A review of The Future Is Degrowth: a guide to a world beyond capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan (London: Verso, 2022)
The Future Is Degrowth recommends practical proposals for degrowth while at the same time suggesting what Ernst Bloch, of all writers dead or living, called a “concrete utopia.” Bloch was a visionary whose masterwork The Principle of Hope defended the notion that “everyone lives in the future”. One need not agree with everything Schmelzer et al. say to be impressed that they quote him.
This is an expanded edition of a book written by three German authors in 2019, with the help of British doctoral candidate Aaron Vansintjan, and of European academic associations and reading groups. Its aim is “building a future for all beyond capitalism”. Its starting point is that “it is feasible to live well without growth and to make society more just, democratic, and truly prosperous on the way”. This is not a Green New Deal proposal, though it does argue that “while Green New Deal proposals tend to emphasize this investment push and the growth of everything sustainable, degrowth also and at least as rigorously puts the focus on the many things that will have to go”.
The term “degrowth” stands in opposition to the term “growth,” which is generally taken to mean economic growth, although in an early chapter the connotations of “growth,” understood broadly, are explored:
In many corners of the political spectrum, it still signals improvement, development, more opportunities, more money, and so on. This cluster of interconnected ideas, where growth basically means ‘more of the good stuff’ or ‘progress’, is today almost ubiquitous and largely unchallenged.
Indeed, “growth,” the contrary of “degrowth,” is part of a set of words (“modernization,”“development,” “progress”) which have been held for the past seventy-five years to promote what McNeill and Engelke call the “Great Acceleration.” The other words might merit some investigation if “degrowth” is to be unpacked. Ultimately, the problem with The Future Is Degrowth is its depiction of “making it happen.” This is no surprise, as nobody knows how to “make it happen.” The current social formation is held in place; it will not evaporate by itself to reveal the ecotopia we’ve always wanted. So the current social formation must be dislodged, or revolutionized perhaps.
Degrowth, though, is at a conceptual disadvantage as something to “make happen,” and the authors of The Future is Degrowth typically underestimate the extent to which “progress,” as one of those synonym words, is insinuated into the present-day world’s social and institutional imaginaries. People might wage a revolution to replace growth with degrowth, but they won’t wage a revo-lution to replace progress with regression. There are, to be sure, recognizably regressive institutions in society today – weapons corporations, for example, or cigarette producers. Arguably, the world is regressing in certain ways, but all actors still believe in “progress,” and nobody is out-and-out advocating regression. So perhaps there could be “progress” toward “degrowth.”
It could be argued that the idea of degrowth stands the idea of progress on its head while at the same time suggesting another notion of progress. “Growth,” limited to economic growth in the book, is the colonization of the world by capital. It is the historical process described by Jason W. Moore: “capitalism’s distinctiveness lies in how it organizes quasi-stable relations between humans and the rest of nature in service to endless accumulation.” “Growth” is what governments do and what capital does: changing the world from an external “nature” into extraction sites, conventional farms, suburbs, and cities. Now, of course “progress” has been used as a word to promote “growth.” But “progress” is not specific, and simply suggests that the world is “progressing” toward an ostensibly good goal. Perhaps something can be done with the word “progress,” then.
It was not so long ago that it was considered an article of faith that all nations would have to modernize and develop, and that that development was con-sidered progress. But maybe progress could be held to mean something other than modernization and development, and then the degrowthists would be viewed as genuine advocates of progress, and the advocates of modernization leading to ecological disaster, war, and impoverishment as regressive. Such a framing might help a positive presentation of “degrowth.”
The practical problem with degrowth shows up in Chapter 6, subtitled “Making Degrowth Real,” which argues that
Since modern societies are fundamentally designed to expand and grow, trans-formation encompasses not only material but also economic, social, and mental changes – a ‘prosperous way down’ requires entirely new forms relating to each other, or a ‘relational revolution.
The chapter is then able to refer to piecemeal strategies (“interstitial strategies,” it calls them) and then suggest that the “interplay” of these strategies is what constitutes their “humble proposal”. And at that point the reader might say, “wait a minute. Didn’t you just propose a revolution?”
If one wants to make a case for degrowth as “progress,” The Future Is Degrowth comes close to doing that. The standard tale of progress, from the French Enlightenment until now, is told in two parts. One is an easy-to-show technical progress, of the diffusion of ever-more-complex technologies in historical time; the other is a hoped-for social progress toward equal or human rights, democracy, and (unfortunately) periodic reversions to barbarism. One recalls Condorcet’s “Sketch,” which is a tale of continuous progress from the Greeks to Condorcet’s 18th-century world, except when its author wrote about feudalism:
..in the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the human mind rapidly descending from the height to which it had raised itself, while Ignorance marches in triumph, carrying with her, in one place, barbarian ferocity; in another, a more refined and accomplished cruelty; everywhere, corruption and perfidy.
