Sometimes I feel that degrowth is such a vague and ambiguous idea that I can simply create my own version.
When I think about degrowth I imagine our society as a great, filthy engine powered by, human libido and ambition. Our so called meritocracy – our secular version of eugenics – provides the space for insatiable desires and cruel hierarchies. Without material rewards, the ladder of meritocracy has no meaning – a doctor cannot be distinguished from a store clerk. With no linkage between stuff and status, we would wander aimlessly through the world with no gauge, no map to signify whether we inhabit the sky or crawl on the ground. We would lose our human propensity to worship superiors and regard our inferiors with contempt. Without the key to the storage bins of commodities we would be meaninglessly equal. Will degrowth demand that we abandon the props that have nurtured egos throughout human history? Critics have argued that degrowth is too radical – well beyond the cautious, self-serving calculations of elected officials.
Degrowth, however, has a comforting familiarity. Anti-consumerism has deep roots in American culture. Simplicity, love of nature and rebellion against the rat race have long been noble themes in American letters – Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden:
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.”
Thoreau was not ruminating about redistribution and the hard details of equitable provisioning, he, rather, sought to define virtue as the ability to find meaning and happiness wholly outside of the Darwinian quest for social status and the impulse to stockpile consumeristic junk.
Thoreau’s older contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, gave us an explicit means to escape from the soul devouring institutions of America’s burgeoning capitalism:
“The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.” (from “Nature”)
Emerson and Thoreau formed their ideas in the margins accompanying the emerging “robber baron” era. They were contemporaries of George Bissel and Cornelius Vanderbilt – oil and railroad magnates respectively. Many, before the advent of Karl Marx, saw capitalism as an affront to human wellbeing. Thoreau viewed civil disobedience as an essential moral act to be employed against unjust authority, but he did not, as Marx would only a few years later, imagine opposition to government as a collective endeavor. The individual conscience, not “the movement” drove acts of resistance. Personal moral discretion drove political action.
The transcendentalists, like Thoreau and Emerson, adhered to a sort of individualism that we might now call left libertarianism. We have become accustomed to the perverted notions of individuality characteristic of American capitalism – the right to prioritize the self and pursue riches without regard to the wellbeing of others – but the transcendentalists tilted gently toward anarchy. They brandished a relentlessly skeptical view of government, conventional thinking and materialism. Critically for us, the transcendentalists fired salvos at anthropocentrism, declaring that nature ruled over humankind, not the other way around.
The ideas of the transcendentalists beguilingly suggest many of the values associated with degrowth. It would be wonderful if degrowth could simply slip into the comfortable old outfits that Thoreau wore while seated at his writing desk in his cabin at Walden pond. (Thoreau, in his methodical condemnation of consumerism, warned against “any enterprise that required new clothes”)
But Thoreau never had the weight of mass extinction on his shoulders. Upon being released from jail for refusing to pay taxes to the unjust government that sustained slavery and engaged in colonial wars, Thoreau tells us, he went to the woods to pick berries. In Thoreau’s world respite always stood taller than despair.
Degrowth, on the other hand, must keep an eye on the hands of the clock. For now, it is a collection of untested ideas but it cannot continue to be a cloistered wing of academia. Urgency drives the world view of degrowth. Transcendentalists saw anti-materialism as a necessary tool to achieve personal enlightenment – we now view simple living in the context of climate anxiety. Some of us will view degrowth as an opportunity to rediscover Transcendental values, while others will see it as a necessary imposition. But simple living can no longer be merely a matter of personal choice.
Tens of millions will either be mobilized to act, or not. The climate emergency cannot be mitigated exclusively via private acts of conscience, nor can a strictly theoretical school, without a program of action and a massive base, expect to meaningfully oppose corporate reflexes. Intellectual virtuosity has limits – we would all do well to read Thoreau, but also, we must understand that his literary brilliance did not slow down the robber barons.
This leaves me where I started out – unsure of how to describe degrowth, which seems so closely related to Marxism, Transcendentalism, and it even suggests aspects of anti-modern, agrarian communities like those of the Amish and the Mennonites, but nothing quite fits. Jason Hickel has asserted that degrowth,”has an ecological part and a social justice part.” This bifurcated task poses unique difficulties – those who are able to conceptualize a highly technical interface between economists and climate scientists must simultaneously conjure up a grass roots constituency, numerous and passionate enough about social justice to battle the juggernaut of extinction. No political movement has ever had to meet such arduous demands.
Degrowth is at once familiar and evasive. We find elements suggestive of degrowth everywhere, but a brand new review of the literature just published in the journal, Ecological Economics, determined, after surveying hundreds of peer reviewed papers, that degrowth is wildly eclectic, with research falling into seven different clusters, “with a low overall degree of collaboration.” These authors observed that degrowth rather straddles a boundary between an “academic field” and a “social movement.” One might also classify degrowth as an “ideology.” like Marxism, neoliberalism or secular humanism. Degrowth has an identity crises, an uncertain constituency and a public image that encompasses both the oblivious indifference of average people at one end and the hostility of fellow academics at the other.
