From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Degrowth (French: décroissance) is a term used for both a political, economic, and social movement as well as a set of theories that critiques the paradigm of economic growth. It is based on ideas from a diverse range of lines of thought such as political ecology, ecological economics, feminist political ecology, and environmental justice, pointing out the social and ecological harm caused by the pursuit of infinite growth and Western "development" imperatives. Degrowth emphasizes the need to reduce global consumption and production (social metabolism) and advocates a socially just and ecologically sustainable society with social and environmental well-being replacing GDP
as the indicator of prosperity. Hence, although GDP is likely to shrink
in a "Degrowth society", i.e. a society in which the objectives of the
degrowth movement are achieved, this is not the primary objective of
degrowth.
Degrowth highlights the importance of autonomy, care work, self-organization, commons, community, open localism, work sharing, happiness and conviviality.
Background
The "degrowth" movement arose from concerns over the perceived consequences of the productivism and consumerism associated with industrial societies (whether capitalist or socialist) including:
In academia, a study gathered degrowth proposals and defined the
movement with three main goals: (1) Reduce the environmental impact of
human activity; (2) Redistribute income and wealth both within and
between countries; (3) Promote the transition from a materialistic to a
convivial and participatory society.
Resource depletion
As economies grow, the need for resources grows accordingly (unless
there are changes in efficiency or demand for different products due to
price changes). There is a fixed supply of non-renewable resources, such as petroleum (oil), and these resources will inevitably be depleted. Renewable resources can also be depleted if extracted at unsustainable rates over extended periods. For example, this has occurred with caviar production in the Caspian Sea.
There is much concern as to how growing demand for these resources will
be met as supplies decrease. Many organizations and governments look to
energy technologies such as biofuels, solar cells, and wind turbines to
meet the demand gap after peak oil. Others have argued that none of the
alternatives could effectively replace versatility and portability of
oil. Authors of the book Techno-Fix
criticize technological optimists for overlooking the limitations of
technology in solving agricultural and social challenges arising from
growth.
Proponents of degrowth argue that decreasing demand is the only
way of permanently closing the demand gap. For renewable resources,
demand, and therefore production, must also be brought down to levels
that prevent depletion and are environmentally healthy. Moving toward a
society that is not dependent on oil is seen as essential to avoiding societal collapse when non-renewable resources are depleted.
The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's
ecosystems. It compares human demand with planet Earth's ecological
capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically
productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human
population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste.
According to a 2005 Global Footprint Network report, inhabitants of high-income countries live off of 6.4 global hectares (gHa), while those from low-income countries live off of a single gHa. For example, while each inhabitant of Bangladesh lives off of what they produce from 0.56 gHa, a North American
requires 12.5 gHa. Each inhabitant of North America uses 22.3 times as
much land as a Bangladeshi. According to the same report, the average
number of global hectares per person was 2.1, while current consumption
levels have reached 2.7 hectares per person. In order for the world's
population to attain the living standards typical of European countries,
the resources of between three and eight planet Earths would be required with current levels of efficiency and means of production. In order for world economic equality to be achieved with the current available resources, proponents say rich countries would have to reduce their standard of living
through degrowth. The constraints on resources would eventually lead to
a forced reduction in consumption. Controlled reduction of consumption
would reduce the trauma of this change assuming no technological changes increase the planet's carrying capacity.
Degrowth and sustainable development
Degrowth thought is in opposition to all forms of productivism
(the belief that economic productivity and growth is the purpose of
human organization). It is, thus, opposed to the current form of sustainable development. While the concern for sustainability does not contradict degrowth, sustainable development is rooted in mainstream development ideas that aim to increase capitalist growth and consumption. Degrowth therefore sees sustainable development as an oxymoron, as any development based on growth in a finite and environmentally stressed world is seen as inherently unsustainable.
Critics of degrowth argue that a slowing of economic growth would result in increased unemployment, increased poverty,
and decreased income per capita. Many who understand the devastating
environmental consequences of growth still advocate for economic growth
in the South, even if not in the North. But, a slowing of economic
growth would fail to deliver the benefits of degrowth—self-sufficiency,
material responsibility—and would indeed lead to decreased employment.
