D'Alisa, Demaria, Kallis - Degrowth, A Vocabulary For A New Era
D'Alisa, Demaria, Kallis - Degrowth, A Vocabulary For A New Era
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
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
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
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
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
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]
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]
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
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]
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
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]
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]
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
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]
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
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
Note
1 AIE, World Energy Outlnteook, 2010.
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The elephant and the snail
INTRODUCTION
Degrowth
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
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
excuse the debts of those whose basic standard of living is threatened, but not pay
back debts to those who lent for high profit.
transformation emerging from within the system, in the latest crisis of capitalism
and as the period of growth and expansion comes to an end.
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
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”
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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).
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
[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
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
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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:
[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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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:
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
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
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!