In updating Condorcet’s version of this tale we might add a second reversal, in the barbarism of the neoliberal era as depicted by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, among others. With neoliberalism, “progress” was reduced to a mere series of tech upgrades, a following-through of Moore’s Law, while in social reality the world regresses toward (for instance) abrupt climate change disaster. Degrowth, by contrast, imagines an end to the fetish of cheap gadgets, while hoping that social and institutional worlds can bring back progress without the standard reliance upon economic growth. A shift in the emphasis of progress will, hopefully, become part of the social imaginary – for the sake of a sustainable future.
The Future Is Degrowth starts with a discussion of a Dutch policy proposal which became a public face of degrowth, summarized briefly here:
- A move away from development focused on aggregate GDP growth suggesting that some sectors should grow while others (e.g. fossil fuels) should shrink
- An economic framework focused on redistribution, which establishes a uni-versal basic income rooted in a universal social policy system
- Agricultural transformation towards regenerative agriculture
- Reduction of consumption and travel
- Debt cancelation
Thus, progress is hoped to occur in the reverse direction from the economics of the “Great Acceleration”. No debt, less consump-tion and travel, no agriculture based on cheap food, no capital accumulation, and none of that “industry” which makes money without producing anything necess-ary. Degrowthists hope for a wholesale transition out of capitalism, a transition that, while capital still rules the world, risks being badly mismanaged.
Indeed the bulk of history up to the present day appears mismanaged. We appear today to be blundering into a crisis yet unseen in history, that of abrupt climate change, amidst war in Ukraine, tensions in Taiwan, and merciless efforts to stop immigration into Europe from the south. The downward trend in civilization does not appear to have been mitigated by the consolidation of a global financial elite which thinks it can run the world better than anyone else. Nor are social problems any closer to solution as notions of social progress can improve upon the models of the neoliberal world order are discarded. One can easily imagine that, as governments are buffeted by crises of their own making, the future will appear as an escalating set of blowbacks from elite cluelessness.
The Future Is Degrowth offers an alternative vision in a well-organized manner. After the introductory Chapter 1, Chapter 2 discusses the “growth paradigm,” sticking neatly to a critique of capitalist economic logic. If “the future of growth is uncertain,” and indefinite economic stagnation likely, actual degrowth will perhaps come to us anyway.
Chapter 3 overviews “critiques of growth” with a series of warnings that some critiques of growth are inappropriate to the desired future.
Chapter 4 discusses degrowth visions. Here our authors cheerfully admit that they are doing some significant utopian dreaming. After all, they have read Ernst Bloch. They discuss alternative lifestyle approaches, alternative economies, feminism, and anticapitalism, settling upon ecological justice, social justice, and the redesign of institutions. Could these not be called goals of social progress?
Chapter 5 discusses pathways to degrowth. The authors caution that “just like there is no single, unified vision of a degrowth utopia, there is also not a single path to get there, but several paths, often crossing”. They recommend cooperatives and various ways of implementing economic democracy. After more than two hundred pages they argue that “though switching to a degrowth economy would initially take significant capital, eventually it would lead to an economy where capital no longer dominates and fades out –in other words, to post-capitalism” and that “The central demand is to repoliticize and democratize social metabolism”. The authors offer innova-tive ideas about social formations that would make such ideas happen. Chapter 6 can be summarized:
Degrowth is a vision of social transformation that has never been realized: a conscious, radically democratic process of transforming society to create the conditions for a good life for all, by pulling the emergency brake and stepping out of the capitalist and growth-driven megamachine.
Although they recommend a lot of things which would be vast improvements over what we have now, they don’t really know how it’s going to happen, and so what we can expect is a conflict-ridden and untidy process involving a lot of what used to be called “class struggle,” a phrase not used in the book, but which was named as such in an era, the late 19th century, that the history books still call the “Age of Progress.” The phrase “class struggle” also makes an appearance in an important debate about this book to be found in the New Left Review supplement “Sidecar,” which readers of this review are also advised to peruse. Nonetheless we can be thankful to the authors of The Future Is Degrowth for having presented a well-organized and well-documented utopian dream to guide future class struggles.
Editors’ Note
The full version of this article appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2022). To engage with its references and for purposes of citation, please visit the published version of this article on the Taylor & Francis website.