for a wage. Third, capitalists retain ownership of
the products of the production process and must bring them for sale on markets to
realise profits. In this way, capitalist production is the production of commodities,
that is, goods and services produced for sale, not immediate use. Fourth, capital-
ism relies on a monetary system for the production of money through bank credit,
and on market exchange as a key coordinating mechanism. Prices of production
and consumption are determined by competition in the markets; money, labour,
production and consumption goods are all exchanged in markets, as are financial
assets. Finally, in capitalist economies, production is primarily motivated by profit.
In the absence of the expectation of profit, production will not be undertaken.
These institutional arrangements have been subject to conflicting interpreta-
tions (Watts 2009). Liberal theorists such as Hayek, following Adam Smith, have
understood the market as a rational and self-regulating mechanism, a source of
social harmonisation and integration, ultimately capable of promoting individual
freedom and welfare. Critics such as Marx and Polanyi, on the other hand, have
60 Diego Andreucci and Terrence McDonough

tended to see the ‘free market’ as a politically enforced – rather than spontaneous –
institution, the extension of which has been predicated upon the coercive sub-
sumption of land, labour and the social commons under capitalist relations.
Similarly, while mainstream economists see labour as a commodity freely sold in
the market, for critical scholars from Marx onwards the formal freedom enjoyed by
the labourer obscures the highly unequal and exploitative character of this relation-
ship (Watts 2009).
Two further clarifications are in order. First, ‘accumulation’ refers to the
dynamic of reproduction of capital on an expanding scale through the reinvest-
ment of surplus value. In this sense, accumulation is understood as a process, and it
is thus distinct from economic growth. Resulting from accumulation, ‘growth’
simply indicates the overall increase in the production of goods and services at the
aggregate level, commonly measured as the change in a nation’s Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). Second, from a Marxist perspective, the term ‘capital’ does not
denote a quantity of money or a stock of assets, but their mobilisation in produc-
tion with the expectation of increased profits. In this sense, capital is ‘value that
aspires to valorise itself’, the core economic engine of capitalism. As De Angelis
(2007) argues, while capital tends to increasingly colonise socio-economic relations
in a capitalist system (see commodification), it never conquers them completely.
This is a central point. The different degrees to which capital penetrates social
relations, as well as the different sets of social, political and ideological institutions
which sustain accumulation, largely account for the historico-geographical variety
of capitalism. By and large, however, a society can be said to be capitalist as long as
capital thus defined remains its predominant logic of (re)production.
A relevant question for degrowth is whether expansion is a necessary or
contingent (hence modifiable) feature of capitalism. The consensus among
critical scholars is that capitalism is inherently compelled to grow. Continuous self-
expansion – ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’ – is regarded as a structural
feature of capitalism. For Marx, while ‘simple reproduction’ is conceivable in the
abstract, the capitalist’s quest for survival in competitive markets underpins the
necessity of ‘accumulation through expanded reproduction’.
The argument can be summarised as follows: capitalists compete for access to
money, labour, raw materials and markets. This competition is conducted through
the reinvestment of profits. Thus to survive firms must strive to maximise profit-
ability. This is achieved through the more effective extraction of ‘surplus value’
driving the intensification of work, the investment in technological improvements
and expanding the scale of operations. This draws ever more areas of social activity,
ever larger areas of the globe and ever greater quantities of resources into the ambit
of capitalist relations of production. This expansion, in turn, heightens competi-
tion, thereby reproducing capitalism’s growth dynamic.
Beyond the strictly economic, expansion is also served by the cultural and
political deployment of profit. According to Max Weber’s classical position,
the ‘Protestant ethic’ of Western Europe, through promoting work, savings
and investment rendered a logic of continuous accumulation dominant (Ingham
Capitalism 61

2008: 25–30). Today, while this religious element has largely lost its significance,
new needs and limitless wants are stimulated through marketing (see social limits
of growth). Moreover, given the socially disruptive effects of recession, a depoliti-
cising representation of growth as a ‘common good’ has become a dominant dis-
course. Political challenges to growth are also consistently countered by capitalists’
financial dominance of political systems.
There is no agreement among degrowth theorists concerning the inevitability
of capitalist expansion. For some commentators, such as steady-state economist
Philip Lawn, capitalism and negative or no growth can be reconciled by devising
institutions capable of countering the disruptive social effects of recession, most
notably unemployment. Marxist critics, on the other hand, insist that while tem-
porary fixes can be found to sustain capitalist profits in the absence of growth,
these further aggravate crises and undermine the system’s legitimacy. Furthermore,
they point out, political institutions cannot be naively treated as external to and
independent of the requirements of accumulation.
Despite these discussions, the existence of a strong connection, historical or
contingent, between capitalism and growth is unquestionable. A central point,
made within all the intellectual currents which inform the degrowth movement
today, is that limitless accumulation is neither desirable nor sustainable in a finite
world. Critics of different traditions have highlighted the existence of both ‘inter-
nal’ and ‘external’ limits to capital accumulation. First, there are increasing difficul-
ties in reinvesting large surpluses. As Harvey (2010) has pointed out, the recurring
problem of capital ‘overaccumulation’ (lack of further profitable outlets for invest-
ment), particularly dramatic since the 1970s, has been mainly addressed through a)
aggressive privatisation (an instance of ‘accumulation by dispossession’) and b) the
expansion of debt and financial speculation. Neither of these solutions is sustain-
able in the long run. Financialisation in particular, while restoring profits of some
capitalist sectors, has rendered the economy increasingly unstable and crisis-prone.
A second set of limits is more forcefully highlighted by ecological economists,
namely, ‘external’ or absolute biophysical limits to growth. While some Marxist-
inspired commentators are suspicious of the Malthusian undertones of the ‘absolute
limits’ discourse, there is widespread agreement that capitalist expansion is increas-
ingly running up against ecological barriers and undermining the biophysical bases
of society and life itself. As James O’Connor (1991) has argued, the need for endless
expansion creates a fundamental contradiction for capitalism: the drive to increas-
ingly reduce nature and humans alike to commodities in order to sustain accumula-
tion undermines the very conditions for the system’s reproduction.
Degrowth is in full agreement with other radical ecologist traditions regarding
the impossibility of ‘greening’ capitalism. As climate change policy best exempli-
fies, the possibility of successfully adopting market-based solutions to solve eco-
logical problems is often unrealistic. Similarly, the search for ‘technical fixes’, as
proposed by ecological modernisation advocates, is strongly disputed. A typical
example of this is ‘energy efficiency’: against mainstream environmentalists and
policy makers who have proposed it as a panacea, critics have convincingly shown
62 Diego Andreucci and Terrence McDonough

that relative efficiencies enable expanded consumption and investment and do not
necessarily reduce absolute material and energy consumption levels. This is the so-
called ‘rebound effect’ or ‘Jevons’ paradox’.
If capitalism is compelled to grow, and if growth is incompatible with social
and ecological sustainability, is degrowth feasible in a capitalist context? In some
form or other, most degrowth advocates would concede that there is a fundamental
incompatibility between capitalism and degrowth (e.g. Latouche 2012), but are
reluctant to explicitly position themselves against capitalism. This reluctance has
been a point of contention with Marxism and an object of debate within degrowth
itself. There are at least three reasons for such reluctance. First, for degrowth theo-
rists such as Latouche (2012), capitalism should not be fetishised as the principal
object of critique: it is rather the economistic and ‘productivist’ imaginary which
underpins it that should be targeted. Second, degrowth as a social movement is
inspired by principles of voluntary association and decentralised, horizontal self-
organisation, whereby the promotion of specific alternative projects replaces large-
scale, revolutionary forms of struggles clearly positioned against capitalism. Finally,
in academic debate, many degrowth advocates are primarily concerned with the
acceptability of the degrowth project; such a willingness to engage, and seek
the approval of, economists and social scientists within the mainstream discourages
the adoption of an explicitly anti-capitalist discourse.
Due to these concerns, degrowth has so far largely renounced a critical engage-
ment with the political economy of capitalism and the possibility of its transforma-
tion. This remains a crucial intellectual and political task which degrowth scholars
and activists cannot avoid confronting in the future.

References
De Angelis, M. (2007) The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London:
Pluto Press.
Harvey, D. (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ingham, G. (2008) Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Latouche, S. (2012) ‘Can the Left Escape Economism?’ Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 23(1):
74–8.
O’Connor, J. (1991) ‘On the Two Contradictions of Capitalism’. Capitalism Nature Socialism,
2 (3): 107–9.
Watts, M. (2009) ‘Capitalism’. In D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. Watts and
S. Whatmore (eds). The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th ed.). Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, pp. 59–63.
11
CARE
Giacomo D’Alisa¹, Marco Deriu² and
Federico Demaria¹
¹RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
²DEPARTMENT OF ARTS, LITERATURE, HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF PARMA

Care is the daily action performed by human beings for their welfare and for the welfare
of their community. Here, community refers to the ensemble of people within prox-
imity and with which every human being lives, such as the family, friendships or the
neighbourhood. In these spaces, as well in the society as a whole, an enormous quantity
of work is devoted to sustenance, reproduction and the contentment of human rela-
tions. Unpaid work is the term used in feminist economics to account for the free
work devoted to such tasks. Feminists have denounced for years the undervaluation
of work for bodily and personal care, and the related undervaluation of the subjects
delegated to undertake it, i.e. women (Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997). Feminists con-
tinue to affirm the unique role that care has in the wellbeing of humans. This is not
simply because this unpaid work exceeds the total quantity of paid work performed in
the market space (Picchio 2003). It is because care is fundamental in the support the
mental, physical and relational integrity of each and every human being.
Nevertheless, the dominant streams of political and economic thought obscure
this hidden flux of hours and energies devoted to sustenance, reproduction and
relations, as these are not directly consistent with productivity, the only variable
that, in theory, capitalist societies value for the remuneration of labour.
Historically there have been strong connections between the distribution of
care work and the distribution of power across hierarchies of gender, class and
ethnicity. Eco-feminists have revealed these connections and the magnitude of the
care-time that is needed for a man to sell his productive work in the market each
day. Feminists denounce the virile male labour force, which renders them invisible
by passing production costs on to women and nature.
Hierarchies, conflicts and forms of dominance become visible when we juxta-
pose production time (by ‘productive men’) with the biological reproduction time
64 Giacomo D’Alisa, Marco Deriu and Federico Demaria

assigned to women. The contemporary economic imaginary speaks about time as a


scarce resource to be allocated efficiently, keeping in mind costs and opportunities.
In the spaces of domestic economy and care, on the other hand, the use of time
is not directed toward efficiency, but proceeds according to the rhythm of life.
Feminist criticism focuses on the chronological time of production as disembodied
from the daily cycles of the body and the cycle of life, and further disengaged from
the ecological time of seasons and the regeneration of ecosystems, as well as the
biological time of reproduction (see bioeconomics). The time of emotional sup-
port and care is strongly conditioned by the necessities of nourishment and rooted
in the space of proximity (Mellor 1997).
Under capitalism, where markets are subjected to the imperative of con-
stant growth, there seems to remain little time to dedicate to oneself, to fam-
ily, friends or civil and political activities. Yet relationships are fundamental
to a good life, as Aristotle teaches in the Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, Martha
Nussbaum (1986) reminds us that there are three beneficial relationships for the
self, according to Aristotle: love, friendship and political commitment. These
spheres of life constitute ends in themselves and cannot be instrumental. They
can only be enjoyed through reciprocity. This characteristic renders them par-
ticularly fragile – a fragility that is put to a tough test by the profit logic of the
market. For example, love, as such, exists only when it is mutual; when buying
sex, you can only enjoy a surrogate of physical, psychological and emotional
support, but certainly not love. Taking care of your own children implies an
enormous amount of hours; paying a babysitter to assist, on the other hand, is
a surrogate of parenting.
Economic growth is unable to sustain the happiness that it promises through
increased income. Easterlin’s paradox shows that as societies get richer, individu-
als do not necessarily get happier. Production and the market constantly expand,
occupying spaces of care, social life and reciprocity, leading inevitably to the dis-
integration of relationships and engendering negative consequences on well-being.
Care is outsourced outside the family sphere to the state or the market (e.g. child
or elderly care) debasing its essence, which is reciprocity. Happiness literature
argues that an allocation of time with priority on family life and health (and thus
care) increases subjective well-being.
In its strong claim for socio-environmental justice, degrowthers cannot
ignore the feminist claim for a fairer distribution of care work; the impossibility
of cancelling such necessary work has to face its inextensible redistribution across
gender and class. In their commitment to fight productivity – the obsession of
modernity – degrowthers have to account for the continuous re-emergence of
reproductive activities; the care of the other is a step towards emancipation from
the individual excesses of contemporary human being living in an industrialized
society. If these assumptions are true then the inescapable question is how might it
be possible to reinstate the dignity of care in a degrowth society?
Putting care at the centre of a degrowth society requires, first, a radical rethink-
ing of human relations and the ways in which these may correspond to human
Care 65

needs and overcome oppositions, dualisms and hierarchies. Joan Tronto (1993) has
noted that the process of care is composed of four phases:

1. caring about: implies the perception of a need and the personal as well as social
recognition for the need of care;
2. taking care of: contemplating the assumption of some responsibility relative to
the identified need and a choice as to how to respond to it;
3. care-giving: implies commitment and concrete work for the satisfaction of the
needs of care and generally requires a direct relationship between the person
who gives care and the person who receives it.
4. care-receiving: represents the final movement in which the receiver can respond
by showing that the care is indeed for her/his benefit or, alternatively, to show
the inefficiency or inappropriateness of the care offered.

Tronto shows how the expression ‘taking care of’ is often associated with
masculine and public roles and that when men ‘care about’ this refers almost
universally to public questions. On the other hand, the expressions ‘care-giving’
and ‘care-receiving’ are associated with women; and when the actor is a woman,
the expression ‘cares about’ refers to real persons with flesh and blood in intimate
and private space. Clearly this distinction is founded in the dualistic approach to
care in our patriarchal society. The man occupies the public sphere with his interest
in the important questions society has to face. The woman occupies the private
sphere with her responsibilities for the daily necessity of the family. Two separate
spheres, hierarchically predetermined, institute and reinforce asymmetrical power
between man and woman. Overcoming this schism is an important goal for a
degrowth society. This would allow women to express their passion for the world,
participating in creating the public definition of what society should care about
and take care of. Transcending this schism would allow men to learn what it really
means to care for persons in concrete terms of time-consumption and emotional
burden. In this way, degrowthers will be able to bring back the experience of the
vulnerability of bodies’ needs and of people and relocate these at the centre of
politics and of the economy.
It is easy to imagine why re-centring a society around care would pave the
way to degrowth. It responds first to the idea of equity among genders by shar-
ing care work within the sphere of the community as well as within society as
a whole. Secondly, it re-instates the importance caring has on the well-being
of the self, the family, the neighbourhood and the society as whole. It would
persuade people to work less and devote less time to the economic sphere. As a
consequence the unequal burden of care work on immigrants (normally women)
could also diminish. Third, because fewer hours of work would be available for
the market, this would promote work-sharing, allowing most people to find
paid work. Last but not least, working to lessen the vulnerability of others allows
everybody to experience their own vulnerability and reflect on its characteristics.
This is a first important step toward abandoning narcissistic affirmations of the
66 Giacomo D’Alisa, Marco Deriu and Federico Demaria

self as a guard against weakness, or in other words, abandoning the anthropologi-


cal essence of growth society.

References
Jochimsen, M. and Knobloch, U. (1997) ‘Making the Hidden Visible: the Importance of
Caring Activities and their Principles for an Economy’, Ecological Economics, 20: 107–12.
Mellor, M. (1997) ‘Women, Nature and the Social Construction of ‘Economic Man’,
Ecological Economics, 20(2): 129–40.
Nussbaum, M. (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, Cambridge: University Press.
Picchio A. (ed.) (2003) Unpaid Work and the Economy. A Gender Analysis of the Standards of
Living, London and New York: Routledge.
Tronto, Joan, (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York,
NY: Routledge.
12
COMMODIFICATION
Erik Gómez-Baggethun
NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE FOR NATURE RESEARCH (NINA), RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND
ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNONLOGY), AUTONOMOUS
UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

The reach of markets into aspects of life traditionally governed by nonmarket val-
ues and norms is one of the most significant developments of our time. The notion
of commodification describes this phenomenon and can be defined as the sym-
bolic, discursive and institutional changes through which a good or service that
was not previously meant for sale enters the sphere of money and market exchange.
Commodification has been often criticized on the grounds that some things
ought neither to be for sale nor governed through the market logic. Much of
the controversy stems from the historically grounded observation that commodi-
fication transforms the values that govern the relationships between people and
between people and nature as these adopt the form of market transactions. An early
observer of the social effects of commodification was Marx, who used the notion
of commodity fetishism to note how, in the marketplace, producers and consumers
perceive each other by means of the money and goods that they exchange. Mauss
(1954), a reference thinker of degrowth that inspired French anti-utilitarianism,
observed that, as commodity exchange unfolds, symbolic ties and reciprocity logics
that traditionally accompanied economic transactions tend to erode and eventu-
ally disappear. Mauss’ thesis was taken up by Polanyi (1957), who claimed that
commodification in market societies had a tendency to dissolve all social relations
into one of monetary exchange. He critically scrutinized commodification of land,
labor, and money in the rise of liberalism, noting that, unlike traditional commodi-
ties, such fictitious commodities were not human-made or intended for sale.
Historically, commodification has been part and parcel of common property
enclosures. Pioneer analysis of enclosures by Proudhon (1840) and Marx (1842)
famously portrayed the private appropriation of the commons as theft. In Capital,
68 Erik Gómez-Baggethun

Marx suggested that enclosures of common lands in Europe in the early days of
modernity, were at the root of the so-called “primitive accumulation” that allowed
capitalist relations to unfold. Thinkers like Federici (2004) and Harvey (2003)
expanded his thesis, noting that enclosures on the commons extend until the pre-
sent day with accumulation of wealth by dispossessing the public of their land and
resources. Contemporary enclosures include land grabs in Africa and the com-
modification of nature through biodiversity offsets and carbon trading schemes.
Degrowth is as much a critique of growth, as it is a critique of the colonizing
expansion of market values, logic, and language into novel social and ecological
domains. It demands the de-commodification of social relations and of the human
relationship with nature and challenges the “new environmental pragmatism”
that sees market based instruments as the solution for environmental protection.
Environmentalists (see environmentalism) are both victims and villains of the
commodification of nature. Disappointed by the failure to reverse the ecological
crisis, many are focusing on monetary valuation and market incentives as a pragmatic
short-term strategy to communicate and capture the value of biodiversity in a lan-
guage that reflects dominant political and economic views. This well-intentioned
strategy oversees the broader sociopolitical processes through which markets
expand their limits and monetary value colonizes new domains. Within the pre-
vailing institutional setting in market societies, a focus on monetary valuations and
incentives paves the way, discursively and sometimes technically, for the com-
modification of human-nature relations and can crowd out intrinsic motivations
for conservation by inducing a logic of short-term economic calculus. Such is the
tragedy of well-intentioned valuation.
Commodification – and the fight against it – is a core theoretical and practical
component in the struggle of the defense and re-appropriation of the commons.
This struggle is an inevitable part of a broader struggle against capitalism. With
the structural tendency to decline with market competition, capitalist economies
constantly seek to expand the frontiers of commodification into new social and
ecological domains (Luxemburg 1951, Harvey 2003). The commons constitute
the natural playing field where capital seeks fresh space for accumulation. Yet, their
colonization is always incomplete. In its expansion, commodification encounters
limits of biophysical, institutional, and social nature. Biophysical limits stem from
the non-fungible character of ecosystem processes and components, meaning that
they may not be separable into discrete tradable units. Bakker (2007) suggests that
this uncooperative nature of environmental commodities explains the failure to
achieve higher levels in the commodification of water in the United Kingdom in
recent decades. Institutional limits stem from the public good nature of many eco-
logical commons, meaning low capacity to prevent others having access to them,
which is a precondition to set up effective markets. This explains why well-devel-
oped markets of ecosystem services are still relatively rare despite being actively
promoted by economists and intergovernmental organizations. Finally, social limits
stem from the fierce opposition commodification can encounter when it affects
essential goods to cover basic needs. For example, in the 2000 conflict known as
Commodification 69

the Water War in Cochabamba, Bolivia, an attempt to privatize water encountered


contestation that scaled up to an insurrection.
As these cases illustrate, commodification is a contested and transient phenom-
enon, contingent on the power relations that prevail at each historical moment
between possessors and dispossessed. Contrary to what is often assumed, the process
of commodification is not necessarily unidirectional or irreversible. Objects move in
and out of commodity status and history offers many cases of de-commodification.
These range from the abolition of the medieval practice of selling indulgence let-
ters to the formal abolition of slavery in many countries worldwide during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indulgencies and human beings were exter-
nalized from markets and (re)regulated following non chrematistic values such as
spirituality and human rights. Examples of institutions that limit the commodifica-
tion of nature include the Convention on International Trading with Critically
Endangered Species (CITES) and the constitutions of countries like Bolivia and
Ecuador, which are permeated – if timidly – by values and ontologies of non-cap-
italist indigenous societies. These constitutions formally recognize rights to nature,
and the latter declares ecosystem services as public goods that may not be subject
of private appropriation (see Buen Vivir).
To keep their hands away from the mud of real life politics, many social move-
ments and contemporary critics shelter themselves in the distant and morally safe
position of opposing every form of commodification. But despite its ubiquitous
character under capitalism, commodification is a millenary and pre-capitalist phe-
nomenon, and markets stand among the most enduring institutions of human-
ity. Re-embedded within proper social and ecological boundaries, markets will
certainly have a role to play as a coordination mechanism in any realistic political
project able to organize exchange and provision on our increasingly complex and
vastly populated planet.
The critical question is thus to define where to put the limits to commodifica-
tion, a dilemma hinted at by Emanuel Kant in his famous statement “In the king-
dom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity.” Thus, if technical aspects
such as the feasibility of producing equivalent substitutes, or the level of rivalry and
excludability exhibited by the affected good can be important practical criteria,
the question of where to put the limits to commodification is most fundamen-
tally an ethical and political one. Sacredness, uniqueness, rareness, intrinsic value,
human rights, environmental justice, and basic needs are some of the notions
and criteria that can help us delineate what may or may not be commodifiable.
Such delineation needs to be addressed from multiple angles, ranging from the
enactment of international treaties for the protection of the global commons, to
national constitutions protecting public goods, to local rules, norms, and taboos
which ban on specific forms of commodification. Many ingredients for this insti-
tutional assemblage can be found in current institutional diversity. Others can be
rescued from the vast laboratory of institutional arrangements developed by human
societies over millennia and swept away by modernity and capitalist globalization.
Many other new forms of still to be collective action will be necessary to secure
70 Erik Gómez-Baggethun

an effective defense of the global commons in an era of unprecedented world


interconnectedness.
Only once the sphere of markets and commodities has been tentatively defined
will environmentalists, growth objectors, and society at large be ready to decide
which externalities are to be internalized in markets and which internalities are to be
externalized and governed by non-market norms and values.

References
Bakker, K. (2003) An Uncooperative Commodity: Privatizing Water in England and Wales,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch. Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation, New
York: Autonomedia.
Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luxemburg, R. (1951) The Accumulation of Capital, Monthly Review Press.
Marx, K. (1975/1842) “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Debates on the
Law of the Theft of Wood.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume
I, New York: International Publishers, pp 224–63.
Mauss, M. (1954) The Gift, New York: Free Press.
Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,
Boston: Beacon Press.
Proudhon, P-J. (1840) Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Paris: Chez J.-F. Brocard.
Sandel, M. (2012) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, New York: Farrar,
Straus and Girou.
13
COMMODITY FRONTIERS
Marta Conde and Mariana Walter
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

In the Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology, we


understand and analyze ‘commodity frontiers’ as the locus where extraction geo-
graphically expands, colonizing new land in search for raw materials (oil, minerals,
biomass etc.). This makes it possible to feed the expanding demand associated with
the increase of the social metabolism of industrialized economies (MartinezAlier
et al. 2010). The expansion of commodity frontiers fosters conditions of social and
environmental degradation and conflict.
The term ‘commodity frontier’ can also be traced to the theory first introduced
by Jason W. Moore (2000) to describe how capitalism initiated its expansion with
the sugar complex in the fifteenth century. He argues that going beyond existing
frontiers is the main strategy for expanding the scope and scale of the commodifica-
tion process. Further expansion is possible as long as there remains un-commodified
land, products and relations. Here, land should be seen as equivalent to the space to
grow food or to extract minerals, or the sea for oil or gas exploration.
Moore’s (2002, 2003) definition of commodity frontiers combines Immanuel
Wallerstein’s world-system theory with the Marxist concept of metabolic rift. The
world-system theory’s concept of a ‘commodity chain’ explores the labour and
production processes that result in a finished commodity. Instead of focusing on
the finished product, the task in a commodity frontier analytical framework is to
track the frontier of expansion by looking at the different raw materials that consti-
tute it. The concept of metabolic rift gives light to the social and ecologic rupture
that occurred with the development of capitalism. With the displacement of
small-scale agriculture and industrialisation, peasants lost their traditional forms of
subsistence. Disconnected from the soil, their social metabolism and their pro-
duction, they became alienated from their natural environment. At the same time,
72 Marta Conde and Mariana Walter

flows of products (and nutrients) were taken from the countryside to the cities,
causing degradation at points of extraction and pollution at points of consumption
(Moore 2003). The rise of wage labour through the commodification of land
and labour is at the core of this rift. The dispossession of subsistence farmers and
herders from common land resulted in the proletarianisation of rural populations,
who flooded to urban centres in search of work (Marx 1976). According to Moore
(2003), those still in possession of land generally became highly indebted, fostering
instability and overexploitation by capitalists. This process led to declining pro-
ductivity, driving the frontier further in search of fresh supplies of labour and land.
The sugar complex expansion from Madeira in the late fifteenth century, to
Brazil in the sixteenth century and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century,
showed an industrialization pattern that transformed the land and labour of these
countries profoundly. The sugar industry required high quantities of wood, not
only for its production, but also for the construction of infrastructures and ships
for transportation, causing massive forest clearance and land erosion. Ecological
exhaustion at the production point and the environmental destruction that fol-
lowed pushed capitalist expansion to other lands through a process of cyclical
fluctuations. As land was being exhausted, fresh land was being occupied. Moore
sustains that local ecosystems that might have otherwise been allowed to regenerate
were destabilized, leading to falling productivity and profitability. This renewed
the search for fresh land, often found outside the boundaries of the capitalist world-
economy (Moore 2000). From a social point of view, labour transformations did
not succeed in the case of sugar production. Existing indigenous labour in the
Caribbean rapidly died off, so Africans were then imported to work on sugar slave
islands (Moore 2003).
An important implication of commodity frontiers is that they set in motion a vast
complex of economic activities that imply the expansion towards new frontiers. For
instance, consider modern gold mine extraction; this activity requires inputs, such as
chemical reagents, machinery, fuel, construction materials and food for the workers,
that need to be extracted and processed, thereby pushing other frontiers further.
What happened with sugar in America later happened (and is still happening)
with minerals, fossil fuels, timber and crops (i.e. cotton, soy bean, agrofuels). In
such extractive activities, labour is organized in ways that often exclude local popu-
lations from qualified job opportunities and benefits. The ecological implications
are vast; topsoil vegetation is removed, generally implying deforestation and huge
biodiversity loss that is pushed and further encroached into smaller areas. Fertilizers
and pesticides are produced to feed the expansion of industrialized crops, polluting
land, water and bodies. Water is extracted and used in large quantities, competing
with local uses, affecting its availability and quality. The extraction of minerals pro-
duces irreversible changes in hydro-geological structures. Environmental Justice
and Ecological Economics have explored the incommensurable implications for
local populations that live at these commodity frontiers. Indigenous and peasant
communities, whose livelihood and culture is tied to their territory, have seen how
their land is enclosed, removed or polluted (Martinez Alier et al. 2010).
Commodity frontiers 73

Indeed, one of the features of the 2000s has been the significant increase of
socio-environmental conflicts involving communities that oppose extractive and
other high-impact activities in their lands (Martinez Alier et al. 2010). In Latin
America, these contestations have triggered proposals based on alternative views of
what development can be that question growth as a social aim and reframe the
meaning of wellbeing and Nature. In Africa there has been a call for a return to
Ubuntu, an African socio-cultural framework that rests on values such as solidar-
ity, consensus and autonomy. Martinez- Alier (2012) has suggested that there is an
opportunity to generate alliances between the movements promoting Buen Vivir
in the South and degrowth in the North.
However, the advance of extraction frontiers and their impact are not only
a matter of concern for the South. The crisis and subsequent structural adjust-
ments that have recently affected Europe have brought a devaluation of labour
costs and the elimination of health and environmental regulations. Extraction pro-
jects that were not possible in the past are now increasingly more feasible. Coal and
gold mining is returning to Europe, creating violent conflicts such as the one in
Chalkidiki in northern Greece. This tendency is accentuated by the advent of new
technologies such as gas fracking, which has expanded rapidly in the US and now
in Europe and both deep, and not so deep, sea drilling.
As physical frontiers become saturated, new modes of expanding capital not tied
to geography have taken shape. The commodification processes of indigenous
knowledge, environmental services and CO2 emissions (through the carbon mar-
ket) are examples of the new frontiers of accumulation.
Commodity frontiers and degrowth are linked in four ways. First, the presence
of commodity frontiers is rooted in the inherent and ceaseless drive of capitalism
to expand.
Second, commodity frontiers reminds us that growth comes at a high cost to
people far from the location in which it is delivered. The commodities that sup-
ply our growing global economy come from particular places, where people live
and whose lives are transformed at a high social and environmental cost in incom-
mensurable ways. The intent of degrowth should be not only to reduce human
consumption at the point of delivery but also to challenge the structures of produc-
tion at the point of extraction. Contesting successfully the imperative of endless
economic growth can have direct and positive impacts in the lives of communities
at these frontiers.
Third, the social and environmental impacts of extracting resources are increas-
ing as the quality and availability of resources decreases. In the case of mining, a
much larger amount of waste and pollution is generated today to obtain the same
quantity of metal ores than was generated a decade ago. The question is no longer
whether there are available resources but rather what the social and environmental
cost will be if they continue to be extracted.
Fourth, in Europe and the Americas, economies that in the very recent past
mostly imported raw materials are now promoting extraction within their own
borders, fostering new industries, dynamics and conflicts. Thus, the expansion of
74 Marta Conde and Mariana Walter

the extraction frontier is extending from the South to the North, and to the core
of capitalist societies.
Finally, opportunities can rise to form alliances between the movement for
degrowth and the movements that contest extraction and frame innovative alterna-
tives to growth-laden development formulas.

References
Martinez-Alier, J. (2012) ‘Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance
between Two Movements’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23(1): 51–73.
Martinez-Alier, J., Kallis, G., Veuthey, S., Walter, M., and Temper, L. (2010) ‘Social
metabolism, ecological distribution conflicts, and valuation languages’, Ecological
Economics, 70: 153–8.
Marx K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, London: Penguin Classics.
Moore, J. W. (2000) ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy:
Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’, Review: A
Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, 23(3): 409–33.
Moore, J. W. (2003) ‘The Modern World-Systems Environmental History? Ecology and
the Rise of Capitalism’, Theory and Society, 32(3): 307–77.
14
COMMONS
Silke Helfrich and David Bollier
COMMONS STRATEGIES GROUP

The commons consists of a vast array of self-provisioning and governance systems


that flourish mainly outside of both the market and the State, on the periphery of
mainstream politics and economics. While functioning as a social glue and embod-
ying a different logic than that of market fundamentalism, commons are essentially
invisible. They generally are not based on money, legal contracts, or bureaucratic
fiat, but on self-management and shared responsibility.
The commons is usually understood in two primary senses: as a paradigm of
governance and resource-management, and as a set of social practices in virtually all
fields of human endeavor. As a system of governance, the term refers to the norms,
rules, and institutions that enable the shared management of specific resources. As
social practices, the commons is better understood as a verb (a social process) than
a noun. It is more accurate to talk about “commoning” or “making the commons”
than “the commons” as a thing. Commons don’t just fall from the sky. They aren’t
simply material or intangible collective resources, but processes of shared steward-
ship about things that a community (a network or all of humankind) possesses and
manages in common or should do so. These things we are entitled to use collec-
tively may be gifts of nature or collectively produced resources like knowledge and
cultural techniques, urban spaces, landscapes, and countless others.
A resource becomes a commons when it is taken care of by a community or net-
work. The community, resource, and rules are all an integrated whole.
This definition of the commons poses enormous conceptual challenges to con-
ventional economics and even to traditional commons scholarship. Both tend to
see the commons as inhering in the resource itself. In conventional economics it is
customary to call a resource a commons if excludability is difficult and the resource
is “rivalrous” (my use of a resource diminishes your capacity to use the same
76 Silke Helfrich and David Bollier

resource). Yet, culture or code does not get used up if someone uses them. They
are “non-rivalrous.” And still, many people talk about them as commons (such as
Wikipedia and free software). This suggests, that it is impossible to base a coherent
commons approach on resource-categories. What matters most in the commons
are the social commitments, knowledge, and practices to manage the resource,
whatever it may be. A source of freshwater can be stewarded as a commons –
with non-discriminatory but limited use by all – or it can be fenced, converted
into a commodity and sold as bottled water (see commodification). The centre
of the commons and of commoning is not a “common pool resource,” but the
active process of “pooling common resources.” Both, rivalrous (water, land, fish,
etc.) and non-rivalrous resources (knowledge, code, etc.) can be pooled – or not.
It is mainly up to us. Thus, the commons is primarily about the ways we relate to
each other when using something in common.
Before a commons can be created, however, a problem of collective ideation
has to be overcome. Everyone must share a clear vision of what is to be shared
and how. Commons may fail because of bad leadership, inappropriate governance
structures, or simply because of the power relations in a marketized world.
According to the International Land Coalition (ILC), an estimated two bil-
lion people in the world directly rely on the commons as a provisioning model.
Even though it has been around for millennia as the default mode of social
reproduction, its strength as a pattern for change has only recently been rediscov-
ered. Much of the academic interest grew out of research on “common property
regimes” by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, who in 1973 founded the Workshop in
Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Elinor Ostrom would
win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. The commons also got a boost
when new communication and information technologies arose in the 1980s (see
digital commons).
Most commons have little to do with individual property rights, markets, or
geo-political power. They are focused on solving concrete problems and meeting
people’s needs by providing effective self-governance of a shared resource or space.
Hence, the commons are constantly and continuously being overwhelmed and
destroyed by market forces, parliaments, and governments. This process is called
enclosure. Throughout history, enclosures have been justified by a narrative that also
underlies one of the most quoted essays in social sciences of the last 45 years – “The
Tragedy of the Commons,” published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin. Its misleading
message continues to hold sway in the popular mind. Hardin makes his readers
picture “a pasture open to all . . . .” He argues that if everybody can graze cattle on
common land, no single herder will have a rational incentive to hold back. Instead,
he will put as many cattle as possible. Thus, the pasture will inevitably be overex-
ploited. The practical solution, Hardin suggests, would be individual property as a
way to protect exclusivity or top-down control and coercion by authorities.
Hardin was not in fact describing a commons but an open-access regime, a free-
for-all situation without boundaries, rules, and communication among users. But
a commons has boundaries, rules, monitoring systems, punishment of free-riders,
Commons 77

and social norms – all of which are typically developed by the users themselves
according to their circumstances. The conditions in which self-management can
thrive were summarized in the design principles that Elinor Ostrom published in
the 1990 book, Governing the Commons. They include clearly defined bounda-
ries, effective exclusion of unauthorized parties, locally adapted rules regarding
the appropriation and provision of resources, collective-choice arrangements that
allow most users to participate, monitoring, graduated sanctions for rules violations,
easily accessible mechanisms of conflict resolution, and recognition by higher-level
authorities.
Many commoners continuously points to the generative side of the commons
as a form of wealth creation. In Yochai Benkler’s (2006: 63) description of the
so-called digital commons, we are seeing “the emergence of more effective
collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the
price system or a managerial structure.” The commons out-compete by out-
cooperating. Benkler’s term for this is “commons-based peer production,” mean-
ing systems that are collaborative, non-proprietary, and based on “sharing resources
and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals” (ibid.)
Over the past few years, a fledgling commons movement – working alongside
scholars – has developed a discourse of the commons as a political philosophy
and policy agenda. This network is fighting moral and political justifications for
enclosures, today justifying individual (corporate) ownership of ethno-botanical
knowledge, genes, life-forms, and synthetic nano-matter. Degrowth strategies
must confront these (new) enclosures, which sweep aside people’s bonds, impose
an extreme individualism, and convert citizens into mere consumers. This is the
ground on which an alliance with the commons movement is emerging.
In fact, both discourses reinterpret the notion of wealth while linking it to an idea
of “enhanced liberty in connectedness.” A critique of growth sets the frame (what
to do?), while the commons develops a narration for how to live and structure our
social relationships within this frame. Degrowth helps us to understand the urgency
of getting out of the “iron prison of consumerism,” while commoning shows what
a “beyond-consumerist-culture” looks and feels like. Commoners tend to set forth
a “logic of abundance,” the proposition that there will be enough produced for all if
we can develop an abundance of relationships, networks, and forms of co-operative
governance. This kind of abundance can help us develop practices that respect the
limits of growth and enlarge everybody’s freedom to act in a self-determined way.
Furthermore, commoning can actively contribute to the dematerialization
of production and consumption in three ways. First, it can re-localize produc-
tion (many commons are tied to a geographic territory); second, commoning can
intensify use through co-use and collaborative and complementary use, which in
turn can either prevent or intensify rebound effects (see Jevons’ paradox); third,
commoning can foster “prosumption,” the combining of production and con-
sumption into one process. It is important to note, however, that strengthened
social bonds in itself spur dematerialization, because they are needs-based instead
of needs-creating.
78 Silke Helfrich and David Bollier

In short; the commons and degrowth are complementary to each other. The
commons suggests radically democratic solutions that don’t pit environmental con-
cerns against social justice. The principles of commoning don’t need economic
growth to thrive. Instead, they help replace the cultural imperative “to have more”
with alternative social spheres that demonstrate that “doing together” can trump
“having” – and thus bring “degrowth” and “quality of life” into closer alignment.
Furthermore, the commons movement’s focus on (intellectual) property rights has
the virtue of undermining a fundamental pillar of capitalism and thus growth.
If “the economy” is re-imagined through key commons notions like distributed
production, modularity, collective ownership, and stewardship, it is possible to
embrace the idea of a high-performance economic system while rejecting capital-
ist notions and institutions (corporation, global markets, competition, labor) (see
capitalism).