Rather, degrowth proponents advocate the complete abandonment of the
current (growth) economic model, suggesting that relocalizing and
abandoning the global economy in the Global South
would allow people of the South to become more self-sufficient and
would end the overconsumption and exploitation of Southern resources by
the North.
Proponents of degrowth see it as a possible path to preserve ecosystems
from human pressures. In this idea, the environment is communally cared
for, integrating humans and nature; degrowth implies the perception of
ecosystems as inherently valuable, not just as a source for resources.
At the Second International Conference on degrowth, ideas such as a
maximum wage and open borders were discussed. There's also an
acknowledgement with degrowth that population growth is not the central
issue to the need for industrial growth, because larger populations in
the global South may use far less resources than a handful of
individuals in the global North. Degrowth suggests a deontological shift
so that lifestyles that involve a high level of resource consumption
are no longer seen as attractive. Other visions of degrowth include the
global North repairing past injustices from centuries of colonization
and exploitation, and redistributing wealth, and a concept of the
appropriate scale of action is a major topic of debate within degrowth
movements.
Some researchers believe that the world will have to pass through Great Transformation, "by design or by disaster", therefore ecological economics have to incorporate Postdevelopment theories, Buen vivir and degrowth if they want to really change something.
"Rebound effect"
Technologies designed to reduce resource use and improve efficiency
are often touted as sustainable or green solutions. Degrowth literature,
however, warns about these technological advances due to the "rebound effect", also known as Jevons paradox.
This concept is based on observations that when a less
resource-exhaustive technology is introduced, behavior surrounding the
use of that technology may change, and consumption of that technology
could increase or even offset any potential resource savings.
In light of the rebound effect, proponents of degrowth hold that the
only effective "sustainable" solutions must involve a complete rejection
of the growth paradigm and a move to a degrowth paradigm. There are
also fundamental limits to technological solutions in the pursuit of
degrowth, as all engagements with technology increase the cumulative
matter-energy throughput. However, the convergence of digital commons of knowledge and design with distributed manufacturing technologies may arguably hold potential for building degrowth future scenarios.
Mitigation of climate change and determinants of 'growth'
1.5 °C scenario map under different levels of energy-GDP decoupling, RE speed and NETs
Scientists report that degrowth scenarios, where economic output either "declines" or declines in terms of contemporary economic metrics such as current GDP, have been neglected in considerations of 1.5 °C scenarios reported by the IPCC,
finding that investigated degrowth scenarios "minimize many key risks
for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven
pathways" with a core problem of such being feasibility in the context
of contemporary decision-making of politics and globalized rebound- and relocation-effects.
However, structurally realigning 'economic growth' and socioeconomic
activity determination-structures may not be widely debated in both the
degrowth community and in degrowth research which may largely focus on
reducing economic growth either more generally or without structural
alternative but with e.g. nonsystemic political interventions.
Similarly, many green growth
advocates suggest that contemporary socioeconomic mechanisms and
metrics – including for economic growth – can be continued with forms of
nonstructural "energy-GDP decoupling". A study concluded that public services are associated with higher human need
satisfaction and lower energy requirements while contemporary forms of
economic growth are linked with the opposite, with the contemporary economic system being fundamentally misaligned with the twin goals of meeting human needs and ensuring ecological sustainability,
suggesting that prioritizing human well-being and ecological
sustainability would be preferable over growth in current metrics of
economic growth.
Easterlin Paradox
In 1973, Richard Easterlin
published a paper entitled "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?
Some Empirical Evidence" which finds that, after a certain income level
or "satiation point", income has no effect on happiness levels. While the Easterlin Paradox has been reassessed multiple times with varying conclusions,
the original findings indicate that a redistribution of wealth need not
result in decreasing happiness levels. Furthermore, Easterlin writes
consumption levels directly correlate with income level, indicating that
after reaching a certain satiation point increased consumption has no
effect on happiness levels.
Origins of the movement
The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the
anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century, developed in Great
Britain by John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement (1819–1900), in the United States by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).