The piece in Ecological Economics referenced above recommended:
“Academic publications on degrowth should give greater attention to discussing the socio-political feasibility of its ideas and proposals including interactions with possible constraints.”
This advice is problematic because degrowth, cannot be titrated in order to make it palatable to either profiteers or addicted consumers. It is inherently radical and based on the assumption that any alternative will be catastrophic. The English title of Timothee Parrique’s recent book – “Slow Down or Perish” – expressly conveys degrowth’s relationship to constraints. Should degrowth seek to appeal to skeptics and moderates or should it rather strive to inspire the public? The Ecological Economics review of degrowth literature recognized that many peer reviewed articles rather casually assumed that degrowth might be employed within the context of reform rather than revolution. There are no historical events that support such optimism. Degrowth is innately hostile toward capitalism, and it is simply irresponsible to imagine that oligarchs, profiteers and politicians on-the-take will defer to disadvantageous policies on moral grounds. Force (not necessarily violence) always precedes social transformation.
Two Dutch students – Leila Rezvani and Fleur Zandvoort – realized the need to give degrowth the tools for mass mobilization when they petitioned Extinction Rebellion (XR) in 2019 to adopt the arguments of degrowth into their set of three demands. It is completely natural for advocates of degrowth to see their cause as an essential component of the climate movement, and to identify the civil disobedience of XR as the likely means of establishing and building a grass roots presence. Unfortunately, XR has not, at this point, incorporated degrowth into their general platform. It is, however, well known that many people within XR view degrowth with great sympathy
Degrowth cannot emerge as a mass social movement without a revamped and vital story. Marshall Ganz, in his paper, “The Power of Story Telling in Social Movements,” asserts:
“Story telling is how we access the emotional – or moral – resources for the motivation to act…”
While Ganz’s paper traces the narrative history of The United Farmworkers, I believe that the civil rights movement offers a clearer and more familiar example of how story telling propels collective action – the civil rights story retells the biblical tale of David and Goliath.
Stories that give life to social protest movements almost invariably center on acts of civil disobedience and retaliatory state violence – the ordinary citizen confronting the Goliath of the militarized police. Popular culture consummates stories of courage and resistance with works of art that travel to universal spaces beyond the reach of news reports. Thus, we all know the story of Rosa Parks, an ordinary victim of Jim Crow, who, in 1955, refused to vacate a seat in a Whites only section of an Alabama bus. Parks was arrested and jailed (retaliatory state violence) and the event became the subject matter for poems, visual arts, documentaries, feature films, editorials and popular songs like this one by The Neville Brothers. The arrest of Rosa Parks became the iconic narrative of the civil rights movement.
We see the same themes in the anti-Vietnam War movement where the Kent State Massacre in May of 1970 provoked such fierce mass protest that virtually the entire US campus system closed down within days of that event. Again, we have civil disobedience, state violence and popular culture, all interacting to tell a story. The famous song “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was recorded 17 days after the massacre.
Mass movements begin with an identifiable core – southern Black people and draft age students were the original constituents of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, respectively. But invariably, mass social movements attract a diverse following – stories of state sponsored brutality leveraged against those struggling to obtain human rights evoke universal moral sympathy.
The George Floyd protests of 2020 amassed the largest protest constituency in human history, encompassing tens of millions of people across thousands of cities in over sixty nations. That, perhaps, resulted from a viral cell phone video posted by bystander, Darnella Frazier, on YouTube. Frazier’s video inadvertently focused on a group of onlookers pleading with police to check George Floyd’s pulse. This ad hoc group became a sort of Greek Chorus that tied tens of millions of YouTube watchers to the brutal act of police violence. The Greek Chorus was a dramatic device used to represent the audience. Viewers identified with the helpless bystanders, and this, I belief, created a cascading and largely subconscious revulsion directed toward our collective impotence. Within days people were in the streets in unprecedented numbers. Story telling can be subtly and unintentionally connected to universal emotions. Advocates of degrowth ought to keep that in mind – for degrowth has yet to compose a story.
Who comprises degrowths core constituency? We seldom ask that question, and might simplistically assume that academic scholars are the beginning and end of degrowth, but there are indigenous communities living degrowth lives in real time, not as a future fantasy.
Ted Trainer, in a brief exchange with this writer in the comment section of his piece, “What is to be done? Thoughts on degrowth strategy,” mentioned the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. This is an indigenous group that has engaged in armed resistance against the Mexican state and achieved remarkable success in attaining concessions. The Zapatistas have developed a decentralized, equalitarian array of rural, agricultural communities. This group represents a coalition of indigenous and middle class allies who see themselves as embodying Marxist values of sharing and common ownership, along with the importance of participatory democracy and gender equality. The Zapatistas have also gained recognition in American popular culture with this song by Rage Against the Machine. A powerful movement almost always has a footprint in the world of popular music.