References
The Commoner, A web journal for other values. Available online at www.commoner.org.uk
(accessed September 4 2013).
Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bollier, D., Helfrich, S., and Heinrich Böll Foundation (eds.) (2012) The Wealth of the
Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Amherst, Massachusetts: Levellers Press.
Available online at hwww.wealthofthecommons.org (accessed March 3 2013).
Linebaugh, P. (Jan.8–10, 2010) “Some Principles of the Commons,” Counterpunch,
available online at www.counterpunch.org/2010.01/08/some-principles-of-the-
commons (accessed July 1 2013).
Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, A. (2013) “Enlivenment: Toward a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature,
Culture and Politics,” Series on Ecology, No. 31, Berlin, Germany: Heinrich Boell
Foundation. Available online at http://commonsandeconomics.org/2013/05/15/a-
new-bios-for-the-economic-system (accessed 3 February 2014).
15
CONVIVIALITY
Marco Deriu
DEPARTMENT OF ARTS, LITERATURE, HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF PARMA

Ivan Illich derives his idea of conviviality from Physiologie du goût ou méditations
de gastronomie transcendante, an 1825 text by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Illich’s
reflection nevertheless unfolds with complexity and moves far beyond a reminder
of the importance of the social bond. To Illich, the word ‘conviviality’ does not
mean joy or light-heartedness; it refers to a society in which modern tools are used
by everyone in an integrated and shared manner, without reliance on a body of
specialists who control said instruments.
Illich’s reflections on conviviality come from an awareness that industrial
growth forces us to recognize: that there exist certain ‘thresholds’ of wellbeing
that cannot be crossed. As institutions related to medicine, education or econom-
ics grow beyond a certain point, the ends for which they were originally designed
change. Institutions become a threat to society itself.
For Illich, conviviality is the ‘opposite of industrial productivity’. In reality, the
apparent freedom the growth of industrially produced devices guarantees impov-
erishes humankind and limits possibility. In fact, industrial tools often introduce
what Illich calls a ‘radical monopoly’. Monopoly does not refer here to alternatives
within a specific category, but to the fact that the supply of commodities or ser-
vices, produced industrially, ends up depriving people of the freedom to produce
goods on their own, or to exchange and share what they need outside the market.
As our needs are transformed into commodities, new commodities create new
needs (see commodification). So the measure of wellbeing is not equivalent to a
disproportionate increase in production, but in a reasonable balance between goods
and commodities, allowing a synergy between use value and exchange value.
This line of reasoning distinguishes Illich’s contribution from traditional ecologi-
cal thought, which focuses primarily on the environmental effects of production.
80 Marco Deriu

Even with more eco-efficient products, Illich points out, an affluent society gen-
erates, through radical monopoly, the paralysis of its people and eliminates their
autonomy: ‘This radical monopoly would accompany high-speed traffic even if
motors were powered by sunshine and vehicles were spun of air’ (Illich 1978: 73).
It is therefore in a social sense – not just an environmental one – that the instru-
ments society has created prove inadequate in guaranteeing the sustainability of
our society. Unfettered industrialization produces tools that are seemingly indis-
pensable, but which, primarily, devalue individual autonomy and force people
to become increasingly dependent on commodities for which they have to work
more and more. The result, argues Illich, is that the rate in growth of frustration
exceeds the rate of production, resulting in a form of ‘modernization of poverty’.
Convivial tools for Illich are a condition for the realization of autonomy under-
stood as the power to control the use of resources and on the satisfaction of our
own needs.
One detects a connection here with the theme of alienation in Marx. But the
alienation that Illich describes does not depend on the ownership of the means
of production. It is not an issue of property or redistribution, but of the inherent
logic embedded in the instrument. Certain tools are inherently destructive, main-
tains Illich, no matter who owns and uses them. According to Illich, some tools
are designed to produce new demands and new forms of slavery so as to make an
industrial society with an intensive market economy indispensable.
On the other hand, the tool is convivial if it can be used and adapted with ease
and for a purpose chosen by the individual, and if it has the result of expanding
freedom, autonomy and human creativity. Illich cites the motorway networks,
aircrafts, open pit mines and the school as examples of tools that are not con-
vivial; he cites the bicycle, sewing machine, telephone and radio as convivial tools.
But the conviviality of other devices is more complicated. Consider, for example,
the computer and the Internet– would they be considered convivial according to
Illich?
In his work Tools of Conviviality (1973), Illich views the computer, informa-
tion technologies, and more generally what can be called the digital civilization
and cybernetics, as controversial. In other essays, too, the author wonders if the
computer encourages ‘disembodied’ thinking. He emphasizes his fear that humans
may become more and more dependent on computers in order to talk and think –
just as we have become dependent on cars. In the work Deschooling Society (1973),
Illich identifies computer networks and the ability to create connections between
peer groups based on similar interests in the same city, or even in distant lands, as
an alternative means of meeting, creating and having social relationships and learn-
ing, when compared to traditional forms of standardized education (Illich 1971).
For this reason, Michael Slattery (http://convivialtools.org, accessed 3 November
2013), who runs the site Convivial Tools, claims that Illich was a precursor of
the digital revolution. He recalls how the computer engineer Lee Felsenstein, a
designer of the Osborne 1, the first industrially produced laptop, had read Illich’s
text and considered his computer a convivial tool. One could counter that critical
Conviviality 81

considerations of the change of the perception of speed, time and image and the
value of face-to-face relationships hardly make Illich’s position tantamount to that
of the so-called network society enthusiasts.
In any case, the discussion reveals the ways in which Illich’s definition of the
convivial demonstrates a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. It is true that Illich
expressly refers to the structure of the instrument and not to the structure of the
character of the individual and the community; yet, too rigid a separation between
convivial and non-convivial tools risks losing sight of two crucial aspects of his
argument.
The first is that technical tools do not exist in a vacuum but, rather, are immersed
in networks of social and gender relations. Illich seems to put the structure of the
object first, or above the structure of relations. From one point of view, it is a
certain structure of relations that led to the invention of the first firearms, car, jet
or the atomic bomb. On the other hand, in the structure of a non-convivial rela-
tion the use of any instrument, even a seemingly convivial one, will work against
the autonomy and freedom of choice of men, women and children. Any tool
therefore fits into an ambit of social and gender relations, and to a certain extent,
expresses the structure of these relationships. So the structure of social relations
and the structure of the instrument are codetermined and develop in a circular and
non-unidirectional fashion.
From here, we arrive at the second consideration. Some tools – the Internet
probably among them – seem to fall into a grey area and demonstrate a certain
degree of malleability and dynamism and, depending on the context, can be tilted
more towards their use value or their exchange value. To a certain extent, if the
structure of social relations can change, so too can the convivial or non-convivial
character of an instrument. It is worth noting that Valentina Borremans (1979: 4),
has expressed the need for a new discipline of research on convivial instruments
and cultural, social and political conditions that could defend their use value.
Illich points out in several places that there is no reason to ban from a convivial
society any powerful tool or any form of centralized production. What matters is
that the society ensures a balance between the instruments that it produces to meet
the demands for which they were conceived, and tools that will foster invention
and personal fulfilment. ‘Convivial reconstruction demands the disruption of the
present monopoly of industry, but not the abolition of all industrial production’
(Illich 1975: 88). The convivial society is not motionless or frozen. ‘A changeless
society would be as intolerable for people as the present society of constant change.
Convivial reconstruction requires limits on the rate of change’ (Illich 1975: 91).
The transition to a post-industrial society is a potential opening toward a
model of society in which the ways and means of production are diversified and
favourable to personal initiative. While industrial production is standardized in
the long run, convivial production encourages personal creativity and collabo-
rative innovation. The transition from productivity to conviviality is, in some
ways, the transition from economic scarcity to the spontaneity and extravagance
of a gift economy.
82 Marco Deriu

Without doubt, the contribution of Ivan Illich on ‘conviviality’ has been a


major source of inspiration for degrowth theorists, starting with Serge Latouche
(2010). From the perspective of degrowth, conviviality constitutes one of its core
anthropological constructs; it represents faith in the possibility of space for rela-
tionships, recognition, pleasure and generally living well, and thereby, reduces the
dependence on an industrial and consumerist system.
However, Illich did not use the term ‘degrowth’. He believed that the inverse
of a progressively modernized poverty was a form of ‘modern existence’, which
he called ‘convivial austerity’. This would be one process of political choice, ‘to
safeguard the freedom and use of convivial tools’, and is very close to what we now
mean by the prospect of voluntary degrowth:

[L]et us call the modern subsistence the style of life that prevails in a post-
industrial economy in which people have succeeded in reducing their
market dependence, and have done so by protecting – by political means –
a social infrastructure in which techniques and tools are used primarily to
generate use-values that are unmeasured and un-measurable by professional
need-makers.
(Illich 1978: 52)

References
Borremans, V. (1979) Guide to Convivial Tools, Library Journal Special Report, 13, Preface
by Ivan Illich, New York: R.R. Bowker Company.
Brillat-Savarin, J. A. (1825) Physiologie du goût ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, Paris:
A. Sautelet.
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society, New York: Harper & Row.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins.
Illich, I. (1978) The Right to Useful Unemployment, London: Marion Boyars.
Illich, I. (1978) Toward a History of Needs, New York: Pantheon.
Latouche, S. (2010) Pour sortir de la société de consommation. Voix et voies de la décroissance, Paris:
Les liens qui libèrent Editions.
16
DEMATERIALIZATION
Sylvia Lorek
SUSTAINABLE EUROPE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The term “dematerialization” refers to a reduction (in fact a tremendous reduction)


in the quantity of materials used to serve the production and consumption needs
of our planet. Dematerialization indicates how (much) our social metabolism has
to decrease. Dematerializsation is an input-oriented strategy, which, in contrast to
traditional ‘end-of-pipe’ measures, intends to tackle environmental problems at
their source. The concept of dematerialization argues that current environmental
problems (such as climate change and biodiversity loss) are closely related to the
volume of material and energy used for the production of goods and services: if the
input decreases the overall environmental impact will decrease as well.
Dematerialization is also intended as a response to the fact that the availability
of non-renewable resources are coming to an end and that some important renew-
able resources, like fish and timber, show higher rates of consumption than their
reproduction rate. Some indicative data:

x Extraction of “conventional” crude oil peaked in 2006; most major fields were
discovered in the 1960s and production from them is declining at 4–6 percent
per year (and “new” oil cannot keep up) (see peak oil).
x Sixty-three of the 89 non-renewable resources that enable high-tech industrial
society had become globally scarce by 2008.
x Eighty-two percent of monitored fish-stocks were fully exploited or over-
exploited by 2008 (32 percent are overexploited, up from 10 percent in the
1970s)
x Thirty percent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive; soil erosion/
degradation continues at 10–40 times the rate of natural replenishment.
84 Sylvia Lorek

Dematerialization is often used in relation to the term decoupling and gets mixed
up with it. Resource decoupling means reducing the rate of resource use per unit of
economic activity measured in GDP. Decoupling generally refers to the economy
and its activities while dematerialization takes the Earth’s capacity and its limitations
as the reference point. A general distinction exists between relative and absolute
decoupling. Relative decoupling is achieved when resource use grows less then GDP.
Absolute decoupling means that the economy grows but resource use remains at least
stable or decreases. Dematerialization, as defined here, would show up as absolute
decoupling, i.e. an absolute reduction in material and carbon use. The possibility of
an absolute decoupling is often invoked, for example, in the visions of a “Factor 4”or
“Factor 10” decline in the material or carbon intensity of the economy.
Such declines in resource use are expected by their advocates to happen through
a significant increase in resource productivity compensating for any increase in
resource consumption due to economic growth. Strategies to achieve an absolute
decoupling include a variety of approaches like the development of new technolo-
gies and materials, resource productivity standards in construction, increasing dura-
bility and recycling of goods, and new, so-called “resource-extensive lifestyles.”
These developments require specific policy measures such as support for research
and development, fostering of eco-efficient public procurement, and active sup-
port for the establishment of markets for dematerialized products and services.
Other common proposals by advocates of decoupling are the internalization of
external environmental costs, in particular through market-based instruments such
as energy taxes or taxes on raw materials.
Some nations like Germany or the US claim to have managed an absolute
decoupling of their economy (i.e. stabilizing resource use despite growing GDP) as
a result of their resource efficiency programs. In reality, the consumption of mate-
rials and carbon in these countries increases. It is only that it takes place in countries
from which they increasingly import material goods.
The impression of absolute decoupling results from the way material flows
are accounted for. There is an ongoing global shift, whereby developed econo-
mies substitute domestic material extraction and processing as well as produc-
tion processes with imported embodied material resources from developing and
emerging countries (Peters et al, 2011). This raises a question of environmen-
tal justice. Regarding such physical trade balance between regions, Europe is
the biggest shifter whereas Australia and Latin America are the largest takers of
environmental burden. It is this shift that has created the impression of absolute
decoupling in Europe.
To improve its data on material use, the European Environmental Agency has
developed programs that calculate economies’ material use not on the basis of pro-
duction but on the basis of consumption. This means accounting the total mate-
rial required (TMR) in all final products consumed within a nation and involves
following resource consumption back all along the production chains – including
investments in machinery and infrastructure as well (European Environment
Agency 2013).
Dematerialization 85

Most countries, however, do show a relative decoupling which means that


material consumption is still increasing but at a pace slower than economic output.
Globally material productivity increased by 37 percent from 1980 to 2008. GDP
grew 147 percent, while material consumption grew by “only” 79 percent. Such
relative decoupling, however, involved a tremendous further materialization of the
global economy. Indicatively, during this same period, the global use of biomass
increased by 35 percent, mineral extraction grew by 133 percent, fossil fuels went up
60 percent, and metals 89 percent. GHGs rose by 42 percent (Dittrich et al. 2012).
The technological and market-based solutions raised by the proponents of
decoupling remain far from adequate for the scale of the challenge faced if popula-
tion and income continue to grow. The sheer scale of action implied by continuous
growth is daunting. In a world of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western lifestyles,
the carbon intensity of every dollar of output must be at least 130 times lower in
2050 than it is today if we are to stay within the 350 ppm limit that scientists claim
is necessary for avoiding dangerous climate change. By the end of the century, eco-
nomic activity will need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere not adding to
it. This is made even more difficult if one considers the Jevons’ Paradox and the
possibility that money saved by efficiency gains are spent on other material/energy
intensive goods. Efficiency gains might lead to more, rather than less, resource use.
In this context, more appropriate mechanisms for absolute dematerialization are
carbon and resource caps, since these reduce the possibility of “leakages” and rebounds
(see resource cap coalition). The aim of cap agreements is to realize an absolute
reduction in resource use through resource allowances that get progressively lower
year by year. This can constantly transform production and consumption patterns
and prove incentives for innovations towards products and services with low mate-
rial input. A planned resource cap can also contribute to re-localizing the economy
with shorter economic cycles and higher self-sufficiency, favoring initiatives covered
in this volume, such as nowtopias, urban gardening, or back-to-the-landers.
Slight adjustments within the system will not be enough to foster the radical
reductions in the use of materials and carbon that are necessary, according to the
precautionary principle, for staying within Earth’s safe capacity. Dematerialization
is unlikely in an economy that continues to grow. Instead a substantial degrowth
is necessary to reduce our social metabolism to a sustainable steady state level.
Caps are one politically sanctioned way to push for such degrowth.

References
Clugston, C. (2012) Scarcity – humanity’s final chapter? Port Charlotte: Booklocker.
Dittrich, M., Giljum, S., Lutter, S., and Polzin, C. (2012) Green economies around the world? –
Implications for resource use for development and the environment. Vienna: SERI.
European Environment Agency (2013) “Environmental pressures from European
consumption and production.” EEA Technical Report No 2/2013. Copenhagen.
Peters, G. P., Minx, J. C. Weber, C. L., and Edenhofer, O. (2011) “Growth in emission
transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008.” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 108(21): 8903–8.
17
DÉPENSE
Onofrio Romano
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BARI “A. MORO”

Energy consumption consists of two parts. The first is necessary for the conserva-
tion and the reproduction of life. The second is used for non-productive expendi-
tures: luxury, mourning, war, religion, games, spectacles, the arts, perverse sexual
activity. All told, these activities – qualified as dépense – are ends in themselves.
Any society has an excess of energy, defined precisely as all that energy that is not
needed for the mere reproduction of life.
In a wider sense, which includes nature, dépense indicates that share of energy
which cannot be employed by living organisms, owing to their physiological lim-
its. This portion continues to circulate aimlessly in the environment up until the
point where it extinguishes itself.
George Bataille introduces this definition of excess energy in his essay “The
Idea of Dépense” appearing for the first time in La Critique Sociale (1/1933). As with
all of Bataille’s theoretical constructs, the contents and contours of dépense are flex-
ible and never defined in axiomatic categories. There are seven different versions
of this essay alone. Bataille eventually attempted to construct a theoretical project
for a “general economy” departing from the notion of dépense. The first fragmen-
tary versions of it appear in the essays L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers (1946) and
La limite de l’utile (posthumously published in the complete works, 1976). The pro-
ject was fully born in the work La part maudite (1949). A second part to this work
followed with the title Histoire de l’érotisme (1957) and then a final third part enti-
tled La Souveraineté (Bataille 1976). Some resonances with dépense can be found in
the Freudian concepts of Vergänglichkeit (transience) and the death impulse (Freud
1990) but mainly in Marcel Mauss’ analysis of potlach in The Gift (1925). All these
works deal with a perturbing tendency of human beings and societies toward loss,
reversing their alleged “natural” vocation to self-advance.
From an anthropological framework, energy could be redefined as the fuel of
action, that is, the fuel that calls us to act. The portion of energy that a living being
Dépense 87

employs for either sustenance or biological growth, Bataille terms “servile.” In


fact, mere biological sustenance can be achieved spending only a miniscule portion
of the total amount of available energy. The basic problem relates to the residual
energy that exceeds the share devoted to such servile use. Excess energy requires
a “sovereign” use: it is necessary to choose a destination for the fuel of action on
the basis of the philosophical intent of a political prospect (Romano 2014). It is
the sovereign employment of excess energy that qualifies us as “humans.” The dif-
ferent patterns of excess energy use characterize and distinguish different types of
societies across space and time. Excess can be spent on sacrifice or festival, in war or
in peace. The Tibetan society, for example, almost entirely employs excess energy
to support a specific class of monk.
The human encounter with excess energy is a crucial moment. In this sense,
excess energy is an “accursed share”: it forces human beings to question the mean-
ing of life and their path in the world. The non-use of excess energy would signal
the incapacity of human beings to exercise their own freedom. For this reason, all
human societies have designed forms of ritual for dépense – that is, forms of destruc-
tion of that energy which lies beyond the servile.
These forms of ritual have different degrees of sophistication and respond to
different functions:

x They serve to humanize excess waste, bringing it from the dominion of


uncontrolled natural processes into the realm of culture and the symbolic.
x They release energy from the utilitarian dimension (the biological-functional)
to access the sacred – in fact, the destruction of the objects is aimed to destroy
their servile status as useful things, in order to relocate them in the realm of the
sacred (this is the true meaning of sacrifice: producing sacred things through
their ritual destruction).
x They physically delete the stressful presence of excess and therefore, the call
to be and to act.

The concept of dépense helps identify a main hole in the “society of growth.”
How should we go about the removal of the problem of energy and excess? The
worship of the servile moment is in fact at the foundation of this society. Modernity
arose in a context of existential emergency and fear for the survival of the species,
unleashed by an unexpected demographic explosion (and therefore an increase of
social needs) that was incompatible with the productive capacities of the communities
of the time. This imbalance resulted in the deconstruction of traditional communities
whose symbolic codes did not permit them to confront the new challenge. In order to
satisfy their unfulfilled needs, individuals tried to break bonds with their communities
and to autonomously take up new and more effective, growth-oriented, courses
of action. For Europe, Riesman (1950) dates this crucial demographic shift, and its
social consequences, to the seventeenth century.
The process of individualization deprived communities of their ability to manage
energy. This included dépense rituals that burned off excess energy. Still imprinted
88 Onofrio Romano

by this “original emergency” of survival, modern society continues its growth


momentum without stopping. Making permanent the original emergency situation
removes the problem of excess energy, so we avoid confronting the “meaning” of
action. Perpetually in pursuit of survival (which requires continuous growth), we
are liberated from the state of paralysis when faced with the necessity of “being,”
which arises from the emergence of excess energy. In other words, remaining ani-
mal frees us from the fatigue of becoming human. At the same time, we expunge
dépense from the “official” public forum. Instead it is “privatized” and hidden in
shame (as any “wasting” activity becomes morally incompatible with the alleged
perpetual state of emergency).
Given the individualization of society, single individuals take on the burden of
waste through small trade-offs: from perverse sexuality to alcoholism, gambling
and flashy consumption – what Bataille called the “vulgar eructation” of the petty
bourgeoisie. In the era of growth there is no longer sumptuous and collective
dépense, only its private dissolution informally consumed. Hence modern societies
try to solve the problem of energy with a twofold strategy: they first expand to
an unprecedented level their servile use (i.e. the growth obsession), and second
they privatize dépense. But this strategy appears inadequate for the crucial cause of
putting the available energy to work. A large amount of energy remains unused; it
continues to circulate and to stress human beings. Lacking tools of deliberate and
symbolic catastrophe (i.e. the ritual collective dépense), the inhabitants of growth
societies begin to dream and to desire a “real” natural catastrophe.
Dépense is a key concept, then, for theorizing a way out of the growth society.
Yet, paradoxically, it does not figure among the epistemological pillars of main-
stream theories of degrowth, nor is it a source of inspiration for the movement of
growth objectors. This is perhaps because truly embracing dépense would entail the
dismantling of a cognitive frame of catastrophe and scarcity that is at the basis of the
degrowth paradigm. In light of dépense, the catastrophe threat haunting Western
societies is only a symptom of the failed disposal of excess energy. For degrowth
supporters it is a “real” risk. Degrowth thought is therefore implicitly subordi-
nated to the dominant culture, one that justifies neoliberal capitalist restructuring.
It denounces a shortage of resources necessary to sustain contemporary lifestyles
and indeed acts out a mere reversal of the foundational problem of the growth
society. According to Bataille:

[A]s a rule, particular existence always risks succumbing for lack of resources.
It contrasts with general existence whose resources are in excess and for which
death has no meaning. From the particular point of view, the problems are
posed in the first instance by a deficiency of resources. They are posed in the first
instance by an excess of resources if one starts from the general point of view.
(Bataille 1988: 39)

The individualized being is bound by the precarious nature of its existence and
therefore obsessed with the problem of its survival. When isolated, it embraces
Dépense 89

a fundamentally servile position and reverts to the status of an animal, in which


obtaining resources is central. The challenge of excess energy becomes visible only
if we are able to relocate our point of view to a systemic level. Degrowth supporters
do little more than transfer the servile position typical of the individualized subject
to the general system; humanity’s complexity becomes subject to “the rule of
needs,” supported by a utilitarian logic of survival. The individual point of view
that emphasizes the insufficiency of resources gets applied to the general collective.
As a result, the theory of degrowth risks to reanimate and give new momentum
to the basic precept of economics, that is, the principle of scarcity. It risks mirror-
ing the myth of growth by using the same imaginary from a reversed viewpoint,
an imaginary that entails the employment of all the energy in circulation for the
preservation of existence, this time round by means of “virtuous” lifestyles and
efficient techniques. The degrowth project could gain a wider breath and appeal by
emphasizing instead its concern towards the collective construction of meaning in
life and the restoration of political sovereignty. That is the only way for us moderns
to face the challenge of excess energy.

References
Bataille, G. (1933) “La notion de dépense.” La Critique Sociale, 1: 7.
Bataille, G. (1946) “L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers.” In Œuvres complètes (1976), vol. 7.
Paris: Gallimard.
Bataille, G. (1949) “La Part maudite.” In Œuvres complètes (1976), vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard.
Bataille, G. (1957) “Histoire de l’érotisme.” In Œuvres complètes (1976). vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard.
Bataille, G. (1976) Oeuvres completes, Tome VIII. Paris: Gallimard.
Bataille, G. (1988) The accursed share. An essay on general economy vol. I Consumption. New
York: Zone Books.
Freud, S. (1990) Beyond the pleasure principle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Riesman, D. (1950) The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Romano, O. (2014) The sociology of knowledge in a time of crises. Challenging the phantom of
liberty. London & New York: Routledge.
18
DEPOLITICIZATION
(‘THE POLITICAL’)
Erik Swyngedouw
DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT,
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

‘The political’ is the contested public terrain where different imaginings of possible
socio-ecological orders compete over the symbolic and material institutionalization of
these visions. Indeed, the terrain of struggle over political-ecological futures – a terrain
that makes visible and perceptible the heterogeneous views and desires that cut through
the social body – and how to achieve this is precisely what constitutes the terrain of
‘the political’. The political refers, therefore, to a broadly shared public space, an idea of
living together, and signals the absence of a foundational or essential point (in nature,
the social, science, the cultural, or in political philosophy) on which to base a polity or
a society. The political is an immanent domain of agonistic practice.
Transformative politics in the direction of ‘de-growth’ therefore require par-
ticular forms of politicization adequate to the situation the world is currently in.
However, while the normative view of the need for ‘de-growth’ substantiates
its claims on the basis of the analysis of the entropic energetic imbalances of capi-
talist metabolisms of nature, and the socio-ecological inequalities and conflicts that
inhere in these processes, the transformation of a ‘growth’ to a ‘de-growth’ based
socio-ecological configuration has to extend its concern from ‘scientific’ and social
arguments to consider the political.
I consider politics or policy-making, in contrast to the political, to refer to the
power plays between political actors and the everyday choreographies of negotiat-
ing, formulating, and implementing rules and practices within a given institutional
and procedural configuration in which individuals and groups pursue their inter-
ests. Politics, then, in the forms of the institutions and technologies of governing,
and the tactics, strategies, and power relations related to conflict intermediation
and the furthering of particular partisan interests, contingently institute society and
give society some (instable) form and temporal coherence.
Politics as public management stands in contrast to the political as the sphere of
agonistic dispute and struggle over the environments we wish to inhabit and on
Depoliticization (‘the political’) 91

how to produce them. There is a tendency for the first to suture, and ultimately
disavow or foreclose, the former. This process is marked by a colonisation of the
political by politics or the sublimation of the political by replacing it with ‘com-
munity’ (as an imagined undivided unity), a particular sociological imaginary
of ‘the people’ (as nation, ethnic group, or other social category), ‘organization’,
‘management’, ‘good governance’. In the current de-politicizing neoliberal cli-
mate, the public management of things and people is hegemonically articulated
around a naturalization of the need for economic growth – the unquestioned
mobilization of market relations and forces as the only possible mode of access-
ing, transforming, and distributing (transformed) nature – and capitalism as the
only reasonable and possible form of organization of socio-natural metabolism.
This foreclosure of the political in terms of at least recognizing the legitimacy of
dissenting voices and positions constitutes a process of de-politicization. In other
words, de-politicization takes the form of the increasing domination of a series of
inter-related managerial and technical forms of governance aimed at maintaining
and nurturing growth and understood as the uninterrupted accumulation of eco-
nomic wealth (see Swyngedouw, 2011). For example, the dominant ecological
concern today is one whereby sustainable development refers primarily to the
mobilisation of technical and institutional configurations, like the Kyoto proto-
col to mitigate climate change, whereby the aim is to make ecological concerns
compatible with a capitalist growth-based economy ‘so that nothing really has to
change’ (Swyngedouw 2010: 222). The wider framework of neoliberal growth
is in itself not contestable. Consider, for example, how the post-2008 crisis was
governed by the assembled national and international elites in ways that permitted
the survival and ultimate strengthening of the accumulation process and restora-
tion of economic growth. It is precisely this condition that disavows, or rather,
forecloses the agonistic appearance of dissenting voices or alternative visions that
many have come to identify with post-democratic forms of managing the existing
order. It is a process marked by the twin imperatives of the de-politicization of the
economy (i.e. neoliberal capitalism cannot be disputed within the existing reg-
isters of dominant politics) and the economization of politics (i.e. rendering every
domain of public concern subject to market rule and economic calculus).
The challenge for politicizing de-growth, then, is to think and practise the
re-emergence of the political in an age of post-democratic de-politicization. The
political cannot be suppressed indefinitely. It returns invariably as an immanent
practice that revolves around the tropes of emergence, insurrection, equality, and
theatrical staging of egalitarian being-in-common. The re-emergence of the politi-
cal unfolds through a procedure of interruption in the state of the situation: a riot,
a rebellion, an insurgency, or the politicized staging of new practices of being-in-
common. It is always specific, concrete, particular, but stands as the metaphori-
cal condensation of the universal. This procedure implies the production of new
egalitarian material and discursive socio-ecological spatialities within and through
the existing spatialities of the existing order. It asserts dissensus as the base for
politics, and operates through the (re-)appropriation of space and the production
92 Erik Swyngedouw

of new socio-ecological qualities and new socio-ecological relations (Wilson and


Swyngedouw 2014).
Examples of such emergent forms of embryonic re-politicization can be dis-
cerned in the variegated insurgent activism and proliferating manifestations of radi-
cal discontent, such as the Indignados in Spain, the Occupy! movement, and
a range of other insurgencies as well as by the fledgling de-growth movement
and assorted other activist mobilisations articulated around more equitable, socially
inclusive, and ecologically more appropriate sensibilities. What marks these hesi-
tant returns of ‘the political’ is precisely that these movements operate outside the
registers of actually existing (democratic or otherwise) policy-making or politics.
In other words, politicization operates, as Miguel Abensour argues, at a distance
from the state. Moreover, the claims and demands voiced by such new political
agents stage a claim for equality in a context whereby unequal socio-ecological
conditions prevail.
In a context of neoliberal de-politicization, a re-politicization of socio-ecological
matters requires urgent and strategic thought. First, rather than embracing the post-
modern obsession with identitarian politics and celebrating the diversity of possible
modes of being, or celebrating the micro-politics of dispersed resistances and indi-
vidualized alternative practices, it is important to foreground division and exclu-
sion, and emphasize ‘the political act’ and a fidelity to a political truth procedure
that necessitates taking sides while aspiring to universalization. The latter refers to a
politicizing process whereby everybody is invited in (although by no means all will
accept the invitation). Insurgent egalitarian performances, if they are to be effec-
tive, transgress the fantasy of the sort of acting that calls upon ‘resistance’ as a posi-
tive injunction. The act of resistance (‘I have to resist the process of, say, unlimited
growth, neoliberalization, globalization, or capitalism, or otherwise the city, the
world, the environment, the poor will suffer’) just answers the call of power in its
post-democratic guise. Resistant acting is actually what is invited, but leaves the
police order intact. Politics understood merely as rituals of resistance is doomed to
fail politically. Resistance and nurturing conflict, as the ultimate horizon of many
social movements, has become a subterfuge that masks what is truly at stake, i.e. the
inauguration of a different socio-ecological, post-capitalist order.
Therefore, and second, attention needs to turn to the modalities of
re-politicization. Re-politicization as an intervention in the state of the situation
that transforms and transgresses the symbolic orders of the existing condition marks
a shift from the old to a new situation, one that cannot any longer be thought of in
terms of the old symbolic framings. Politicization is thus about inaugurating prac-
tices that lie beyond the symbolic order of the existing post-democratic arrange-
ment and, therefore, would necessitate transformation in and of the existing order
to permit symbolization to occur. The most promising politicizing moments of
the de-growth movement reside precisely in sustaining and nurturing such tactics.
Third, the proper response to the injunction (by the elites) to undertake action,
to design the new, to be creative (in a neoliberal sense), to be different, is the
refusal to act. Time after time, the population is invited to act in certain ways,
Depoliticization (‘the political’) 93

to recycle waste, to reduce ecological footprints, sustaining the myth that such
individualized consumer practices will nudge the socio-ecological order in a more
equitable and ecologically sensible direction, while, in fact, making sure that noth-
ing really happens. Such refusal to act is also an invitation to think or, rather, to
think again. There is an urgent task that requires the formation of new egalitarian
imaginaries or fantasies and the resurrection of emancipatory thought that has
been censored, scripted out, suspended.
All this centres on re-thinking equality politically, i.e. thinking equality not
as a sociologically verifiable concept or procedure that permits opening a policy
arena which will remedy the observed inequalities (utopian/normative/moral)
some time in a utopian future, but as the axiomatically given and presupposed,
albeit contingent, condition of the democratic political; equality appears in its per-
formative staging. One should insist on the equality of each and all in their capac-
ity to take active part in the production of life-in-common in an egalitarian and
free manner. Achieving this requires, foremost, the radical politicization of the
manner through which we organize access, transformation, and distribution of
socio-ecological things and services. Indeed, traversing consensual elite fantasies
requires the intellectual and political courage to imagine radically the collective
production of equitable and common socio-ecological spatialities. It also requires
the inauguration of new political trajectories of living life-in-common, and, most
importantly, the courage to choose, to take sides, to declare fidelity to the egalib-
ertarian practices already pre-figured in some of the place-moments that mark the
emergent political landscapes of which the de-growth movement is an integral
part. In that sense, we have to reclaim socio-ecological egalibertarian practices as an
utmost necessity for today. De-growth and egalitarian democratization are indeed,
of necessity, interlinked.

References
Abensour, M. (2011). Democracy Against the State. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Badiou, A. (2012). The Rebirth of History. London: Verso.
Rancière, J. (1998). Disagreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Swyngedouw, E. (2010). ‘Trouble with Nature: Ecology as the New Opium for the
People’. in Hillier, J. and P. Healey (eds). In Conceptual Challenges for Planning Theory,
Farnham: Aldershot.
Swyngedouw, E. (2011). ‘Interrogating Post-Democracy: Reclaiming Egalitarian Political
Spaces’. Political Geography, 30, 370–80.
Wilson, J. and E. Swyngedouw (2014). The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of
Depoliticization, Specters of Radical Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
19
DISASTER, PEDAGOGY OF
Serge Latouche
FACULTÉ DE DROIT, ÉCONOMIE ET GESTION JEAN MONNET, UNIVERSITÉ PARIS-SUD

Denis de Rougemont, one of the early pioneers of ecology, wrote in 1977:

[I] feel it coming, a series of disasters created through our diligent yet
unconscious efforts. If they’re big enough to wake up the world, but not
enough to smash everything, I ‘d call them learning experiences, the only
ones able to overcome our inertia.
(de Rougemont cited in Partant 1979)

Partant’s idea expressed in their citation, based on the popular concept that
experience provides lessons, is both shockingly radical and fatalistic. At the same
time, one might doubt its effectiveness. Yet, with the publication of Jean-Pierre
Dupuy’s book, For a Crystalizing Catastrophe (2002), it has experienced a revival.
Dictionaries define disasters as a sudden and fateful misfortune to a person or
people. An example of a disaster would include an accident that causes the death
of many people: a rail or air disaster. Literally this would be: “a decisive event
that brings about a tragedy.” The catastrophes or disasters that concern us here are
those of the Anthropocene, that is, those generated by the dynamics of a com-
plex system, the biosphere, in co-evolution with human activity and altered by it:
Chernobyl or Fukushima, but also climate change or the collapse of biodiversity.
To bring about the decolonization of the imaginary needed to change the fatal
path we are on we can hardly rely on such “disaster lessons.” Yet François Partant,
guru of the French alternatives and a harbinger of degrowth, counted on such
threats for a “jump start” out of the madness of the productivist society. It is not by
chance that he titled one of his books, provocatively, May the Crisis Deepen! In this
1978 book he argued that a profound crisis would be the only way to prevent the
self-destruction of humanity.
Disaster, pedagogy of 95

Is this vision catastrophic? Worshipers of progress immediately accuse anyone


who reflects on the dangers that threaten our civilization of pessimism. It’s true
that pedagogy of disaster was born in the course of discussions concerning nuclear
apocalypse, following the experience of the first atomic bombs. I think here par-
ticularly of the books of Karl Jaspers or Gunther Anders. It’s also related to the
thesis of collapse, a theme popularized by Jared Diamond (2005) but already devel-
oped 20 years earlier by Joseph Tainter (1988). A civilization disappears, according
to Diamond, when it destroys its environment without being able to adapt to the
new situation. Complex societies, for Tainter, tend to collapse because their strate-
gies for obtaining energy are subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Disaster pedagogy falls in line with philosopher Hans Jonas’ “heuristics of fear”
according to which “it is better to lend an ear to the prophecy of misfortune than
to that of happiness” (1990: 54). He does not masochistically hope for a taste of the
apocalypse, but precisely to ward it off. His is an alternative to the suicidal opti-
mism of “a politics of ostriches.” It is this latter blissful (and passive) optimism that
will lead us more certainly to disaster than an attitude of a crystalizing catastrophe.
In this, disaster pedagogy joins the more recent analyses of philosopher Jean-
Pierre Dupuy. Isn’t he also into a form of disaster pedagogy? Dupuy refers to Hans
Jonas giving to his catastrophism a learning role. However, in his conception, it
isn’t the catastrophe itself that teaches, it is its anticipation. Dupuy proposed a
method of governance for the technocrats, an experience of thought suggesting pre-
caution in the face of major technological risk, especially nuclear risk. This disaster
pedagogy aims to prevent the irreparable and in particular to prevent a collapse or
final catastrophe. Neither of these two approaches expresses a wish for the worst.
Both are intended to avert it. The first is based on experience and the shock expe-
rienced from warning crises, while the second wants to do without them.
It is natural to wonder whether the lessons of a tragic experience, such as
Fukushima, are actually useful. Naomi Klein (2008), in her famous work, The
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism supports a vision radically opposed to
that of a beneficial disaster. According to her, the neo-liberal and neo-conservative
oligarchy takes advantage of disasters, or provokes them, to impose its solutions,
which become disastrous for the lower classes but profitable, in the short term, for
multinationals. Her book opens with the devastation of Louisiana by Hurricane
Katrina and the calamitous management of the disaster by the Bush administration:
destruction of the public school system, urban exclusion of the poor, unbridled
speculation for reconstruction. Many other examples, from September 11, 2001, to
the war in Iraq, are analysed in her text and reinforce a very convincing argument.
In fact, the two theses, the pedagogy of disaster and the exploitation of disas-
ters for profit, are not mutually exclusive. The reason isn’t that humanity needs
to become wiser. The point is that the capitalist oligarchy has to be disarmed and
neutralized. Depending on the context, in some cases, lobbies will prevail in the
face of disasters. In others, people’s pressure can impose life-saving solutions and
changes against the wishes of these lobbies.
96 Serge Latouche

References
Diamond, Jared (2005) Collapse, How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed, Harmondsworth:
Peguin.
Dupuy, J-P. (2002) Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain, Paris: Seuil.
Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jonas, H. (1990) Le principe responsabilité, une éthique pour la civilisation technologique, Paris:
Editions du Cerf.
Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto: Knopf Canada.
Partant, F. (1978) Que la crise s’aggrave! Paris: Parangon.
Tainter, J. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20
ENTROPY
Sergio Ulgiati
DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCES FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, PARTHENOPE UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES

Entropy, a measure of energy and resource degradation, is one of the basic con-
cepts of Thermodynamics. Its definition requires a closer look at the concept of
energy, usually defined as the capacity for doing mechanical work or, in a broader
sense, the “ability to drive a system’s transformation,” which includes all kinds of
physical, chemical, and biological transformations. While driving a process trans-
formation, energy loses its ability to do it again, i.e. energy is conserved (in the
form of heat) but some of the characteristics that made it capable to support the
process are irreversibly lost (e.g. gradients of concentration, temperature, pressure,
height, information). A similar definition and behavior also applies to material
resources, not only energy, that are capable of supporting processes thanks to the
dissipation of their gradients relative to the natural background. During a real pro-
cess the gradient is lost, not the matter or the heat, which are, instead, conserved.
The decreased ability to do work is what is broadly referred to as “entropy.” The
conservation of energy can be restated as “conservation of heat” (First Law of
Thermodynamics), while the loss of ability to support processes pertains to the
entropy concept and the impossibility of 100 percent converting heat into work,
supporting the concept of “available energy,” namely the amount of energy that
can be actually converted.
The concept of entropy originated during the Industrial Revolution in England
(beginning of the eighteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century). The
development of steam-powered machines (to pump water out of coal mines and to
convert coal combustion heat into work) was the starting point of huge technolog-
ical and scientific research. These studies yielded a general framework for energy
conversion processes, known as the Laws of Thermodynamics, describing the main
principles underlying any energy transformation. Carnot in 1824 first understood
and stated the constraints to the conversion of heat into work, which then received
98 Sergio Ulgiati

a stronger mathematical formulation by Clausius in 1850 and Thomson in 1851


(also known as Lord Kelvin). Entropy was also related to the probability of a state
(Boltzmann 1872), and the natural evolution from less probable (more organized,
higher concentration, higher quality) states to more probable (less organized, more
diluted, lower quality) states, evolution that can only be countered by providing
available energy from outside the system. Later on, the term “entropy” was also
used in the economy with reference to resource degradation, namely a loss of the
concentration, structure, and information content of materials and the impossibility
of their full recovery (Georgescu-Roegen 1971).
The state of a system, called A, is always characterized by an entropy value,
SA, with reference to a standard state, So. When an energy conversion occurs, the
system moves to a new state, B, characterized by a different entropy value, SB.
The new value depends on the heat exchange with the surrounding environment
and the temperature of such exchange. Depending on the direction of the heat
transfer, the entropy of the system may decrease or increase, while the entropy of
the surrounding environment would have the opposite behavior. The variation of
entropy in an irreversible transformation between two states, A and B, is always
higher than for reversible ones (real processes in nature are always irreversible).
If a system is isolated, i.e. it has no exchange of energy (or matter) with the sur-
rounding environment the so-called entropy law emerges: “If an isolated system
undergoes a transformation from an initial state A to a final state B, the entropy of
the final state is never lower than the entropy of the initial state,” which means that
entropy always increases. This is the case of a dead organism, unable to use external
energy to fight the entropic degradation. A building would have the same behavior
and requires input energy from outside (maintenance) to prevent its entropy from
increasing. Photosynthesis is a typical case: plants receive energy from the sun and
use it to build polymers, i.e. decrease their entropy at the expenses of the increasing
entropy of the outside environment.
What happens when entropy increases? What does it mean in practical terms?
From a strictly thermodynamic point of view, the increase of a system’s entropy
measures the amount of energy (or material resource) no longer usable to support
any further process evolution. When all the energy of a system becomes unus-
able, no more system transformations are possible. As a consequence, the word
“entropy” is often used with less constrained and looser meanings than in the sci-
entific community, being generally associated with disorder, lack of organization,
indefiniteness, physical and social degradation, lower quality, and lower usefulness.
It supports concepts of decreasing availability of high quality resources, increasing
pollution due to waste, chemicals, and heat release into the environment, increas-
ing social disorder due to degraded conditions of life in mega-cities all around
the world, collapsing economies, and calls for increased attention to appropriate
resource use and prevention of natural and human environment degradation (i.e.
loss of stored information).
The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) stressed the applicability
of the entropy concept to matter degradation identified as a Fourth Principle of
Entropy 99

Thermodynamics (see bioeconomics). Matter is valuable for production and con-


sumption in that it is concentrated and organized. Use processes slowly degrade
matter by decreasing these two properties: matter dilutes into the environment and
loses structure. Recovering the diluted matter (e.g. metal atoms lost by metal coins)
would require huge (infinite) amounts of energy, which makes recovery almost
impossible. The Fourth Principle gave rise to a heated debate about its applicability
and foundations (e.g. Khalil 1990) and might be rather recognized as a special case
of the Second Principle (Bianciardi et al. 1993). Yet, its underlining rationale laid
the foundations for a thermodynamically based culture of the limits to growth and
the development of bioeconomics as opposed to neoclassical economics.
Matter and energy degradation is countered by a constant inflow of solar energy
as well as other renewable sources of deep heat and tidal momentum. These pow-
erful driving forces, at the basis of Odum’s emergy concept, provide support to
biosphere self-organization, out of disordered materials, only constrained by the
available sources and sinks. During the self-organization process, entropy is gener-
ated and released towards the outer space as degraded heat. This point of view,
less scaring than a perspective of total collapse, calls for adaptation to the style
of Nature, by recognizing the existence of oscillations (growth and degrowth)
and resource constraints (limits to growth), within which many options and pat-
terns are still possible. As a consequence, we would do a disservice to the entropy
concept, by limiting its significance to the concept of disorder and degradation.
Provided the biosphere constraints are respected, life processes (such as photo-
synthesis) build organization, create new structures, assemble materials, upgrade
energy, and create new information by also degrading input resources. The latter
becomes again available for new life cycles, ultimately driven (and limited) by the
entropic degradation of solar energy.