The concept of "degrowth" proper appeared during the 1970s, proposed by André Gorz (1972) and intellectuals such as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Jean Baudrillard, Edward Goldsmith, E.F. Schumacher, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich, whose ideas reflect those of earlier thinkers, such as the economist E. J. Mishan, the industrial historian Tom Rolt, and the radical socialist Tony Turner. The writings of Mahatma Gandhi and J. C. Kumarappa also contain similar philosophies, particularly regarding his support of voluntary simplicity.
More generally, degrowth movements draw on the values of humanism, enlightenment, anthropology and human rights.
Club of Rome reports
The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing it with all their might in the wrong direction.
In 1968, the Club of Rome, a think tank headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland, asked researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a report on the limits of our world system and the constraints it puts on human numbers and activity. The report, called The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, became the first significant study to model the consequences of economic growth.
The reports (also known as the Meadows Reports) are not strictly
the founding texts of the degrowth movement, as these reports only
advise zero growth, and have also been used to support the sustainable development
movement. Still, they are considered the first studies explicitly
presenting economic growth as a key reason for the increase in global environmental problems such as pollution, shortage of raw materials, and the destruction of ecosystems. The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was published in 2004, and in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.
Lasting influence of Georgescu-Roegen
The degrowth movement recognises Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as the main intellectual figure inspiring the movement. In his work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity
of Earth—that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and
consumption levels—is bound to decrease sometime in the future as
Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted
and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse.
Georgescu-Roegen's intellectual inspiration to degrowth dates back to the 1970s. When Georgescu-Roegen delivered a lecture at the University of Geneva in 1974, he made a lasting impression on the young, newly graduated French historian and philosopher, Jacques Grinevald ,
who had earlier been introduced to Georgescu-Roegen's works by an
academic advisor. Georgescu-Roegen and Grinevald became friends, and
Grinevald devoted his research to a closer study of Georgescu-Roegen's
work. As a result, in 1979, Grinevald published a French translation of a
selection of Georgescu-Roegen's articles entitled Demain la décroissance: Entropie – Écologie – Économie ('Tomorrow, the Decline: Entropy – Ecology – Economy'). Georgescu-Roegen, who spoke French fluently, approved the use of the term décroissance
in the title of the French translation. The book gained influence in
French intellectual and academic circles from the outset. Later, the
book was expanded and republished in 1995, and once again in 2006;
however, the word Demain ('tomorrow') was removed from the title of the book in the second and third editions.
By the time Grinevald suggested the term décroissance to
form part of the title of the French translation of Georgescu-Roegen's
work, the term had already permeated French intellectual circles since
the early-1970s to signify a deliberate political action to downscale
the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis. Simultaneously, but independently, Georgescu-Roegen criticised the ideas of The Limits to Growth and Herman Daly's steady-state economy
in his article, "Energy and Economic Myths", delivered as a series of
lectures from 1972, but not published before 1975. In the article,
Georgescu-Roegen stated the following:
[Authors who] were set exclusively
on proving the impossibility of growth ... were easily deluded by a
simple, now widespread, but false syllogism:
Since exponential growth in a finite world leads to disasters of all
kinds, ecological salvation lies in the stationary state. ... The
crucial error consists in not seeing that not only growth, but also a
zero-growth state, nay, even a declining state which does not converge
toward annihilation, cannot exist forever in a finite environment.
... [T]he important, yet unnoticed point [is] that the necessary conclusion of the arguments in favor of that vision [of a stationary state] is that the most desirable state is not a stationary, but a declining one. Undoubtedly, the current growth must cease, nay, be reversed. [Emphasis in original]
When reading this particular passage of the text, Grinevald realised
that no professional economist of any orientation had ever reasoned like
this before. Grinevald also realised the congruence of
Georgescu-Roegen's viewpoint and the French debates occurring at the
time; this resemblance was captured in the title of the French edition.
Taken together, the translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work into French
both fed on and gave further impetus to the concept of décroissance in France—and everywhere else in the francophone world—thereby creating something of an intellectual feedback loop.
