The vision
It’s a five minute bike ride to the train station. On crisp mornings like this, I wear gloves and pack a hot coffee for the commute. My workmate Lucy gets off two stops, always with a few scones, as she rides her bike next to mine in the downstairs locker before joining me in the sunny carriage section. Half an hour later we unload the bikes and race each other along the green road to our office. Twice a week, this; twice a week we work together from a cafe in the suburbs. The rest of the week is ours to enjoy.
— a drabble from Looking Forward reader Betsy Ruckman
The spotlight
If you like the idea of a perpetual three-day weekend, you may be among a growing cadre who support the concept of degrowth: a school of thought that aims to shrink economies and move away from GDP growth as a measure of success, while instead emphasizing universal basic services and social well-being. The idea is to gain followers, especially in Europe and especially among young people. But this is not just a fringe theory. A Beyond Growth conference hosted by the European Parliament last May 7,000 participants seenincluding the president of the European Commission.
Akielly Hu, Grist’s News and Politics Fellow, discussed the growing popularity of degrowth with Kohei Saito – A Marxist author whose 2020 degrowth manifesto quickly turned into a bestseller in Japan and beyond. (The English translation, mentioned Slow downwas just released last month.)
“I think one of the reasons people like the idea so much is because people work in a capitalist economy very,” Hu said. “And one of the central ideas of degrowth is shorter working hours.” We have it in a previous newsletter about the four day work week – one of the first policies that is a derowth-like policy that we are starting to see implemented in some places. (The idea of a future where work is less emphasized also inspired Betsy Ruckman to submit the drabble above, which shows two coworkers enjoying a four-day week and enjoying basic services like accessible public transportation.)
Hu was also inspired by Looking Forward’s drabbles in writing the members of her piece, which paints a picture of an outgrown future:
Imagine a world where you work three or four days a week. In your spare time you play sports, spend time with loved ones, garden, and get involved in local politics. Overnight shipping, advertising, and private jets no longer exist, but health care, education, and clean electricity are free and available to all.
It’s a vision that’s pretty hard to argue with — especially, as Hu pointed out, the idea of working less and having more time for activities about joy doesn’t apply. But there is another aspect of degrowth that lends itself to a vision of a clean, green, fair future: It is inherently about producing and consuming less, and that means less carbon.
“We are rushing towards these big climate deadlines,” Hu said. “And I think there’s this deep sense of disconnect between what we say we’re going to do about climate change and what’s actually happening. And one of the things that’s actually happening is that there are all these blatant, unnecessary and unhelpful ways that massive amounts of carbon still being consumed.” She offers private jets as a common example highlighted by degrowth advocates. Taking a private jet (ahem, Taylor Swift) creates an absurd amount of emissions relative to the number of people it benefits. “It’s a form of consumption that contributes to economic growth, but it’s not accessible to 99.99 percent of people,” Hu said. “So why are we spending so much of the remaining carbon budget on private jets?”
Even if the theoretical future of degrowth sounds appealing, critics still say it’s a political non-starter. “When you tell people to shrink economies, it’s kind of focusing on scarcity. And that’s a bit distasteful in a world where we’re already facing so much scarcity,” Hu said. But, she added, the original goal of the degrowth movement was to create a “shit disturbing” — to provoke thought and make people question the way in which economic growth is prioritized in our society and embedded in our policies.
Saito admits the idea of widespread growth is “in a sense utopian.” But, he adds, “to believe that capitalism will flourish in the coming decades is also utopian.”
We’ve excerpted Hu’s Q&A with Saito below. Find the full piece on the Grist site.
– Claire Elise Thompson
Q. Why do you think we are seeing a growing interest in criticism of capitalism, and degrowth in general?
A. Looking at previous decades, neoliberal reforms have truly destabilized our society around the world. And there’s a lot of discussion about how we can solve the climate crisis, and how we can solve economic inequality. But these measures are not working properly, and the climate crisis has accelerated. People suffer from insecure jobs, low wages and a lot of competition. And people are indeed unhappy.
Degrowth and the idea of post-capitalism are, of course, in a sense utopian at the moment. But at the same time, people who are really looking for an alternative — people who really care about the crisis — cannot find the answer within the existing framework. I do not claim that my answer is definitive and comprehensive, but it resonates with the general atmosphere of dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction, especially among younger generations.
Q. I want to delve into your critique of capitalism as outlined in Slow down. Can you talk about why you think capitalism drives global inequality and climate change?
A. Karl Marx famously demonstrated that capitalism tends to increase economic inequality because capitalism exploits workers so that capital accumulates in the hands of the few. And Marx also said that in such a system where people are exploited, nature is also exploited. We didn’t really recognize this trend for many years because prosperous countries, like the US and Japan, and the EU, were able to externalize a lot of costs to somewhere else.
This means that our prosperous lives are often supported by cheap products and cheap resources based on the exploitation of nature and people in the global South.
Capitalism has now submerged the entire planet due to globalization. This means we have outsourced all the costs. Now we have no more room to externalize because China is expanding, Brazil is expanding, India is expanding: Everyone is trying to be a capitalist and it is no longer working. We are experiencing the global ecological crisis, the pandemic, the climate crisis, competition for resources – and these things are closely related to capitalism and the tendency to constantly expand.
Q. Many climate policies today, such as Green New Deal proposals, are focused on expanding renewable energy and clean technology while creating new jobs and continuing to grow the economy. In your opinion, why are these measures insufficient to tackle the climate crisis?
A. First of all, I am not against technology. We need renewable energy. We need electric vehicles and so on. I am for inventing new technologies and investing more in the development of cheaper, sustainable energy. I am not an advocate of going back to nature.
The problem is that when we try to grow, we sell more products and bigger products. The most representative case is SUVs. Even if we switch to electric vehicles, if we keep building bigger cars, we’re still using a lot of energy and resources that come mainly from the global South. So there will be a continuation of the robbery of land and resources, exploitation of miners and the destruction of indigenous life, deforestation, and so on.
I think what is needed is: Invest in those green technologies. But at the same time we need to start talking about the need to reduce the number of cars, for example, or industrial meat consumption, or frequency of flying. Maybe we should ban private jets. Maybe we should ban domestic short-haul flights because we can take trains. These things also need to be prioritized.
The problem with the existing mainstream green capitalism discourse is that they never talk about reducing our excessive consumption and production because this is not something that capitalism can accept. For everyone to live a decent life on this planet, the Global North must give up what is unnecessary. This is not something capitalism can do.
Q. You write in the book about how an outgrowth transition doesn’t have to happen all at once, and that in fact it is already happening. Can you talk about some examples you see today that represent a step toward degrowth?
A. France has ban domestic short-haul flights — this is one important step. Some European societies are now experimenting with shorter working hours, such as a four-day work week. Free education and free medical care are other examples. We need to expand it to free internet, which is something [former U.K. Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn presented during his election campaign a few years ago.
We should also introduce maximum limits on annual income, worker cooperatives and social ownership of companies, including water companies and electricity companies. These are some of the basic countermeasures we can introduce within capitalism.
More exposure
A parting shot
A woman poses with a sign, in French, that reads “Only growth is green,” as part of a climate protest in Toulouse in 2021.