References
Bianciardi, C., Tiezzi, E., and Ulgiati, S. (1993) “Complete recycling of matter in the
framework of physiscs, biology and ecological economics.” Ecological Economics, 8: 1–5.
Boltzmann, L. (1872) “Further studies on the thermal equilibrium of gas molecules” (“Weitere
Studien über das Wärmegleichgewicht unter Gasmolekülen”) In Sitzungsberichte der
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematische-Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse (pgs. 275–370),
Bd. 66, Dritte Heft, Zweite Abteilung, Vienna: Gerold.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The entropy law and the economic process. Cambridge, MA :
Harvard University Press.
Khalil, E. L. (1990) “Entropy Law and exhaustion of natural resources: is Georgescu-
Roegen’s paradigm defensible?” Ecol. Econ., 2: 163–78.
Thomson, W. (1851) “On the dynamical theory of heat; with numerical results deduced
from Mr. Joule’s equivalent of a thermal unit and M. Regnault’s observations on steam.”
Math. and Phys. Papers 1: 175–83.
21
EMERGY
Sergio Ulgiati
DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCES FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, PARTHENOPE UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES

Emergy, defined as the total amount of available energy (usually of the solar kind)
that is directly and indirectly invested by the environment in a process, was sug-
gested as a scientific measure of the biosphere’s work in support of life processes on
Earth (Odum 1988, 1996). Within such a “donor-side” perspective, the “value”
of a resource relies on the effort that is displayed for its generation by nature and
processing by society, over an evolutionary “trial and error” process that ensures the
optimization of a resource cycle. Mainstream economic theories address the concept
of value in monetary terms (willingness to pay, i.e. a user-side value), while emergy-
based value is related to the amount of primary resources (solar energy, geothermal
heat, etc) invested by nature for sustainable generation and cycling (generation of
oil and uptake of carbon dioxide emissions requires the same photosynthetic activ-
ity, independently of how much are we willing to pay for an oil barrel: supply-
side value). The emergy accounting method is therefore a technique of quantitative
evaluation that determines the environmental value of non-marketed and marketed
resources, services, commodities, and storages in common units of cumulative solar
energy (seJ, solar equivalent joules) required to make a given product or service.
Solar radiation, gravitational potential and deep earth heat are the driving forces
that keep the biosphere able to develop and operate, by supporting matter and infor-
mation cycles. It is through cycling that systems maintain themselves far from ther-
modynamic equilibrium, adaptive and vital (e.g., the carbon cycle: trees generate
leaves out of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis; dead leaves degrade in the
ground and generate topsoil organic matter, which in turn is metabolized by micro-
organisms and becomes CO2 again. Cycling applies to water, nitrogen, phosphorus,
and all ecosystems components at all scales and turnover times). Emergy is not energy;
it uses the driving energies as a measure of the environmental support to processes;
the emergy accounting includes energy and mineral resources, time, and ecosystems
services. By concentrating minerals in the earth crust, and by circulating air, water,
Emergy 101

and nutrients, the environmental flows of solar radiation, gravitational potential, and
deep heat generate and keep operating the life support system within which organ-
isms, species, populations, and entire communities interact and develop over time.
Ecosystems supported by these environmental driving forces provide direct services
to all species, and also contribute to build resource storages for future use: a) slow-
renewable storages such as ground water, topsoil, standing biomass and biodiversity;
b) non-renewable storages such as fossil fuels and minerals (the terms slow-renewable
and non-renewable are relative to the lifespan of human societies).
The emergy procedure accounts for resources inflows, assigns them supply-
side quality factors (named transformities or Unit Emergy Values, UEV) based on
their role and cost within the environmental dynamics, and generates performance
indicators that link economic performance, resource availability, environmental
integrity, and the final products. A set of performance indices and ratios can be
accordingly introduced in order to account for the different features of a process
or system evolution: local versus outside resources, renewable versus nonrenew-
able, efficient versus inefficient, diffuse versus concentrated, resource-based versus
monetary-based trade balance, static versus dynamic, among others. For example,
the emergy method accounts for resource trade in terms of their embodied envi-
ronmental cost, not in terms of their monetary value (as with economic terms of
trade): even when the economic balance is approximately even, the environmental
balance may not; developing countries exporting primary raw resources for money
lose environmental wealth and work potential, that could have been used within in
support of their economies; such loss is not generally compensated by the emergy
equivalent of the money received (i.e. the emergy value of the small amounts of
manufactured resources purchased in the international market using this money).
Economic activities release new flows and develop new storages. Oil is con-
verted into electricity and transportation services; minerals are converted into infra-
structures, machinery and cities; electricity, machinery, and infrastructures are in
turn converted into educational, health, and recreational services. In so doing, new
storages of information are created (universities, libraries, arts and museums, know
how and, over longer time frames, entire cultures, religions, languages) that in turn
become the basis for further development of societal system and, at the same time,
feedback to the lower hierarchical levels to expand or stabilize the resource basis.
Pointing out that human societies feed on natural capital withdrawal and use
different kinds of ecosystem services, Odum (1988, 1996) identified natural capital
and ecosystem services as the real source of wealth, in alternative to and comple-
ment of the common belief that only labor and economic capital can be such a
source. Traditional energy or economic analyses usually don’t take into account
inputs they cannot evaluate on a monetary or energy basis. Only monetary val-
ues are recognized by the market, but economies rely upon very large inputs
from environment: if these inputs are not considered and given an appropriate
value, misuse of resources can follow and future prospects for the system cannot
be inferred. While it is impossible to measure most of these human-dominated
flows in a way that captures their complex value, it is much easier to assess their
102 Sergio Ulgiati

“production cost” and generate a hierarchy of value in the biosphere processes


by means of the emergy concept. Emergy advocates a different concept of value,
rooted in the cost of production of resources by nature: the “effort” displayed by
nature to generate resources in favor of a much larger set of users, all species on
Earth, not only humans in the marketplace. Maximizing market value in the eyes
of humans jeopardizes survival patterns for other species. Emergy demands optimi-
zation – not maximization – and policy choices that address the rights of all species
and the quality of resources in terms of what it takes (energy, time, materials) to
make them, even if this may not be recognized by market value assessments.
Natural processes have been selected over long biological timeframes and have
tuned their use rate in accordance to the available flow of resources. Unfortunately,
after the discovery of fossil energies, human societies have learned how to exploit
resources at a higher rate than they are replaced; this raises the problem of their
sustainability versus the biosphere carrying capacity and the available storages.
Economic growth and performance are day-by-day increasingly affected by envi-
ronmental problems and constraints (climate change, energy shortage and supply, loss
of biodiversity, lack of fresh water) that cannot be fully addressed in monetary terms.
The total emergy driving a process becomes a measure of the self-organization activ-
ity of the planet. Such a measure provides the maximum size allowed for system’s
growth, i.e. represents the upper limit to the carrying capacity of the biosphere.
Environmental constraints and general systems principles force all kind of sys-
tems through cycles of growth, climax, descent, and restoration (pulsing paradigm).
Accordingly Odum and Odum (2001) have designed patterns of a prosperous way
down (“descent”, or what in this book may be called “degrowth”) for the pre-
sent civilization, pointing out sustainability to be the capacity to adapt to resource
oscillations rather than to reach a steady state to be sustained forever. Forest
ecosystems with short pulsing cycles with tree blossoming and growing in spring,
making fruits and seeds (stored information) in summer, losing leaves in autumn
(for recycling by soil microorganisms), and recovering in winter-time, when avai-
lable resources (solar energy) are reduced. Very similar resource-dependent pat-
terns characterize all other systems and living species on Earth, including humans.
As pointed out by Odum and Odum (2001), it is difficult for us to recognize soci-
etal cycles of which we are part, characterized by longer pulsing “wave-length”;
instead, we easily identify the shorter pulsing cycles of ecosystems. Degrowth and
resource optimization are properly addressed by the emergy method, due to its
focus of embodied time and quality.

References
Brown, M. T. and Ulgiati, S. (2011) “Understanding the Global Economic crisis: A
Biophysical Perspective,” Ecological Modelling, 223(1): 4–13.
Odum, H. T. (1988) ‘Self Organization, Transformity and Information,” Science, 242: 1,132–9.
Odum, H. T. (1996) Environmental Accounting. Emergy and Environmental Decision Making.
New York, NY: Wiley.
Odum, H. T. and Odum, E. C. (2001) A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies,
Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
22
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
Dan O’Neill
SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

Gross domestic product (GDP) is an indicator of economic activity. It measures the


total value of all final goods and services that are newly produced within the bor-
ders of a country over the course of a year. Its predecessor, gross national product
(GNP), was initially developed in the 1930s to help America get out of the Great
Depression. At the time, the government lacked comprehensive data on the state
of the economy, making it difficult to know whether policy responses were work-
ing or not. Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets prepared the first set of
national GNP accounts. His basic idea was simple – to collapse economic produc-
tion data into a single number that would go up in the good times, and down in
the bad (Fioramonti 2013: 23–6).
The system of national accounts developed by Kuznets proved to be invaluable
during the Second World War. It allowed America to locate unused capacity in
the economy and exceed the production levels that many had thought possible. As
Cobb et al. (1995: 63) remark, “In the United States the Manhattan Project got
much more glory. But as a technical achievement the development of the GNP
accounts was no less important.”
Following the end of the war, the Employment Act of 1946 turned GNP into
official economic policy in the US. In 1953, the United Nations published its inter-
national standards for a system of national accounts. The ideas of Simon Kuznets
had gone global. Through proper fiscal management and detailed knowledge of
economic performance (as measured by GNP), economists began to believe that
they could finally master the dreaded “business cycle” and ensure rising prosperity
(Cobb et al. 1995).
Nevertheless, GNP was not universally accepted. The Soviet Union used a
different measure of economic progress – net material product – which included
104 Dan O’Neill

physical goods but excluded services. Services were not counted as primary
income in the socialist approach, but were considered the result of its distribution.
Throughout the Cold War, the two indicators were used as propaganda tools, with
both the US and Soviet Union claiming higher rates of economic growth based
on their respective indicators. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, however,
GNP became the only game in town (Fioramonti 2013: 34–40).
In the same year, gross “national” product was quietly replaced by gross “domes-
tic” product. Although the two indicators are closely related, there is an important
difference. With GNP, the earnings of a multinational company are attributed to the
country where the company is owned, and where the profits end up. With GDP, on
the other hand, the profits are attributed to the country where the factory is located
and resource extraction occurs, even if the profits leave the country. This change in
national accounting has had important consequences, in particular lending support to
globalisation. As Cobb et al. (1995: 68) put it, “The nations of the North are walking
off with the South’s resources, and calling it a gain for the South.”
As early as 1934 Simon Kuznets warned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely
be inferred from a measurement of national income” (Cobb et al. 1995: 67).
By 1962, Kuznets had become an outspoken critic of the way in which his system
of accounts was being used and interpreted, stating that “goals for ‘more’ growth
should specify more growth of what and for what” (ibid).
The basic problem is that GDP does not distinguish between good and bad
economic activity, but counts all activity the same. If I buy a beer or a new bicycle
this contributes to GDP. If the government invests in education, this also contrib-
utes to GDP. These are both expenditures that we would probably count as posi-
tives. However, if there is an oil spill that taxpayers must pay to clean up, this also
contributes to GDP. If more families go through costly divorce proceedings, the
money spent contributes to GDP. War, crime, and environmental destruction all
contribute to our main indicator of national progress. It is a calculator with a giant
“plus” button, but no “minus” button.
At the same time, GDP does not count many beneficial activities, such as
household and volunteer work, because no money changes hands. If I wash my
own laundry, this does not contribute to GDP. However, if I pay you $10 to wash
my laundry, and you pay me $10 to wash yours, then GDP would go up by $20,
even though the number of clean shirts would not have changed.
A further problem is that GDP provides no information on income distribution.
Even if GDP per capita goes up, the average person may be no better off if the addi-
tional income goes to those at the top. An unequal distribution of income and wealth
implies unequal opportunities for people across society (van den Bergh 2009).
A strategy of forever increasing GDP is particularly worrisome given that a
number of social indicators suggest growth is no longer improving people’s lives
in wealthy nations (see social limits of growth). Beyond an average income of
about $20,000 a year, additional money does not appear to buy additional hap-
piness. US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was particularly critical of
GDP, warning in 1968 that GDP “measures neither our wit not our courage,
Gross domestic product 105

neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to
our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worth-
while” (Fioramonti 2013: 81).
Despite these criticisms, GDP maintains its power. The economics profession
has become locked in a kind of “groupthink” where the desire for conformity is
stifling independent thinking and causing the profession to avoid raising contro-
versial issues or proposing alternative solutions (Fioramonti 2013: 146–8). Policy
makers fear that insufficient growth will lead to economic instability and ris-
ing unemployment, even though the empirical evidence for this view is weak.
Fioramonti (2013: 153–6) argues that GDP is not just a number, but a way of
organizing society based on the idea that markets are the only producers of wealth.
To challenge GDP is therefore to challenge the market economy itself. If this is
true, then replacing GDP is fundamentally a political project, not a technical one.
Nevertheless, there is a growing recognition around the world that GDP is a
poor measure of progress, and a heightened desire to do something about it. The
Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,
established by former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by two Nobel
Prize-winning economists, concluded that one of the reasons the global economic
crisis took people by surprise is that we were focussing on the wrong indicators
(Stiglitz et al. 2009).
So what are the right indicators, particularly if our goal as a society shifts
from growth to degrowth? It might be tempting to use GDP as an indicator of
degrowth, and just change the target (e.g. from +3 percent a year to -3 percent a
year), but this would not be a good idea. Although a decline in GDP might signal
a reduction in environmental pressure, it would not reveal whether the level of
economic activity was environmentally sustainable. Moreover, a decline in GDP
would not necessarily tell us anything about social progress. GDP is a poor indica-
tor of progress, and changing the target on a poor indicator does not alter this fact.
To paraphrase the ecological economist Herman Daly, the best thing we can do
with GDP is to forget about it.
In order to measure degrowth, a different approach that includes two separate
sets of indicators is required: (1) a set of biophysical indicators to measure how soci-
ety’s level of resource use is changing over time and whether this level of resource
use is within ecological limits, and (2) a set of social indicators to measure whether
people’s quality of life is improving. I say “sets of indicators” (as opposed to a single
indicator) to emphasize that degrowth may have many goals, and each of these may
require its own indicator. This is a key difference between degrowth and neoclassi-
cal economics, which focuses on the single goal of utility maximization.
Based in part on the declaration from the first international degrowth confer-
ence (held in Paris in 2008), I have created a set of “Degrowth Accounts” to meas-
ure whether degrowth is occurring, and how socially sustainable it is (see O’Neill
2012). These accounts include seven biophysical indicators (material use, energy
use, CO2 emissions, ecological footprint, human population, livestock population,
and built capital) and nine social indicators (happiness, health, equity, poverty,
106 Dan O’Neill

social capital, participatory democracy, working hours, unemployment, and infla-


tion). They do not include GDP, and neither should any modern set of economic
indicators.
GDP evolved in an era when the challenges facing society were very differ-
ent than they are today. We are no longer facing the need to maximize wartime
production; instead we are facing the need to improve the well-being of all people
within the environmental constraints of a single planet. If wealthy nations decide to
change their goal from the pursuit of economic growth to the pursuit of sustain-
able degrowth, then they will also need to change the way they measure progress.
They will need to abandon GDP and replace it with more relevant information.

References
Cobb, C., Halstead, T., and Rowe, J. (1995) “If the GDP is up, why is America Down?”
Atlantic Monthly, October, 59–78.
Fioramonti, L. (2013) Gross Domestic Problem: The Politics Behind the World’s Most Powerful
Number. London: Zed Books.
O’Neill, D. W. (2012) “Measuring Progress in the Degrowth Transition to a Steady State
Economy.” Ecological Economics 84, 221–31.
Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., and Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009) Report by the Commission on the
Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Available online at www.
stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr (accessed May 6 2013).
van den Bergh, J. C. J. M. (2009) “The GDP Paradox.” Journal of Economic Psychology 30(2),
117–35.
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‘Towards growth’: the European Commission in Brussels. (Photo taken by Filka
Sekulova at the Berlaymont Building, Headquarters of European Commission in
Brussels, March 2014)
23
GROWTH
Peter A. Victor
FACULTY OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, YORK UNIVERSITY

Economic growth is usually defined as an increase in the goods and services pro-
duced by an economy in a given period of time, typically a year. The essence
of economic growth, as normally understood, is the increase in Gross Domestic
Product – GDP – in a country. This may sound simple but there are many ques-
tions that arise when it comes to measuring economic growth. For example, which
goods and services are to be included? What if their quality changes over time?
How are the many different types of goods and services, from bananas to haircuts,
to be added up to get a total that can be said to be growing, or not?
Since the 1940s, the United Nations has led an international effort to establish
procedures for measuring GDP that all countries are encouraged to follow. The
UN procedures have answers to these and other questions on the scope and meth-
ods for calculating GDP and changes in it over time. A fundamental principle
when measuring economic growth is to distinguish between increases in GDP that
result from increases in the quantity of goods and services produced (i.e. increases
in ‘real’ GDP), and increases in GDP that result simply from increases in their
prices (i.e. increases in ‘nominal’ GDP). In practice, both quantities and prices
change over time and new products and services replace old ones, all of which
complicate the measurement of real economic growth.
The history of economics is full of attempts to explain economic growth. The
classical economists, notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo, emphasized the
contribution of specialization, the division of labour and the extent of markets and
foreign trade based on comparative advantage, as key sources of economic growth.
Later in the ninteenthcentury and into the twentieth century, there were various
attempts to classify growth according to ‘stages’ through which, presumably, every
economy had to pass as it expanded, though with very different outcomes. Where
110 Peter A. Victor

Karl Marx (1887) saw economic growth in its capitalist phase as containing the
seeds of its own destruction, at the other end of the ideological spectrum W.W.
Rostow (1960) saw ‘take-off’, ‘maturity’ and ‘high mass-consumption’ as stages
in a process of self-sustaining economic growth. Somewhere between these two
perspectives are the insights of Joseph Schumpeter. He popularized the term ‘cre-
ative destruction’ to describe the process by which new innovations destroy older
technologies and the businesses which depend on them, to be replaced by new,
more profitable ones.
In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) John Maynard
Keynes explained that unemployment was caused by insufficient spending. He
emphasized the role of investment in new buildings, equipment and infrastructure,
which fluctuates more than other components of a nation’s expenditures (e.g. con-
sumption and government), but he paid little attention to the role that investment
plays in expanding the productive capacity of the economy over time. In the 1950s
and 1960s, this aspect of investment became the focus of attention of neo-classical
economists, who produced mathematical models of economic growth in which the
accumulation of capital and technological change play a pivotal role by increasing
labour productivity. Increased labour productivity (i.e. GDP/employed labour),
combined with a rising labour force, yields economic growth. However, while
these economists, Robert Solow being the most famous example, recognized the
importance of technological change in economic growth, their models did not
explain how it came about. This was subsequently addressed under the heading of
‘endogenous’ growth theory in the 1980s, which, with the right assumptions about
investment and innovation, suggested that the process of economic growth could
go on forever.
An alternative to endogenous growth theory came from those who saw eco-
nomic growth as a physical process as well as an economic one. Explanations of
economic growth they said must be based on principles from the natural sciences
as much as on economic ones. Robert Ayres (2008) made the case that exergy (i.e.
useful work obtained from energy), and not technological change, is the omitted
variable in the neo-classical growth theory of Robert Solow. By analyzing the
hundred-year history of economic growth in Japan and the USA, he found that it
is no longer necessary to call upon technological change to account for that part
of economic growth not attributable to increases in capital and labour. Ayres con-
cluded that

we can be quite certain that exergy . . . is indeed a third factor of production . . .


and that future economic growth depends essentially on continued declines
in the cost of primary exergy and/or on continued increase in the output of
useful work from a decreasing exergy input.
(Ayres 2008: 307)

Critiques of economic growth have a history almost as long as economic growth


itself. Malthus, a contemporary of Smith and Ricardo, argued that increases in
Growth 111

population would inevitably outpace increases in food production, making a


sustained increase in living standards unachievable. Most economists repudiated
Malthus, but the attention he paid to the capacity of natural systems to support ever
expanding economies remains a primary line of critique of economic growth to
this day. Most recently, these limits have been expressed as ‘planetary boundaries’,
such as climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and interference with
biophysical cycles, plus concern about diminishing sources of low cost fossil fuels
on which economic growth has depended for two centuries. So even if economic
growth remains desirable it may not be possible. The downward trend in the rate
of economic growth in many advanced countries since the 1960s suggests that its
demise may be nearer than most expect.
But is economic growth still so important in rich countries? As early as 1848,
John Stewart Mill bemoaned ‘the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading in
each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life’ (Mill 1848: 113) and
went on to describe many of the negative aspects of economic growth so familiar
today. Ezra Mishan’s book The Costs of Economic Growth (1967) sparked a lively
debate punctuated by the celebrated Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), which
contained scenarios of expansion and collapse bearing an unnerving correspond-
ence to the data of the past 40 years (Turner 2012).
Others have challenged the usually implicit assumption that economic growth
in advanced economies improves well-being. Rather than assume that higher
incomes make people happier, researchers have investigated this supposed con-
nection and found it difficult to demonstrate (Layard 2005). It seems that beyond
income levels surpassed by many in advanced economies, further increases in
income add little to self-declared levels of happiness.
And then there’s the line of critique that says that increases in GDP, taken to
be synonymous with economic growth, are a deeply flawed measure of anything
of real significance. GDP can increase for all sorts of reasons unrelated to well-
being. If activities normally conducted without a financial transaction become a
matter of commerce, GDP will rise. This may partly explain unusually high rates
of economic growth in developing countries. Rather than real increases in produc-
tion, GDP rises because commercialization and commodification replace more
traditional practices. Similarly, increases in GDP may be at the expense of resource
depletion and environmental contamination, neither aspect being captured in the
conventional measure of economic growth. Neither are increases in inequality.
Although by some measures overall global inequality has decreased in the past two
decades, the majority of the world’s population lives in countries which have expe-
rienced increasing income inequality. And feminist scholars have drawn attention
to disparities between the economic circumstances of men and women to which
GDP is blind, as further evidence of the inadequacy of its validity as a measure of
well-being (see feminist economics).
There are two main reasons why these critiques of economic growth matter.
First, by pursuing economic growth as a primary policy objective, economies may
well be failing to meet other objectives that would contribute more directly to
112 Peter A. Victor

well-being and prosperity such as full employment, more leisure, richer social lives,
greater democratic participation and a resilient environment. Second, in an eco-
logically and resource constrained world, the pursuit of economic growth in rich
countries is likely to be at the expense of economic growth in developing countries
where its benefits are more apparent.
For all these reasons it’s time for those living in advanced economies to think
about managing without growth, or even, with degrowth.

References
Ayres, R. U. (2008) ‘Sustainability Economics: Where do we Stand?’ Ecological Economics,
67(2) 281–310.
Keynes, J. M. (1936) General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Layard, R. (2005) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Penguin.
Mill, J. S. (1848) Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI. London, UK: J. W.
Parker. Page reference is to the 1970 Penguin Books edition.
Rostow, W. W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schumpeter, J. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
Turner, G. (2012) ‘On the Cusp of Global Collapse? Updated Comparison of The Limits
to Growth with Historical Data’, GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 2:
116–23.
Victor, P. A. (2008) Managing without Growth, Cheltenham, UK Edward Elgar.
24
HAPPINESS
Filka Sekulova
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY),
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Happiness is a component of subjective well-being and a construct which some-


what overlaps with life-satisfaction, given high correlation levels between reports
on life-satisfaction and happiness. Notions of happiness differ through the philo-
sophical currents. Hedonic happiness stands for the positive effects associated with
obtaining material objects or pleasurable experiences. It is located empirically
closer to life-satisfaction, and is operationalized through numerical scales where
the lowest digit corresponds to complete dissatisfaction with life, and the high-
est to complete satisfaction with life. Eudemonic happiness, on the other hand,
implies living in coherence with one’s best potentials and life-purpose. It is for-
malized using questionnaires assessing positive psychological functioning. While
some activities give rise to both eudemonic and hedonic happiness, not all forms of
hedonic enjoyment give rise to eudemonic happiness.
The first relevant aspect of the happiness literature is the treatment of subjective
well-being as a composite construct including both tangible and intangible compo-
nents. It has been shown that non-monetary domains (such as health, social capital,
relational goods, marital status and temperament) tend to carry a heavier weight
in happiness than pecuniary ones (such as the material conditions, or the level of
disposable income) (Easterlin 2003). Disruptions in the non-monetary domains of
happiness tend to cause deeper and more permanent ruptures in well-being than
losses in the pecuniary ones. These findings are in line with degrowth theory and
the idea of reshuffling the importance of economic components of life towards the
ones based on human relations, social connectedness and conviviality.
The second relevant insight concerns utility theory in economics. If life-
satisfaction could be taken as an imperfect proxy of utility, happiness studies indicate
that the satisfaction a consumer receives from augmenting a particular consumption
114 Filka Sekulova

bundle would cease to positively contribute to utility over time. Thus, happi-
ness studies indicate that even in a pure utilitarian economist framework, growth
would fail to comply with its initially set objective.
The third finding is related to the Easterlin paradox. This refers to the lack of
association between income growth and reported subjective well-being over time
within countries over time. This disassociation mostly happens for two reasons.
One is the influence of social comparison on affective moods, or the process of
drawing inferences on what consists a good, or ‘happy’, life from a particular refer-
ence group, or environment (see also social limits of growth). The other is the
adaptation of material expectations, or the so-called continuously rising aspirations,
which offsets the positive impact of income increase on well-being over time.
How do these three insights relate to specific degrowth ideas? An intuitive
first-hand answer is that if degrowth translates into a widespread and equitable
decline in consumption, this will not necessarily have a negative effect on subjec-
tive well-being. Firstly, because of adaptation. People tend to grow accustomed to
improvements in their material conditions. Lottery winners, for example, are not
happier than people in a control group with similar characteristics over time. In the
same way, adaptation to lower material consumption might not create permanent
dents in happiness, if social status is taken into account. This relates to the second
reason, namely: social comparison. A decrease in consumption, which affects eve-
ryone will bring downwards reference income standards, and therefore off-set the
associated adverse social and psychological effects. However, if degrowth translates
into a consumption decrease for a small fraction of the population, surrounded by
a society characterized by abundant material wealth, as in times of economic crisis,
well-being would decline.
Beyond the general understanding of degrowth as a multidimensional transfor-
mation involving complementary actions, policies and strategies, one could try to
explore the repercussion of certain emblematic degrowth proposals on happiness.
One of these can be generally defined as a reduction of formal working hours and
an introduction of work sharing. There is some evidence in the happiness litera-
ture that part-time work is associated with higher levels of life-satisfaction. Again,
if raising the incomes of all does not increase the happiness of all, a decline in the
incomes of all (resulting from the reduction of formal working hours), is not likely
to reduce the happiness of all. Along the lines of prospect theory, one might argue
that monetary losses are more hurtful than monetary gains of the same size. Yet,
the empirical verdict on the existence and persistence of such an asymmetry in the
long term is mixed.
The proposal for work sharing within degrowth is accompanied by an increase
of free time and the life-space dedicated to non-monetary, reciprocal, communal
activities, many of which can be defined as reproductive. Given that the quality
of social and family interactions (see care) has been found to be a major posi-
tive determinant of well-being, increasing the share of community-based work
might not decrease happiness. Furthermore, freedom, understood as having the
locus of control over your time and life, has been found to predict changes in life
Happiness 115

satisfaction better than health, employment, income, marriage or religion, across


countries and within countries. Thus, the increased share of the time dedicated
to the activities that one considers meaningful could boost satisfaction with life.
Volunteering, for example, has been found to positively contribute to happiness for
increasing empathic emotions and creating shifts in aspirations.
Furthermore, in degrowth we often talk about a democratically established and
fixed ratio between the minimum and maximum levels of pay (see basic and
maximum income). Income inequality has been shown to have a highly nega-
tive effect on life satisfaction. Individuals living in areas of high inequality tend to
score low in both health and happiness terms. Thus, if the income gap between
individuals and countries narrows down as a result of degrowth, subjective well-
being could improve due to the associated decline in rivalry.
Another emblematic idea in degrowth has to do with downscaling car-
dependence, as well as fast transport modes and polluting infrastructure in gen-
eral. As long as such a transformation allows for an increased space for (wild)
nature in urban and rural landscapes without creating social deprivation, it is
likely to have a positive effect on well-being. Studies on commuting indicate that
spending many hours in a motorized vehicle bears a permanent negative effect on
happiness. Moreover, there is a growing literature indicating that environmental
degradation upsets well-being. Various studies indicate that poor air quality, for
example, is associated with lower scores on happiness. This is found for both
London and big cities in China, where traffic congestion emerges as a menace to
well-being. In terms of car use, if most of the people in a given city switch from
car to public transport, or select working placements based on the proximity
principle, it is unlikely that they are going to suffer a decrease in life-satisfaction.
On the contrary, abandoning your car is likely to be disturbing in a society which
functions on the basis of cars.
One proposal which often emerges in public talks on degrowth is the introduc-
tion of bans on advertising in public spaces. The literature indicates that individuals
with high scores on materialism and who place greater emphasis on financial secu-
rity, tend to be less satisfied with their lives (Kasser, 2002). Thus if such a measure
dampens material aspirations, it could enhance well-being. Moreover, there is a
small literature demonstrating that watching television depresses relational activi-
ties, which are an important component of happiness.
A more abstract, but classic, degrowth proposal concerns challenging the
dominant imaginary of growth and the extraction of social prestige from material
possession and accumulation. The few studies exploring the relation between non-
materialistic values and well-being report that the former are often associated with
higher levels of life-satisfaction. Intrinsic values (such as altruism, for example) are
generally associated with higher level of well-being and little material resources
requirements for the fulfilment of basic needs. Moreover, considering the negative
impact of rivalry-based, consumption on happiness, one could expect that cultivat-
ing a social imaginary that is not colonized by material domains, on either indi-
vidual or societal level, would positively affect happiness.
116 Filka Sekulova

The foregoing review of the implications of some references proposals in


degrowth for happiness is far from exhaustive. It is naïve to believe that degrowth
is and will be ‘happy’ by default, nor should happiness be the only objective of
society. It is rather suggested here that satisfaction with life is unlikely to decrease
with degrowth, especially if the following hold: any reductions in income or paid
work are equally experienced by all, as well as an increase of personal free time and
autonomy; increasing the time dedicated to reciprocity/community work is com-
pensated by improvements in relational goods; downscaling fast modes of trans-
portation – by the increase in the time available for travelling; reduction in luxury
goods consumption/comfort levels by adaptation to goods sharing and convivi-
ality. In other words, if degrowth involves a trajectory of multiple actions and
policies which compensate for each other’s (possible) negative effects, it might not
endanger personal happiness. If degrowth stirs an improvement in the determinants
of happiness to which adaptation is limited, such as allocation of free time, state of
the urban and natural environment, health status, personal freedom and the qual-
ity of social relations, the associated effect on subjective well-being is likely to be
lasting and positive.