The literature on degrowth routinely argues (appropriately so) that the global north rather than the global south must be the target for change, but it may well be that the vanguard for degrowth resides, paradoxically, in the global south. It may be that subconscious bias causes us to believe that the global south must catch up with the economic production of the wealthiest states, rather than encouraging us to imagine that the wealthy states need to catch up to the level of consciousness displayed by the most radical societies in the global south.
A paper by noted anthropologist Alpa Shah details the little known equalitarian values and practices of the indigenous Adivasi people of Eastern India. Shah, in language reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau, describes the Adivasi as being, “among the poorest people in the world but among the richest inside.”
She focuses on the Adivasi practice of choosing village leaders via sortition, a topic very dear to my heart, as I have written, somewhat whimsically, that sortition ought to be a significant component of the degrowth political strategy. I share Shah’s view that sortition profoundly connects to the value of equality. If every person has equal access to the institutions of political authority it becomes almost impossible to imagine society coalescing into exploitative patterns of hierarchy.
Shah describes the remarkable Adivasi ritual of sortition in which a blindfolded person:
“wandered from house to house till the spirit eventually left him again to settle at another house. There, a man dressed in his loin cloth was quietly eating while his household, and therefore he, was declared the new paenbharra for the next three years as he unceremoniously continued to finish his lunch.”
There are also Indigenous people in the US subscribing to values that we associate with degrowth. This is from a piece by Tokata Iron Eyes regarding the corporate desecration of Indigenous lands designated for lithium extraction at Thacker Pass in Nevada:
“But mining is not a thing of the past. Present day efforts often focus on other valuable minerals in the Black Hills region, such as uranium and rare earth elements essential for various modern technologies — lithium included. It’s all connected, and it’s hardly an overstatement to say that anywhere you look, extractive industry encroaches on Indigenous homelands. That must change going forward. If we’re to shift the trajectory of the climate crisis and create a better future for the coming generations, we must listen to the age-old wisdom of Indigenous peoples who understand how to live in balance with the Unci Maka, our Grandmother Earth.”
The very poor – tens of millions in the US alone – have the most to gain from the proposed policies of degrowth. People dependent on entitlement programs struggle to feed their families, often fail to find affordable housing and suffer disproportionately from state violence. Poor people endure a host of mental health and physical ailments linked to poverty, and have little access to dental care. This group has been abandoned by both US political parties, and poor people vote at much lower rates than middle or working class people. However, the poorest people in Europe have a history of civil disobedience as evidenced by the Amsterdam coronation riots of 1980 that protested housing shortages. Civil disobedience over “squatters” rights have historically led to conflicts between police and unhoused people. Globally, there are estimated to be a billion squatters – a huge potential constituency for the degrowth movement if it prioritized housing security, health care and high quality nutrition as a fundamental plank in its social justice agenda.
The very poor represent an enormous potential source of leadership and support for the degrowth movement. Unfortunately, the academic scholars who labor to create the theoretical basis for degrowth may, coming from relatively privileged communities, have little familiarity and comfort with poor people and impoverished communities. This split should be acknowledged and remediated to the best of our abilities. Cross class alliances require disciplined, conscious soul searching.
The role of poor and working class people in the Cuban revolution has long been underappreciated, but the research of Steve Cushion presented in his 2016 book: “A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerilla’s Victory,” debunks the idea that the Communist Revolution was largely driven by the ideology of middle class leaders like lawyer, Fidel Castro, and Argentine physician, Che Guevara. Cushion, drawing on archival sources in Havana argued that working class and union organizations played a major role in the revolution, and in sustaining revolutionary goals over the course of the now 65 year US embargo..
I reference the Cuban Revolution for two reasons, 1) It is yet another example of radical perspective and action emerging from the global south, and 2) It demonstrated the critical role of poor and working class leadership in the success of radical movements.
Radical political movements have figured prominently in the history of Latin America, with indigenous movements often at the vanguard. While indigenous people comprise only 4% of the world’s population, they make up a third of those murdered by governmental and corporate goons for climate activism.
“In Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras – three countries that also rank as some of the most dangerous in the world for environmental activists – crimes against Indigenous leaders are linked to the growing presence of companies involved in extractive activities and to the state of impunity that reigns over their lands.”
I believe that we have been discussing degrowth in an ass-backward manner – slowing the economy will never be accomplished via the altruistic sacrifices of the materially privileged classes, but can only happen as a result of a transfer of power. A coalition of poor, working, indigenous people and other allies will have to be sold on degrowth and be well organized enough to engage in civil disobedience. Where has political change occurred without strikes, demonstrations and massive numbers of people willing to take personal risks and be arrested?
Degrowth, I believe, is at a critical cross road – advocates must now choose to continue to regard degrowth as an unending thought experiment, or to take degrowth into communities of ordinary folks. We waste our time debating Matt Huber or Daniel Driscoll in fruitless discourse while masses of people have no familiarity with degrowth. We are communicating in echo chambers or expending energy trying to convince opponents whose views are already a foregone conclusion. We have to create natural alliances, engage in civil disobedience and compose a story. That is a lot to do in a very short time.