By the 2000s, when décroissance was to be translated from
French back into English as the catchy banner for the new social
movement, the original term "decline" was deemed inappropriate and
misdirected for the purpose: "Decline" usually refers to an unexpected,
unwelcome, and temporary economic recession, something to be avoided or quickly overcome. Instead, the neologism
"degrowth" was coined to signify a deliberate political action to
downscale the economy on a permanent, conscious basis—as in the
prevailing French usage of the term—something good to be welcomed and
maintained, or so followers believe.
When the first international degrowth conference was held in
Paris in 2008, the participants honoured Georgescu-Roegen and his work. In his manifesto on Petit traité de la décroissance sereine ("Farewell to Growth"), the leading French champion of the degrowth movement, Serge Latouche, credited Georgescu-Roegen as the "main theoretical source of degrowth". Likewise, Italian degrowth theorist Mauro Bonaiuti considered Georgescu-Roegen's work to be "one of the analytical cornerstones of the degrowth perspective".
Serge Latouche
Serge Latouche, a professor of economics at the University of Paris-Sud, has noted that:
If you try to measure the reduction
in the rate of growth by taking into account damages caused to the
environment and its consequences on our natural and cultural patrimony,
you will generally obtain a result of zero or even negative growth. In
1991, the United States spent 115 billion dollars, or 2.1% of the GDP on the protection of the environment. The Clean Air Act increased this cost by 45 or 55 million dollars per year. [...] The World Resources Institute tried to measure the rate of the growth taking into account the punishment exerted on the natural capital
of the world, with an eye towards sustainable development. For
Indonesia, it found that the rate of growth between 1971 and 1984 would
be reduced from 7.1 to 4% annually, and that was by taking only three
variables into consideration: deforestation, the reduction in the reserves of oil and natural gas, and soil erosion.
Schumacher and Buddhist economics
E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful
predates a unified degrowth movement, but nonetheless serves as an
important basis for degrowth ideas. In this book he critiques the neo-liberal
model of economic development, arguing that an increasing "standard of
living", based on consumption, is absurd as a goal of economic activity
and development. Instead, under what he refers to as Buddhist economics, we should aim to maximize well-being while minimizing consumption.
Ecological and social issues
In January 1972, Edward Goldsmith and Robert Prescott-Allen—editors of The Ecologist—published A Blueprint for Survival, which called for a radical programme of decentralisation and deindustrialization
to prevent what the authors referred to as "the breakdown of society
and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this
planet".
In 2019, a summary for policymakers of the largest, most comprehensive study to date of biodiversity and ecosystem services was published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The report was finalised in Paris. The main conclusions:
1. Over the last 50 years, the state of nature has deteriorated at an unprecedented and accelerating rate.
2. The main drivers of this deterioration have been changes in
land and sea use, exploitation of living beings, climate change,
pollution and invasive species. These five drivers, in turn, are caused
by societal behaviors, from consumption to governance.
3. Damage to ecosystems undermines 35 of 44 selected UN targets, including the UN General Assembly's Sustainable Development Goals
for poverty, hunger, health, water, cities' climate, oceans and land.
It can cause problems with food, water and humanity's air supply.
4. To fix the problem, humanity needs transformative change, including sustainable agriculture, reductions in consumption
and waste, fishing quotas and collaborative water management. Page 8 of
the report proposes "enabling visions of a good quality of life that do
not entail ever-increasing material consumption" as one of the main
measures. The report states that "Some pathways chosen to achieve the
goals related to energy, economic growth, industry and infrastructure
and sustainable consumption and production (Sustainable Development
Goals 7, 8, 9 and 12), as well as targets related to poverty, food
security and cities (Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 11), could
have substantial positive or negative impacts on nature and therefore on
the achievement of other Sustainable Development Goals".
In a paper published in June 2020, a group of scientists argue that "green growth" or "sustainable growth"
is a myth: "we have to get away from our obsession with economic
growth—we really need to start managing our economies in a way that
protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no
or even negative growth." They conclude that a change in economic
paradigms is imperative to prevent environmental destruction.
In June 2020 in the official site of one of the organizations
promoting degrowth was published an article written by Vijay
Kolinjivadi, an expert in political ecology, that explains how the
creation of the Coronavirus disease 2019 is linked to the ecological crisis.