References
Diener, E. and Biswas-Diener, R. (2002) ‘Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being? A
Literature Review and Guide to Needed Research’, Social Indicators Research Vol. 57(2):
119–69.
Di Tella, R., Haisken-De New, J. and MacCulloch, R. (2010) ‘Happiness Adaptation to
Income and to Status in an Individual Panel’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,
76(3): 834–52.
Easterlin, R. A. (2003) Building a Better Theory of Well-Being, IZA Discussion Paper No. 742.
Kasser, T. (2002) The High Price of Materialism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Porta, P. L. and Bruni, L. (eds) (2005) Economics and Happiness, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
25
IMAGINARY, DECOLONIZATION OF
Serge Latouche
FACULTÉ DE DROIT, ÉCONOMIE ET GESTION JEAN MONNET, UNIVERSITÉ PARIS-SUD

The idea and the project to decolonize the imaginary has two main sources: the
philosophy of Cornélius Castoriadis, on the one hand, and the anthropological
critique of imperialism, on the other. Alongside the ecological critique, these two
sources, are the intellectual origins of degrowth. In Castoriadis, the focus is on the
imaginary, while among the anthropologists of imperialism the focus is on decolo-
nization. Going back to these two sources illustrates the exact meaning of the term.
In Castoriadis’ work the performative phrase, “to decolonize the imaginary,” is
obvious, though, to my knowledge, he has never used it as such. For Castoriadis,
author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, social reality is the implementation of
“imaginary significations,” that is to say representations that mobilize feelings. If
growth and development are beliefs, and therefore imaginary significations like
“progress” and all founding categories of the economy, then to get out, to abolish
and go beyond them (the famous Hegelian Aufhebung), means that the imaginary
must be changed. The achievement of a degrowth society therefore in part, means
to decolonize our imaginary; to really change the world before the change of the
world condemns us. This is the strict application of Castoriadis’ lesson. Castoriadis
argues:

[W]hat is required is a new imaginary creation of a size unparalleled in the


past, a creation that would put at the center of human life other significations
than the expansion of production and consumption, that would lay down
different objectives for life, ones that might be recognized by human beings
as worth pursuing. . . . Such is the immense difficulty to which we have
to face up. We ought to want a society in which economic values have
ceased to be central (or unique), in which the economy is put back in its
118 Serge Latouche

place as a mere means for human life and not as its ultimate end, in which
one therefore renounces this mad race toward ever increasing consumption.
That is necessary not only in order to avoid the definitive destruction of the
terrestrial environment but also and especially in order to escape from the
psychical and moral poverty of contemporary human beings.
(Castoriadis 1996: 143–4)

In other words, the required exit from the hyper-modern society of consumption
and spectacle is also eminently desirable. However, Castoriadis adds:

[B]ut that sort of revolution would require profound changes in the


psychosocial structure of people in the Western world, in their attitude
toward life, in short, in their imaginary. The idea that the only goal in life
is to produce and consume more is an absurd, humiliating idea that must
be abandoned. The capitalist imaginary of pseudo-rational pseudo-mastery,
and of unlimited expansion, must be abandoned. Only men and women can
do that. A single individual, or an organization, can only prepare, criticize,
encourage, and sketch out possible orientations, at best.
(Castoriaadis 2010: 199)

However, to attempt to think of an exit out of the dominant imaginary, we must


first of all go back to the way we entered into it, that is to say, to the process of
economization of minds concomitant to the commodification of the world. For
Castoriadis, the economy is an invention. The last pages of The Imaginary Institution
of Society are precisely on this subject. They are the seeds which I have tried to
develop in my book The Invention of the Economy, meaning an analysis of how the
economy is instituted in the Western modern imaginary (Latouche 2005).
In Castoriadis, development and growth are not subjects of extensive analysis.
His account of both is settled in a few sharp sentences, either at the turn of a discus-
sion, or during reflections devoted to other subjects. Speaking of the crisis of devel-
opment, he analyses it as a crisis of the correspondent imaginary significations and,
in particular, of progress. The incredible ideological resilience of development is
based on the no less astonishing resilience of progress. As he admirably puts it:

[N]obody really believes in progress any more. Everyone wants to have a


bit more next year, but no-one thinks that happiness resides in a 3 per cent
annual rise in consumption. The imaginary of growth definitely still exists:
it’s even the only imaginary that subsists in the Western world. Western man
doesn’t believe in anything, except in the fact that he’ll soon be able to buy
a high-definition television set.
(Castoriadis 2010: 181)

One form of uprooting a belief is readily formulated through the metaphor of


decolonization in the analysis of North/South relations. The term “colonization,”
Imaginary, decolonization of 119

as commonly used by anti-imperialist anthropologies in relation to mentalities,


can be found in the title of several books. The oeuvre by Octave Manonni on the
psychology of the colonized, is one of the first. More explicitly, Gérard Althabe, a
disciple of Balandier, titled his 1969 study of Madagascar, Oppression and Liberation
within the Imaginary. In 1988, Serge Gruzinski published The Colonization of the
Imaginary, whose subtitle refers to the process of Westernization. However, when
Gruzinski talks of the colonization of the imaginary, this is still a continuation
of the colonial process in its strict sense and the conversion of the natives by the
missionaries. That change of religion was both a de-culturation of minds and an
acculturation to Christianity and Western civilization by the imperialist project.
This is a real oppression in the imaginary, conducted by means that are not just
symbolic: think of the pyres widely used in the New World by the Spanish
conquerors during the Inquisition.
With growth and development, we are dealing with a process of conversion
of mentalities, a process of an ideological and quasi-religious nature, aiming at
establishing the imaginary of progress and economy. However “The rape of the
imaginary,” to use the beautiful expression of Aminata Traoré (2002), remains still
symbolic. In the West, when we speak of the colonization of the imaginary we
are dealing with a mental invasion in which we are the victims and the agents. It is
largely self-colonization, a partly voluntary servitude.
Hence the term “decolonization of the imaginary” marks a semantic shift. The
originality lies in the emphasis on the particular form of the inverse process to the
one analyzed by the anthropologists. It is a change of “software” or paradigm, a
“veritable revolution of the imaginary,” as Edouard Glissant calls it. It is first and
foremost a cultural revolution. But that is not all. It is also about exiting the econ-
omy, changing values, and thus de-Westernizing. This is precisely the program
developed within the post-development project of the “partisans” of degrowth.
The question of exiting the dominant or colonial imaginary, for Castoriadis as
for the anti-imperialist anthropologists, is a central issue but very difficult because
we can not decide to change our imaginary and even less that of others, especially
if they are “addicted” to growth. One cannot but think first of education, paideïa,
which for Castoriadis has an essential role.

[W]hat does it mean, for example, freedom or the opportunity for citizens
to participate, he asks, if in the society of which we are talking about there
is not something – which disappears in contemporary discussions . . . - and
that is the paideïa, the education of the citizen? It does not mean teaching
arithmetics, it means to teach him to be a citizen. Nobody is born a citizen.
And how to become one? Learning to be. We learn it, first, looking at the
city in which we live. And certainly not watching today’s TV.
(Castoriadis 2010)

This detoxification, however, is not fully possible if a degrowth society has not
been already established. We should first have exited the consumer society and
120 Serge Latouche

its system of “civic stupidification,” which locks us into a circle that needs to be
broken. Denouncing the aggression of advertising, a vehicle of today’s ideology,
is certainly the starting point of the counter-offensive out of what Castoriadis
called the “consumerist and TV onanism.” The fact that the newspaper La
décroissance is derived from the association “Casseurs de pub” (ad-busters) is not a
coincidence. Advertising is the key driver of the growth society. The movement
of degrowthers and growth objectors is widely and naturally linked to a resistance
against advertising’s aggression.

References
Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Castoriadis, C. (1996) La montée de l’insignifiance, Paris, Les carrefours du labyrinthe IV,
Paris. English translation, The rising tide of insignificancy (The big sleep). Translated from the
French and edited anonymously. Electronic publication date: 2003. Available at http://
www.costis.org/x/castoriadis/Castoriadis-rising_tide.pdf (accessed 19 May 2013).
Castoriadis, C. (2010) Démocratie et relativisme, Débat avec le MAUSS, Paris, Mille et une
nuits. p. 96.
Castoriadis, C., Escobar, E. , and Gondicas, M. (eds) (2005) Une société à la dérive, Paris, Seuil.
English translation (by Helen Arnold) (2010), A Society Adrift, New York: Fordham
University Press.
Latouche, S. (2005) L’invention de l’économie, Paris: Albin Michel.
Traoré, A. (2002) Le viol de l’imaginaire, Paris: Actes Sud/Fayard.
26
JEVONS’ PARADOX (REBOUND
EFFECT)
Blake Alcott
RETIRED ECOLOGICAL ECONOMIST

In the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, as Britain worried about running out of
coal, William Stanley Jevons (Jevons 1865; Alcott 2005) pondered two simultane-
ous phenomena: (1) required coal input per unit of smelted iron or work done by
steam engines had long been falling; and (2) total coal consumption had been ris-
ing. Likewise, demand for labour input had been rising alongside rising labour pro-
ductivity. From these observations, he derived the general claim that technological
change which increases the efficiency with which a resource is used increases rather
than decreases the rate of consumption of that resource.
This claim was later exemplified by electric lighting, where a hundred-fold
decrease in the amount of electricity needed for a lumen spawned a thousand-fold
increase in the amount of electricity used for lumens to light buildings and streets.
Jevons called this a ‘paradox’, because for psychological reasons we expect a per unit
decrease in an input/output ratio to cause a decrease in the overall consumption
of the input. The input could, of course, also be water, phosphorus, arable soil or
work-hours as well as energy.
First, a few definitions. Suppose the average kettle becomes 10 per cent more
energy-efficient at boiling water. Suppose also that the number of kettles and the
amount of water boiled per kettle doesn’t change. Then the amount of energy used
to boil water would fall by 10 per cent. This 10 per cent of the total amount of
energy previously used to boil water would be an absolute amount of saved energy,
known by the technical term engineering savings. But this amount is theoretical
only. In reality, less than this gets saved because, aided by lower prices both of out-
puts and of the energy inputs, the energy momentarily saved gets used by consum-
ers to do other things. Unless suppliers lower supply, thus counteracting the price
falls, latent consumer demand snaps up this temporarily fallow-lying energy. This
new demand is called rebound consumption.
122 Blake Alcott

Jevons held that rebound consumption is higher than engineering savings. That
is, even more energy gets consumed than if efficiency were to stay the same; had
steam-engine efficiency remained at James Watt’s level around the year 1800,
we would be consuming much less coal. A second possible outcome is rebound
equals 100 per cent of engineering savings. This happens when the technological
efficiency increases do not affect input consumption, which simply continues its
rising trend. A third outcome would be when some of the fallow-lying energy
remains permanently undemanded, rebound then being between 1 per cent and
99 per cent. As rebound nears 100 per cent, policies to induce increased efficiency
become cost-ineffective. At 100 per cent, they are simply ineffective; at over 100
per cent – Jevons’ paradox – they backfire, and they are counterproductive.
Is it then a reasonable degrowth strategy to encourage or legislate greater effi-
ciency? Not if latent demand and population growth pounce on all the resources
temporarily freed up by the efficiency increases, and certainly not if Jevons is right.
Historians, anthropologists and psychologists usually find it completely plausi-
ble that we don’t leave any theoretically conservable energy lying in the ground
unused. More consumers, new discoveries of energy, new uses for it and more effi-
cient technology in mining it – all these affect the level of overall combustion. But
efficiency increases also contribute. They expand society’s production possibilities,
amounting to a rise in society’s total purchasing power; they encourage discovery
of new uses for energy; and they aid population increase by increasing food yield
and by providing healthy, heated buildings.
There is evidence that world-wide, over perhaps 20 decades, output per unit
of input has gone up: one hour of work, one joule of fossil fuel, one hectare of
farmland produces more goods and services than before. We can measure this as
an increase in the ratio of the sum of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP)
to physically-measured inputs like worked hours, energy, fresh water or metals
like copper, iron or rare earths. But has the increase in this efficiency ratio been
accompanied, globally, by a decrease in amounts of energy used, people working
or minerals mined? No. In fact, the big empirical picture shows that rebounds are
at least 100 per cent. Interestingly, for labour-hours, no historian or economist
claims anything but that rebound is greater than 100 per cent: higher productivity
has meant economic growth and more jobs.
Those who believe that rebound is less than 100 per cent do not of course deny
that efficiency increases to date have not saved a drop of oil. However, they claim
counterfactually that without them, even more oil would have been burnt. This
points to the fact that today’s rebound discussion is basically theoretical. To be
sure, we can use micro-economic methods to measure so-called direct rebound: if a
given consumer drives a more fuel-efficient car, thereby saving money previously
spent on fuel, some of this income gets spent on driving more. The output – driven
kilometres – increases, so rebound is greater than 0 per cent (Khazzoom 1980).
Further indirect rebounds are however also certain, namely a so-called income effect
enabling this consumer to use his or her saved purchasing power to buy a gadget,
clothes or a plane ticket. These two types of rebound give us the environmentally
Jevons’ paradox (rebound effect) 123

relevant number we want – total rebound. Indirect rebounds, however, are notori-
ously difficult to measure, and there is moreover no methodology to derive indi-
rect and total rebound from the direct rebounds for the various economic sectors,
however precisely these may have been measured.
Studies of rebound in single countries or groups of countries, rather than at
world level, face a further problem: if they count only the amount of energy con-
sumed within the countries, ignoring the amounts ‘embodied’ in the countries’
net imports such as cars or computers, the result is distorted. A final difficulty in
judging average rebound for all countries is that studies of total rebound in poorer
societies yield higher estimates (often backfire) than studies of Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development countries, perhaps because consumers
there are less satiated. Given these problems of method, it is no wonder that even
after 30 years of micro-economic study, total-rebound estimates vary by more than
an order of magnitude (Sorrell 2009).
Thus, to say the least, it is only with high uncertainty that one can claim real
savings through technological efficiency, and it is tempting to turn to the alterna-
tive strategy of living more ‘sufficiently’ – working, producing and consuming less.
Here too, though, there is rebound: if I unilaterally decide to buy less energy, my
evaporated demand lowers energy’s price by an increment in the world-wide energy
market. This in turn enables the world’s billions of ‘marginal consumers’, who wish
to work as much as usual and consume more output, to demand what I no longer
demand. This might contribute to equitable consumption, but not to energy con-
servation. Unless the entire world population starts living more sufficiently, which is
immoral since billions live in involuntary poverty, other people take up the slack in
demand left by those who voluntarily ‘do without’ some energy.
Rebound is relevant to degrowth because what must degrow down to sustain-
able size is not utility, happiness or even necessarily GDP, but rather the amount of
bio-physical throughput caused by humans – the total amount of natural resources
consumed plus the emissions and waste caused by this consumption. And there is
in fact a well-known policy option that reduces throughput directly and with cer-
tainty: legal caps on the amount of a resource mined and consumed. Communities
have, for instance, for centuries capped what can legally be pumped from aquifers,
and the Kyoto process is now trying to cap air emissions.
As in Jevons’ time, instead of degrowing resource consumption by means of
physically defined caps, many people bank on the uncertain strategy of more effi-
cient use of the resource. But what happens to the energy that could thus be saved?
Is it saved? If some of us live with lower throughput, perhaps working less through
work sharing, won’t the rest of humanity demand the freed resources, which
after all continue to be supplied at a profit? Input consumption rebounds, and the
tail, moreover, cannot wag the dog: If society first caps its resource consumption,
people will automatically live more efficiently and sufficiently – and perhaps not
less happily.
The hope of our ‘inner engineer’ is that technological, per-unit efficiency gains
will somehow lower overall levels of depletion and pollution, and this is what
124 Blake Alcott

gives birth to the environmental strategy of increased efficiency. The environment,


however, doesn’t ‘care about’ ratios such as our human efficiency, or – which
comes to the same thing – the economy’s dematerialisation. Only real amounts
matter, regardless of how much utility we squeeze from our budgeted amounts of
resources.
If there is something to Jevons’ claim that humans will ecologically expand
through a combination of population increase and greater material affluence, we
should move away from technical or purely personal changes to political solu-
tions based on the insight that natural resources are collectively-owned commons
(Sanne 2000).

References
Alcott, B. (2005) ‘Jevons’ paradox’. Ecological Economics 54(1): 9–21.
Jevons, W. S. (1865) The coal question, 3rd ed. 1965. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
Khazzoom, D. (1980) ‘Economic implications of mandated efficiency in standards for
household appliances’. Energy Journal 1(4): 21–40.
Sanne, C. (2000) ‘Dealing with environmental savings in a dynamical economy – how to
stop chasing your tail in the pursuit of sustainability’. Energy Policy 28 (6/7): 487–95.
Sorrell, S. (2009) ‘Jevons’ paradox revisited: the evidence for backfire from improved energy
efficiency’. Energy Policy 37(4): 1456–69.
27
NEO-MALTHUSIANS
Joan Martinez-Alier
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Authors known as “Neo-Malthusians,” and among them Stanford ecology pro-


fessor Paul Ehrlich, raised in the 1960s and 1970s a strident alarm on population
growth. In fact, the alarm was justified because human population increased in the
twentieth century from 1.5 billion to 6 billion. In the 2010s, world population
reached 7 billion, but fertility (the number of children per woman) is now decreas-
ing fast in many countries, and it is persistently below two in many other countries.
World population will probably reach a maximum at about 8.5 or 9 billion by 2050
and will then decline slightly. Not only rural depopulation will take place, there
will also be urban depopulation in some countries.
Ehrlich, who published The Population Bomb in 1968, acknowledged that over-
population was only one of the factors in environmental degradation. He intro-
duced a well-known equation, I = f (P, A, T), meaning that environmental impact
(for instance, increased production of greenhouse gases changing the composition
of the atmosphere) depended on the size of the population, of its income per
capita (“affluence”) and on the technologies used. Population indeed remained
one important factor.
The degrowth movement has rarely discussed population growth. On the
whole, while it adopts a position contrary to population growth, it puts more
emphasis on social inequality in consumption per capita. This is common to other
currents on the Left.
The degrowthers dislike, in general, the top-down population policies and the
restriction to migration that Neo-Malthusians such as Paul Ehrlich and even more
Garrett Hardin preached in the 1960s and 1970s. They dislike forced sterilizations
and also the Chinese policy of one child per family imposed by the state. But the
degrowthers, as opposed to Marxists, worry or should worry about population.
126 Joan Martinez-Alier

True, Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population of 1798 took a pessimis-
tic view on the growth of agricultural production. He believed in the existence
of decreasing returns to the labour input. Population growth would make more
people available to work in agriculture but the production would increase less than
proportionally. Hence, the final outcome would be a crisis of lack of food. The
Marxists disliked Malthus because Malthus believed in decreasing returns and even
more because he implied that improving the economic situation of the poor was
useless because any improvement would result in increased fertility. He was truly a
reactionary. Marxists also disliked Malthus’ emphasis on crises of subsistence when
Marx explained crises as due to excessive investment compared to the purchasing
power of the exploited proletariat. Population growth for Marxists is driven by the
need of capitalism for cheap labor, and as Engels noted, in a non-capitalist social
formation, population could be much better controlled.
The degrowthers know all such arguments and although they also dislike
Malthus’ reactionary politics, they think nevertheless that Malthus had a point and
that population cannot grow without checks. Degrowthers take issue with optimis-
tic economists who assume that human population growth is no major threat to the
natural environment. Such economists are in favor of population growth pointing
out that productivity per hectare and even more per hour of work could increase
with technical progress. Indeed, Ester Boserup in her 1965 book The Conditions of
Agricultural Growth explained that population growth led to increased production
(turning the tables on Malthus) because it allows more intensive systems of pro-
duction with shorter rotations (from itinerant agriculture to irrigated double crop-
ping). However, this might apply to remote periods of human economic history
but since the mid-nineteenth century in Europe agriculture has increasingly relied
on imported fertilizers like guano and, later, factory-made fertilizers. The modern
food system is very intensive in fossil fuel energy. It can be argued that there is no
increase in productivity of agriculture from an ecological-economic point of view.
The degrowthers are the inheritors not of Malthus himself but of the radical, femi-
nist Neo-Malthusians of 1900 (in Europe and the United States) who were in favor
of “conscious procreation.” Poor women and men were deemed capable of volun-
tary, “conscious procreation” (Masjuan 2000; Ronsin 1980). This was a feminist and
proto-environmental movement. Instead, today’s Neo-Malthusianism of the rich con-
siders the larger reproductive rate among the world’s poor as a threat to their own
environment through migration. In Hardin’s case this developed into a so-called “life-
boat ethics.” Hence, the need for top-down population policies. Instead, the Neo-
Malthusianism of 1900 was not a doctrine imposing population policies from above.
The degrowthers feel close to the “bottom up” feminist Neo-Malthusians and
do not share the views of the optimistic economists regarding population growth.
They make fun of the argument that in order to pay pensions to old people there
is a need for more and more employed young people, who will in due course
become pensioners in a kind of demographic Ponzi pyramid.
The Neo-Malthusian anarcho-feminists preached women’s freedom to choose
the number of children they wanted to have. Many of them were explicitly
Neo-Malthusians 127

concerned about environmental issues, and they asked themselves how many peo-
ple the Earth could feed sustainably. This successful international social movement
(with leaders such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger in the United States
and Paul Robin in France) called itself deliberately Neo-Malthusian but in contrast
to Malthus, it believed that population growth could be stopped among the poor
classes by voluntary decisions. Birth control, including voluntary vasectomies, was
recommended. This Neo-Malthusian movement did not appeal to the State to
impose restrictions on population growth. On the contrary, it was based on “bot-
tom up” activism based on women’s freedom, the avoidance of the downward
pressure of excessive population on wages, and the threat to the environment and
human subsistence. An excess of population was foreseen, and this led to anticipa-
tory ideas and behavior. In France and elsewhere, Neo-Malthusians challenged
the political and religious authorities of the time through the idea of a “womb
strike” (la grève des ventres), and also through anti-militarism and anti-capitalism.
Controlling population voluntary was a refusal to provide capitalism with the
cheap labor of the “reserve army of workers.”
Outside Europe and the United States, the movement was active in Argentina,
Uruguay, and Cuba. In Brazil, in 1932, Maria Lacerda de Moura wrote a book
entitled Love One Another, And Do Not Multiply. In South India, E.K. Ramaswami
(Periyar) formed the Self-Respect Movement in 1926. He developed a political
philosophy against caste and in favor of freedom for women. He preached birth
control, arguing against Hindu religious notions of purity of blood and consequent
control over women’s sexuality (Guha, 2010). Sixty years later, when attempting
to explain the low birth rate in Tamil Nadu, demographers notice that education
levels for women have been low (compared to Kerala), and poverty is high, so
that perhaps the political will and the social reform movements initiated by Periyar
played a role in the demographic transition.
When Françoise d’Eaubonne (1974) introduced the word “ecofeminism” she
was active as a late-day militant of this radical Neo-Malthusian current, still fight-
ing at the time for the right to abortion and also for sexual freedom not only for
women (which had advanced very much already) but also for homosexuals who
were still criminalized in Europe at the time.
To conclude, there have been different varieties of Malthusianism and Neo-
Malthusianism in the last 200 years:

x According to Malthus, human populations would grow exponentially unless


checked by war and pestilence, or by the unlikely restraint of chastity and late
marriages. Food would grow less than proportionately to the growth of the
labor input, because of decreasing returns. Hence, subsistence crises.
x The Neo-Malthusians of 1900 believed that human populations could regu-
late their own growth through contraception. Women’s freedom was required
for this, and it was desirable for its own sake. Poverty was explained by social
inequality. “Conscious procreation” was required in order to prevent low
wages, and pressure on natural resources. This was a successful bottom-up
128 Joan Martinez-Alier

movement in Europe and America against States (which wanted more sol-
diers) and against the Catholic Church.
x The Neo-Malthusians of the 1960s and 1970s appeared because of delayed
demographic transitions and the lack of success in the world at large of the
Neo-Malthusians of 1900. They preached a top-down doctrine and practice
sponsored by international organizations and some governments. Population
growth was seen as one main cause of poverty and environmental degrada-
tion. Therefore States must introduce contraceptive methods, even sometimes
without the populations’ (particularly women’s) prior consent.

For degrowthers, the first and third points are abhorrent but the second point is
very close in spirit. The idea of a voluntary restriction of procreation, a collective
act of self-limitation against the engine of growth, continues to inspire degrowth.
Yves Cochet (a long serving member of the European Parliament and partisan
of degrowth) has proposed a grève du troisième enfant (a strike of the third child)
(Guichard 2009).

References
Boserup, E. (1965) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change
under Population Pressure. London: G. Allen and Unwin.
D’Eaubonne, F. (1974) Le féminisme ou la mort. Paris, France: Pierre Horay Editeur.
Erlich, P. R. (1968) The Population Bomb. San Francisco: Sierra Club/Ballantine Books.
Guichard, M. (2009) Yves Cochet pour la «grève du troisième ventre». Libération. Available online at
www.liberation.fr/societe/2009/04/06/yves-cochet-pour-la-greve-du-troisieme-ventre_
551067 (accessed January 28 2014).
Lacerda de Moura, M. (1932) Amai e não vos multipliqueis. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao
Brasileira Editora.
Malthus, T. R. (1798) Essay on the Principle of Population. London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s
Church-yard.
Masjuan, E. (2000) La ecología humana en el anarquismo ibérico. (Urbanismo “orgánico” o ecológico,
neomalthusianismo y naturismo social). Barcelona/Madrid: Editorial Icaria y Fundación
Anselmo Lorenzo.
Ronsin, F. (1980) La grève des ventres. Propagande neo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalité en
France 19-20 siècles. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne.
Ramaswami, E. V. “The Case for Contraception,” In R. Guha (ed.) The Makers of Modern
India, Penguin: New Delhi, pp. 258–9.
28
PEAK-OIL
Christian Kerschner
IRI THESYS, HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN AND DEPARTMENT
OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUIDES, MASARYK UNIVERSITY

Collin Campbell and Aleklett Kjell developed the concept of ‘Pea-Oil’ when they
founded ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) in 2002. All too often
observers misinterpret Peak-Oil as the depletion or ‘running out’ of oil and there-
fore often equate the term to the biophysical (resource) limits debates of the 1970s
and 1980s. That debate missed the fact that non-renewable resources are not only
limited in stock (the economically extractable physical quantity of deposits) but,
like renewables, also in flow (rate). Hence the concept can be equally applied to
renewable resources, which has already happened in the literature e.g. Peak-Water,
Peak-Fertile-Land, etc.
A ‘resource flow’ is the physical amount that can be extracted per unit of time
(usually days) given external constraints, which may be geologic, economic, envi-
ronmental or social. The peak can therefore be defined as ‘the maximum pos-
sible flow rate of a resource (i.e. production and consumption) given external
constraints’. According to Peak-Oil literature, this rate is about 85 million bar-
rels per day (mb/d), in the case of oil. Peaks are the crucial moment in terms of
resource scarcities and their resulting impact on society. In contrast, the often-
quoted time left until resource depletion (calculated by dividing the estimated
remaining resource by current yearly consumption flows) is highly misleading.
British Petroleum, for example, estimates these numbers to be about 40 years for
oil, 60 for gas and 120 for coal. Such numbers create the wrong impression that the
remaining time for action to respond to resource limitations is still far off.
Hence the first key message of Peak-Oil is that supply constraints are much
closer in time than is commonly assumed. When this will happen is the subject
of the ‘below ground’ Peak-Oil literature dominated by geologists whose main
concern is with the quantity dimension of the phenomenon, i.e. possible flow rates
130 Christian Kerschner

and recoverable stocks. Petroleum geologist King Hubbert developed a curve fit-
ting methodology that mirrors production and discovery trends in order to show
ultimate crude-oil production. He almost exactly predicted Peak-Oil for the US
(Hubbert predicted a 1971 peak, the real peak happened in fall 1970) and estimated
a world peak of oil production for the year 2000. Campbell and Laherrere (1998)
updated Hubbert’s work. They placed the peak at 2006. This prediction was fur-
ther refined for ASPO’s first press release in 2002, which predicted 2010 for the
peak at a flow rate of 85 mb/d. For now this estimate appears to hold, as produc-
tion has currently plateaued at about that level. The most extensive meta-analysis
of “below ground” Peak-Oil studies so far concluded that a production peak of
conventional oil for geological reasons was likely before 2030, with a significant
risk for this to occur before 2020 (Sorrell et al. 2010).
The URR (ultimately recoverable resource) focuses debate regarding the tim-
ing of Peak-Oil. This is the estimated total amount (historic and future) of a given
resource ever to be produced. ASPO uses 1900 Gigabarrels (Gb) of conventional
and 525 Gb of unconventional oil (i.e. deep sea, heavy oils e.g. tar sands, shale oil
and gas, oil shale and polar oil) for its calculations. Given total historic consump-
tion of oil to date of around 1160 Gb, this means we are about half way through
the resource. URR estimates of those denying an imminent peak of world oil
production are much higher. The IEA (International Energy Agency) produces
its forecasts on the basis of 1,300 Gb for conventional and 2,700 Gb for uncon-
ventional oil. Recent advances in fracking technology for extracting shale oil and
gas has given new ‘fuel’ to such optimistic outlooks. However a significant part of
the IEA figures relies on ‘yet to be found’ oil, without stating where this oil could
possibly be located and according to many analysts the ‘shale hype’ is a bubble that
is to burst at any moment.
When URR numbers are discussed, Peak-Oil deniers often omit reference to
the possible flow rate of the deposit in question, which is the determining variable
for this matter. Sorrell, Miller et al. (2010) found that, given the current trend in
decline rates of existing oil fields (4 per cent annually), the world would have to
discover daily production capacities equal to that of Saudi Arabia every three years in
order to keep up with current demand. Saudi Arabia holds approximately 264.2 Gb,
which is why Canadian tar sands with 170.4 Gb are often seen as a possible succes-
sor. However, Saudi oil fields release about 10.85 mb/d onto world markets while
Albertan tar sands struggle to increase its current production level of 1.32 mb/d.
Apart from geology, the possible oil flow rate is determined by many other con-
straints. For example, many oil-producing countries have substantially decreased
exports due to increases in (often subsidised) domestic demand. Geopolitics could
be another such constraint. Most importantly, however, the quality dimension of
Peak-Oil, which belongs to the ‘above ground’ Peak-Oil literature, may determine
flow rates.
The second key Peak-Oil message is that the phenomenon will prove signifi-
cantly harmful to the present socio-economic system. This is mainly due to the fact
that higher quality oil has been extracted first (best first principle). Lower quality
Peak-oil 131

oil not only translates directly into greater economic costs per unit of resource
obtained, but into social and environmental costs, as well. We can distinguish the
quality of the resource itself and the quality of the location. In resource terms, we
are now more and more dependent on heavy oils (e.g. tar sands) or oil with high
levels of contaminants (mostly sulphur). In location terms, we are increasingly
faced with difficult geological (e.g. deep sea, impregnated rocks, liquid salt layers,
scattered pockets/shale), geopolitical (e.g. hostile regimes, political instability) and
geographic (e.g. polar oil, extreme weather, open sea, etc.) conditions. What we
face is an expansion of oil’s commodity frontiers.
These increasing exploration, extraction and production costs inevitably reduce
our energy return on investment (EROI), which has already been decreasing for
most energy resources over the years. The EROI is the net energy remaining after
subtracting the amount necessary to explore, extract and refine an energy resource.
In the 1970s, this used to be about 30:1 for domestic oil in the US. In 2005 it was
already down to about half that. In comparison, tar sands are situated between 2
and 4:1 (Murphy and Hall 2010). It’s still too early to know exactly the EROI for
shale oil and gas produced with hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Experts already
point to the fact that shale wells are very expensive and tend to peak fast (not to
mentions its seismic and environmental impacts). Most renewable forms of energy
(except hydropower) also have very low EROIs.
According to energy analysts, the change in the quality of our main energy
resource is bound to have significant consequences for economies. Adherents of
the ‘Olduvai theory’ even predict an imminent societal collapse. Some argue that
the economic crisis of 2008 was due mainly to high oil prices caused by scarcities
and that Peak-Oil is in fact behind the current global economic crisis. Orthodox
economists on the other hand continue to deny any such relation, as they believe
that with the help of technological innovation any resource can be substituted.
One problem with this belief is that, apart from the lower EROIs of most substi-
tutes, the same dynamics described previously for oil are evident in other resources.
Ever-lower ore grades drive up the prices of minerals (e.g. Peak-Phosphorous) and
metals (e.g. Peak-Copper), some of which are desperately needed for renewable
energy technology, in particular the so-called rare earth minerals (e.g. terbium,
yttrium and neodymium).
In other words, resource peaks highlight the fact that human society has reached
important biophysical limitations. Economic degrowth from this perspective is no
longer an option, but a reality. The challenge for the degrowth movement is to
help develop a path towards a post-carbon society that is socially sustainable. Some
energy analysts argue that such a managed or prosperous descent is not possi-
ble because the economic system is too complex and specialized and thus very
hard to change smoothly. To them, tweaking the wheels is likely to cause more
harm than good. For this reason it is important to study economic vulnerabilities
to Peak-Oil in order to design adaptation policies carefully (e.g. Kerschner et al.
2013). A first starting point would be the voluntary advancement of biophysical
limits via resource caps in order to reduce the decline curve and give more time
132 Christian Kerschner

for adaptation. However, the goal of the degrowth movement should not only be
to ‘survive’ Peak-Oil with the least social cost, but to use this crisis to stimulate
the creation of a more equitable and sustainable world that questions the current
modes of socio-economic organization and a civilization based on the careless
over-exploitation of non-renewable resources.

References
Campbell, C. and Laherrere, J. (1998) ‘The end of cheap oil’. Scientific American, 278(3):
78–84.
Kerschner, C., Prell, C., Feng, K. and Hubacek, K. (2013) ‘Economic vulnerability to Peak
Oil.’ Global Environmental Change, 23: 6, 1, 424–1, 423.
Murphy, D. J. and Hall, C. A. S. (2010) ‘Year in review: EROI or energy return on (energy)
invested’. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1185 (Ecological Economics
Reviews), 102–18.
Sorrell, S., Miller, R. Bentley, R. and Speirs, J. (2010) ‘Oil futures: A comparison of global
supply forecasts’. Energy Policy, 38(9): 4,990–5,003.
29
SIMPLICITY
Samuel Alexander
MELBOURNE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE & SIMPLICITY INSTITUTE

In broad terms, voluntary simplicity can be understood to imply a way of life that
involves consciously minimizing wasteful and resource-intensive consumption. But
it is also about reimagining ‘the good life’ by directing progressively more time and
energy toward pursuing non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning. In
other words, voluntary simplicity involves embracing a minimally ‘sufficient’ mate-
rial standard of living, in exchange for more time and freedom to pursue other life
goals, such as community or social engagements, more time with family, artistic or
intellectual projects, home-based production, more fulfilling employment, politi-
cal participation, spiritual exploration, relaxation, pleasure-seeking, and so on –
none of which need to rely on money, or much money. Variously defended by
its advocates on personal, social, political, humanitarian, and ecological grounds,
voluntary simplicity is based on the assumption that human beings can live mean-
ingful, free, happy, and infinitely diverse lives, while consuming no more than an
equitable share of nature (see generally, Alexander and Ussher 2012).
A social philosopher named Richard Gregg coined the term ‘voluntary sim-
plicity’ in 1936, although obviously the way of life to which he referred is as old
as civilization itself. Throughout history there have always been individuals and
communities who have expressed doubts about the merits of living a materialistic
life focused on material wealth and possessions. A history of simplicity could begin
with Siddhartha Gautama – the Buddha – who at the age of twenty-nine gave up
what he considered to be the superficial luxuries of a royal existence and sought
spiritual truth in a life of extreme asceticism. After nearly starving himself to death
through his practice of self-deprivation, Siddhartha reconsidered his path and after
years of inner struggle he is said to have found Enlightenment in what Buddhists
call ‘the Middle Way’ – a path of meditative self-discipline that lies between the
paths of worldly indulgence and asceticism. A similar message about the spiritual
value of living a materially simple life can be found in almost all of the world’s
134 Samuel Alexander

religious and spiritual texts (if not always in their practices!), as well as many of the
world’s indigenous wisdom traditions.
Simplicity of living also found many advocates among the great philosophers of
ancient Greece and Rome, the Cynics and the Stoics, in particular. In one of the
most radical expressions of simplicity, Diogenes the Cynic voluntarily embraced
a life of poverty to show by example that a free and meaningful life could not
be measured by conventional accounts of wealth. Less extreme were the Stoics,
such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, who advocated disciplined and
thoughtful moderation rather than poverty. In various ways the Stoics argued that
people cannot always be in control of how much worldly wealth and fame they
attain, but they are or can be in control of the attitudes they adopt in relation
to such things. Similarly, the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu once said, ‘He who
knows he has enough is rich,’ suggesting also that they who have enough, but who
do not know it, are poor.
Leaping forward to the Victorian era in England, one finds passionate support
for simple living in the works of the great ‘moralists,’ John Ruskin and William
Morris. Ruskin refused to treat money as a neutral meeting place of mere exchange
and instead highlighted the ways in which the obscuring distances of a money
economy pushed the social and environmental consequences of consumption out
of sight. Ruskin urged people to recognize that material things are worthwhile
only to the extent that they further some worthwhile end, a perspective encapsu-
lated in his maxim, ‘There is no wealth but life.’ William Morris developed this
line of thought in important ways, drawing particular attention to how consump-
tion is always dependent upon labour. Morris suggested that huge reductions in
‘useless toil’ could be achieved if people would reduce their consumption of ‘those
articles of folly and luxury.’ The Bohemians in Europe, on the other hand, tended
to live simple lives for the sake of their art and for pleasure. Quite different again
are the Amish, the Trappist monks, and the Quakers, who exemplify varieties of
the simple life grounded upon religious belief. In the twentieth century, towering
figures such as Gandhi, Lenin, Tolstoy, and Mother Teresa all lived lives of great
material simplicity.
Given that the US is the birthplace of hyper-consumerism, it might surprise
some people to discover that in fact the US has always had an undercurrent of
‘plain living and high thinking’ (Shi 2007). In the mid-nineteenth century there
were the fascinating versions of the simple life articulated by the New England
Transcendentalists. This was a colourful group of poets, mystics, social reformers,
and philosophers – including Henry Thoreau (see Bode 1983) – who lived on
modest means in order to afford the luxury of creativity and contemplation. As
leading Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once asserted: ‘It is better to
go without than to have possessions at too great a cost’. Other early Americans
highlighted the tension between profiteering and civic virtue, and insisted on the
close connection between simple living and a flourishing democracy. There were
also the warnings of Benjamin Franklin, who railed against consumers thought-
lessly going into debt:
Simplicity 135

[W]hat Madness must it be to run into debt for these Superfluities! . . . think
what you do when you turn in Debt; you give another power over your
liberty . . . Preserve your Freedom; and maintain your Independency:. . . .be
frugal and free.
Franklin 1817: 94

In more recent decades, US President Carter advocated material restraint on the


grounds that ‘owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for
meaning.’ Referring to ‘a crisis of spirit’, he felt that the worship of ‘self-indulgence
and consumption’ was based on ‘a mistaken idea of freedom’ (see generally, Shi
2007).
What could be called the ‘modern’ simplicity movement is typically traced back
to the North American and European counter-cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, for
these movements had deep anti-consumerist and environmentalist sentiments that
generally supported simple living. This was especially so with respect to the so-
called ‘back-to-the-landers’ movement of that era, exemplified by the inspired
lives of Helen and Scott Nearing and echoed in contemporary neo-rurals. More
recently the Transition Town, Permaculture, and Eco-village movements also
advocate moving away from consumerist lifestyles toward less consumptive, less
energy-intensive ways of living (see eco-communities). These movements are
trying to build the alternative society by living the solution, even if presently their
impact is modest. There have also been more focused theories of simplicity, advo-
cating a ‘sufficiency economy’ (Alexander, 2012) or ‘The Simpler Way’ (Trainer
2010). These theories variously argue for a restructuring of society with the aim of
creating low-energy, highly localized, steady state economies, based on a politi-
cized culture of simple living (see de-politicization). It is certainly the case that a
simple living movement without a politics would be insufficient to change politi-
cal and macro-economic structures. Simple living movements must not seek to
‘escape’ the system, but radically ‘transform’ it.
The purely macro-economic perspective on degrowth, as a process of planned
contraction, fails to highlight the cultural values and practices that must accom-
pany, and perhaps precede, a degrowth transition. After all, if a culture is generally
comprised of individuals seeking ever-higher levels of income and consumption,
it follows that such a culture would desire and indeed require a growth economy.
In order for an economics and politics of degrowth to emerge, therefore, it would
seem that people at the cultural level must be prepared to give up or resist high-
consumption ‘affluent’ lifestyles and instead embrace ‘simpler’ lifestyles of reduced
or restrained consumption. Ideally this would be a voluntary transition – a ‘planned
economic contraction’ – but it may end up being a transition imposed on people
by way of recession or even collapse. There is some ground for optimism in that
throughout history, from East to West, people have simplified their lives to engage
in a variety of enriching pursuits, including philosophy, religious devotion, artis-
tic creation, hedonism, revolutionary or democratic politics, humanitarian service,
and ecological activism. At the same time, the values of voluntary simplicity have
136 Samuel Alexander

generally been dominated by more materialistic values. In the present age of gross
ecological overshoot and economic instability, however, perhaps simplicity of liv-
ing is at last a way of life whose time has come. Degrowth surely depends on it.

