Degrowth: The awakening of consciousness before an alternative

Ed. note: This article was originally written in Spanish. The English was translated by the author and lightly edited by Jane K. Brundage.

How many times have we heard our political leaders talk about economic growth, production or even consumption? These three spheres have dominated political discourse in practically all Western societies, establishing “economic fundamentalism” as the essential basis for consolidating the association of social welfare with money.

While business groups, political parties and other social actors encourage us to “grow and produce”, our conscious awareness may come to assume that such consumption would lead to an increase in levels of happiness, despite the fact that in most cases we consume things we do not really need.

The same thing happens when we hear political discourse revolving around the concept of “development” as a national objective, through a frenzied competition for creating new “needs”, producing more, stimulating more demand and generating growth that, supposedly, benefits everyone. They have also failed to hide the reality of consumerism from us: the more we consume, the greater our use of energy, minerals, water and land, which generates enormous quantities of waste.

Degrowth as a theory has become an alternative to streams of thought that defend a new post-capitalist scenario. Put simply, degrowth is much more than a theory that advocates reducing our economy and production model. It calls for a substantial change at both the individual and social levels that seeks to focus on elements as disparate as they are complex.

In Spain we find different writers who continuously promulgate degrowth ideals. One of them is Carlos Taibo, an economist from Madrid, who defines the demands for degrowth as “endless precise fields such as health and education, the rural world and trade unionism, cities and migrations.” For this reason, degrowth first senses a change in the quotidian life of people associated with a way of living that is friendly to the environment and with an outlook that seeks to resolve what the ideals of economic growth have abandoned.

Degrowth strives to minimize the importance of the dominant discourse, which it bases on that “way of life slavishly obsessed with the generation of capital”, through the practical integration of what we often carry in our consciousness. It incorporates emotional elements associated with our daily lives and responsive to the neoliberal logic that the more we work, the more money we have and the more material goods we can consume, the happier we will be.

Serge Latouche, a French economist and one of the principal promoters of degrowth, analyzes the reasons why the neoliberal model has settled in our societies. Latouche speaks chiefly of three processes, or pillars, that drive our “capitalist being”: The first, advertising, drives individuals to buy products that often are not needed. The second, credit, makes it easier to get the money to buy what is not objectively needed. And finally, expiry, is associated with the usage or functional life of the acquired products that over time stop working, forcing us to buy again.

Latouche’s pillars invoke an awakening of awareness reminding us that the ideals of economic growth do not seek to resolve all the issues involved in the current scenario of polycrisis and the effects of climate change. Even so-called “green capitalism” has taken advantage of the awakening of awareness about the environmental crisis by offering “environmentally friendly” products such as electric vehicles, which certainly do not emit CO2 emissions. This is assumed to be a great achievement, despite the fact that EV components use a range of minerals that are even more scarce than those derived from petroleum, minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel or graphite and the so-called rare earths (minerals with highly valued features of conductivity and magnetism).

Despite the scarcity of these metals and the impact of their extraction — as in the case of lithium in which the crushing of hard rocks and separation of minerals in saltwater ponds require large amounts of energy and chemicals — the countries that contain these scarce minerals are diverse and often troubled. The largest lithium reserves are in the triangle formed by Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. Lithium is also found in China. The largest nickel producer today is the Philippines. The largest source of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that has become a battleground for control of cobalt.

Degrowth intuitively knows that capitalism with its ideal of economic growth does not assume we have to reduce our levels of consumption to continue having a habitable planet, and thereby lessen the effects of climate change. Given this point of view, degrowth invites us to reconsider neoliberalism from a vantage point acceptable to our conscious awareness, and through a change in the daily life of people whose way of life is already on good terms with the environment and whose outlook seeks to resolve all that has been abandoned by the ideals of economic growth.

It is important to emphasize that the ideals of degrowth do not advocate a defense of economic poverty, but rather call for sufficiency. The emphasis on the true meaning of the term consumption — distinguishing it from consumerism — seeks to introduce a change in our way of life that reflects sufficiency, what we truly need.

The degrowth perspective insists on downplaying the dominant discourse, which it bases on that “way of life slavishly obsessed with the generation of capital.” For this reason, degrowth considers essential the incorporation of emotional elements associated with our daily life as a point of focus and attraction toward the values that many times we carry in our conscious awareness.

Work is one example. For degrowth, work has become a fundamental tool for satisfying the consumption needs imbued in us by the current economic model. These created needs have separated us from elements as fundamental to our well-being as free time. If we abandoned or simply diminished the logic of productivity and competitiveness, decreasing them in this sense, we would not only have more time to dedicate ourselves to those activities, be they family or leisure, for which we work, but we would also considerably reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in our atmosphere.

The reduction of productivity and workday would only bring about a decrease in the hours of work. By reducing the workday, we would have more job opportunities for individuals who have been excluded by capitalist logic, and who are currently unemployed. With this, the distribution of labor in the degrowth proposal is fundamentally associated with the reduction of production and therefore of consumerism.

In the logic of degrowth, a reduction in mass production and consumption promotes the cancellation of entire segments of the economy associated with the unstoppable growth of the pollution levels affecting the environment. This could certainly produce considerable growth in levels of unemployment. For this reason, different degrowthers, among them Carlos Taibo, suppose that it is necessary, first, to promote the development of those economic activities related to the attention of unsatisfied social needs and with respect for the natural environment; and second, to distribute work among the segments of the conventional economy that will inevitably continue to exist.

Degrowth not only responds to the fallacies of the traditional development model, it also promotes a radical change in all spheres of society. Its critical perspective on the existing order — characterized by being anti-patriarchal, self-managed and internationalist — is fundamental, given the introduction of equitable social values that recover the sense of community lost under capitalism, and given the continuous insatiable individualism that it [neoliberal capitalism] promotes. This, in turn, is accompanied by the strength of degrowth, in that it combines the individual and the collective in the search for a change in the daily life of people that recovers certain elements of rural life.

We must consider that degrowth, as a dynamic of change, first seeks to generate awareness of the social and ecological impact that the current development model — through its political current of neoliberalism — has had on our planet. Next, we have to rethink the educational structure that essentially responds to the logic of capital, fostering an ideal that workers adapt to hierarchy and authority, accepting the system´s ´rules of the game´, that is, behaving primarily as mere consumers.

Degrowth is not alien to our consciousness and our “inner voice”. Thus, the incorporation of degrowth elements in our society such as solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid, are not alien either to the human spirit or to our lives. They are the response of our conscience to what we have perceived as unfair and contemptible. Degrowth fights for the construction of positive, healthy scenarios for future generations, respecting the environment and cultural diversity through a reorientation of economic activity that abandons unlimited individual growth for a social growth that is measured, such that others can simply live.