Degrowth movement
Conferences
The movement has included international conferences promoted by the network Research & Degrowth (R&D). The First International Conference on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Paris
(2008) was a discussion about the financial, social, cultural,
demographic, and environmental crisis caused by the deficiencies of capitalism and an explanation of the main principles of degrowth. Further conferences were in Barcelona (2010), Montreal (2012), Venice (2012), Leipzig (2014), Budapest (2016), and Malmö (2018).
Barcelona Conference (2010)
The Second International Conference in Barcelona focused on specific ways to implement a degrowth society.
Concrete proposals have been developed for future political actions, including:
- Promotion of local currencies, elimination of fiat money and reforms of interest
- Transition to non-profit and small scale companies
- Increase of local commons and support of participative approaches in decision-making
- Reducing working hours and facilitation of volunteer work
- Reusing empty housing and cohousing
- Introduction of the basic income and an income ceiling built on a maximum-minimum ratio
- Limitation of the exploitation of natural resources and preservation of the biodiversity and culture by regulations, taxes and compensations
- Minimize the waste production with education and legal instruments
- Elimination of mega infrastructures, transition from a car-based system to a more local, biking, walking-based one
- Suppression of advertising from the public space.
The Barcelona conference had little influence on the world economic
and political order. Criticism of the proposals arrived at in Barcelona,
mostly financial, have inhibited change.
Degrowth around the world
Although
not explicitly called degrowth, movements inspired by similar concepts
and terminologies can be found around the world, including Buen Vivir in Latin America, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Kurdish Rojava or Eco-Swaraj in India, and the sufficiency economy in Thailand.
Relation to other social movements
The
degrowth movement has a variety of relations to other social movements
and alternative economic visions, which range from collaboration to
partial overlap. The Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie (Laboratory for New
Economic Ideas), which hosted the 2014 international Degrowth conference
in Leipzig, has published a project entitled "Degrowth in movement(s)" in 2017, which maps relationships with 32 other social movements and initiatives. The relation to the environmental justice movement is especially visible.
Criticisms, challenges and dilemmas
Critiques
of degrowth concern the negative connotation that the term "degrowth"
imparts, the misapprehension that growth is seen as unambiguously bad,
the challenges and feasibility of a degrowth transition, as well as the
entanglement of desirable aspects of modernity with the growth paradigm.
Criticisms
Negative connotation
The
use of the term "degrowth" is criticized for being detrimental to the
degrowth movement because it could carry a negative connotation, in opposition to the positively perceived "growth". "Growth" is associated with the "up" direction and positive experiences, while "down" generates the opposite associations. Research in political psychology
has shown that the initial negative association of a concept, such as
of "degrowth" with the negatively perceived "down", can bias how the
subsequent information on that concept is integrated at the unconscious
level. At the conscious level, degrowth can be interpreted negatively as the contraction of the economy, although this is not the goal of a degrowth transition, but rather one of its expected consequences. In the current economic system, a contraction of the economy is associated with a recession and its ensuing austerity measures, job cuts, or lower salaries. Noam Chomsky commented
on the use of the term "degrowth": "When you say 'degrowth' it
frightens people. It's like saying you're going to have to be poorer
tomorrow than you are today, and it doesn't mean that."
Since "degrowth" contains the term "growth", there is also a risk of the term having a backfire effect, which would reinforce the initial positive attitude toward growth.
"Degrowth" is also criticized for being a confusing term, since its aim
is not to halt economic growth as the word implies. Instead, "a-growth"
is proposed as an alternative term that emphasizes that growth ceases
to be an important policy objective, but that it can still be achieved
as a side-effect of environmental and social policies.
Marxist critique
Traditional Marxists
distinguish between two types of value creation: that which is useful
to mankind, and that which only serves the purpose of accumulating
capital.
Traditional Marxists consider that it is the exploitative nature and
control of the capitalist production relations that is the determinant
and not the quantity. According to Jean Zin, while the justification for
degrowth is valid, it is not a solution to the problem. Other Marxist writers have adopted positions close to the de-growth perspective. For example, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, in common with David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Sweezy and others focus on endless capital accumulation
as the basic principle and goal of capitalism. This is the source of
economic growth and, in the view of these writers, results in an
unsustainable growth imperative.