References
Alexander, S. (2012) ‘The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning a Prosperous Way Down’
Simplicity Institute Report, 12s. Available online available at: www.simplicityinstitute.org/
publications (accessed 7 July 2013).
Alexander, S. and Ussher, S. (2012) ‘The Voluntary Simplicity Movement: A Multi-
National Survey Analysis in Theoretical Context’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 12(1):
66–86.
Bode, C. (ed.) (1983) The Portable Thoreau, New York: Penguin.
Trainer, T. (2010) The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Sydney: Envirobook.
Shi, D. (2007, revised edition) The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American
Culture, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Weems, M. L. (1817) The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia: M Carey.
30
SOCIAL LIMITS OF GROWTH
Giorgos Kallis
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH, ICREA AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Above a certain level of economic growth, which satisfies basic material needs,
a rising proportion of income goes to so-called ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976).
Exclusive real estate, an expensive car, a rare painting, a degree from a top pri-
vate university; these are all positional goods. Access to such goods signifies one’s
position in society and depends on relative income. Unlike normal goods, the
more of a positional good our peers have, the less satisfaction we derive from it.
Positional goods are inherently scarce since scarcity is their essence; by defini-
tion, not everyone can have high status, own a rare painting or the most expensive
car. Economic growth can never satisfy the desire for positional goods. Worse,
growth makes positional goods less accessible. As the material component of the
economy becomes more productive, positional consumption, inherently limited
as it is, gets more expensive. Witness the rising price of a house with a vista or the
life-costs of a degree from a top university. Positional goods signal therefore the
social limit of growth, i.e. a limit on what growth can deliver, as compared to limits
to growth, i.e. limits to the continuation of growth.
Nevertheless, what sustains the desire for growth in wealthy economies is pre-
cisely the dream of access to positional goods. Consider pundit Daniel Ben-Ami
who in a book against degrowth defends the dream of ‘Ferraris for All’. Let us for a
moment follow his argument, and assume away peak oil or climate change since in
theory technological progress could supersede such limits. Let us assume away also
the congestion if everyone had a Ferrari, a congestion that would make Ferraris
slower than bicycles. In theory, cities and highways could be rebuilt to accommo-
date 7 billion Ferraris running at full speed. Even so, the fundamental limit of Ben-
Ami’s dream is still that if everyone had a Ferrari, then a Ferrari would no longer
be a ‘Ferrari’. It would be the equivalent of a Fiat Cinquecento, a car of the masses.
Aspirations would have shifted to another, faster car, which would signify wealth
138 Giorgos Kallis

and position. Those without access to the new model would remain as frustrated as
those who do not have a Ferrari today. The pursuit of positional goods is a zero-
sum game (Frank 2000).
Yet this is a zero-sum game with a substantial social cost (imagine the resources
wasted in reconfiguring territories or cleaning up the air for 7 billion Ferraris). The
personal and public resources wasted in such zero-sum positional games could be
used beneficially elsewhere (Frank 2000). In fact, in affluent societies a rising pro-
portion of social income is wasted on private, positional consumption, while public
goods that would improve the quality of life for all are left to deteriorate (Galbraith
1958). Positional consumption increases also the cost of free time, making leisure less
attractive, undermining sociability and reducing the time devoted to family, friends,
community, or politics (Hirsch 1976). Time is budgeted and increasingly valued in
money; as a result, social relations get increasingly commodified. Commodification
is also the result of enclosures that are enforced to maintain privileged access to posi-
tional goods (e.g. a private beach or a college fee; Hirsch 1976). In a vicious cycle,
as more and more goods and services come under the sway of money and positional
competition, the love of money is further inflated, undermining even more social
relations and social mores (Hirsch 1976; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012).
The social limits thesis is central for degrowth. It is not only that growth will
not last forever or that it is becoming uneconomical because of its social and envi-
ronmental costs. It is that growth is ‘senseless’, a goal without reason, the pursuit
of an elusive dream (Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012: 7). In affluent countries there
is enough to satisfy the basic material needs of everyone; positional inequalities are
a matter of distribution not aggregate growth (Hirsch 1976). If rising productiv-
ity and growth make positional goods more expensive, then degrowth will make
them less expensive, increasing wellbeing and releasing collective resources from
unnecessary positional consumption. A degrowth trajectory could lead in this way
to an improvement, and not a deterioration as is often alleged, of basic goods such
as education, health, or public infrastructure.
There remain however some unexplored issues in this account. First, in much
of the degrowth literature, especially that related to voluntary simplicity, absti-
nence from positional and conspicuous consumption is presented as a moral and
individual matter. This is wrong: positional consumption is not a personal vice. It
is a structural social phenomenon to which individuals conform to remain part of
the mainstream. Exiting the ‘rat race’ and downshifting has first-mover risks, such
as reduced respectability, fewer job opportunities and loss of income (Frank 2000).
People from less privileged backgrounds facing economic insecurity are under-
standably less confident with taking such risks. There is also a healthy dose of civic
ethic in the desire to conform to the average lifestyle and not to differ too much.
In fact, under late capitalism, it is the desire to differ that constantly creates new
positional goods and fuels accumulation. Paradoxically, frugal, ‘simple’ life-styles
have become signifiers of distinction and position, since they are first adopted by
members of the educated or artistic elites who can appreciate and afford them
(Heeth and Potter 2004). Think of the jeans, first used by back-to-the-landers
Social limits of growth 139

in the 1960s, or of the rise of property values in the remote parts of the countryside
‘discovered’ by counter-culturals and settled by eco-communities. Somewhat
tragically, those wishing to escape from positional consumption become the pio-
neers of new positional goods.
If the problem is structural, then the solution should also be structural.
Some economists want governments to make positional goods more expensive.
Proposals include taxing luxury goods or shifting taxation from income to con-
sumption, basically by subtracting savings from taxable income (with steeply
progressive rates to account for the fact that the rich save more [Frank 2000]).
Others go further. One proposal is for a radical redistribution, since if everyone
had similar levels of wealth no one could bid up for positional goods. Another
proposal is the removal of positional goods from the commercial sector (de-
commodification) making them available through public access or public, non-
market allocation (Hirsch 1976).
A second, related, issue is whether positional competition can be tamed with
taxes and regulation within capitalism, or whether overcoming it marks a transition
out of capitalism. Inequalities are central, rather than incidental, to capitalism’s
dynamism, as noted by Joseph Schumpeter. Unequal access to positional goods sus-
tains a generalized insatiability that is essential if capitalism is to constantly extract
social energy from everyone, even after material needs have been satisfied. Vice
versa, while positional goods and money competition have existed in all human
societies, it is only capitalism that has ‘released them from the bounds of custom
and religion within which they were formerly confined’ (Skidelsky and Skidelsky
2012: 40). Insatiability may have psychological roots, but it is capitalism that made
it the psychological basis of a civilization. A society that would consider itself satis-
fied to have ‘enough’ would have no reason to accumulate and would no longer
be capitalist (Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012).
Socialist economies suppressed positional goods by decree, redistribution and
forced collectivization. But positional competition resurfaced into competition for
positions in the bureaucracy and for scarce goods from the West. Some ancient
societies channelled competition to symbolic sports events, potlatches and gift-
giving. Anthropologists have documented also how in primitive egalitarian socie-
ties positions existed, yet they were not that important, either because they rotated,
or because they were socially controlled and reprimanded, making sure that no
individual or group accumulated too much power. Assuming that any given col-
lective (nation, community or other) decides today to move in such an egalitarian
direction in the contemporary world of globalized communications and states of
reference, one question is why wouldn’t its members compare themselves to those
of wealthier individuals in less egalitarian neighbours and find themselves wanting.
This may be part of what happened in socialist countries. Although the competi-
tion for positional goods is a structural problem, its solution can never be imposed
solely from above. It has to be part and parcel of an ethico-political project of self-
limitation, simplicity and equality to which the members of a collective autono-
mously subscribe to.
140 Giorgos Kallis

References
Frank, R. (2000). Luxury fever: Weighing the cost of excess. New York: The Free Press.
Galbraith, J. K. (1958). The affluent society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Heeth, J. and A. Potter (2004). Nation of rebels. How counter-culture became consumer culture.
New York: Harper Collins.
Hirsch, F. (1976). Social limits to growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Skidelsky, R. and Skidelsky, E. (2012). How much is enough? Money and the good life. London:
Penguin.
PART 3

The action
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31
BACK-TO-THE-LANDERS
Rita Calvário1 and Iago Otero2
ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS
1

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
2
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND IRI THESYS, HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITÄT ZU BERLIN

Back-to-the-landers (or neorurals) are people with no agrarian background who


migrate from the city to the countryside to adopt a radically new agrarian or artisan
lifestyle. Their motivations are linked to the search for a simpler, self-sufficient,
autonomous (free from wage labor and market), close-to-nature, and ecological
way of life. They do this by following a critique of materialist mainstream culture,
modern farming practices, and the globalization of the agri-food systems. Back-to-
the-landers perceive their choice as a lifestyle project and a way for social transition
towards ecological sustainability. This explains why they may be considered actors
of a diversified strategy of socio-ecological change towards a degrowth future.
Organic small-scale farming, re-localization of production and consumption,
alternative economies and networks are some of the qualities associated with the
“rural” by back-to-the-landers. These qualities conflict with other representations
of rurality (e.g. agribusiness views). Even if “radical ruralities” often adopt a rural–
urban divide for their discursive frame, connections with the “city”, through alter-
native economies and networks, are common.
Back-to-the-land is not new in Western history. Since the advent of capi-
talism, the “countryside” has played a role of critique to rationalist abstraction,
commodification of land and labor, modern state and politics, individual aliena-
tion, and the dissolution of social bonds. These critiques – which feature strongly
in the degrowth discourse – have been expressed in different ways by different
actors across time. For instance, the countryside has been a place for the elite’s
mourning of a lost past and also a place for utopian socialist or libertarian quests
for a new social order. Alternately, the countryside has been a place of refuge from
the degrading conditions of industrial labor and urban life. States have also been
promoters of urban-to-rural migration, small-scale agrarian capitalism, or an undif-
ferentiated “peasantry” as a way of shifting the cost of social reproduction through
144 Rita Calvário and Iago Otero

self-provision, reducing relief payments, and tackling urban unrest during crisis
periods.
The 1960s and 1970s are of considerable significance for back-to-the-land
ideals, the restructuring of capitalism, and rural change. Hippie and May 1968
social movements led to a rise of back-to-the-landers, which paralleled the broader
process of counter-urbanization, i.e. the outmigration of urbanites to rural areas
attracted mainly by a better quality of life, but without any counter-cultural moti-
vation. Back-to-the-land echoed the growing environmental consciousness, the
reaction to consumerism, and the discourses on the limits to growth after the ener-
getic crisis of the 1970s. It was inspired by a return to both “nature” and to an ide-
alized rural society as a way of rejecting commodity fetishism, alienation of wage
labor, and the modern values of progress and technological improvement. Several
of these back-to-the-land experiences and communes ended due to internal con-
flicts, disillusionment, debts, and poverty, while others thrived and still exist today.
The persistence of the back-to-the-land movement can be partly explained by
the people’s engagement in a countryside increasingly turned into a place of leisure
for an increasingly urban population. Rural areas changed as a result of a growing
service economy and consumerist lifestyles, identities, and culture. Paradoxically,
back-to-the-landers may have acted as pioneers of rural gentrification and com-
modification, facilitating the (re)production of “nature” and “rurality” valued for
new consumption demands. Integration of the activities of initially radical back-
to-the-landers into new markets and access to State funding to recreate a nostalgic
rural environment were some of the forms of co-optation. This co-optation signals
more broadly the way the critique of the alienation of everyday life of the 1960s
was recuperated into a “new spirit of capitalism” arising from the mid-1970s
onwards. Ideas such as autonomy, network, creativity, flexibility, individual ini-
tiative, and liberty were integrated into the dominant (neoliberal) discourse. The
removal of its initial anti-capitalist ethos undermined the power of back-to-the-
land social critique.
Back-to-the-landers sustained in other ways: the rise of alternative economies
and networks worked as modes of contesting the increasingly globalized agri-
industrial systems. Some authors argue that alternative economies and networks
create spaces outside capitalism, building networks of local counter-powers that
resist and subvert capitalism’s ideological hegemony. This view allows us to look
at back-to-the-landers’ experiences and projects as ways of building imaginaries of
a degrowth (post-capitalist) society. Others, however, argue that alternatives that
reinforce the notions of consumer sovereignty, State incapacity, and self-reliant,
ordered communities are reproducing neoliberal subjectivities and practices. Or,
that living in a highly competitive capitalist market makes it very difficult for alter-
native projects to maintain their intended differences. Yet another criticism is that
by remaining small, local, and marginal, such initiatives are not capable of challeng-
ing the conventional farming and distribution channels and the root causes of the
unequal social access to high-end quality food. Self-provisioning at a micro-level
may also facilitate the ongoing accumulation of capital at a more macro-level.
Back-to-the-landers 145

Back-to-the-landers have the potential to transform the dominant agri-food


model and an increasingly commodified countryside, which makes them actors of a
degrowth transition. The challenge is to transcend being only a residual fraction of
the agri-food system and the rural space. For this, and against the risk of being co-
opted, political action involving strategic alliances with other actors towards eman-
cipation from capitalist social relations seems crucial. More than the shape of local
experiences, it is their direction that counts. Opening small windows of emancipa-
tion may be important for feeding imaginaries of degrowth and to empower indi-
viduals. But to formulate emancipation in a capitalist global market as a concrete
possibility involves a broader and articulated collective struggle for social change, in
which networks of local experiences can play an important role. Networked action
has been important in struggles against land speculation, privatization of resources,
rural gentrification and commodification, and agribusiness expansion. This net-
working has been made possible by empowering localities and their inhabitants
with resistance capacity and by amplifying their capacity. Reclaiming the com-
mons is a key point for such land-based social movements. More than defending
their own interests, this should be seen as a vision of transcending capitalist relations
of private property and of reconnecting inhabitants with their territories.

References
Boyle, P. and Halfacree, K. (eds) (1998) Migration into Rural Areas: Theories and Issues,
Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Brown, D. (2011) Back-to-the-Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Halfacree, K. (ed.) (2007) “Back-to-the-Land in the Twenty-first Century – Making
Connections with Rurality”, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 98(1): 3–67.
Jacob, J. (1997) New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable
Future, Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Wilbur, A. (2013) “Growing a Radical Ruralism: Back-to-the-Land as Practice and Ideal”,
Geography Compass, 7:149–60.
32
BASIC AND MAXIMUM INCOME
Samuel Alexander
MELBOURNE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE AND SIMPLICITY INSTITUTE

To eliminate poverty, capitalist societies generally rely on growing the economic


pie, not slicing it differently. If the pursuit of growth were given up, however,
and a degrowth process of planned economic contraction were embraced, pov-
erty would have to be confronted more directly. Among other things, this would
require a restructuring of the property and tax systems for the purpose of redis-
tributing wealth and ensuring everyone had ‘enough’ (Alexander 2011). The Basic
Income and the Maximum Income are two policies that could help achieve these
important egalitarian goals, without relying on growth.
Although there is considerable variety in forms of Basic Income, the core idea
is relatively straightforward. In its idealised and most radical form, every person
living permanently in a nation would receive from the state a periodic (e.g. fort-
nightly) payment, and this payment would be sufficient for an individual to live at a
minimal though dignified standard of economic security. Advocates typically argue
that a Basic Income payment should be guaranteed by the state, unconditional on the
performance of any labour, and universal.
Within a fully developed Basic Income system, some advocates argue that other
state transfers could be abolished – such as unemployment benefits, family allow-
ances, pensions, etc. – since the Basic Income grant would be sufficient to provide
everyone with a decent, though minimal, subsistence. Existing ‘social welfare’ has
proven unable to eliminate poverty, even in the richest nations, so the powerful
moral attraction of a Basic Income lies in how directly it confronts poverty. It is a
policy based on the idea that the distribution of an economy’s wealth must begin
by ensuring that everyone has ‘enough’ to live with dignity. The Basic Income
could also include non-monetary benefits, such as free health care, or direct provi-
sion of food, clothes, and accommodation to those in need.
The feasibility of a Basic Income System is typically questioned on two main
grounds (Fitzpatrick 1999). The first objection is that making the Basic Income
Basic and maximum income 147

unconditional on the performance of any labour would give rise to a society of


‘free-loaders’ and ultimately lead to economic collapse. This objection, however,
arises out of a debatable conception of human beings. While it may be the case
that the ‘free-loader’ problem would exist to some extent, a case can be made that
human beings, by and large, are social creatures, who find being engaged in their
community’s work more meaningful and fulfilling than being isolated, idle, and
parasitic on their community. Furthermore, even if there were a minority that
chose not to contribute productively in any way, this could well be a tolerable
social burden – more tolerable, one might argue, than the levels of poverty that
exist today. Alternatively, the Basic Income could mandate some form of social
contribution, even if that contribution were outside the ‘formal economy’.
The second objection typically levelled at the Basic Income concerns its finan-
cial feasibility, a pragmatic issue that is obviously of great importance. However,
this is arguably more a matter of political commitment than a financing challenge,
especially since the state has the power to issue money for worthwhile or neces-
sary purposes. To ease the burden on the public purse and soften the transition,
one policy option is to begin the Basic Income payments at some very low level
and increase them gradually over time to a level of dignified subsistence. Another
option would be to establish a Negative Income Tax system, which differs from a
Basic Income in that it provides a tax-credit to people, not universally, but only to
those with incomes below the subsistence level. This would provide low-income
earners with a guaranteed minimum income but via an alternative route. Over
time, the Negative Income Tax system could evolve into a Basic Income system.
The social benefits of a successful Basic Income system would be profound and
far-reaching. Beyond eliminating poverty and economic insecurity, its institution
would also strengthen the bargaining position of employees, since it would give
people a property right that was independent of their paid employment, and thus
more power to demand decent working conditions. It would also mean that peo-
ple did not have to accept alienating, exploitative, or degrading jobs just to survive;
nor would there be any real pressure to sacrifice social and political autonomy
in order to achieve economic security. Furthermore, a Basic Income would also
effectively acknowledge the worth of unpaid work and other forms of social con-
tribution, thereby extending economic citizenship beyond participants in the tra-
ditional labour market or ‘formal economy’ (see care, the New Economy). For
these reasons, among others, a Basic Income would produce far more democratic
and egalitarian societies than any capitalist society ever could, which is why it
receives support from many advocates of degrowth.
As well as a Basic Income – or income ‘floor’ – some degrowth advocates
also insist that there should be an income ‘ceiling’ – that is, an upper limit to the
size of any individual’s income. This is sometimes called a ‘maximum income,’
and like the Basic Income it could be achieved in various ways. For example, a
tax rate could increase progressively as the taxable income increases, culminating
in a 100 per cent tax on all income over a specified level. This would avoid the
creation of a stratified society of Basic Income recipients, on the one hand, and
148 Samuel Alexander

the super-rich, on the other. Such a policy also finds support in the voluminous
evidence showing that great inequalities of wealth are socially corrosive and that
more equal societies do better on a whole host of social and economic indicators
(Pickett and Wilkinson 2010). The ‘maximum income’ idea finds further justifica-
tion in the sociological research indicating that once basic material needs are met,
further increases in income contribute little if anything to subjective wellbeing or
happiness (Alexander 2012). What this research suggests is that high incomes are
essentially wasted so far as wellbeing is concerned, making a maximum income an
extremely important means of avoiding wasteful consumption and creating more
egalitarian societies. The tax procured from the maximum income could be used
to fund a basic income.

References
Alexander, S. (2011) ‘Property beyond Growth: Toward a Politics of Voluntary Simplicity’,
(doctoral thesis, University of Melbourne).
Alexander, S. (2012) ‘The Optimal Material Threshold: Toward an Economics of
Sufficiency’, Real-World Economics Review 61: 2–21.
Fitzpatrick, T. (1999) Freedom and Security: An Introduction to the Basic Income Debate, New
York: Palgrave.
Pickett, K. and Wilkinson, R. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger, London: Penguin.
Raventós, D. (2007) Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom, London: Pluto Press.
33
COMMUNITY CURRENCIES
Kristofer Dittmer
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Money is conventionally defined through its three main functions: a unit of


account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Currencies refer to the
medium of exchange function. Community currencies (CCs) are unconventional
monies, i.e. monies not being declared by any national government to be a legal
tender. CCs are created for a range of different purposes. With varying connota-
tions, they are also often referred to as alternative, complementary, or local cur-
rencies. An attempt at a strict definition appears inadvisable; however, the terms
refer to currencies that are mostly created by civil society and sometimes by public
authorities, circulating at subnational levels.
Since the early 1980s, there has been worldwide experimentation with com-
munity currencies at a scale unparalleled since the Great Depression. The five most
significant contemporary types are LETS (usually Local Exchange Trading System
or Scheme), time banks, HOURS, barter market currencies, and convertible local
currencies (see North 2010 for a book-length introduction). Many of these have
spread through the international green movement, for which they embody green
principles like “small is beautiful” and grassroots economics. However, the ideo-
logical legacy of community currencies goes back at least to nineteenth century
utopian socialists Owen and Proudhon’s attempts to construct more progressive
markets by means of monetary innovations. Contemporary experimentation with
community currencies within the Left can be understood as part of its reappraisal
of market-based approaches in view of the failure of central planning in socialist
countries. Community currencies are also favoured by right wing libertarians in
the tradition of E. C. Riegel, though more likely by other names such as “mutual
credit systems.”
The relevance of community currencies to degrowth depends on what is meant
by the latter. In one sense, degrowth can be thought of as an intentional departure
from growth-based society, meant to pre-empt further environmental destruction
150 Kristofer Dittmer

and human suffering. Alternatively, in the context of a long-term crisis of global


capitalism manifested as chronically deficient growth levels (a scenario that many
degrowth advocates consider likely for the not-too-distant future), degrowth can
be imagined as a socially equitable adaptation to a society without growth. Since
contemporary experimentation with community currencies has taken place within
the ordinary ups and downs of capitalism, their existing track record is of larger
relevance to the former scenario than the latter. According to this track record,
community currencies have not significantly facilitated any voluntary departure
from the growth path. Their potential for purposive degrowth can be assessed
with respect to four criteria which are among the most common motivations for
setting up and participating in community currency systems: community-building,
i.e. the resurrection and improvement of local social networks; advancing alter-
native values mediated through economic exchange (i.e. challenging mainstream
values regarding race, class, gender, and nature); facilitation of alternative livelihoods,
where larger self-determination over productive activity weakens the impera-
tive to seek employment irrespective of its environmental consequences; and eco-
localization, i.e. the ecologically and politically motivated localization of networks
of production and consumption. A recent review of the academic literature on
LETS, time banks, HOURS, and convertible local currencies found that the basis
for advocating them as tools for purposive degrowth was very weak judging by
their performance with respect to these four criteria (Dittmer 2013).
The relevance of community currencies to degrowth in the second sense is
more speculative, as there is no precedent for a long-term crisis of capitalism.
Existing experience does suggest that community currencies may have a role to
play in situations where increased restrictions on popular access to conventional
money generate widespread unmet needs together with idle productive capacities.
The usefulness of barter currency networks to millions of Argentineans during
the crisis of 2001–2 is the outstanding case in point (see e.g. Gómez 2009; North
2007). However, these networks were largely based on the second-hand exchange
of domestic possessions of the middle class, accumulated in previous years of rela-
tive wealth, and the networks were overwhelmed and collapsed partly because this
spare capacity had become exhausted. Fortunately, important welfare policies were
introduced by the government at this stage of the crisis. The mitigation of a more
long-term crisis, in which weaker welfare policies may be expected, would require
a much larger positive impact on broader productive sectors than achieved by the
Argentinean barter currencies.
A major challenge to the adoption of community currencies by formal produc-
tive sectors is the problem of overcoming the contradiction between the increased
access to resources that comes with large-scale circulation, and the difficulties of
currency management. Worldwide, community currencies have only escaped this
contradiction, to a limited extent, through backing the money supply with con-
ventional money; an unworkable solution in a situation of monetary drought. In
Argentina, the large-scale currencies that had served the overwhelming majority of
participants collapsed in hyperinflation from bad monetary management combined
Community currencies 151

with widespread forgery. As this illustrates, large-scale monetary systems require


vast amounts of financial and organizational resources, and it may be generalized
that stable ones have historically been the work of states (see also money, pub-
lic). This leaves little scope for the maintenance of materially significant currency
systems in a position of resistance against the state. However, in Argentina, some
smaller networks were able to continue despite the collapse of the larger ones. But
by then the worst phase of the crisis was over, so these networks were useful only
to a few people, often for social rather than economic reasons. Perhaps in a long-
term crisis, such smaller networks could play a more lasting role. Their potential
for democratic management, in contrast to unaccountable large-scale networks,
will sustain their attraction to many degrowth advocates. In a scenario of long-term
crisis of capitalism in which large populations were left to fend for themselves,
superfluous to the interests of governments and capitalists, community currencies
could become especially useful.

References
Dittmer, K. (2013) ‘Local Currencies for Purposive Degrowth? A Quality Check of some
Proposals for Changing Money-as-Usual’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 54: 3–13.
Gómez, G. M. (2009) Argentina’s Parallel Currency: The Economy of the Poor, London:
Pickering & Chatto.
North, P. (2007) Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
North, P. (2010) Local Money: How to Make it Happen in Your Community, Totnes: Transition
Books.
34
CO-OPERATIVES
Nadia Johanisova1, Ruben Suriñach Padilla2 and
Philippa Parry3
MASARYK UNIVERSITY, 2CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND
1

INFORMATION ON CONSUMPTION; 3FORUM FOR THE FUTURE SCHOLAR

The term co-operative (or co-op) refers to a type of organisational structure


applicable to various types of enterprises in many sectors. Many co-operatives also
see themselves as part of a worldwide movement which was born in Europe in the
mid-nineteenth century. The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA – a federa-
tion of co-operative networks representing one billion individuals) defines a co-
operative as an ‘autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their
common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-
owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.’ In 1995, the ICA accepted the
following seven co-operative principles: voluntary and open membership; demo-
cratic member control (the one-member-one-vote principle: members participate
in co-operative governance and elected representatives are accountable to them);
members’ economic participation; autonomy and independence; commitment to
education about the ethos and practice of co-operation; co-operation among co-
operatives; concern for the sustainable development of their communities (Birchall
1997: 64–71).
Co-operatives operate in a number of sectors and consist of three main types:
producer or worker co-ops (first developed in France and Italy), consumer co-ops
(first developed in the United Kingdom by the Rochdale Pioneers) and credit co-
ops or credit unions (first developed in Germany). Another important group are
farmers’ buying and selling co-ops (especially successful in Scandinavia).
Co-operatives have gone through a difficult history, co-opted by dictator-
ships (e.g. Spain under Franco, Czechoslovakia under communism), promoted
indiscriminately by many governments in the 1950s and 1960s, then reviled in
Central and Eastern Europe and many Global South countries under neoliberalism
(Birchall 1997: 143, 169). Some modern co-ops that began with a strong ethos
have since lost it and are predominantly motivated by profit. The reasons why so
Co-operatives 153

many successful co-operatives have lost their ethos and drifted close to the main-
stream are varied.
One cause is linked to economic pressures in a competitive environment. To
survive economically, a co-operative may decide to reduce its staff, out-source
production, or limit local and fair-trade ingredients in its products. Another root
cause involves scale. Growing co-operatives may find they cannot access enough
capital from their members under the strict co-operative rules. They may then dis-
card the co-op structure. In addition, as the turnover and membership of a co-op
grows and its management gets more complex, members may cease to identify
with it and become passive, while managers may usurp ever-more power. In some
large British building societies variants of this have led to a process of demutu-
alisation (‘carpet-bagging’), where members voted to transform themselves into
shared companies. Within the Austrian credit union movement, there have been
allegations of federations (umbrella-groups) usurping the decision-making power
of their member co-ops.
Ways of making sure that co-operatives stick to their ethos are varied. An
important factor is an emphasis on education about co-op principles and explicit
policies to strengthen member participation in management. Another is building
links between co-operatives to bypass the mainstream economy. This can involve
ethical and community investment institutions. Co-operatives that have what
Richard Douthwaite called a ‘community market’, such as the reader-members
of a co-operatively-owned newspaper or the client-members of community-
supported-agriculture schemes do not have to depend on price as the only motivation
for clients. Finally, opting for a strategy of replication (more smaller co-ops) rather than
growth (one large co-op) may help in retaining member empowerment and loyalty.
Compared to the mainstream for-profit enterprise model based on external
shareholder ownership, the co-operative enterprise model is more suited to a
degrowth economy due to the following (Johanisova and Wolf 2012: 565):

x Share ownership rules: shares which members have invested in their co-oper-
ative are usually not transferable to others and can normally only be redeemed
at their original value (‘par value shares’). This discourages a growth-for-
growth’s sake approach since the value of a member’s share does not increase
with the growth of the co-op. As shares cannot be speculated with, it also
makes for a more-long term and place-based membership, more likely to con-
sider long-term community and environmental values.
x Governance structure: the democratic governance structure opens the decision-
making arena to a wider spectrum of stakeholders. The co-operative structure
at its best collapses the distance between owners, shareholders, workers and
consumers and operates within a mutual-aid needs-satisfying logic.
x Money as ‘servant not master’: a co-operative is free from the requirements of
fiduciary duty (the legal obligation to maximise return to shareholders). Again,
this allows for objectives such as the prioritisation of the long-term existence
154 Nadia Johanisova, Ruben Suriñach Padilla and Philippa Parry

of the organisation, job protection and environmental concerns. Also, a co-


operative prioritising service to its members tends to satisfy real rather than
spurious needs. As the third co-operative principle emphasises that members
who work for the co-operative or otherwise actively engage with it have the
same right to a share in the profit as those who have invested money rather
than labour, financial assets are more equitably distributed within the co-op.

Few of the large mainstream co-ops and their federations have had any
interaction with degrowth and environmental movements and debates. At the
same time, there are two emerging areas that offer examples of newer co-operative
structures intertwined with degrowth ideas and practices.
First, the Solidarity Economy (or Social and Solidarity Economy) movement,
which is relatively young – only a few decades old – and has been boosted by
the anti-globalisation movement, integrates different approaches to social change,
linking social justice to environmental issues. The International Network for the
Promotion of the Social and Solidarity Economy (RIPESS) declared after the
Rio+20 summit held in June 2012:

many economic and social initiatives . . . exist on all continents . . . They


cover many sectors . . . and are the living proof of the concrete, vibrant
possibility to build different development models, forms of organisation and
society where life, plurality, self-management, environmental and social
justice define solidarity economy, an economy that is different from that of
capital.
(RIPESS 2012)

The dominant structure of the organisations represented by RIPESS is that of a


co-operative.
An example would be Som Energia, a Catalan renewable energy co-operative,
whose members source renewable energy via the co-op and can also invest in new
renewable energy projects (http://www.somenergia.coop, accessed 12 January
2014).
Second, there are many initiatives under what has been called ‘Grassroots
Innovations in Sustainability’ (GI). This concept describes a range of initiatives of
community self-organisation and has so far been applied mainly to Global North
countries. Grassroots Innovations develop production and consumption structures
based upon the values of community empowerment and sustainability (Seyfang
2009). They include local organic food networks and consumer groups, barter
markets and time banks, local currencies, community gardens, community hous-
ing, etc. GIs are often informal co-operative structures, which merge the values of
environmentalism and social justice (Suriñach-Padilla 2012). In European coun-
tries, degrowth-related movements have identified GI as one of the main politi-
cal means by which to achieve their goals (e.g. Decrece Madrid in Spain, or the
Transition Towns Movement worldwide).
Co-operatives 155

References
Birchall, J. (1997) The International Co-operative Movement. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Johanisova, N. and Wolf, S. (2012) ‘Economic Democracy: A Path for the Future?’, Futures,
44(6): 562–70.
Réseau Intercontinental de Promotion de l’Economie Social Solidaire (2012) The economy
we need: Declaration of the social and solidarity economy movement at Rio +20. Available online
at www.ripess.org/ripess-rio20-declaration/?lang=en (accessed 10 July, 2013).
Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change, Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan.
Suriñach-Padilla, R. (2012) ‘Innovaciones Comunitarias en Sostenibilidad, ¿Cómo lidera
la sociedad civil?’, p. 124–38 in CRIC (ed.) Cambio Global España 2020/50. Consumo y
estilos de vida, Barcelona, CCEIM.
35
DEBT AUDIT
Sergi Cutillas¹², David Llistar¹ and Gemma Tarafa¹²
¹OBSERVATORI DEL DEUTE EN LA GLOBALITZACIÓ (ODG)
²PLATAFORMA AUDITORIA CIUTADANA DEL DEUTE (PACD)

Debt is a moral obligation between persons. When indebted, a party must fulfil its
obligations to the other party. These obligations are often monetary in nature. At
times, they originate in circumstances that are unjust due to violence and the exer-
cise of undue power; such debts are illegitimate and should not be paid. The anti-
debt movement has raised awareness regarding the importance of citizen audits. In
these audits, citizens decide which debts are legitimate, who is responsible for these
debts and which debts should be abolished.
Powerful social classes use debt to maintain hierarchical order. This is accom-
plished by social customs and laws that prioritise debt repayment. There are records
since the Bronze age of protest movements aimed at reversing this unjust use of
debt. In Mesopotamia, peasants revolted often against a system whereby the non-
payment of obligations could lead to the enslavement of debtors and their family
members (Toussaint 2012). To preserve social order, the dominant classes peri-
odically annulled outstanding debts and restored peasants’ rights. There are many
other instances of debt cancellation in ancient Greece and Rome as well as medi-
eval times, in all cases result of social struggles that were exacerbated by crises
and increasing inequality. With the discovery of Americas and then the advent of
capitalism, there was a mobilization of massive manpower utilising debt, taxes
and inflation to coerce individuals to work as wage-labour. Debt kept the masses
obedient to those in power and mobilised them to work in order to pay off debts
and taxes. In this environment, practices such as debt cancellation became a taboo,
and the non-payment of debts was associated with humiliation and the loss of social
rights.
Dominance in our times is secured by international institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, founded in 1944 to
promote global development. The neoliberal period of deregulation, not least of
financial flows and products, which began in the 1970s, has led to Financialization,
Debt audit 157

a new phase of capitalism in which the financial sphere has become superior to
and controls the productive sphere. Financialization is associated with a marked
increase in the generation of debt and the formation of complex financial relation-
ships that reproduce imperialism by providing a pretext for applying pressure or
resorting to violent measures if an indebted or financially dependent state does not
adhere to the conditions imposed by the dominant powers.
Debt has fuelled material and energetic growth and the payment of debts has
legitimated this growth. But this might be coming to an end as debt is growing
much more rapidly than material wealth. Kallis et al. (2009) hypothesize that limits
in the ‘real-real economy’ (Oikonomía) of energy, materials and reproduction are
limiting the growth of the ‘real’ economy of production. Growth has been main-
tained, but only for a while, by producing paper wealth in the financial sphere of
capital circulation. This framework links debt and degrowth. First, while growth
is considered necessary to pay debts, in reality debt is created in the first place to
sustain an unsustainable growth. Second, distributing debts equitably and cancel-
ling illegitimate debts is necessary for a sustainable ‘way down’, i.e. a prosperous
and not a forced degrowth based on austerity. This is the goal of Citizen Audits.
The origins of contemporary debt audit movements are traceable to global coa-
litions of civic campaigns, such as Jubilee 2000, CADTM (Committee for the Abolition
of Third World Debt) and Jubilee South, created in the early 1990s to lobby for the
cancellation of large portions of the debt accumulated by the world’s most impov-
erished countries in the Global South. Over time, and since 2007 when the crisis
hit the ‘North’, the movement has adopted an increasingly global and multidi-
mensional outlook that recognizes also the ecological limits of the planet. Citizen
debt audits, which have arisen in this context, have identified as illegitimate those
debts which are produced by an order based on the abuse of power and which
contribute to the continued function of this unjust order (Ramos 2006). Norway
and Ecuador are two emblematic precedents to consider. In 2006, after consider-
ing its responsibilities as a co-creditor, the Norwegian government cancelled the
debts owed to Norway by seven countries. In 2007, Ecuador’s Public Credit Audit
Commission (CAIC) conducted an audit of Ecuador’s debt and declared this debt
to be illegitimate.
These examples are instances of mixed audits, which are conducted by elements
of civic society and by the government. Brazil and the Philippines, among other
countries, have conducted debt audits driven solely by civic movements. In Egypt,
Tunisia, Greece, Portugal and Ireland, social movements have begun the process
of conducting civic audits or have pressured governments to institute public debt
audits. Each of these cases features a common protest: a desire to determine how
debts were generated, which individuals are responsible for the generation of the
relevant debts and what effects these debts produce. Movements demand account-
ability from the responsible parties and propose alternative economic models to
turbo-capitalism. Civic audits usually include the following stages: accessing
information, data analysis, advocacy, networking, dissemination, public education
and the prosecution of responsible parties.
158 Sergi Cutillas, David Llistar and Gemma Tarafa

In Spain, a civic audit process is being conducted with the support of the
Citizen Debt Audit Platform (PACD). PACD performs general analyses of Spanish
national debt, at different administrative levels and concurrently conducts sector
specific debt assessments (with respect to healthcare, education, environment or
electricity). These efforts aim to promote audits as a way of understanding the
causes and consequences of the debt crisis. An integral part of this process is the
demand to have permanent access to debt-related information and, most impor-
tantly, the promotion of civic empowerment with respect to political, social and
economic questions. PACD regards its audit as a citizen’s audit involving an open,
collective, permanent and decentralized process in which different organically cre-
ated working groups reach decisions based on consensus. This type of audit is not
limited to expert analysis but allows all parties to request information, demand
governmental explanations, share relevant information, analyse data from their par-
ticular perspectives, denounce irregularities and propose alternatives.

