In industrialized societies, where so many people regard economic growth as the essence of human progress, the idea of deliberately rejecting growth is seen as insane. Yet that is more or less what the planet’s ecosystems are saying right now about the world economy. It’s also the message of an expanding movement, Degrowth, that is particularly strong in Europe and the global South.
A few months ago I blogged about the massive Degrowth conference in Leipzig, Germany, that attracted 3,000 people from around the world. The basic point of the discussions was how to get beyond the fetish of growth, intellectually and practically, and how to transform our idea of “the economy” so that it incorporates such important values as democracy, social well-being and ecological limits.
Several of the movement’s leading figures have now released a rich anthology of essays, Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge). It is the first English language book to comprehensively survey the burgeoning literature on degrowth. More about the book on its website and an amusing three-minute video.
The editors — Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgios Kallis – are three scholars at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and members of the group Research & Degrowth. The editors describe degrowth as “a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism.” The basic idea is to find new ways to achieve “the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.”
Here’s how the book jacket describes the volume:
"We live in an era of stagnation, rapid impoverishment, rising inequalities and socio-ecological disasters. In the dominant discourse, these are effects of economic crisis, lack of growth or underdevelopment. This book argues that growth is the cause of these problems and that it has become uneconomic, ecologically unsustainable and intrinsically unjust."
When the language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary. A movement of activists and intellectuals, first starting in France and then spreading to the rest of the world, has called for the decolonization of public debate from the idiom of economism and the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective. ‘Degrowth’ (‘décroissance’) has come to signify for them the desired direction of societies that will use fewer natural resources and will organize themselves to live radically differently. ‘Simplicity’, ‘conviviality’, ‘autonomy’, ‘care’, ‘commons’ and ‘dépense’ are some of the words that express what a degrowth society might look like.
The book is organized as a “dictionary” of key terms that have to do with degrowth, divided into four Parts: lines of thought such as development, environmental justice, bioeconomics, and anti-utilitarianism; core terms such as capitalism, commodification, entropy, care work and so on; a survey of on-the-ground action that is enacting post-growth alternatives from urban gardens and co-operatives to eco-communities and work sharing; and movement alliances with forces involved in Buen Vivir, feminist economics and Ubuntu.
Contributors to the book include such folks as Tim Jackson, Chris Carlsson, Juliet Schor, Joshua Farley, Aruro Escobar, Samuel Alexander, and Joan Martinez-Alier, among dozens of others. I’m happy to report that Silke Helfrich and I contributed a chapter on the commons.