Foster and Magdoff develop Marx's own concept of the metabolic rift,
something he noted in the exhaustion of soils by capitalist systems of
food production, though this is not unique to capitalist systems of food
production as seen in the Aral Sea. Many degrowth theories and ideas are based on neo-Marxist theory.
Systems theoretical critique
In
stressing the negative rather than the positive side(s) of growth, the
majority of degrowth proponents remains focused on (de-)growth, thus
co-performing and further sustaining the actually criticized unsustainable growth
obsession. One way out of this paradox might be in changing the
reductionist vision of growth as ultimately an economic concept, which
proponents of both growth and degrowth commonly imply, for a broader
concept of growth that allows for the observation of growth in other function systems of society. A corresponding recoding of growth-obsessed or capitalist organizations has been proposed.
Challenges
Political and social spheres
The growth imperative is deeply entrenched in market capitalist societies such that it is necessary for their stability. Moreover, the institutions of modern societies, such as the nation state, welfare, the labor market, education, academia, law and finance, have co-evolved along growth to sustain it.
A degrowth transition thus requires not only a change of the economic
system but of all the systems on which it relies. As most people in
modern societies are dependent on those growth-oriented institutions,
the challenge of a degrowth transition also lies in the individual
resistance to move away from growth.
Land privatisation
Baumann, Alexander and Burdon suggest that "the Degrowth movement needs to give more attention to
land and housing costs, which are significant barriers hindering true
political and economic agency and any grassroots driven degrowth
transition."
In essence, they are saying that it is the fact that land (something we
all need like air and water) has been privatised that creates an
absolute economic growth determinant. They point out that even if one is
committed to degrowth, they have no option but decades of market growth
buy-in to pay the rent or mortgage. Because of this, land privatisation
is a structural impediment to moving forward that makes degrowth
economically and politically unviable. They conclude that because
degrowth, as a movement, has not yet dealt with land privatisation (the
markets inaugural privatisation - Primitive Accumulation) it has not yet
been able to develop a strategy that does not perpetuate the very
growth that it positions as problematic. Just as land enclosure
(privatisation) initiated capitalism (economic growth), degrowth must
start with a reclaiming of land commons.
Agriculture
A degrowth society would require a shift from industrial agriculture to less intensive and more sustainable agricultural practices such as permaculture or organic agriculture, but it is not clear if any of those alternatives could feed the current and projected global population.
In the case of organic agriculture, Germany, for example, would not be
able to feed its population under ideal organic yields over all of its arable land without meaningful changes to patterns of consumption, such as reducing meat consumption and food waste. Moreover, labour productivity
of non-industrial agriculture is significantly lower due to the reduced
use or absence of fossil fuels, which leaves much less labour for other
sectors. Potential solutions to this challenge include scaling up approaches such as community-supported agriculture (CSA).
Dilemmas
Given that modernity has emerged with high levels of energy and material throughput, there is an apparent compromise between desirable aspects of modernity (e.g., social justice, gender equality, long life expectancy, low infant mortality) and unsustainable levels of energy and material use.
Some researchers, however, argue that the decline in income inequality
and rise in social mobility occurring under capitalism from the late
1940s to the 1960s was a product of the heavy bargaining power of labor
unions and increased wealth and income redistribution during that time;
while also pointing to the rise in income inequality in the 1970s
following the collapse of labor unions and weakening of state welfare
measures.
Others also argue that modern capitalism maintains gender inequalities
by means of advertising, messaging in consumer goods, and social media. Furthermore, as of 2021, Cuba, a country with a state-run healthcare system, had an under-five mortality rate of 5.1 per 1,000 live births while the United States, a country with no form of universal healthcare coverage, had an under-five mortality rate of 6.5 per 1,000 live births.
Data from UNICEF exhibits that higher ranking health metrics such as
life expectancy are not synonymous with capitalist or privatized
healthcare systems. Ultimately, the claim that capitalism and certain
desirable aspects of modernity are codependent is contentious.