References
Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melvillehouse.
Kallis, G., Martinez-Alier, J. and Norgaard, R. B. (2009) ‘Paper Assets, Real Debts: An
Ecological-Economic Exploration of the Global Economic Crisis’. Critical Perspectives on
International Business, 5(1/2): 14–25.
Plataforma Auditoría Ciudadana de la Deuda (2013) ‘¿Por qué no debemos pagar la deuda?’.
Razones y alternativas. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial.
Ramos, L. (2006) Los crímenes de la deuda: deuda ilegítima. Barcelona: ODG & Icaria Editorial.
Toussaint, E. (2012) The Long Tradition of Debt Cancellation in Mesopotamia and Egypt from
3000 to 1000 BC. CADTM. Available online at http://cadtm.org/The-Long-Tradition-
of-Debt (accessed 10 October 2013).
36
DIGITAL COMMONS
Mayo Fuster Morell
INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC POLICIES, AUTONOMOUS
UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA AND BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

With the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs), com-


munities of individuals are following common goals and are collaboratively build-
ing resources through technologically mediated communication (Benkler 2006).
We define as digital commons (DC) those “online creation communities” (OCCs)
which share non-exclusive digital information and knowledge resources that
are collectively created. Generally these resources are owned and/or used freely
between or among the community, and are also available for use by third parties.
They are used and reused but not exchanged as commodities. The people who
are part of an online community that is building and sharing digital commons can
intervene in the governance of their interaction processes and shared resources
(Fuster Morell 2010).
A first root of the digital commons community is the hacking culture. The
hacker ethic is characterized by a passion for creating and sharing knowledge. In
the 1950s most software circulated freely between developers. However, in the
1970s a proprietary sense towards software started to grow. In order to preserve the
free character of the software Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software move-
ment) established the “General Public License,” a legal frame for free software.
Another root of the DC and cyber-culture more generally, is the counter-cultural
movement of the 1960s (Turner 2006). Back-to-the-landers communities were
among the first to see a social use for the Internet and created “virtual” communi-
ties such as The Well, which influenced digital culture. Environmentalism and
ecology were important inspirations – present in the language, terminology, and
ecosystemic thinking of Internet communities.
The spread of the Internet and personal computers lowered barriers, and expres-
sions of a new “free culture” emerged, with the aim of collaboratively creating cul-
tural content and generating universal access to knowledge. The most well-known
example is Wikipedia.
160 Mayo Fuster Morell

Another prominent case of file-sharing and peer-to-peer architecture that facili-


tates access and exchange of cultural products is the Swedish Pirate Bay.
DC ideals have also reached the scientific world, with struggles over access to
anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS in South Africa during the 1990s and the
movement to reclaim the public character of research through open access, such as
the Public Library of Science, an open access set of scientific journals.
Finally, social movements against “software patents” have been able to stop the
creation of such patents in Europe. A huge range of legislative efforts to put the
Internet under the control of corporate interests has been stopped in Europe and
elsewhere.
After the “dot-com” crash in 2001, a new commercial model – ex-post known
as the information economy, Web 2.0, or Wikinomics – emerged, which was
based on providing services and infrastructures for online collaboration (Tapscott
and Williams 2007). Examples include YouTube, provided by Google, and Flickr
(a photo sharing platform), provided by Yahoo. Such sites popularized online col-
laborative infrastructure but changed the conditions of their use from a logic of
commons to one where corporations are the main providers. In digital commons
such as Wikipedia, the community is involved in infrastructure provision and has
more control over the design of the process. Under corporate logic, most sources
of control are in the hands of the infrastructure provider, and the community of
users is mostly disempowered. For example, with Flickr the community does not
have control over the design of the platform, does not participate to the decision-
making mechanism of the site, and cannot define the rules that govern community
interaction.
There are several commonalities between degrowth and the digital commons
movement. Both question the mainstream paradigm of consumption. The digital
commons promote the figure of “prosumer” (producer-consumer), an individual
who partakes in the online community and “consumes” value, but also produces
value. Products and value are not a commodity, but accessible as public services.
Indeed, the digital commons realize degrowth’s call for de-commodification.
Moreover, in digital commons, there is open access to the value created, which is
universally accessible (without establishing discrimination mechanism others than
internet connectivity and “visibility”). Finally, the production or creation of the
common resource is not driven by commercial motivations and labor contracts,
but by voluntary engagement. The access to the value produced is separated from
its production. Some sectors of the digital commons movement have also called for
a basic income or they promote social online currencies (see community cur-
rencies) to reduce dependency on monetary exchange. Digital commoners, like
degrowthers are critical of and resist advertising (see for example Wikipedia, where
the commitment to zero advertising is one of the online community’s strongest
principles).
Additionally, in DC the means of production are under the control of the com-
munities aiming to cover its social necessities and its common mission, in contrast
to capitalism where they are privately-held and serve the aim of profit. In DC,
Digital commons 161

information and knowledge are conceived of as part of our human heritage and
access to knowledge is a human right. DC therefore contest neoliberal visions that
try to restrict access to knowledge (through its privatization or commodification).
Unlike traditional commons, the new technologies of information and
communication provide accessibility to information and knowledge that is not
rivaled nor exhaustible. On the other hand, DC depends on an infrastructure that
consumes and contributes to the exhaustion of environmental resources (scarce
materials for mobile phones, electricity for the computers, cables in oceans, elec-
tromagnetic camps). Although some in the digital commons movement are sen-
sitive to questions of environmental impact, this is not a predominant issue in
the movement’s agenda and is something it has much to learn from degrowthers.
Energetics and energy limitations also do not feature in DC communities, which
generally have an optimistic view of the capacities of cooperation and commu-
nication-based productivity improvements to maintain economic development.
However, beyond such differences concerning environmental questions, or the
degrowthers’ imaginary of “less” that the DC movement does not share, DC and
degrowth meet one another in their call for a paradigmatic shift in value produc-
tion and consumption and the reclaim and re-politicization of the commons.

References
Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Fuster Morell, M. (2010) Governance of Online Creation Communities, (Ph.D. thesis ed.),
European University Institute.
Tapscott, D. and Williams, A. (2007) Wikinomics. Portfolio, New York, NY: Penguin.
Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
37
DISOBEDIENCE
Xavier Renou
LES DÉSOBÉISSANTS COLLECTIVE

Civil disobedience is a political method of resistance which consists in a collective


action of disobedience to a law considered unjust. To be “civil,” as US intellectual
Henry David Thoreau (2008) in the nineteenth century called his first actions of
resistance to the war against Mexico, one must be willing to break the law in the
name of conscience. To Thoreau, this would never be an act of delinquency done
secretly for individual interests, but must be perpetuated openly. In the twentieth
century, the Indian activist and leading figure of civil disobedience, Gandhi (2012),
added a crucial dimension: an exclusive stance of non-violence which entailed the
will (the result being always beyond will) to harm the adversary, his or her human
person and psychology, as well as his or her family and goods, as little as possible.
He rejected the old, ends justify the means view. To Gandhi, the ends were in the
means; it was not possible to achieve just goals with unjust means. He considered
non-violent means the only way to convince the public that his ends were just and
that the struggle should therefore be supported.
Quite near to civil disobedience are the concepts of direct action and consci-
entious objection, also called non-cooperation, a possible first step towards civil
disobedience and the collective organization of one’s refusal. The French La Boetie
(2012), in the sixteenth century, expressed the idea that in order to keep oppress-
ing the people, tyrants need their cooperation: the tyrant never has enough police
to force every single subject to constantly obey orders. In other words, the tyrant
needs our cowardly acceptance and daily obedience to maintain power. Stopping
to cooperate with what offends our consciousness is therefore a moral obligation
and a principle of coherence. Direct action is the twofold idea that we should act
directly when offended, without waiting for others (such as elected people) to act
in our name. The concept holds that we should act directly on problems and their
origin. Non-violent direct action is a version of this political strategy. It strictly
prohibits the use of violence and therefore greatly resembles the concept of civil
Disobedience 163

disobedience but without the necessity to break any law. When one disobeys an
unjust law this is indeed a non-violent direct action: building dry toilets in one’s
home as a form of resistance to water contamination is also a non-violent direct
action, although perfectly legal.
In the past, civil disobedience proved to be a powerful tool to fight for equal
rights (women’s, gay and lesbian’s and Blacks’ emancipation), labor rights, inde-
pendence (such as India and Zambia), peace (such as opposition to nuclear bomb
testing, to the Vietnam war), and political liberation (the fall of numerous Western,
Eastern, and recently Arabic dictatorships).
Civil disobedience shares a lot with the degrowth idea and movement. Thanks
to a growing awareness, an increasing number of struggles involving civil disobe-
dience and non-violent direct actions have been influenced by, if not conducted
in the name of, degrowth-related values, visions, or claims. These have included
actions to stop mining projects, to introduce radical changes in energy and water
policies (anti-privatization of water movements in Italy, France, Greece), to oppose
major infrastructural projects of airports, highways and fast train railways (Spain, Italy,
France), etc. As it is sometimes necessary to disobey to live according to degrowth
principles, some struggles involving civil disobedience have been directly initiated
by degrowth activists. For example, in France in 2011, squatter camps were installed
in several cities and successfully opposed a law targeting free housing (tents, cara-
vans, squats) and the right to self-build one’s home. The mass mobilization against
the introduction of genetically modified crops in France by the end of the 1990,
which saw hundreds of people taking part in the uprooting of GM fields, was largely
motivated by degrowth (and the same in Spain and Belgium), as was the battle for
the right to grow and trade traditional seeds (following an international campaign of
civil disobedience called “Act for Seeds,” initiated by Indian activist Vandana Shiva).
Civil disobedience has been used against advertising (with activists provoking trials
by painting billboards) or new intrusive technologies (neo-luddite mobilizations such
as those against nanotechnologies in the UK and France). In the emblematic case of
Catalan degrowth activist Enric Duran, acts of “financial civil disobedience” were
directly aimed at sponsoring degrowth. Duran openly “expropriated” (in his own
words) 492,000 euros from 39 banks, drawing attention to the unsustainable Spanish
credit and banking system, just before the crisis imploded in 2008. Duran, who used
the money to fund alternative movements and projects, including many related to
degrowth, declared that he had no intention to repay the debt and was prepared to
face the consequences and go to jail.
These political struggles remind degrowth activists that fighting the law through
civil disobedience might be necessary. They will not save themselves by chang-
ing their way of life while the world around them is collapsing, and they will not
defeat capitalism and productivism only by the virtue of their example, as the
“utopian socialists” of the nineteenthcentury or the hippies of the 1970s thought
they could do.
On the other hand, civil disobedience and non-violent direct actions are pri-
marily methods and tactics and are sometimes chosen by activists who have nothing
164 Xavier Renou

to do with environmental and progressive values, such as anti-abortion activists.


Nonetheless, tactics are not neutral and can’t be successful if not supported by
strong values. These values are often very close to those of degrowth supporters.
First, the value of direct action, including the rule of direct democracy, often refers
to consensus-based decision-making processes and leaderless movements. Second,
the value of a pragmatic approach relates to keeping an open mind to differences
and the choice of realistic and reachable objectives, with trial-and-errors-based
processes as opposed to dogmatic postures and too abstract and unrealistic objec-
tives. Third, because activists know they can be wrong just like anybody and they
know they can be misled by their conscience, they choose not to cause damages
that would be irreversible – as damages provoked by the use of violence are – by
practicing non-violence against humans. This non-violence includes, increasingly,
life and goods in general.
Last, it is the search for coherence between values and actions which has driven
some of the main figures in the history of civil disobedience to live according to
principles strongly resembling those of degrowth: Thoreau practiced and advo-
cated self-sustainability, Tolstoï and Gandhi distributed their goods and embraced
sobriety. The three of them shared a strong concern for the environment and all
living creatures. Gandhi also insisted on the need for campaigns of civil disobedi-
ence driven by a pragmatic, alternative/constructive program. Obstructive pro-
grams of civil disobedience get more momentum and strength if stimulated by
a constructive program and positive alternatives to oppression that show what a
victory could lead to.
Many civil disobedience activists consider degrowth to be a constructive pro-
gram of that sort, a possible response to what they’re struggling against, which is
often capitalism. Degrowth-related solutions were articulated with civil disobedi-
ence in most of the recent campaigns mentioned previously, with encampments
involving collective kitchens based on vegan, organic, or recycled free food, alter-
native moneys or bartering, dry toilets and solar powered low technology showers,
etc. These acts of disobedience prove that it is possible to create strong resistance
and build up degrowth-compatible alternatives, both at the same time.

References
de la Boetie, E. (2012) Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett
Publishing Co.
Gandhi, M. K. (2012) Autobiography. The Story of my Experiments with Truth, CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform. Available online at www.createspace.com (accessed
April 3 2013).
Thoreau, H. D. (2008) On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Radford, Virginia: Wilder
Publications.
38
ECO-COMMUNITIES
Claudio Cattaneo
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY),
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Eco-communities are specifically planned and set up for people to come and live
together with the goal of living and working according to ecological principles by
promoting a degree of sharing (see also work-sharing) and pursuing well-being
through more sustainable life-styles, direct democracy and a degree of autonomy.
Eco-communities include eco-villages, which according to Gilman (1991: 10)
are characterized by ‘human-scale, full-featured settlement, in which human activi-
ties are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of
healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite
future’. Although eco-villages represent the most common form, eco-communities
can also be established in isolated buildings or within cities (some of them in forms
of co-housing).
Eco-communities are generally characterized by their relatively small size –
below or around one hundred people. There are both urban and ‘rurban’ projects,
yet the majority of eco-communities are located in rural areas where access to
natural means of production is easier and rent and property cheaper. Participants
practice small-scale organic agriculture and permaculture, craft and workshop
production, self-construction or DIY practices and favour renewable energies
or energy-conserving means of production and transport, such as bicycles (c.f.
Nowtopias). Materials and production processes tend to be low-impact and often
items are recycled from waste or re-used or repaired. The conjunct of these types of
agricultural, material and service provisioning expresses the idea of convivial places
where the means of production are held in common (Illich 1973, see conviviality).
Eco-communities can be considered as both material and immaterial com-
mons because they manage land and physical resources communally while, at the
same time, set norms, beliefs, institutions and processes that empower a common
identity which in turn contributes to the preservation and reproduction of the
community.
166 Claudio Cattaneo

Willing to set-up places where tthey can live and cultivate their own utopian
ideals, their participants form part often of a back-to-the-landers wave inspired
in magazines such as In Context or Integral (in Spanish). The movement originated
in the 1960s, and in 1994 the Global Ecovillage Network was constituted.
Some remarkable examples, which also constitute different typologies of eco-
communities, are: The Farm, in Tennessee, on a property communally bought by
vegan Californian hippies; Twin Oaks, an egalitarian rural community in Virginia
based on a structured labour-credit system (Kinkaid, 1994); Lakabe, a squatted
village in the Basque Region with a communally-managed commercial bakery;
and Longomai, a pragmatic out-spring of the May 1968 movement, with a main
property in South France and several satellite communities bought elsewhere in
France, Switzerland and Germany.
Utopian values are manifest in the creation of a group identity, in the sharing
of certain cultural and political ideals (also spiritual ideals sometimes), and in the
establishment of organizational practices that might include anything from simple
residential living to developing a common life project.
An eco-community constitutes a particular entity that exists between the indi-
vidual and the larger society. They are characterized by their environmental (eco-)
and social dimensions (community), which, in combination, are considered by
eco-commoners to be largely missing from living arrangements in (post-) industrial
societies.
There is a lot of variation among communities with respect to the relevance of
the individual sphere within the community and degrees of autonomy from the
rest of society. These constitute challenging issues in the development of every
eco-community project.
Bridging the individual/family scale and the large societal scale, eco-communi-
ties are internally constituted by self-organized decision-making processes which,
among other things, determine the nature and ecological dimension of the project
and the integration between individual and communal economies. Normally, hor-
izontal decision-making and deliberative non-representative processes characterize
eco-communities, while some adopt consensus rather than majority decision rules.
Eco-communities are in a sense Aristotelian oikonomies (referring to the art of
the good life and, literally, to “managing the house”). Money does not play a
primary role; it is simply a means to satisfy necessities. Eco-communities prevent
accumulation because the community guarantees the maintenance of a certain level
of welfare to all its members. The type of economic model varies a lot among
communities. Some share all money among members, others maintain a strong
individual economic sphere. A study of rural squats, which can be considered
a particular case of an eco-community, postulates the existence of a correlation
between a community’s degree of isolation and its degree of communalism. Eco-
communities closer to large cities are more likely to maintain a higher degree of
personal (monetary) economies (Cattaneo 2013).
The sources of monetary income vary a lot. In general, principles of co-
operative self-management prevail and the eco-community collectively
Eco-communities 167

produces commodities that can be sold in place or off-site, for instance at


market-fairs. Larger communities, such as Logomai in France, depend on
fundraising and, increasingly, crowd-funding. Eco-communities with a high
degree of financial integration among their members function as ‘integral co-
operatives’, where workers, producers and consumers are embedded within
the same organization.
Eco-communities provide insights as to how a degrowth society might look.
Any realization of utopian intentions depends on a strong willingness and a prag-
matism that might clash with original ideals. In the start-up phases (relevant for the
beginning of a societal transition) getting things done is the priority: in such dif-
ficult circumstances self-imposed austerity and self-exploitation of members often
occur. Through self-organized processes, an eco-community chooses to live inde-
pendent from society at large. As Marcuse has observed in One-Dimensional Man, a
society freed from external control and manipulation will be able to self-determine
its need satisfiers; participants choose to become protagonists of their lives and
foment a degrowth imaginary by conferring to the community the source of eco-
nomic and socio-political authority normally found in capitalist markets and in the
state apparatus.
If the community survives this initial phase, then a degrowth practice made of
sound ecological performance and social conviviality is likely to emerge. There is
no empirical data for eco-communities on the trends in material and energy con-
sumption over time. A plausible hypothesis is that most eco-communities start with
a drastic fall in personal material and energy consumption but as they enter into
a mature phase more comfortable, though not more sustainable, living conditions
replace more precarious ones (although the former still conserve more resources
when compared to society on average).
Eco-communities develop practices of voluntary simplicity. Although this
forms part of the degrowth imaginary, some simplifiers can be criticized because
they avoid engagement with societal problems and political actions. Generally, eco-
communities cannot be characterized as political or a-political. At one extreme,
some can be considered as ‘lifeboats’, with a clear limit and ‘closed borders’, while
in others, particularly those characterized by radical left-wing political ideals, mem-
bers are more aware of the need to cooperate beyond boundaries and promote
universal societal change. Most eco-communities are aware of their limited power
and endorse a philosophy similar to that of Holloway about ‘changing the world
without taking power’. This can occur through the constitution and consolidation
of bottom-bottom networks – rather than bottom-up processes – that contribute
to strategically leaving the system (Carlsson and Manning 2010) in increasingly
larger numbers and to the consequent shrinkage in the role, size and power played
by the establishment. The enlargement of these practices to larger sectors of society
other than those inhabited by ecologically attentive persons has not occurred yet.
The enduring economic and ecological crisis might be an opportunity to foment
more eco-communities and create a social phenomenon that will go beyond the
counter-cultural movement that preceded it.
168 Claudio Cattaneo

References
Carlsson, C. and Manning, F. (2010) ‘Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?’ Antipode, 42(4), 924–53
Cattaneo, C. (2013) ‘Urban squatting, rural squatting and the ecological-economic perspective’,
In: Squatting Europe Kollective (ed) Squatting in Europe, Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles.
London, New York: Minor compositions – Autonomedia. Available online at: www.
minorcompositions,info/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/squattingeurope-web.pdf
(accessed 11 December 2013).
Gilman, R. (1991) ‘The eco-village challenge’. Context Institute. Available online at www.
context.org/iclib/ic29/gilman1/ (accessed 14 May 2014).
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. Available online at http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_
conviviality/ (accessed 12 October 2013).
Kinkaid, K. (1994) Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community in Its Twenty-
Sixth Year, 2nd edition. Louisa, Virginia: Twin Oaks Publishing.
39
INDIGNADOS (OCCUPY)
Viviana Asara¹ and Barbara Muraca²
¹RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
²SOCIOLOGY INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF JENA

The Indignados or Occupy movement is an ongoing social movement that began


in 2011 in many different countries to protest against austerity policies, high rates
of unemployment, worsening trends of social inequalities, and the collusion of
government politics with the interests of corporate and financial capitalism, while
campaigning for “real” democracy and social justice. Although the two move-
ments refer to two separate dynamics that originated respectively in Spain and in
the United States and then spread to other countries, they share similar claims, the
methodology of occupations of urban space, and the use of assemblearian direct
democracy.
At the beginning of 2011, in Spain, a new platform of different collectives and
networks, named “Real Democracy Now”, published a manifesto on Facebook
and called for a demonstration on May 15th with the slogan “we are not mer-
chandize in the hands of politicians and bankers.” In the manifesto, the activists
declared themselves to be outraged (the Spanish term for indignados) at the “dic-
tates of big economic powers,” party dictatorship, the dominance of economism,
social injustices, and the corruption of politicians, bankers, and businessmen. Their
call successfully brought to the streets tens of thousands of people in 50 cities
throughout Spain, and, following the demonstration, occupations spread out in
a few days to more than 800 cities around the world. In Spain, many encamp-
ments continued until June or July, producing a rich debate and proliferation of
working groups, commissions, and, in many cities, a long and difficult process of
elaboration of a consensus concerning the minimal demands of the mobilization.
The Barcelona-manifesto included the following demands: no more privileges for
politicians, bankers, and big incomes, decent salary and quality of life for all, the
right to a home, quality of public services, liberties (connected to freedom of infor-
mation and expression in internet), direct democracy, and environment. After the
(not always) voluntary removal of the camps, some working groups, commissions,
170 Viviana Asara and Barbara Muraca

and assemblies continued to be operative, and neighborhood assemblies gained


in importance, periodically gathering in spaces of coordination. The movement
entered into a more latent phase, gaining visibility in general strikes and demon-
strations, such as the symbolic “surrounding” of the Parliament in September 2012.
The manifesto for the first anniversary of the movement included claims such as
the refusal of bail-out for banks, a citizens’ audit of the debt, public education,
economic redistribution and basic income, work redistribution, the refusal of
precarious work, and the valuation of reproductive, domestic, i.e. care work.
The Occupy Wall Street movement initiated on September 17, 2011 with the
occupation by roughly one hundred people of the Zuccotti Park, in Manhattan’s
financial district. Massive occupations surged after the Adbusters magazine pub-
lished a call in July to occupy Wall Street, and occupations mushroomed in many
American cities, continuing until November. Some of the main issues Occupy
Wall Street raised included an equal distribution of wealth, a reform of the bank-
ing system, a reduction of the political influence of corporations, and the need to
change the system to address issues of injustice and inequality.
Both movements share similar structure and organization of the internal deci-
sion processes: the General Assembly (GA) is the (open) apparatus that owns
decision-making power. Specific issues are dealt with by commissions and work-
ing groups, which periodically report to the GA. Decisions are most of the times
taken by consensus, which can also be visualized with a system of hand signals.
The “medium of assemblearian occupations” mirrors the core claim for a “real”
democracy and embodies in a prefigurative way the implementation of consensus-
oriented basis-democratic forms of decision-making and self-management. The
current representational system of democracy is critiqued as a corrupted “plutoc-
racy” or “corporate-party system” subdued to the interests of financial capitalism
and denounced as unable to represent the will of the people.
Like other social movements before them, Occupy and Indignados constitute
a significant arena where different conceptions of democracy can meet and be
experimented, with an explicit challenge to the minimalist, individualistic, and
liberal vision of liberal democracy (Della Porta 2013). While some activists call for
the generalization of direct democratic-assemblearian system and self-organization
to replace parliamentarian systems, others seek to strengthen actual participation
within institutional politics and to improve representation mechanisms by a reform
of the electoral laws with injections of direct democracy at the local level.
The implementation of a ‘real’ democracy, however, implies more than the trans-
formation of forms of representation and of political decision making: social rights
and redistribution of wealth are necessary conditions for people to really and effec-
tively participate in democratic processes. While current democracies are hijacked
by economic powers, real democracy requires economic democracy, i.e. the demo-
cratic (self) management of neighborhoods, work, and production. Real democracy,
accordingly, is “to imagine a democracy in all the realms of life” (see Asara, 2014).
Far from being merely a reaction to austerity policies and to the undemo-
cratic character of (liberal) representative democracies, the Indignados movement
Indignados (Occupy) 171

embodies a more radical, cultural critique of contemporary societies with respect to


their values of productivism, economism, individualism, and consumerism. There
is quite evidently common ground between Indignados/Occupy and the degrowth
movement: the claim for a systemic change is, as in most degrowth perspectives,
compounded with the perception of an undergoing systemic multi-dimensional
crisis, which includes not only political and economic, but also ecological and cul-
tural (value) dimensions. Instead of protesting for a resumed growth, both plead for
different socio-economic models in which degrowth claims are intertwined with
redistributive and social justice appeals (Asara 2014). The prefigurative politics of
the movement and its imaginary significations, such as the occupations, encamp-
ments, and reclaims of public squares, the urban orchards, the collective kitchens
and cleanings of the occupied spaces, or the free and barter exchange markets, are
also primary significations of degrowth.
The current crisis marks a turning point in the fragile alliance between democ-
racy and capitalism as we know it: indeed, such an alliance seems to have been
rather conjunctural to the virtuous relationship between economic growth and the
welfare state and to the mediation of political mass parties and party competition
(Offe 1984; Macpherson 1977). In the meantime, while the former promise of
prosperity and freedom attached to economic growth no longer holds, policies
aiming at austerity as a means to growth as the sole remedy to the crisis are jeop-
ardizing democracy itself.
The hegemonic neoliberal program, however, seems to be undergoing a legiti-
mation crisis with respect to its ability to consolidate a large consensus. How far
social movements like Indignados or Occupy might start building the core for a
counter-hegemonic block is too early to say. Yet, they could become the spring-
board for a long-term transformation due to their original recipe: the success-
ful merging of contentious forms of opposition with creative practices, in which
feasible alternatives are collectively experimented and improved; the pluralistic
openness of decision making processes that can become a platform for a larger
consensus; the shared and on-going articulation of an alternative value system; and
the ability to global networking and communication. Their “prefigurative politics”
that try to build “here and now” societal alternative visions, have a strong, attrac-
tive potential.

References
Asara, V. 2014. ‘The Indignados movement. Framing the crisis and democracy’. Forthcoming
in Sociology.
Della Porta, D. (2013) Can democracy be saved? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (1977) The life and times of liberal democracy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the welfare state. London: Hutchinson & Co.
40
JOB GUARANTEE
B. J. Unti
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

A job guarantee (JG) is a policy proposal calling on government to promise a job to


any qualifying person seeking employment. The proposal stems from the recogni-
tion that capitalist economies are characterized by chronic involuntary unemploy-
ment. While several versions of the program have been proposed, the most general
approach calls for a universal guarantee, with the national government providing
the funds necessary to offer a uniform wage and benefit package to anyone will-
ing and able to work (Mitchell 1998; Wray 1998, 2012). Most proposals also call
for a decentralized administration of the program, relying on local governments,
non-profits, and community organizations to propose and oversee JG projects. The
wage and benefit package is set by the national government and serves as a floor for
wages throughout the economy. With the floor price of labor set, the quantity of
labor that the government promises to purchase is allowed to float over the busi-
ness cycle. Consequently, the government’s deficit automatically moves counter-
cyclically in just the right amount to maintain full employment.
The idea of a JG appeared as early as the 1930s. Just as the central bank acted
as a lender of last resort, it was argued that the treasury should act as an employer
of last resort (Wray 2012: 222). Building on the works of Keynes, Lerner, and
Minsky over the last two decades, economists associated with the Center for Full
Employment and Price Stability (CFEPS) at the University of Missouri – Kansas
City, the Center of Full Employment and Equality (CofFEE) at the University of
New Castle, and the Levy Economics Institute in New York, have refined propos-
als for a JG.
Advocates of the JG argue that its benefits extend beyond simply creating jobs.
Eliminating unemployment will help to address related social and economic prob-
lems such as poverty, inequality, crime, divorce, domestic violence, discrimination,
mental illness, and drug abuse (Wray and Forstater 2004). While existing welfare
programs (as well as proposals for a basic income) aim to address similar issues,
Job guarantee 173

proponents of the JG point out that such programs carry the stigma of dependence
without ensuring that those who are willing to work can find work. A JG will not
only offer jobs to the unemployed, but also training, skills, and work experience.
Most importantly, by making employment and not merely income a right, a JG
will provide those who want to work with an opportunity to participate produc-
tively in their communities. The benefits of the program are not limited to its
participants. A JG will also improve working conditions in the private sector: since
private sector workers always have the option of entering the JG, private employers
will be forced to provide pay, benefits, and conditions at least on par with those of
the program (Wray 2012: 223–4). In this regard, a JG can serve as a tool for achiev-
ing a variety of policy goals. With respect to degrowth for example, the JG might
initiate a four-day workweek, pressuring private employers to follow suit. Last, JG
work can be directed toward provisioning society with needed public goods and
services not produced by the private sector.
The two most common objections to the JG relate to inflation and afford-
ability. Conventional wisdom holds that full employment and price stability are
incompatible goals because tight labor markets place upward pressure on wages and
prices. Thus, unemployment is viewed as the necessary cost of fighting inflation.
However, JG advocates argue that the program will increase price stability by creat-
ing a buffer stock of workers employed in the program, allowing for loose labor
markets at full employment (Mitchell 1998; Wray 1998). Under a JG, government
promises to buy all labor offered at a floor price and to “sell” labor to the private
sector at any price above the floor. The buffer stock of workers in the JG acts like
a reserve army of the employed, providing the flexibility required by a dynamic
economy (Forstater 1998). During an expansion wage pressures are held in check
as the government “sells” labor. If the pool of JG workers becomes too small to
restrain inflationary wage demands, the government can cut discretionary spend-
ing or raise taxes, replenishing the buffer stock. On the downside of the cycle, the
buffer stock places a floor under incomes and aggregate demand, counteracting
deflationary pressures. Finally, because labor is a key input into the production of
all goods, stabilizing its price will help to stabilize prices throughout the economy
(Wray 2012: 224).
Several estimates of the monetary cost of a JG program (calculated prior to the
financial crisis) put total expenses at less than 1 percent of GDP for the US. Much
of the monetary cost will be offset by reductions in spending on other programs
such as unemployment insurance and welfare (Wray 1998). More importantly,
proponents of the JG argue following modern money theory (MMT) that a sov-
ereign currency government can always finance a JG. The perceived problem of
affordability arises from a false analogy in neoclassical theory between government
and household finances. This analogy overlooks the fact that while households
are users of the currency, the government is the issuer of the currency (see public
money). Because the government is the monopoly issuer of the currency, it must
as a matter of logic, issue money (i.e. spend) first in order to collect it back through
taxes or bond sales. This stands conventional wisdom on its head – the government
174 B. J. Unti

does not need the public’s money in order to spend, rather the public needs the
government’s money in order to pay taxes or purchase bonds. And because a sov-
ereign government spends by issuing money, it can always afford to buy anything
for sale denominated in its own currency, including all unemployed labor (Wray
1998; 2012).
A JG is consistent with degrowth on multiple fronts. Most obviously its poten-
tial relates to issues of social and economic justice. Indeed, the program was origi-
nally conceived with a narrow focus on the problem of unemployment. However,
reconsidered in light of environmental decline, the JG presents unique possibilities
for simultaneously addressing socioeconomic and environmental issues.
In the near term, a JG offers a means for reconciling the apparent contradiction
between employment and the environment faced by capitalist societies. Unlike tra-
ditional policies that rely on increasing aggregate demand and accelerated growth
to stimulate employment, a JG guarantees full employment regardless of the level
of aggregate demand. Decoupling employment from aggregate demand allows for
full employment even as growth ceases or becomes negative.
In the longer term, a JG may offer a transitional path away from existing, envi-
ronmentally and socially destructive forms of production based on money profits,
and toward a system organized around meeting fundamental social and ecological
needs. The most promising feature of the JG is that it is not constrained by profits.
It thus creates the possibility for people to earn a living outside the sphere of accu-
mulation. And because JG work involves production for use rather than exchange,
it can be channeled toward environmentally sustainable projects and methods of
production that will not and cannot be undertaken by the private sector (Forstater
1998; Mitchell 1998). Workers under a JG can be employed doing anything dem-
ocratically deemed to be of social value, potentially broadening our conception of
work to include things like: raising children, caring for the elderly and infirm (see
care), education, habitat restoration, community gardening, the arts etc. As such,
a JG is an open-ended policy tool that might serve to complement, support, or
incorporate any number of other proposed measures for degrowth.

References
Forstater, M. (1998) “Flexible Full Employment: Structural Implications of Discretionary
Public Sector Employment.” Journal of Economic Issues, 32(2): 557–64
Mitchell, W. F. (1998) “The Buffer Stock Employment Model and the Path to Full
Employment.” Journal of Economic Issues, 32(2): 547–55.
Wray, R. L. (1998) Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price
Stability. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Wray, R. L. (2012) Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics and Sovereign Monetary
Systems. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wray, R. L. and Forstater, M. (2004) “Full Employment and Economic Justice.” In C.
Dell and J. Knoedler (eds.) The Institutionalist Tradition in Labor Economics. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe.
41
MONEY, PUBLIC
Mary Mellor
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY

The case for action around public money sees money as a public resource (Mellor
2010). It is argued that public creation and circulation of money, free of debt,
under democratic control could enable the provisioning of large-scale societies
on the basis of social justice and ecological sustainability (Robertson 2012). To
support this notion of public money it is important to explore how new money is
created in modern economies (Ryan-Collins et al. 2011). In modern economies
there are two sources of new money: money created by monetary authorities such
as central banks (usually referred to as High Powered Money or Base Money) and
money created through the banking system as loans (usually referred to as Credit
Money). The production of national currencies (notes and coin) is a monopoly
of public monetary authorities, but public money can also be issued in electronic
form, as when central banks issued large amounts of new money in response to the
2007/2008 financial crisis (quantitative easing).
The main difference between the two sources of new money (monetary author-
ities or bank credit) is that publicly authorised money may be issued as debt, but
bank credit can only be issued as debt (Ingham 2004). Banks are not allowed to
mint coins or print notes (they must buy these from the central bank), but they can
set up loan accounts, that is new money issued to a borrower (personal, business
or government) through adding figures to a bank account (as in a mortgage loan).
Conventional banking theory claims that monetary authorities have the ability
to control the amount of new money created by banks as loans, but the financial
crisis indicates that bank lending can spiral out of control. Most money in modern
economies is created and circulated by the banking sector as debt, over 97 per
cent in the case of the UK (Jackson and Dyson 2013). Effectively, the money sup-
ply in modern economies has been privatised and is issued on a commercial basis.
Several factors have led to this ‘privatisation’ of money supply as debt: neo-liberal
ideology and deregulation; increased public and private debt; less use of notes and
176 Mary Mellor

coin and more reliance on transfers between bank accounts; public backing for
bank accounts as in deposit insurance; and the role of central banks as a seemingly
unlimited lender of last resort.
The link to degrowth lies in the role of debt in the issuing of new money.
Whereas new public money could be issued without debt, by being spent into
circulation, (for example, as quantitative easing for the people, rather than the
banking system), money issued through the banking system is always issued as
debt; that is, the money must be returned, with interest, to the issuing bank. This
creates a huge growth dynamic. If nearly all money is issued as loans that have to
be repaid with interest, the money supply has to be constantly expanded through
the issue of new debt. If the willingness of the banks to lend, or people to bor-
row, ceases then the money supply breaks down. Debts to the banks default, or if
they are repaid, shrink the money supply even further. During such crises the only
source of new money is the state/central bank. However, although the emergency
issue of public money could be spent directly into the economy, current monetary
policy demands that it is issued to the banking system or to governments as debt.
There is a logic to providing public money as debt to the banking system (which
will lend it on with interest) but not to the public to whom the money should
belong. Instead, the public is deemed to have borrowed the money used to rescue
the banks, pushing state budgets into deficit and resulting in the imposition of
severe austerity measures.
The simplest way to remove bank created debt and its growth dynamic is to
remove from the banking system the right to create new money, or to severely
limit it. Banks would be restricted to doing what most people think they do:
lending savers’ existing money to borrowers. Instead of money created through
bank-issued debt, new public money could be issued free of debt directly into the
economy to meet public needs. At present, public expenditure has to wait for the
commercial circulation of money to produce a profit which can be taxed. That
is, public expenditure relies on growth in the commercial sector. Equally, most
people cannot produce directly the goods and services they need, they first have
to work in private profit-driven, or public profit-dependent, activities to obtain
access to money.
Proposals to create new public money as a public resource would aim to cre-
ate all new money either under democratic control through a national monetary
budget or through an independent monetary authority (Jackson and Dyson 2013).
Public money would be issued free of debt and would be spent directly into the
economy. Enough money could be circulated to enable sufficiency provisioning
and needs-led economic activity (Mellor 2010). Public money could be issued in
various ways at national, regional, local or even international level. New money
could be used to finance key public provisioning such as the health and care
services or low carbon energy systems. Flexibility within the economy could be
achieved by issuing money as a basic income or as a fund for social investment or
community based economic development. Newly issued public money could be
made available to commercial banks to lend, as long as the money was used in the
Money, public 177

wider public interest. There would still be a role for taxation, which would be used
to remove money from the economy if there was a threat of inflation. Tax could
also be used to encourage the most efficient use of natural resources and to redis-
tribute wealth. The case for public money is the need to rescue money from profit
and growth-oriented control and return it to where it belongs – to the public,
but this time under democratic control and according to principles of ecological
sustainability and social justice.

References
Ingham, G. (2004) The Nature of Money. Cambridge: Polity.
Jackson, A. and Dyson, B. (2013) Modernising Money: Why our Monetary System Is Broken and
How it Can Be Fixed. London: Positivemoney.
Mellor, M. (2010) The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public Resource. London:
Pluto Press.
Robertson, J. (2012) Future Money: Breakdown or Break through? Totnes: Green Books.
Ryan-Collins, J. Greenham, T., Werner, T. and Jackson, A. (2011) Where Does Money
Come From? A Guide to the UK Monetary and Banking System. London: New Economic
Foundation.
42
NEW ECONOMY
Tim Jackson
CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGY, UNIVERSITY OF SURREY

Society is faced with a profound dilemma: to resist growth is to risk economic and
social collapse, but to pursue it relentlessly is to endanger the ecosystems on which
we depend for long-term survival. The response to the recession was a ubiquitous
call to re-invigorate consumer spending and kick start growth. Those inclined to
question the consensus were swiftly denounced as cynical revolutionaries or mod-
ern day luddites.
With that confusingly-attired bogey-man looming over us, kick starting
growth looked like a no-brainer. And the closest we got to doing anything other
than business as usual was the possibility that somehow out of the crisis we might
create a ‘different engine of growth’ as Achim Steiner from the UN Environment
Programme called it. Green growth became the holy grail of economic recovery.
This idea is still essentially an appeal to decoupling (see dematerialization).
Growth continues, while resource intensity (and hopefully throughput) declines.
But at least in the idea of a green economy, unlike technological dreams of
decoupling – that somehow expect miraculously in a world of 9 billion people all
aspiring to Western lifestyles, we will manage to reduce the carbon intensity of
every dollar of output 130 times lower in 2050 than it is today – there is something
in the way of a blueprint for what an alternative economy might look like. It gives
us more of a sense of what people are buying and what businesses are selling in this
new economy. Its founding concept is the production and sale of de-materialised
‘services’, rather than material ‘products’.
Clearly it can’t just be the ‘service-based economies’ that have characterised cer-
tain Western development over the last few decades. For the most part those have
been achieved by reducing heavy manufacturing, continuing to import consump-
tion goods from abroad and expanding financial services to pay for them.
So what exactly constitutes productive economic activity in this new economy?
Selling ‘energy services’, certainly, rather than energy supplies. Selling mobility
New economy 179

rather than cars. Recycling, re-using, leasing, maybe yoga lessons, perhaps, hair-
dressing, urban gardening: so long as these aren’t carried out using buildings,
don’t involve the latest fashion and you don’t need a car to get to them. The hum-
ble broom would need to be preferred to the diabolical ‘leaf-blower’, for instance.
The fundamental question is this: can you really make enough money from
these activities to keep an economy growing? And the truth is we just don’t know.
We have never at any point in history lived in such an economy. It sounds at the
moment suspiciously like something the Independent on Sunday would instantly
dismiss as a yurt-based economy – with increasingly expensive yurts.
But this doesn’t mean we should throw away the underlying vision completely.
Whatever the new economy looks like, low-carbon economic activities that
employ people in ways that contribute meaningfully to human flourishing have to
be the basis for it. That much is clear.
So rather than starting from the assumption of growth, perhaps we should
start by identifying what we want a sustainable economy to look and behave like.
Clearly, some form of stability – or resilience – matters. Economies that collapse
threaten human flourishing immediately. We know that equality matters. Unequal
societies drive unproductive status competition (see social limits of growth) and
undermine wellbeing not only directly but also by eroding our sense of shared
citizenship.
Work – and not just paid employment – still matters in this new economy. It’s
vital for all sorts of reasons. Apart from the obvious contribution of paid employ-
ment to people’s livelihoods, work is a part of our participation in the life of
society. Through work we create and recreate the social world and find a credible
place in it.
Perhaps most vital of all, economic activity must remain ecologically-bounded.
The limits of a finite planet need to be coded directly into its working princi-
ples. The valuation of ecosystem services, the greening of the national accounts,
the identification of an ecologically bounded production function: all of these are
likely to be essential to the development of a sustainable economic framework.
And at the local level, it’s possible to identify some simple operational principles
that these new economic activities need to fulfil. Let’s call these activities ecological
enterprises if they satisfy three simple criteria:

x They contribute positively to human flourishing.


x they support community and provide decent livelihoods.
x They use as little as possible in the way of materials and energy.

Notice that it isn’t just the outputs from economic activity that must make a
positive contribution to flourishing. It’s the form and organisation of our systems of
provision as well. Ecological enterprise needs to work with the grain of community
and the long-term social good, rather than against it.
Interestingly, ecological enterprise has a kind of forerunner. The seeds for the
new economy already exist in local, community-based social enterprise: community
180 Tim Jackson

energy projects, local farmers’ markets, slow food co-operatives, sports clubs,
libraries, community health and fitness centres, local repair and maintenance ser-
vices, craft workshops, writing centres, water sports, community music and drama
and local training and skills. And yes, maybe even yoga (or martial arts or medita-
tion), hairdressing and gardening.
People often achieve a greater sense of wellbeing and fulfilment, both as pro-
ducers and as consumers of these activities, than they ever do from the time-
poor, materialistic, supermarket economy in which most of our lives are spent. So
it’s ironic that these community-based social enterprises barely count in today’s
economy. They represent a kind of Cinderella economy that sits neglected at the
margins of consumer society.
Some of them scarcely even register as economic activities in a formal sense at
all. They sometimes employ people on a part-time or even voluntary basis. Their
activities are often labour intensive. So if they contribute anything at all to GDP,
their labour productivity growth is of course ‘dismal’ – in the language of the dis-
mal science. If we start shifting wholesale to patterns of de-materialised services, we
wouldn’t immediately bring the economy to a standstill, but we’d certainly slow
down growth considerably.
We’re getting perilously close here to the lunacy at the heart of the growth-
obsessed, resource-intensive, consumer economy. Here is a sector that could
provide meaningful work, offer people capabilities for flourishing, contribute posi-
tively to community and have a decent chance of being materially light. And yet
it’s denigrated as worthless because it’s actually employing people.
This response shows up the fetish with labour productivity for what it is: a
recipe for undermining work, community and environment. Of course, labour
productivity improvements aren’t always bad. There are clearly places where it
makes sense to substitute away from human labour, especially where the working
experience itself is poor. But the idea that labour input is always and necessarily
something to be minimised goes against common sense.
In fact, there’s a very good reason why de-materialised services don’t lead to
productivity growth. It’s because for many of them it’s the human input to them
that constitutes the value in them. The pursuit of labour productivity in activities
whose integrity depends on human interaction systematically undermines the qual-
ity of the output.
Besides all that, work itself is one of the ways in which humans participate
meaningfully in society. Reducing our ability to do that – or reducing the quality
of our experience in doing so – is a direct hit on flourishing. Relentless pursuit of
labour productivity in these circumstances makes absolutely no sense.
So in summary, it seems that those calling for a new engine of growth based
around dematerialised services are really onto something. But they may perhaps have
missed a vital point. The idea that an increasingly serviced-based economy can (or
should) provide for ever-increasing economic output doesn’t quite stack up.
On the other hand, we’ve made some clear progress here. This new ‘Cinderella’
economy really does offer a kind of blueprint for a different kind of society. New,
New economy 181

ecological enterprises provide capabilities for flourishing. They offer the means to a
livelihood and to participation in the life of society. They provide security, a sense
of belonging and the ability to share in a common endeavour and yet to pursue
our potential as individual human beings. And at the same time they offer a decent
chance of remaining within ecological scale. The next economy really does mean
inviting Cinderella to the ball.

Reference
Jackson, T. (2009) Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan.
43
NOWTOPIANS
Chris Carlsson
SHAPING SAN FRANCISCO

Tinkerers, inventors, and improvisational spirits who bring an artistic approach to


important tasks that are ignored or undervalued by market society are what I call
Nowtopians. Rooted in practices that have been emerging over the past few decades,
Nowtopians’ relationship with work highlights an important thread of self-
emancipatory class politics beyond the traditional arena of wage-labor. These prac-
tices include such activities as urban gardening/farming, do-it-yourself bicycle
repair co-operatives often called “bike kitchens,” hacker collectives engaged in
developing free software tools and expanding and improving social communica-
tions, recycled clothing makers, biofuels co-ops, and more. Characteristic of many
of these activities is that people are taking their time and technological know-how
out of the market and – working for free – reappropriating the waste stream of
modern capitalism while using technologies in unanticipated ways. Taken at a
broad level, they are inventing the social and technological foundation for a post-
capitalist form of life. More and more people, recognizing the degradation inherent
in business relations, are creating networks of activity that refuse the measure-
ment of money. Nowtopian activities cross paths with the degrowth movement in
practice, even if not explicitly declared. When people take their time and techno-
logical know-how out of the market and decide for themselves how to dedicate
their efforts, they are short-circuiting the logic of the market society that depends
on incessant growth. They are “exiting the economy,” which is the slogan of
degrowth. Their common use of discarded and recycled materials from capital-
ism’s waste stream also demonstrates a shift to productive activity that is by defini-
tion not “growth.”
The self-directed work carried on outside of wage-labor can be best understood
in terms of class and ultimately, a classless society. The two crucial components are
time and the technosphere. People are engaged in activities that go on outside of their
jobs, in their so-called “free” time. These practices, often very time-consuming
Nowtopians 183

and strenuous, require sharing and mutual aid and constitute the beginnings of new
kinds of communities. This represents a “re-composition” of the working class,
even though most of the participants wouldn’t embrace such a framework. Because
these people are engaged in creative appropriation of technologies to purposes of
their own design and choice, these activities embody the (partial) transcendence of
the wage-labor prison by “workers” who have better things to do than their jobs.
When freed from the coercive constraints of wage-labor and arbitrary hierarchy,
people work hard. They are tinkerers and smiths working in the waste streams and
open spaces of late capitalism, conjuring new practices while redefining life’s
purpose.
In a society that perpetually celebrates itself as democratic, public discussion
about our greatest public secret, work, is rarely heard. There isn’t any public con-
trol over the fundamental decisions that shape our lives, whether it be what work is
done, how work is done, who we will work with, or more broadly, the nature of
scientific research, the types of technologies we might choose or refuse (depending
on a public airing of the consequences of various choices), and so on. It is in this
deep separation that class arises, the separation of most of us from the world we
(re)produce with our shared labor.
Engaging with technology in creative and experimental ways, Nowtopians are
involved in a guerrilla war over the direction of society. In myriad behaviors and
in small, “invisible” ways, Nowtopians are making life better right now – but also
setting the foundation, technically and socially, for a genuine movement of libera-
tion from market life.
As capitalism continues its inexorable push to corral every square inch of
the globe into its logic of money and markets, while simultaneously seeking to
colonize our very thoughts and control our desires and behaviors, new practices
are emerging that are redefining politics and opening spaces of unpredictability.
Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are coming
together in practical projects.
The same inventiveness and creative genius that gets wrongly attributed to capi-
tal and business is being applied to planetary ecology. Acting locally in the face of
unfolding global catastrophes (many avoidable were we to really try), friends and
neighbors are redesigning many of the crucial technological foundations of mod-
ern life. These redesigns are worked out through garage and backyard “research
and development” programs among friends using the detritus of modern life. Our
contemporary commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and leftover deep
fryer vegetable oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. “Really really free mar-
kets,” anti-commodities, festivals, and free services are imaginative products of an
anti-economy, provisionally under construction by freely co-operative and inven-
tive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are
getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.
What we see in the Nowtopian movement is not a fight for workers’ emancipa-
tion within the capitalist division of labor (which is the best that could be hoped
for from the unions’ strategy, if we give it the benefit of the doubt). Instead we
184 Chris Carlsson

see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifurcated life that is
imposed in the precarious growth-driven marketplace. They seek emancipation
from being merely workers. To a growing minority of people, the endless tread-
mill of consumerism and overwork is something they are working to escape. Thus,
for many people, time is more important than money. Access to goods has been
the major incentive for compliance with the dictatorship of the economy. But in
pockets here and there, the allure of hollow material wealth, and with it the disci-
pline imposed by economic life, is breaking down.
This is the grassroots essence of a politics of degrowth, too. The incessant logic
imposed by the faceless economy finds its rebuke in the everyday assertion of sub-
jectivity and creative productivity that takes place outside of the money economy.
Degrowth in this context doesn’t mean a crash in material well-being, but a self-
designed reorganization of human activity so that we can work less, waste less,
have everything we need and want, and enjoy life to the fullest. The only people
who can reorganize life in this way are the people who today get up and produce a
global capitalist society – in other words, we can only do this together. Reclaiming
control over what we do and how we do it is the first step off the treadmill of
incessant growth, the first crucial step towards a society that embraces degrowth.

References
Carlsson, C. (2008) Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot
Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today, London: AK Press.
Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, Boston:
South End Press.
Gorz, A. (1999) Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers Inc.
Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today,
New York: Pluto Press.
Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism, New York: Pluto Press.
44
POST-NORMAL SCIENCE
Giacomo D’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH AND ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY), AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Post-normal science (PNS) is a problem-solving strategy to be used “when facts are


uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decision urgent” (Funtowicz
and Ravetz 1994: 1,882). Such contexts characterize environmental problems from
climate change, hazardous waste dumping, and contamination, to the siting of
nuclear plants. Just as in cases with ethical complexities (as in biomedical science),
so in environmental, development and equity policy debates there must be an
“extended peer community,” consisting not only of scientists but also other legiti-
mate participants, i.e. all those people with a stake in the issue, who will participate
in assuring the quality of the scientific input (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994).
The notion of PNS is better grasped by comparing it to “pure” (basic, core, or
normal) science on the one hand, and on the other, to the other two, currently
dominant, modes of problem-solving science: “applied,” mission-oriented science
and “professional consultancy”. In the pure science of laboratory research, decision
stakes are negligible, as there are no external participants, and research is (mostly)
investigator-driven. Uncertainty is also very low: research is undertaken when a
research problem is (reasonably) expected to be solved. Applied science extends
pure science to respond to clear-cut needs to implement or improve a certain
product or process. But stakes and uncertainty tend to be low, and manageable
typically by standard statistical processes. Professional consulting in turn is broader
than applied science, and it involves the application of judgement and creativity
by an “expert.” Compare, for example, the applied science of a surgeon operating
on a broken leg, to the professional consultancy of a pathologist or a psychiatrist.
Uncertainty in professional consultancy is higher, and so are decision stakes, as the
consulting is conducted for a client whose needs must also be served.
For illustrative purposes consider dams (Funtowiz and Ravetz, 1994). For a
long time the design and location of dams has been in the realm of applied sci-
ence. Given flood control, water storage, and irrigation purposes, uncertainties
186 Giacomo D’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis

were managed scientifically with statistical techniques. With the emergence of


disputes over dams, professional consulting came into the picture, with experts
judging on costs and benefits, suitable locations, environmental impacts, etc. The
decision entered the political process and each group with a stake mobilized its
own experts/consultants. By now, the whole rationale of dams and water-fuelled
growth is under question, with different values at stake and uncertainties and criti-
cisms on all fronts, from the hydrological to the social and religious. This is the
realm of PNS.
The epistemic postulates of PNS first appeared in Jerome Ravetz’ (1971)
Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. Like Jacques Ellul, an influential thinker
for many degrowthers, Ravetz (2011) criticized an “industrialized science” that is
“entrepreneurial” and which produces a “runaway technology.” The transition
from craft to industrial science, Ravetz argued, has had the same consequences on
scientists as it had on industrial workers, i.e. a loss of control and direction over
their creation. In the case of scientists this marked a loss of autonomy over their
research. Ravetz criticized the dominance of profit and financing criteria in indus-
trial science, which have reduced science to a factor of production, and pointed to
a shift away from traditional forms of quality assurance based on the (moral) traits
and skills of scientists and towards a concern with the profitability and technologi-
cal applicability of results.
In the 1980s, Ravetz and Funtowicz began collaborating and published Uncertainty
and Quality in Science for Policy, a book whose main contribution was the design of
a notational system called NUSAP – Numeral Unit Spread Assessment Pedigree,
with the aim to assess (and assure) the quality of processes that deal with uncertainty
in policy settings. The authors were motivated by the growing (global) environ-
mental problems of the time, themselves outcome of the runway technology that
Ravetz had criticized in his past work, and the proliferation of new technologies,
such as nuclear or GMOs, and new technology-produced problems, such as cli-
mate change. There was a great deal of uncertainty over the causes and impacts of
these phenomena, high stakes (including the survival and wellbeing of whole human
populations) and irreducible value conflicts, such as weighing the worth of one gen-
eration over another, one community over another, or one species over another. In
such conditions, Funtowicz and Ravetz argued, we can no longer talk about simple
“puzzles” of the normal science type. The search for a single “truth” cannot be the
organizing principle of scientific activity, given that irreducible (incommensurate and
only weakly-comparable) values are involved. For example, the uncertainty of a sea
level rise cannot be reduced to uncertainty of the methodological or technological
sort, addressable in principle with more computational power; the assessment of the
impacts from sea level rise involves also an epistemological uncertainty. PNS indi-
cates that the normal (in the Kunhian sense) science developed in the laboratory and
extended through applied science to the conquest of nature is no longer adequate for
the solution of global environmental problems.
“Quality assurance” is a core concept in PNS. Quality is not simply the proper
management of uncertainty, but an integrated social process that is able to respond
Post-normal science 187

to the different concerns emerging from the multiple narratives of the issue at
stake. PNS marks a shift from a substantive rationality, a science-informed decision
process of looking for optimal solutions, to procedural rationality, which involves
a process aimed at finding shared and “satisfying” solutions (Giampietro 2003).
The peer review process of normal science is necessary but not sufficient in PNS.
An extended peer community has to assure quality. This involves not only the
certified experts of a certain discipline but an enlarged group of laypersons with
the desire to participate in the resolution of the issue. Instead of a community
of experts, this shift entrusts sustainability-related decisions to an “expert com-
munity,” an extended group of peers that emerges in the process of assessment.
This expert community should be able to articulate a configuration of “extended
facts,” including a diversity of knowledge (scientific, indigenous, local, traditional),
a plurality of values (social, economic, environmental, ethical), and beliefs (mate-
rial, spiritual), which all together, and together with conventional “scientific facts,”
inform the analysis of the problem at stake. Applied science and professional con-
sulting can be part of the overall activity, but can no longer dominate the decision-
making process. And make no mistake: there are still many other contexts, where
normal, applied, or professional science alone may be adequate; but not for the
most pressing environmental, social, or economic problems.
Until now, degrowthers have challenged scientists as truth-holders, mainly
“economists”, whose expertise and claims to truth have tended to colonize and
depoliticize the social sphere (see depoliticization). Still, there is limited reflec-
tion concerning the role of science and of the ways problems will be solved in a
hypothetical degrowth society. Problem-solving science will remain an impor-
tant part of a degrowth transition, in choosing for example among a range of
socio-environmental courses of action, and it will remain essential even in a
hypothetical degrowth society, since even a downscaled and qualitatively differ-
ent society, will have to manage the legacies of our generation, i.e. dams, nuclear
plants, hazardous dumps and an altered climate. For several reasons, the starting
point for such reflection of “science for a degrowth society” cannot be other
than PNS.
First, because there is a strong bond between the community of degrowthers
and ecological economists, the community within which PNS evolved. A new
generation of degrowthers, many educated in ecological economics, are already
imbued with the epistemic reasoning of PNS. The very praxis of the degrowth
international conferences is inspired by the PNS ideal, attempting to do away
with ex-cathedra experts and create an “extended peer review community” for
degrowth research (Cattaneo et al. 2012).
Second, the denunciation of runaway technology by Ravetz resonates with fun-
damental degrowth theories. The epistemological roots of PNS meet degrowth’s
criticism about technology such as Illich’s critique of radical monopoly, exercised
by large scale technology (see conviviality), and Ellul’s claims of the need to
escape from an autonomizd “technological system,” a self-referential system that
discovers what can be discovered for the sake of itself.
188 Giacomo D’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis

Third, the democratization of science promoted by PNS advocates is in line


with degrowthers’ call for reshaping (supposedly) democratic institutions in west-
ern societies, including scientific institutions, reclaiming them from the rule of
experts (Cattaneo et al., 2012).
Last but not least, dialogue, value commitment, plurality of legitimate perspec-
tives, recognition of uncertainty, and the eradication of the monopoly of experts
from collective decision-making are fundamental tenets of both PNS and degrowth.

References
Cattaneo C., D’Alisa G., Kallis G., and Zografos C. (2012). “Degrowth Futures and
Democracy,” Futures, 44(6): 515–23.
Funtowicz, S. O. and Ravetz, J. R. (1990) Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Funtowicz S. O. and Ravetz J. R., 1994. “Uncertainty, Complexity and Post Normal
Science,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 12(12): 1,881–5.
Giampietro, M. (2003). Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Agroecosystems, London: CRC Press.
Ravetz, J. R. (1971) Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ravetz, J. R. (2011). “Postnormal Science and the Maturing of the Structural Contradictions
of Modern European Science,” Futures, 43(2): 142–8.
45
UNIONS
Denis Bayon
RESEARCH & DEGROWTH

In Western countries – and most of the world – the principal worker unions are
opposed to the idea of economic degrowth for historical and pragmatic reasons.
Since it became obvious that no proletarian revolution would happen, labor unions
have been acting as reformist organizations committed to full employment and
increasing the workers’ share from economic growth. In industrialized countries,
this strategy proved quite successful between 1950 and 1980. As a consequence,
social inequality and poverty decreased greatly. Even though some “class struggle
unions” kept on fighting for the development of non-capitalist institutions (social
security, public services in health, education, culture, etc.), they never criticized
economic growth and the industrial and social division of labor, nor any of the
major subsequent environmental impacts.
The violence of the crisis of capitalism, especially since 2008, has led labor unions
in two directions. On the one hand, confronted with the destruction of employment
and a historically high increase in bankruptcies, the big unions appear less open than
ever to the thematics of degrowth or of “shared frugality.” In the short term, they
have concentrated all their efforts on defending workers’ employment and wages,
and they have supported economic policies which are supposed to boost growth.
On the other hand, however, new alliances are also emerging between some unions
and degrowth activists. Not surprisingly, these connections involve small, even
marginal, unions historically opposed to the reformist strategies of big unions, or
dissident sections within major unions. Most of them are rooted in the revolutionary-
syndicalist movement or are at least implicitly influenced by it. Examples are the
Confédération Nationale du Travail (CNT), or the Union Syndicale Solidaires
(SUD), in France; and the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), in Spain
(65,000 members, the largest libertarian union in the world with 65,000 members).
A pro-degrowth stance is thus clear within the French CNT, which recently
declared: “the defense of the environment implies the fight against capitalism; our
190 Denis Bayon

labor class union is ecologist and in favor of degrowth” (Confédération Nationale


du Travail 2011). For the Spanish CGT, the exploitation of both nature and labor
imposes a similar strategy of class struggle that could draw from the idea of degrowth.
At odds with the theory defended by reformist unions as well as capitalist ideologists
that growth creates conditions for a more cohesive society, CGT denounces the
“slave’s way of life” (“modo de vida esclavo” – Taibo Arias 2008) imposed by mass
production and consumption. The union points out the risk of a forced economic
degrowth because of the overexploitation of natural resources, which is likely to
take place in brutal conditions. The violence of the economic recession in Greece or
Spain since 2008 may well prefigure such a social and economic collapse.
Of course these revolutionary unions, if they don’t want to lose their modest influ-
ence also have to fight for employment in the economic sectors where it is threatened
if they don’t want to lose their (modest) influence. As a result, they may find themselves
defending jobs even when these are ecologically and ethically questionable (car indus-
try, nuclear plants, toxic factories). But these are precisely the difficulties the degrowth
movement has to face when it moves away from academia or small groups of activists
and engages in the daily reality of the millions of workers in industry, agriculture, and
the public or private services sectors.
Wage earners in industry, services, or administration are neither the owners of
capital nor the masters of their own work. Unlike farmers, who can develop agro-
ecological practices on their own farms and initiate co-operative links with con-
sumers, wage earners cannot act as producers in the direction of degrowth. There
are few signs, however, as we can hope that limits are reached in the sacrifices
asked of workers reaching their limits, and the current crisis creates a suitable con-
text for the re-emergence of worker-run co-operatives, supported by unions after
occupations and strikes to oppose redundancies or “fire-sales.” Examples include
the Vio-Me plant in Greece, the New Era Windows factory in Chicago, produc-
tion of tea (Scop Ti) and ice cream (La Belle Aude) in France, and more than 300
factory workshops in Argentina. Once tools are increasingly in workers’ hands, one
may expect that ecological and health issues in the work place will raise to promi-
nence, considering the growing concern for occupation diseases.
As far as we know, the Spanish CGT is the only union that provides a stimu-
lating reflection on the links between work and degrowth – a result of its coop-
eration with the association Ecologistas en Acción. In an interesting document
of the union, “work” is given a broad definition since it applies not only to the
“use of nerves, muscles, brain,” that legitimates the wage paid by private or public
bosses (and which defines “labor force”), but also to domestic or collective work
(food, health, educating children, taking care of old parents, developing neigh-
borhood relationships, culture). This includes the work people do for themselves
(food, health, culture) carried out for self-reproduction (see also care and feminist
economics) (Confederación General del Trabajo y Ecologistas en Acción 2008:
18–19). This approach challenges the traditional opposition between “labor”,
“work” (both subject to necessity and opposed to freedom), and “action” (equated
to “the realm of human freedom” [see Arendt 1958]), and thus differs clearly from
contemporary theories known as “criticism of labor”. Considering the reality of
Unions 191

the exploitation of the labor force, some unionists want to free concrete work from
the domination of capitalism, in other words, the abolition of the labor market.
Indeed, there is a growing class conflict in European countries which is trying to
enlarge the area of human activities that can justify a wage. For example, an unem-
ployed person should be considered a worker in the double sense that he/she doesn’t
get any property incomes (interests, profits) and that seeking a job, health care, and
domestic tasks are work. Therefore all the unemployed should earn a salary and not
a minority of them as it is now the case because of the limits and restrictions that
apply to unemployment (and others) benefits – currently threatened by neo-liberal
policies. That’s why, even within big unions, there are growing demands for “profes-
sional social security” and for guaranteed decent wages for all workers, employed or
not. Unlike the demand for “basic income,” this proposal could be implemented
through a reinforcement of existing institutions of social security already effective
in most developed countries. Considering the increase of poverty produced by the
economic crisis, such claims should be priorities, as they would put an end to the
“employment blackmail” to which workers are subjected by massive unemploy-
ment, while questioning the sense and finality of human work.
Such a conception of work suggests that the end of “labor” is a pre-requisite for
the degrowth project. As the economy of growth appears as “a vast accumulation
of environmental nuisances,” economic degrowth as viewed by radical unionists
would involve a massive reduction of production (and consequently of environ-
mental nuisances) and the destruction of employment; in other words, a destruc-
tion of labor exploited by capital. But work would still exist! No longer dominated
by capital, human work could generate, with new tools – or an alternative use
of some of the existing machines – a more co-operative and sustainable society.
If work were under the control of workers, human work would be much more
likely to be environmentally friendly, since under capitalism’s property rules and
the imperative of growth, labor is forced to be environmentally harmful. Therefore,
degrowth appears as a potential path to the end of the exploitation of both nature
and human work by capital. A common goal for degrowth activists and radical, if
not all, unionists?

References
Arendt, H. (1958/1998), The human condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arias, T. C. (2008) Intervención en las jornadas CGT “Una realidad de lucha y compromiso
contra la crisis del capital,” 26 de septiembre [Taibo Arias C. (2008), speech for the meeting
of the Spanish CGT “A reality of struggle and commitment against the crisis of the capital,”
on September 26]. Available online at www.cgt.org.esgeb (accessed 17 August 2013).
Confederación General del Trabajo y Ecologistas en Acción (2008), Ecologia y
Anarcosindicalismo, Manual Corso [General Confederation of Labor and Ecologists in
Action- Spain (2008), Ecology and Anarchosyndicalism, Handbook Available online at
www.cgt.org.es/sites/default/files/IMG/pdf/pdf_ecologismo_y_sindicalismo.pdf
(accessed September 15 2013).
Confédération Nationale du Travail (2011), “Sortir du nucléaire? Le minimum syndical,”
communiqué du 7 mars National Confederation of Labor – France (2011), “Fazing out
nuclear power? The least we can do,” communiqué, on March 7.
46
URBAN GARDENING
Isabelle Anguelovski
ICTA (INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY),
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Urban gardening is a practice through which people grow plants and crops in cit-
ies. It is a term often used interchangeably with urban agriculture, although the
latter is generally practiced at a larger scale. What is known as “allotment gardens”
were born in Germany in the nineteenth century to respond to food insecurity.
During World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression, “liberty gar-
dens” and “victory gardens” sprouted in the USA, Canada, Italy (under the name
“Orticelli di Guerra”), and the UK, in which people grew produce and herbs to
reduce pressures on food production and support war efforts. In the USA many
were cultivated by European immigrants, especially Italians. Today, more than 800
million people participate in urban agriculture throughout the world, even though
in many cases, especially in the Global North, the size of gardens is too small to
provide produce every day for the gardeners and their families. Urban agriculture
has reached much political visibility, the latest example of it being the media frenzy
over Michelle Obama planting a garden with school children within the White
House.
The numerous benefits of gardening have been largely recognized. First, urban
agriculture supports greenhouse gas emission targets by promoting local, low-
impact, and fresh food production to nearby customers. Gardening enhances the
environmental quality of urban neighborhoods by mitigating storm water runoff,
filtering air and rain water, mitigating urban heat island effects, serving as a sink
for urban waste through decentralized composting, and helping to prevent soil
erosion – even if in some cases gardening is practiced in heavily contaminated
soil and requires much technical support. As gardens sprout in the city, they also
provide greenery to neighborhoods that were formerly considered blighted, such
as Haddington in West Philadelphia. In many instances, they thus help beautify
places. However, neighborhood greening through urban gardening entails risks
of gentrification and displacement, as newly attractive neighborhoods start being
Urban gardening 193

valued again by investors. In cities such as Delhi, New York, or Boston, urban
gardens are indeed increasingly being managed by recently arrived, higher-income
residents, while the proportion of lower-income gardeners and gardeners of color
has decreased.
From a social standpoint, through gardening, relationships in the neighborhood
are strengthened and renewed, as gardeners actively engaged in garden clean-up,
production, and maintenance. They enhance the connection between people and
their neighborhood and provide a greater sense of community. Growers often build
a collective project without appropriating spaces for private uses and enclosing it,
share responsibilities, and imagine a different use (than speculative use) for the land
(see commons). Gardens facilitate networking, promote interactions between
groups, and promote local pride and citizens’ participation (Lawson 2005). From a
health standpoint, they provide relaxation, healing, and trauma-recovery benefits,
and also offer recreational and leisure opportunities for residents who might tend
to remain isolated at home.
Last, and maybe most importantly, urban gardening addresses inequalities in
food provision throughout the city by offering affordable sources of food for low-
income residents and residents of color, who often tend to live in food deserts. For
instance, in Los Angeles, the LA Regional Food Bank created a 14-acre farm, South
Central Farms, in 1993, which brought fresh food to more than 350 poor Latino
families until it was bulldozed by the City in 2006. In the Global South, urban gar-
dening has always been woven into the urban landscape and been has increasingly
supported by governments, NGOs, and farmer groups in places such as Harare,
Nairobi, Rosario, Delhi, or Havana to support residents’ income (Mougeot 2005).
The concept of metabolic rift, as advanced by Marx, is helpful in exploring
the relationship between degrowth and urban gardening. Indeed, urban gardening
contributes to addressing three dimensions of metabolic rift: the ecological rift,
which is the rift in biophysical metabolic relationships (i.e. nutrient cycling), as
humans are constantly in search of new spaces for ongoing accumulation, and the
corresponding rescaling of production and search for technological fixes (i.e. fer-
tilizers); the social rift, which is related to the commodification of land, labor, and
food, best exemplified by the dispossession of rural populations from their land;
and last, the individual rift, through which humans become alienated from nature
and from the products of their labor (McClintock 2010).
Rescaling these nutrient cycles, reducing dependence on petroleum-based food
production, and recycling organic waste through planting nitrogen fixing crops
are at the center of the potential of urban gardening to mitigate the ecological rift.
Urban gardening is a response to the social rift by cultivating under-exploited land,
limiting the expansion of agri-businesses and processes and packaged food items in
poor neighborhoods and beyond, and ensuring small-scale or subsistence produc-
tion (while indirectly allowing ongoing accumulation at a more macro level) so
that the market does not fully control the soil and the people. Here, urban garden-
ing as alternative food movement can contribute to reclaiming resources formerly
seen as commons from the enclosure of capitalist forces (see commodification)
194 Isabelle Anguelovski

in ways that makes food available and affordable to everyone. Last, gardening in
cities addresses the individual rift by reconnecting people with their metabolism
and processes of food production and consumption.
Urban gardening and degrowth have a close relation. Often, activists have
engaged in urban gardening, such as residents of Can Masdeu (Barcelona) or lead-
ers of the Urbainculteurs (Québec), aiming to demonstrate the value of small-scale,
non-commercial, low-impact farming where food is grown in ways that benefit
local residents and engage them in food production. They are community initia-
tives embodying a transition towards a low-carbon economy and an alternative to a
corporate agri-chemical intensive agriculture focused on returns. Urban gardening
is often a non-capitalist practice. Through urban gardening, the distance between
food production and consumption decreases. Urban gardening fosters face-to-face
relationships between producers and consumers and might lead to what some call
“civic agriculture,” the reconnection between farm, food, and community (Lyson
2004). People are more aware and interested in the origin and quality of their food,
and in ensuring that farmers have control over the means and process of produc-
tion. Such interest is exemplified by the growing demand for farmers’ markets and
food co-operatives.

References
Lawson, A. (2005) City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Lyson, T. A. (2004) Civic Agriculture : Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community, Civil Society.
Medford, Mass., Lebanon, NH: Tufts University Press; University Press of New England.
McClintock, N. (2010) “Why Farm the city? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens
of Metabolic Rift.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3(2): 191–207.
Mougeot, L. (ed.) (2005) The Social, Political, and Environmental Dimensions of Urban
Agriculture. London: Earthscan.
Schmelzkopf, K. (1995) “Urban Community Gardens as Contested Space.” Geographical
Review 85(3):364–80.
47
WORK SHARING
Juliet B. Schor
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, BOSTON COLLEGE

In a shrinking capitalist economy, fewer people are necessary to produce declining


levels of production. Working hours will almost certainly fall. The conventional
case is where reductions in hours come in the form of unemployment. With inten-
tional degrowth, work is to be shared by reducing the schedules of all workers,
thereby avoiding unemployment for some. This is called work sharing.
Work sharing has been an important feature of economic policy in Europe
since the 1980s but is less common in North America. Since the global finan-
cial panic of 2008, work hours have fallen in most wealthy countries. In some
European countries, shorter work time policies were enacted as a response to the
downturn. Germany, Italy, France, Austria, and the UK remain on a trajectory
of declining hours. However, in the US and the Netherlands, economic recov-
ery has reversed the shorter hours of the recession period. In Sweden and Spain,
hours are considerably higher today than before the recession. Significant differ-
ences in average hours remain among nations. German employees work an aver-
age of 1,396 hours per year, British workers are at 1,660, and Americans are at
1,708, as measured by data from employers. Some mainstream economists argue
that high labor costs are an obstacle to job growth; however, the current crisis
is due to weak aggregate demand and the long term effects of the corruption of
the financial sector rather than high wages. Indeed, real wages have declined in
many countries since 2008.
The degrowth movement aspires to expand work sharing in the Global North
beyond its current status as a temporary policy. If output is intentionally shrinking,
hours must follow a parallel path of reductions, except in cases where the labor
force and labor productivity are also declining. However, labor force shrinkage is
unlikely even in the low fertility countries of Europe, because wealthy countries
will need to accept climate refugees. (The majority of refugees are likely to be
of working-age, given the current age structure of populations in Global South
196 Juliet B. Schor

countries that will be most affected.) Similarly, growth in labor productivity is


likely to continue. Innovations in digital technology can replace large amounts
of human labor, particularly in the labor-intensive service sector. There is also a
potential for significant productivity increases associated with eco-efficient produc-
tion methods. A counter-argument is that the end of cheap energy will require
higher inputs of labor (see metabolism). It is impossible to know the net effect of
these opposing trends in productivity growth and energy costs, particularly because
energy use and productivity are not independent from one another, but it is those
variables that will determine how much work sharing is required to keep the labor
market in balance.
How can working hours be reduced in a way that is consistent with the larger
goals of the degrowth movement? Conventional work sharing entails the use of
unemployment insurance to replace at least part of workers’ lost wages. Replacing
income is important in order to retain popular support for declines in yearly hours
of work, especially for lower-paid workers. In degrowth scenarios, wages are typi-
cally assumed to remain constant and reductions in working time are financed
through productivity growth. Reducing hours at a constant pay rate raises hourly
wages and could lead to lower labor demand by employers.
Another approach is voluntary trading of income for time, through four-day
workweeks, permanent part-time (with benefits and career ladders) and job shar-
ing. These approaches were first introduced in the 1970s, although they remain
relatively rare outside a few Western European countries. Trading income for time
is more popular among highly educated professionals than manual workers. A pri-
mary obstacle to voluntary working time reduction is opposition from employers,
who resist allowing short schedules for highly paid workers. A landmark law passed
by the Dutch government in 2000 gives employees a statutory right to reduce
their hours. Another option is to reduce the length of working lives by earlier or
phased retirement, a promising approach but one that requires significant reform
of pension systems.
Degrowth advocates also support work sharing because it yields additional ben-
efits. Recent research on wealthy OECD countries shows that those with shorter
hours of work have significantly lower carbon emissions and lower ecological foot-
prints. Countries with shorter hours are producing less than their full production
capacity, which means their pollution levels are lower. These nations also tend to
grow more slowly over time and workers do less commuting. The second reason
is that when households have more free time they are able to live more sustainable
lifestyles, because low-impact activities are often more time-consuming. Mobility
is a prime example: to get somewhere faster requires using more carbon.
A third benefit of work sharing is the value of free time itself. In the work-
centric societies of the Global North, family, community, and political life suffer
as people do not have sufficient leisure for social activities. Social relations are
time-intensive; long working hours reduce investment in social connections and
produce higher television viewing and exhaustion. Similarly, short working hours
are essential for robust participation in democratic governance.
Work sharing 197

For degrowth, a key challenge is to transform underemployment and part-


time work into a desirable way of living. Many degrowth advocates believe that
the high levels of work effort of the full-employment era are no longer attain-
able; and besides, they are ecologically unsustainable. The alternative is to provide
public goods, basic income, and access to inexpensive, but high-quality, goods
and services so that working less is a freely chosen lifestyle. Innovative ways of
meeting people’s needs include public or collective provisioning of basic services
such as housing, energy, and transportation. Internet-enabled peer-to-peer sharing
schemes in which people rent, share, or give access to lodging, vehicles, consumer
goods, and space, are growing (see digital commons). Urban gardening, barter
schemes, time trading, and community currencies are also expanding. These
more time-intensive ways of living are only possible when hours of work are not
onerous. The degrowth movement envisions that the transition to shorter hours
will also lead to new patterns of producing and consuming goods and services.

References
Coote, A. and Franklin, J. J. (eds.) (2013) Time on Our Side: Why We All Need a Shorter
Working Week, London: New Economics Foundation.
Gorz, A. (1999) Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, Cambridge: Polity.
Knight, K. W., Rosa, E. A., and Schor, J. B. (2013) “Could Working Less Reduce Pressures
on the Environment? A Cross-National Panel Analysis of OECD Countries, 1970–
2007,” Global Environmental Change, 23(4): 691–700.
Schor, J. B. (2011) True Wealth: How and why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich,
Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy, New York: Penguin.
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PART 4
Alliances
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48
BUEN VIVIR
Eduardo Gudynas
LATIN AMERICAN CENTER OF SOCIAL ECOLOGY (CLAES)

The term ‘Buen Vivir’ (living well) originates in South America and signifies
critiques of and alternatives to conventional ideas about development. It brings
together a diverse set of questions and alternatives, ranging from the more superfi-
cial to deeper ones concerning the conceptual and practical bases for development.
The direct precursors of Buen Vivir are to be found in diverse concepts among
some Andean indigenous groups. The first references with meanings similar to the
present appeared in the 1990s, particularly in Peru, and became much more signifi-
cant in Bolivia and Ecuador in the years after.
Three uses of the label Buen Vivir can be recognised:

x A generic use. This is employed in generic criticisms of different forms of


conventional development. It has been used in questioning the practice of
corporations (for instance, blowing the whistle on companies that pollute), or
as a slogan to characterise alternative projects by progressive South American
governments (for example, classifying as Buen Vivir the construction of pedes-
trian zones in the city of Quito or social support policies such as cash transfer
programmes for the poor in Venezuela).
x A restricted use. This corresponds to more complex criticisms of contempo-
rary capitalism that call for another, post-capitalist type of development.
Most such criticisms are linked to the socialist tradition and the questioning
posed is profound and involves a debate about different kinds of desirable
development. Although this use does not necessarily question the goal of
economic growth or the utilitarian use of Nature, it does convey specific
views on the ownership of resources and the role to be played by the State in
the allocation of such resources. The best-known expressions in this stream
involve Buen Vivir as ‘republican bio-socialism’ in Ecuador, or as ‘integral
development’ in Bolivia.
202 Eduardo Gudynas

x Substantive use. This relates to a radical criticism of all forms of development


at their conceptual foundations, and a consequent defence of alternatives
that are both post-capitalist and post-socialist. These alternatives draw from
indigenous knowledges and sensibilities, as well as critical Western strands of
thought. Substantive use is a plural and intercultural set of ideas still under
construction. This was the original formulation of Buen Vivir, whereas the
two former formulations are more recent.