Another way of looking at the argument that the development of
desirable aspects of modernity require unsustainable energy and material
use is through the lens of the Marxist tradition, which relates the superstructure (culture, ideology, institutions) and the base
(material conditions of life, division of labor). A degrowth society,
by its drastically different material conditions, could produce equally
drastic changes of the cultural and ideological spheres of society. The political economy of global capitalism has generated a lot of bads, such as socioeconomic inequality and ecological devastation, which have engendered a lot of goods through individualization and increased spatial and social mobility. At the same time, some argue the widespread individualization promulgated by a capitalist political economy is a bad due to its undermining of solidarity, aligned with democracy as well as collective, secondary, and primary forms of caring,
and simultaneous encouragement of mistrust of others, highly
competitive interpersonal relationships, blame of failure on individual
shortcomings, prioritization of one's self-interest, and
peripheralization of the conceptualization of human work required to
create and sustain people.
In this view, the widespread individuation resulting from capitalism
may impede degrowth measures, requiring a change in actions to benefit
society rather than the individual self.
Some argue the political economy of capitalism has allowed social emancipation at the level of gender equality,
disability, sexuality and anti-racism that has no historical precedent.
However, others dispute the social emancipation as being a direct
product of capitalism or question the emancipation that has resulted.
The feminist writer Nancy Holmstrom,
for example, argues that capitalism's negative impacts on women
outweigh the positive impacts, and women tend to be hurt by the system.
In her examination of China following the Chinese Communist Revolution,
Holmstrom notes that women were granted state-assisted freedoms to
equal education, childcare, healthcare, abortion, marriage, and other
social supports.
Thus, the point of whether the social emancipation achieved in Western
society under capitalism may coexist with degrowth is ambiguous.
The capitalist system is built on the exploitation of female reproductive labor as well as that of the Global South. Sexism and racism embedded in its structure. Therefore, some theories (such as Eco-Feminism or political ecology) argue that there cannot be equality regarding gender and the hierarchy between the Global North and South within capitalism.
The structural properties of growth present another barrier to
degrowth as growth shapes and is enforced by institutions, norms,
culture, technology, identities, etc. The social ingraining of growth
manifests in peoples' aspirations, thinking, bodies, mindsets, and
relationships. Together, growth's role in social practices and in
socio-economic institutions present unique challenges to the success of
the degrowth movement.
Another potential barrier to degrowth is the need for rapid transition
to degrowth society due to climate change and the potential negative
impacts of a rapid social transition including disorientation, conflict,
and decreased wellbeing.
In the United States, a large barrier to the support of the
degrowth movement is the modern education system, including both primary
and higher learning institutions. Beginning in the second term of the
Reagan administration, the education system in the US was restructured
to enforce neoliberal
ideology by means of privatization schemes such as commercialization
and performance contracting, implementation of standards and
accountability measures incentivizing schools to adopt a uniform
curriculum, and higher education accreditation and curricula designed to
affirm market values and current power structures and avoid critical
thought concerning the relations between those in power, ethics,
authority, history, and knowledge. The degrowth movement, based on the empirical assumption that resources are finite and growth is limited,
clashes with the limitless growth ideology associated with
neoliberalism and the market values affirmed in schools, and therefore
faces a major social barrier in gaining widespread support in the US.
Nevertheless, co-evolving aspects of global capitalism, liberal
modernity, and the market society, are closely tied and will be
difficult to separate to maintain liberal and cosmopolitan values in a degrowth society.
At the same time, the goal of the degrowth movement is progression
rather than regression, and researchers point out that neoclassical
economic models indicate neither negative or zero growth would harm
economic stability or full employment.
Several assert the main barriers to the movement are social and
structural factors clashing with the implementation of degrowth
measures.
Healthcare
It
has been pointed out that there is an apparent trade-off between the
ability of modern healthcare systems to treat individual bodies to their
last breath and the broader global ecological risk of such an energy
and resource intensive care. If this trade-off exists, a degrowth
society would have to choose between prioritizing the ecological
integrity and the ensuing collective health or maximizing the healthcare
provided to individuals.
However, many degrowth scholars argue that the current system produces
both psychological and physical damage to people. They insist that
societal prosperity should be measured by well-being, not GDP.