Buen Vivir corresponds most closely to the concept of degrowth in its


substantive use, since other positions express positions that are more accurately
described as ‘development alternatives’ – that is, instrumental arrangements that
do not question fundamental ideas, such as the need for industrialisation, the myth
of progress or the duality that separates society from Nature. In comparison, Buen
Vivir, in its substantive sense, constitutes an ‘alternative to development’ (in the
sense of Escobar 1992).
If Buen Vivir in its substantive sense is a plural field under construction, already
there exist key consistent elements. Buen Vivir radically criticizes different types of
conventional development, foundations both conceptual and practical, as well as its
institutions and legitimising discourses. In particular, Buen Vivir rejects the idea of
a predetermined historical linearity in which ‘development stages’ must be followed
by all nations (imitating industrialised nations), but rather defends the multiplicity of
historical processes. It does not accept the concept of progress and its derivatives (par-
ticularly growth) or the idea that welfare depends only upon material consumption.
In its substantive sense, Buen Vivir defends the diversity of knowledges. The
dominance of Western ideas is replaced by a promotion of ‘interculturality’ under
which Western ideas are not rejected but seen as one among many options. The
separation of society and nature is not recognised and is replaced by a notion of
expanded communities, which may also include different living beings or elements
of the environment in territorial contexts. Buen Vivir is only possible within com-
munities of extended or relative ontologies. This involves recognising intrinsic val-
ues in Nature, thus breaking with the prevailing Western anthropocentric position
in which humans are the only subjects of value. Furthermore, Buen Vivir rejects
the instrumentalisation of Nature by humankind.
This and other factors make Buen Vivir a non-essentialist perspective, relative
to every historical, social and environmental context. Such a characteristic also
accounts for the plurality underlying the term.
This plurality can be appreciated in its different variants. One of the best-known
forms is the category suma qamaña, expressing the sensibility of some aymara com-
munities in Bolivia. It is a notion of wellbeing, or a fulfilled life, which can only
be achieved by deep relationships within a community. In turn, the sense of ‘com-
munity’ is extended as it integrates other living beings and elements of the envi-
ronment located within a territorial framework (ayllu). A sense of fulfilment is
only possible within the framework of these kinds of amplified rationalities and
sensibilities.
Buen Vivir 203

The idea of sumak kawsay, from Ecuador, is also well known. This concept is
similar to the previous one and highlights a welfare system that is not only material
but that is also expressed within extended communities, both social and ecological.
Unlike suma qamaña, sumak kawsay does not contain a concept like the Bolivian ayllu.
Several indigenous peoples have analogous concepts, such as the ñande reko of
the Guaraní people, the shiir waras of the Ashuar in Ecuador or the küme mongen of
the Mapuche in southern Chile.
Buen Vivir is also based on critical thought within the Western tradition. The
two most important sources are environmentalism, which proposes the rights of
Nature, and new feminism, which questions patriarchal centralities and claims an
ethic of care.
Thus, Buen Vivir represents the confluence of knowledge of different origins,
and it cannot be restricted to be an ‘indigenous’ idea. This is because there is no
such thing as an indigenous knowledge in the singular, as this is a colonial category.
Thus, Buen Vivir incorporates some concepts and sensibilities of some indigenous
groups, as each one has a specific cultural backgroundthe suma qamaña posture of
Buen Vivir among Aymara communities is not the same as sumak kawsay of the
kichwas in Ecuador. These are positions pertaining to each social and environ-
mental context, which, furthermore have been affected, hybridised or mixed in
different ways with present-day or modern thought, even though they have no
relationship with ideas like the ‘good life’ in the Aristotelian sense or in any of its
Western derivatives.
Buen Vivir is not a return to the past; rather it confronts current situations with
an eye to the future. This occurs in an intercultural context and even generates
reciprocal challenges (for instance, for Western critical knowledge, the challenge of
understanding the visions of extended communities regarding non-human aspects,
and for some indigenous views, dealing with male chauvinism). An example of this
involves the explorations of a transition from environmental justice, based upon
third-generation human rights (quality of life or health), to ecological justice, spe-
cifically based on the rights of Nature (those independent from human appraisals).
Buen Vivir should be interpreted as a shared platform or field in which different
positions converge in a criticism of development in particular and of Modernity
in general. Buen Vivir proposes alternatives that also present complementary senses.
Buen Vivir is not presented as a unit or an academic discipline or a plan of
action. It is a set of ideas and sensibilities deployed on another level, which could
be said to be located in ‘political philosophy’, to use an available Western term, as
occurs with ideas such as participation or equality.
Buen Vivir in its original radical sense influenced the drafting of the new
Constitutions of Bolivia and, in particular, of Ecuador. In both these countries,
however, there have been political decisions and new laws or resolutions that limit
the components of the radical criticism of development inherent in Buen Vivir.
This has been displaced by a new form of acceptable development (this is the case
of ‘integral development’ in Bolivia) or, in a restricted sense, by a socialist option
sui generis in Ecuador (Gudynas 2013).
204 Eduardo Gudynas

As Buen Vivir in its substantive sense does not accept the conceptual bases of
the different types of contemporary development, links with degrowth can be
established. This is especially true with regard to Buen Vivir’s criticism of growth
or consumerism. In any case, Buen Vivir displaces the discussion of growth to that
of social and environmental fulfilment. Thus, in a Latin American context some
sector must be downsized and consumerism rejected, but the improvement in
other sectors, such as education or health, may result in economic growth. From
this perspective it could be said that degrowth is one of the possible consequences
in certain contexts and not an objective in itself. Unlike degrowth, Buen Vivir, due
to its intercultural perspective, follows more ambitious objectives placed in chang-
ing present-day cosmovisions of humans, society and Nature.

Bibliography
Escobar, A. (1992) ‘Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development
and Social Movements’, SocialText 31/32: 20–56.
Gudynas, E. (2011a) ‘Buen Vivir: germinando alternativas al desarrollo’, América Latina en
Movimiento, ALAI, 462: 1–20.
Gudynas, E. (2011b). ‘Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow’, Development 54(4): 441–7.
Gudynas, E. (2013) ‘Development Alternatives in Bolivia: the Impulse, the Resistance, and
the Restoration’, NACLA Report on the Americas 46(1): 22–6.
49
ECONOMY OF PERMANENCE
Chiara Corazza1 and Solomon Victus2
1
CA’ FOSCARI UNIVERSITY
2
TAMILNADU THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF SERAMPORE UNIVERSITY

‘The Economy of Permanence’ is an economic model proposed by J.C.Kumarappa


(1892–1960) – an Indian Christian native of Madras. It was conceived for Indian
villages and shaped from Gandhi’s principles of economics. It aimed to establish
democracy on a small basis, managed by people themselves, by providing primary
needs, helping small village industries and subsistence agriculture. According to the
economics of permanence, everyone had to provide for their own self-sufficiency
with agricultural activity or by providing a useful service to the village by practicing
a craft, such as spinning khadi, the typical Indian hand-made cloth, carpentry, iron
smithy, pottery, water control and artisan works (Kumarappa, 1958a). Peasants and
artisans would then exchange their own products through barter, without using
money, and the village would become a self-sufficient entity. A village council –
or panchayat – would have the task of regulating the administration of the village
itself. In the economy of permanence women had fundamental importance in the
education of young people and children to create future men and women capable
of guaranteeing their own self-sufficiency (Kumarappa 1958a).
Kumarappa defined permanence’ in the sense that ‘inanimate life, the secret of
nature’s permanency, lies in the cycle of life by which the various factors func-
tion in close cooperation to maintain the continuity of life’ (Kumarappa 1945: 1).
He discerned that nature has the capacity to sustain a permanence of life and that
humans should learn from her. Kumarappa argued that the Western economic
system was intrinsically transient, based on large-scale production, export oriented
markets, consumerism and individualism (Kumarappa 1958a). The Economy of
Permanence does not conceive economics as a ‘disembedded’ discipline, but in
coexistence with nature, its resources and future generations. It conceives an insep-
arability of economics, ethics and politics.
The Economy of Permanence is a less familiar term than “Gandhian econom-
ics” because the former refers to a specific alternative economic model while the
206 Chiara Corazza and Solomon Victus

latter is a mix of economic ideas related with Gandhi. Gandhi’s economic ideas
were founded mainly on two principles: Truth and Non-Violence. He also used
other related concepts such as swaraj (self-rule), sarvodaya (welfare of all), swadeshi
(self-reliance), home-made khadi. He made the chakra (the spinning wheel) a sym-
bol of his economic programme (Kumarappa 1951).
The Economy of Permanence was conceived in the 1940s. During this period,
India had long been involved in the struggle for Independence, and Kumarappa had
worked closely with Gandhi, who was imprisoned for more than a year in 1942
during the Quit India Movement, since 1929. On several occasions, Kumarappa had
opportunities to closely examine the economic situation of the Indian villages. He
observed the elimination by British colonialism of the countless crafts and farming
practices that had once animated rural life, and which transformed the Indian village
economy towards the production of raw materials for England’s industries. In this
context, the economy of permanence was born out of desperation. Kumarappa was
motivated by an aspiration to restore the ancient prosperity and sustainability of India
on small-scale rural and self-sufficient bases ensuring a livelihood for everyone.
In 1945, Kumarappa published the book Economy of Permanence. Written in
prison, the book articulated a model that its author had practised and experimented
with in rural India since the second half of the 1930s and was not purely academic.
Two organizations were created by Gandhi and Kumarappa to support Indian
handicraft activities, at the time strangled by English industrial competition: the All
India Spinners Association and the All India Village Industries Association.
The objectives of these associations were the promotion of Indian khadi, Indian
traditional products, skills and technicalities and the teachings of ancient crafts,
reviving them and helping the villagers to gain economic self-sufficiency. The
overall goal was the eradication of a poverty that for Kumarappa was directly linked
to the colonial British tax system.
After India’s Independence, the Economy of Permanence presented itself as a
suitable model for the newborn nation. However Kumarappa’s views collided with
the figure of Jawarlal Nerhu, the first popular Prime Minister of Independent India
in 1947. Fabian Socialist, Westernised and fascinated by modernity, Nehru believed
that Gandhi and Kumarappa’s ideas were inapplicable. He followed an industrial
policy in a developmental fashion and came into conflict with Kumarappa, who –
like Gandhi – abhorred industrialism because it furnished cheaper products in large
quantities in fierce competition with small artisans and hence caused their unem-
ployment. An open dispute between Nehru and Kumarappa arose concerning the
question of what should be the basis of the Indian economic development plan –
cities or villages? Although Gandhi was with Kumarappa in spirit, he politically
supported Nehru, although he tried to strike creative compromises between the
two models. Once Gandhi died, Nehru, with his political power, took the upper
hand and implemented an urban-centred industrialization process that sidelined
Kumarappa’s model.
Kumarappa withdrew from the national political scene but continued cam-
paigning for the Economy of Permanence at a grassroots level. Today, many
organizations are still active and new ones have formed, applying the principles
Economy of permanence 207

of the Economy of Permanence, such as the Kumarappa Institute of Gram Swaraj


founded in Jaipur in 1965 and the Kumarappa Institute of Rural Technology and
Development, based at the Gandhi Niketan Ashram, active since 1956, in Tamil
Nadu. The model’s popularity is now growing among neo-Marxist Indians.
Degrowth thinkers and practitioners could be inspired by Gandhian economic
thought. The Economy of Permanence shares many features with degrowth, such
as an attention to the vulnerability of natural resources; a focus on creativity and
the revolutionary potential of the grassroots; the idea of an alternative path to
economism; the importance on spiritual values as opposed to material contentment
alone; organic agriculture; the value of labour; the care of others; mutual aid and
the revival of interpersonal relationships and permanence as a desirable alternative
value opposed to conspicuous consumerism.
Kumarappa’s economic model has indirectly been an important source for
degrowth, even if up to now this has not been recognized and researched. In fact,
Kumarappa influenced the forefathers of degrowth, such as Ernst Schumacher and
Ivan Illich. Schumacher quotes Kumarappa in his book, Small is Beautiful, urging
a study of the economics of permanence, for they imply a profound reorienta-
tion of science and technology. Illich acknowledged Kumarappa’s influence and
visited T. Kallupati, where Kumarappa spent his last days (Victus 2003). Illich was
impressed with Kumarappa’s holistic understanding, Schumacher with his appro-
priate technology concept. From an Indian perspective, degrowth is an expression
of Gandhian economic thought in the West.
Finally, the Economy of Permanence is very close to degrowth in practice. The
model is still practised today by many Indian villages that rely upon subsistence
incomes in spite of the multi-frontal onslaught by neo-liberalism and Indian heavy
industries or corporations. There have been many past and present Indian social
movements and organizations influenced directly or indirectly by Kumarappa’s and
Gandhi’s thinking about fervent growth and development: the Lakshimi Ashram,
the Chipko Movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Navdanya, the National
Alliance of People’s Movements, the Kumarappa Institute of Rural Technology
and Development and the Kumarappa Institute of Gram Swaraj. These have been
involved in promoting organic agriculture, small dams, decentralised development
and supporting local industries and production. These are the natural allies in India
of the degrowth movement in the West.

References
Kumarappa, J. C. (1945) Economy of Permanence, Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan.
Kumarappa, J. C. (1951) Gandhian Economic Thought, Bombay: Vora & Co.
Kumarappa, J. C. (1958a) Economy of Permanence: A Quest for a Social Order Based on Non-
Violence, Wardha (India): Sarva Seva Sangh.
Kumarappa, J. C (1958b) Why the Village Movements? Rajghat: Akil Bharat Sarva Seva
Sangh (ABSSS).
Lindley, M. (2007) J. C. Kumarappa: Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist, Mumbai: Popular
Prakashan Pvt. Ltd.
Victus, S. (2003) Religion and Eco-Economics of J.C. Kumarappa: Gandhism Redefined, New
Delhi: ISPCK.
50
FEMINIST ECONOMICS
Antonella Picchio
WELL_B_LAB*, SPIN OFF, UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

Feminist economics introduce a shift of perspective in the way we see the econ-
omy. This new perspective is set by seeing women as autonomous subjects not
definable on the basis of the male norm that has transformed sexual difference into
a social inferiority. The feminist standpoint, free of a reductive and distortive male
bias (Elson 1998), allows for a deeper and broader insight into the economy. It is
deeper, because women’s experiential knowledge leads us closer to the complexity
of real life, and broader, because it extends economic analysis to domestic, non-
market activities.
The power to change perspective is rooted in the international feminist move-
ment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, as now, the feminist political
wave was concentrated on women’s resistance against the use of their bodies as a
means of production and reproduction on the part of the State and the Church and
of men’s control of them (Dalla Costa and James 1972).
Feminist economic thought is a rapidly expanding field of studies, a heteroge-
neous and pragmatic effort open to different approaches, paradigms and empirical
methods. The main areas of research and debate are:

x the sex disaggregation of economic data, to highlight overlooked persistent


forms of gender inequalities and their impact on labour markets, development
processes, trade and public policy;
x the extension of micro and macro economic dimensions to non-market activities;
x the position of social dimensions in economic analysis and policy;
x the feminist critique of current mainstream and heterodox theories, for their
methodological blindness to the social reproduction of human beings.

A very important academic institution of the community is IAFFE (International


Association for Feminist Economics), which publishes the journal Feminist Economics.
Feminist economics 209

According to my feminist analysis, economic systems are characterized by spe-


cific relationships between the production of means and the social reproduction of
people. Production and reproduction relationships are grounded on the division of
productive and reproductive labour, the distribution of income and resources and
sex and class power relationships (Picchio 1992).
The capitalist system is based on a specific structure of historical processes: pro-
duction of commodities, market exchange, distribution of income and, last but not
least, social reproduction of the population. These processes are all connected in a
circular flow, which is not automatically sustainable and it adapts through recur-
rent crises.
The capitalist system is characterized by the wage-labour market, i.e. by the
buying and selling of the capability to work (labour force), which is treated as
a commodity (see commodification). Classical political economists (Smith,
Ricardo and Marx) defined wages as the normal costs of the conventional neces-
saries that enabled the ‘labouring population’ to work and reproduce their ‘race’
(the term they used). Actually, in a capitalist context, the lives of workers become
means of production that are to be kept, for the sake of profit, within the limits
of efficiency and social control. This process of transforming lives into capital is a
moral and political battlefield that makes the link between economics and ethics
indissoluble and sex and class conflict endemic in capitalism.
Capitalism is a dangerous and inherently destructive system: on the whole, it is
unsustainable precisely because of the conflict between profit and the well-being of
the labouring population and the exploitation of the environment in order to hide
real costs of production and discharge social responsibilities.
Economic theories are not neutral or innocent with regard to the functioning
of the system of provisioning. The main economic paradigms differ when it comes
to the definition of profit, capital, wages and distribution of incomes. In particular,
the way the social reproduction of the labouring population is connected to other
structural processes entails major paradigmatic differences. Given that in classical
political economy, profit is defined as a residuum between production and what-
ever goes to the labouring population under any title (wages, public services and
transfers), and that the process of distribution of the surplus is explained on the basis
of class power relationships, the process of reproduction of the labouring popula-
tion falls at the centre of the analysis of value and distribution and at the core of a
structural conflict.
In the present context of growing insecurity, social inequality, fears of new
wars and ongoing destruction of the environment, the sentiments of the degrowth
critique and, even more so, the varied experiences of local convivial living, are
appealing and, what is more, are capable of producing more humane living condi-
tions at the local level. Yet, from a feminist perspective they have some limitations.
Macro feminist economics and the degrowth perspective differ in the way they
order and see structural processes, and in the attention they give to the distribu-
tion between profit and subsistence of the (labouring) population. The degrowth
perspective dwells extensively on production and consumption, giving subsistence
210 Antonella Picchio

economy a mythical role, but it does not pay enough attention to the sex and class
body-politics of social reproduction in the capitalist context we live in.
At the micro level, the provisioning of goods and services for direct use may
take into account the need to live a healthy, sociable, just life, but at the macro
level the degrowth narrative does not challenge the structure of capitalism. The
current crisis shows that there is a small group of financial profiteers endowed
with the power to rule public expenditure, i.e. to decide on the suffering of the
bodies and minds of the population. Any sensible person should be outraged by
such developments, but a mere moral reproach aimed at the ways we produce and
consume is equally unsatisfactory. The real challenge is to set out and defuse the
structural forces at the root of such destructive and alienating dynamics.
In order to understand the material and moral features of the capitalist system,
we need theories that grasp its structure and its dynamics. The classical surplus
approach offers powerful tools to this end. Not only does this approach show
surplus to be the leading motive of production, in conflict with a sustainable well-
being of the labouring population, but it shows also that the distribution between
wages (social wages included) and profit (plus rent) is the result of a political, insti-
tutional confrontation based on unequal class and sex power relationships (Picchio
1992). Once the politics of distribution are made clear, and real living conditions
emerge as crucial and at the heart of the social conflict, the so-called ‘objective
constraints’ that condemn so many people to poverty and social exclusion, and
women to more and more unpaid labour, will loose their grip. The use of social
reproduction as capital and as a reason to control women’s bodies and agency could
also explain the long history of violence exercised against women since the begin-
ning of capitalism (Federici 2004).
The more recent analytical tools of the capability approach developed by
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum can enrich the classical surplus approach. They
expand the concept of standards of living: no more a basket of commodities, but
a multidimensional set of individual functionings that defines effective well-being
within a space of multiple capabilities. The freedom to compose our lives accord-
ing to our values as autonomous individuals, embodied agaand embedded in a
social context, becomes a fundamental dimension of a good life.
Drawing from the toolbox of the surplus and of the capability approaches, the
feminist perspective on women’s experience – on what it really means to be embod-
ied and embedded in a social context – proposes a ‘reproductive, extended macro
economic approach’ (Picchio 2003) as a basis for a transformative Care Economy.
The degrowth perspective is not broad enough to include the critique of the
macro-dynamics of the present capitalist system and not deep enough to reveal the
complexity of real lives and the use of women’s activities to make it sustainable.
It thus shares the general blindness which dumps any caring reproductive respon-
sibility onto the domestic space, and this means, among other things, that human
vulnerability, including the vulnerability of adult males, remains a woman’s issue.
Feminist economics 211

References
Dalla Costa, M. and James, S. (1972) The power of women and the subversion of the community,
Bristol: Falling Wall Press.
Elson, D. (1998) ‘The economic, the political and the domestic: businesses, states and
households in the organization of production’, New Political Economy, 3 (2), 189–208.
Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation, New
York: Autonomedia.
Picchio, A. (1992) Social reproduction: the political economy of the labour market, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Picchio, A. (2003) ‘An extended macroeconomic approach’, In Unpaid work and the economy,
a gender perspective on standards of living, London: Routledge.
51
UBUNTU
Mogobe B. Ramose
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA

Ubuntu is a philosophy of the Bantu speaking peoples in Africa. Underpinning the


philosophy is the belief that motion is the principle of being. Accordingly, through
motion, all beings exist in an incessant complex flow of interactions and change
(Ramose 1999: 50–9). In Ubuntu, to be human one must practice giving, receiv-
ing, and passing on the goods of life to others (Griaule 1965: 137). This world-
view takes the ethical position that to be a human being is to care for oneself and
others. A person is a person through other persons, is the motto of Ubuntu. A human is
being and becoming in relation to and interdependence with others.
Here, the concept of others also includes all other entities that are not human
beings and, therefore, the concept relates directly to a care and a concern for the
environment. The Ubuntu philosophy’s ethical position takes as its point of depar-
ture the principle that one must promote life and avoid killing (Bujo 1998: 77). The
Sesotho proverb feta kgomo o tshware motho is a statement of this principle. It means
that if and when one ought to choose between preservation, especially of human
life, and the possession of excess wealth, one must opt for the preservation of life.
The philosophy of Ubuntu (botho or hunhu) is anchored on the ethical principle of
the promotion of life through mutual concern, care and sharing between and among
human beings as well as with the wider environment of which the human being is a
part. Ubuntu philosophy understands life in its wholeness (Bohm 1980).
According to Ubuntu philosophy, a community is a triad comprised of the
living, the living-dead (ancestors), and the yet-to-be born. The community of
the living answers to the living-dead by remembering them constantly through
various rituals, which pertain to the different stages of individual and family life.
It is believed that maintaining the relationship with the living-dead in this way
promotes well-being and harmony and thus the living avoid affliction imposed
by the displeased living-dead. It is also believed that one of the benefits of the
Ubuntu 213

harmony between the living and the living-dead is that the latter will provide
whatever is necessary so that the former fulfil their obligation to the third rung
of the community, namely, making the yet-to-be-born real by bearing children.
Bearing children is incomplete without the means to nurture and rear them; the
necessaries for the preservation of life must be available. This is the node and vital
point at which the concept of life extends to the environment and future genera-
tions, reaffirming the philosophy of wholeness. Here arises the responsibility to
promote life by actually practising the ethics of concern and care for the envi-
ronment. From the point of view of the Ubuntu philosophical understanding
of life as wholeness it may be suggested that the environment forms the fourth
dimension of the community.
In practice, the protagonists of Ubuntu philosophy continue to care for the
environment through various fertility rituals, the observance of taboos and respect
for totems.
Global warming threatens life in its wholeness, a threat paralleled only by the
silenced, but still real, threat of nuclear holocaust. The stubbornly inexorable
march towards collective suicide through the destruction of life as hitherto known
parallels the unbridled pursuit of money, and in particular, profit. This challenges
the Ubuntu concept of community and the attendant ethical principle of feta kgomo
o tshware motho. The community of the yet-to-be-born has the same right to life
as the living have.
Ubuntu offers the philosophical basis for an alternative imaginary to growth
and development, and thus it can be a source of inspiration for degrowthers. If
degrowth challenges the idea of development in the Global North, imaginaries
such as those of Ubuntu challenge it in Africa and elsewhere. The point is not
whether the North has to degrow for the South to grow, but whether we can leave
space for alternative native imaginaries to be part of shaping the future. Ubuntu’s
emphasis on connection, and of being in relation to others, resonates strongly
with the notions of commons and commoning. Ubuntu also expresses a strong
principle of community solidarity materialized into a redistribution of wealth. Its
spirit of ‘extroverted communities’ resonates with degrowthers’ call for localized
economies with open borders and flows. Group work and cooperation are privi-
leged over self-promotion, in line with the cooperativist spirit of degrowth, though
there is also recognition of individuals’ difference and uniqueness. The abstractness
of modern urban societies has undermined a community socialization that is central
to Ubuntu, but this can be regained through an ethic of collective responsibility
and commitment to a collective prosperity.
Despite the suppression of the Ubuntu’s voice in South Africa, for more than
three centuries Ubuntu philosophy has not died. Its continued practise is an impor-
tant challenge to the unfolding environmental problems, not least global warming.
The time for change is now, and the practise of the philosophy of Ubuntu is one
of the appropriate ethical responses to the necessity to halt and reverse global envi-
ronmental change.
214 Mogobe B. Ramose

References
Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the implicate order, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bujo, B. (1998) The ethical dimension of community, Namulondo Nganda Cecilia (trans.)
Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa.
Griaule, M. (1965) Conversations with Ogotommeli, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maathai, W. (2009) The challenge for Africa, London: William Heinemann.
Ramose, M. B. (1999) African philosophy through Ubuntu, Harare: Mond Books Publishers.
FROM AUSTERITY TO DÉPENSE
Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis, and Federico Demaria

– [A] big duel, Uncle . . . Great things are in the offing, and I don’t want to
stay at home . . .
– You’re mad, my boy, to go with those people! They’re all in the mafia,
all troublemakers. A Falconeri should be with us, for the King.
– For the King, Uncle, yes, of course. But which King? . . . If we want
things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, “The Leopard”

[A]ll that city . . . You just couldn’t see an end to it . . . It wasn’t what I saw
that stopped me, Max. It was what I didn’t see. . . . In all that sprawling city,
there was everything except an end . . . Take a piano. The keys begin, the
keys end. You know there are 88 of them . . . They are not infinite, you are
infinite. On those 88 keys the music that you can make is infinite. . . . But
you get me up on that gangway and roll out a keyboard with millions of
keys, and . . . there’s no end to them, that keyboard is infinite. But if that
keyboard is infinite there’s no music you can play.
From the movie “The Legend of 1900”

[A] human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel are no
less interesting than the sale of wheat . . .
It is not necessity, but its contrary . . . “luxury” that presents living matter
and mankind with their fundamental problems . . .
Georges Bataille, “The Accursed Share”
216 Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis, and Federico Demaria

The core question in the aftermath of the economic crisis in Europe and the U.S
has been framed as one of austerity vs. spending. Should governments implement
austerity or deficit spending measures in order to re-launch growth? While the
EU went mostly for the first option, the U.S. opted largely for the second. In
conventional economic terms, one could argue that austerity is not working: most
European countries are still in recession, while the U.S. is slowly growing again.
But in degrowth terms, neither austerity nor deficit spending are the solution.
They are the problem. Both, indeed, aim to re-launch growth; degrowthers oppose
them precisely because they are ideologically rooted in the growth imaginary. Even
those who want spending and growth only for the short-term to exit the crisis, and
hope to move beyond growth afterwards, do not realize that this “after” will never
come, since it is precisely through the spectre of recession and crisis that growth is
legitimated eternally.
To depict the substantial differences between the degrowth society we envision and
the contemporary Westernized society in which we live in, it seems useful to briefly
deconstruct the austerity and spending imaginaries using two examples from the news.
Cut 1. November 11, 2013: David Cameron’s speech about austerity in the
Lord Mayor’s banquet. The UK Prime Minister called for a “fundamental culture
change.” He condemned idleness and invoked the traditional British value of hard
work. “Put simply,” he said, “no country can succeed in the long term if capable
people are paid to stay idle and out of work.” People are trapped into unemploy-
ment by high benefits, Cameron noted: “for generations, people who could work
have been failed by the system and stuck on benefits”. Benefits will be lowered,
he promised, and no one will see any reward in staying idle or working less: “We are
ensuring that for every extra hour you work and every extra job you do, you
should always be better off.” In Cameron’s talk, the State is the problem, not the
solution; it has to be shrunk, become leaner and limit itself to setting and enforcing
rules, letting markets and the private sector produce wealth. His talk was a celebra-
tion of private enterprise: “the UK economy should be based on enterprise . . . we
need to support, reward and celebrate enterprise . . . make sure it is boosted every-
where, promoted in schools, taught in colleges, celebrated in communities.”
Cut 2. November 16, 2013: Paul Krugman comments on Lawrence Summers’
talk at the IMF, where the latter raised the spectre of a “secular stagnation” for
the U.S. economy, that is a long-term zero growth state. For Krugman this is the
result of a liquidity trap, which makes state spending vital. Ideally such spend-
ing should be productive; but even unproductive spending is better than noth-
ing, Krugman argues. The important is to get circulation going. Hide money
or gold in caves and have enterprises dig it up, as Keynes proposed, Krugman
says. Fake a threat from non-existent space aliens and spend for military protec-
tion (Krugman’s “own favourite”). Or get U.S. enterprises “to fit out all their
employees as cyborgs, with Google Glass and smart wristwatches everywhere.”
Even if this does not pay off, “the resulting investment boom would have given
us several years of much higher employment, with no real waste, since the resources
employed would have otherwise been idle.”
Epilogue 217

The two discourses appear on the surface to be worlds apart. Cameron calls for
an unprecedented cultural change, but in fact re-invokes Locke’s instructions to the
emerging bourgeoisie, what Max Weber later called “the protestant ethic”: work
hard, and deny self-indulgence and pleasure. This way capital will accumulate and
enterprises produce wealth, Cameron suggests. In the current conjuncture there
is no doubt that Cameron’s project is classist, redistributing upwards. The work-
ing classes are asked to tighten their belt and accept the loss of services provided
to them, free or subsidized, by the common wealth, so that the rich do not have
to shoulder higher taxes to sustain the common wealth in the absence of growth.
The Keynesian project instead seems to put the employment of the working classes
first; its advocacy of public spending seems, at least in principle, not to be regressive
(even if it is not destined to what one would normally call public services).
However, we maintain, what is common between the two discourses is more
instructive than what separates them. Both Cameron and Krugman are concerned
with “investment.” The former thinks that investment will be unleashed by rais-
ing the confidence of the markets that State expenditures are under control. The
latter wants the State to kick-start investment by pouring money in the economy.
They differ on the “how,” but what both want is to see capital circulating and
expanding again. The second feature they share is their abhorrence of “idleness.”
For Cameron, the problem is the idleness of workers and the resources wasted by
the State to support it. For Krugman the problem is the idleness of capital and the
waste of productive resources that could otherwise be invested. For Cameron,
the problem is the worker who doesn’t work; for Krugman, the capital that doesn’t
flow.
On the contrary, we degrowthers are not afraid of idleness. Paul Lafargue’s
provocative “The right to be lazy” is our inspiration. A society that has developed
so many resources surely can extend the right to idleness from the few rich to eve-
ryone, Lafargue argued in 1883, and André Gorz elaborated 100 years after. We
degrowthers also are not afraid of the idleness of capital; we desire it. Degrowth
involves slowing capital down. The essence of capitalism is the continuous rein-
vestment of surplus into new production. Wealth in industrialist societies is what
can be invested again.
The spending proposed by Krugman and Summers appears wasteful and unpro-
ductive in the short-term, but is productive in the long-term: it is a utilitarian
spending whose goal is to value capital, so that it does not stand idle, re-launching
its circulation and growth. Worse, implicit in their proposal is the assumption that
public policies must not engage with the meaning of life and the creation of a polit-
ical collective. On the contrary, for us, the current socio-ecological crisis urges to
overcome capitalism’s senseless growth through the means of a social dépense.
Dépense refers to a genuinely collective expenditure –– the spending in a collec-
tive feast, the decision to subsidise a class of spirituals to talk about philosophy, or to
leave a forest idle – an expenditure that in strictly economic sense is unproductive.
Practices of dépense “burn” capital out and take it out of the sphere of circulation,
slowing it down. Such collective “waste” is not for personal utility or for the utility
218 Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis, and Federico Demaria

of capital. It aspires to be political. It offers a process through which a collective


could make sense of and define the “good life,” rescuing individuals from their
illusionary and meaningless privatized lives.
Dépense generates horror, not only among the supporters of austerity, but also
among Keynesians, Marxists, and radicals of all sorts, including some environmen-
talists. To return to our examples, witness the reaction to the set-up for Cameron’s
talk. Progressives reacted because the Prime Minister was calling for austerity while
standing in a sumptuous hall surrounded by furniture crafted in gold. Instead, we
are not particularly concerned with such lavish expenditure, by a public institution
such as the City of London Corporation that was founded in the Middle Ages. The
gold of the Mayor’s Hall is an unproductive expenditure with the anti-utilitarian
essence of a by-gone era that preceded capitalism. For Keynesians, what was
appalling in this picture is the display of idle wealth; not for us. The contradiction
is not between Cameron’s call for austerity in the midst of golden furniture; the
real contradiction is between his call for an austere state, in the midst of a place that
symbolizes an era during which sovereigns were not shy of dépense.
The Mayor’s Hall is a form of public dépense, which we do not want to repro-
duce, but that we not reproach as such. We are aware that the gold in London’s
Guildhall is the outcome of the exploitation of workers, colonies, and ecosystems
by the British Empire. We are against such dispossessions and depletions. But our
point here is about the destiny of surplus, not its origin. Social surplus might be,
and has often been the outcome of exploitation, but it doesn´t have to: common-
wealth can be generated without exploitation. The progressives who took issue
with Cameron’s talk condemned the contradiction between the display of wealth
and his call for austerity. We see nothing contradictory between this wealth being
a product of exploitation, and Cameron’s call for austerity, i.e. more exploitation
of workers.
Many environmentalists will find it hard to accept a non-utilitarian waste of
resources, because their imaginary is so strongly wedded to the idea of natural scar-
city. But scarcity is social. Since the stone-age we have had more than what we need
for a basic standard of living. The original affluent societies of Sahlins did not experi-
ence scarcity not because they had a lot, but because they did not know what scarcity
means and thought they always had enough. They consumed what they gathered,
and they never accumulated. Scarcity calls for economizing and accumulating; this
is why the common sense in industrial society is that scarcity is the major problem
of humanity. This is why scarcity is the sine qua non of capitalism. Our message to
frugal ecologists is that it is better to waste resources in gold decorations in a public
building or drink them in a big feast, than put them in good use, accelerating even
more the extraction of new resources and the degradation of the environment. It is
the only way to escape Jevons’ Paradox. Accumulation drives growth, not waste.
Even in a society of frugal subjects with a downscaled metabolism, there will still be
a surplus that would have to be dispensed, if growth is not to be reactivated.
For those who are concerned that there are not enough resources to secure basic
needs, let alone waste them uselessly, let us note the incredible amount of resources
Epilogue 219

currently dispensed in bubbles and zero-sum positional games, whose aim is noth-
ing else than the circulation of capital (in fact what Krugman calls for). Economists
realize now that bubbles are not an aberration; they are vital for capitalism and
growth. Think of the immense amount of resources spent on professional sports,
cinema and commercial modern art, financial services, or all sorts of positional con-
sumption (the latest cars, houses, or gadgets whose only fleeting value is that they
are the latest). A football game was as pleasant as 50 years ago, when sports were
practiced by amateurs, and a movie or a painting no better today than then, despite
the huge amounts of capital that circulate to finance and market sports and arts.
“Ferraris for all” is the elusive dream of growth, but when everyone has a Ferrari,
the Ferrari will be the Fiat of its generation. Economists have called for limits on
such zero-sum competition for positional consumption, limits that would liberate
resources for real growth. We instead want to liberate these resources to secure
basic needs and to collectively feast with the rest to avow the political of a new
era. We in degrowth have made considerable advances in thinking about the State
and autonomous institutions that will cater for the satisfaction of basic needs. Now
we need to think about the institutions that will be responsible for the socialization
of unproductive dépense and the ways in which circulating surplus will be limited
and expended.
At the same time that capitalist discourses blame the idleness of the “factors
of production” at the societal level, they also foster the privatization of waste-
ful consumption: the individual can get drunk, spend all his or her savings at the
casino, organize private parties with champagne and caviar for his or her entourage,
deplete accumulated resources in luxurious hobbies or conspicuous shopping, or
lease beautiful bodies of women and men for orgiastic VIP parties. All this person-
alized dépense is allowed in the name of the liberty of each individual to elusively
search in his or her personal sphere for the meaning of life. The unquestionable
premise of a modern society is the right of each person to accumulate resources
beyond basic needs and use them for realizing what he or she thinks is a “good
life.” As a consequence, the system has to constantly grow to allow each and every
one the opportunity to pursue this right, as it pretends to do in the abstract.
This central feature of modernity has affected many strains of Marxism too,
which pushed the dream of collective emancipation to the extreme by means of a
life of material abundance for everyone. Actually existing socialist regimes found
that basic needs could well be satisfied for everyone. But in doing so, they repressed
private dépense and disavowed socialized dépense (counting out military parades
and ceremonies in honour of Stakhanovite bureaucrats). The hypothesis put for-
ward here is that it was the stifling of both private and social dépense that led to
the failure and eventually collapse of these regimes.
In the degrowth society that we imagine, dépense will be brought back to
the public sphere, but sobriety will characterize the individual. This call for per-
sonal sobriety is not in the name of financial deficits, ecological limits or moral
grounds; ours is not the Protestant call of the supporters of austerity. Our claim
for sobriety is based on the premise that finding the meaning of life individually is
220 Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis, and Federico Demaria

an anthropological illusion. Consider for example those rich individuals who after
having it all, get depressed and don’t know what to do with their lives. Finding
meaning alone is an illusion that leads to ecologically harmful and socially unjust
outcomes since it cannot be sustained for everyone. The sober subject of degrowth
that we envisage, does not aspire to the private accumulation of things because he
or she wants to be free from the necessity to find the meaning of life individu-
ally. People should take themselves less seriously, so to say, and enjoy living free
from the unbearable weight of limitless choice. Like the pianist in “the Legend of
1900” the sober subject knows well not to desire a piano with limitless keys. Like
the pianist, he or she will always prefer a limited vessel, to the limitless city. The
sober subject finds meaning in relations, not in itself. Liberated from the project
of finding individually the meaning of life, he or she can be devoted to a daily life
centered around care and reproduction and participate to the societal dépense
democratically determined. Anthropologically, this subject of degrowth already
exists. It is the subject of the nowtopians and eco-communities. It is to be
found among the back-to-the-landers who work the land, or the city dwellers
cultivating urban gardens, or occupying the squares. The open question is how it
can spread and replicate; but this is a political question, not an individual question.
The pair personal sobriety-social dépense is to substitute the pair social austerity-
individual excess. Our dialectical imaginary is “political” in the deep sense of
the term. Compare it to the supposedly “political” economy of Krugman, who
like the character in the Leopard, wants to change everything (even invent aliens!),
just for things to stay the same. It is indeed the paradox of the contemporary politi-
cal economy that it must not be political, i.e. it must not participate to build the
(new) meaning of life, the latter being an affair let to individuals and their private
networks. Instead, we maintain that once basic needs have been secured, it is in
deciding collectively “what to dépense” that a sense of the “good life” can be
constructed and the political of a new era be liberated. The realm of meaning starts
where the realm of necessity ends. A degrowth society would have to build new
institutions to choose in a collective way how to dedicate its resources to basic
needs on the one hand, and different forms of dépense on the other. The political
does not end with the satisfaction of basic necessities; it starts there. The choice
between collective feasts, Olympic games, idle ecosystems, military expenditures,
or voyages to space will still be there. The weight on democracy and on delibera-
tive institutions will be more intense than now that the dogma of growth and
continuous reinvestment has evaded the difficult questions of what we want to
do once we have enough. The political economy will be interested in the sacred
again. And the economy of austerity, for the most and private enjoyment for few
will give its place to an economy of common feast for all sober individuals.
Vive la décroissance conviviale! Pour la sobriété individuelle et la dépense
sociale!

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