Confronting devastating myths: the missile in Degrowth
Coloniality, race and discourse
Editors note: This article is part of our Thematic Focus “Degrowth, the word”.
The world won't be the same after the horrendous exercise of wiping off an entire people in Palestine. It won't be the same after the unbelievable passiveness of so many nations which would have had the power to stop the madness. The supposedly superior civilization, as one of modernity's myths goes, has shown its colonial face without secrecies.
For what we are seeing here is the legacy of colonialism, or "coloniality of power", at work.
As the Argentinian philosopher E. Dussel has explained: there is an "irrational myth" that gives birth to modernity in 1492, when the "discovery" of the "New World" allows for a conquering 'ego' to emerge and understand itself as superior to the native population. The process involves a particular "sacrificial violence" in the covering up of the non-European. Dussel's message is that we would have to get over modernity because of its intrinsic violence. For the myth is devastating: it has resulted in classifications according to 'race', which could be seen as one of the most effective instruments of social domination invented in the last 500 years, as Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano has argued.
We are talking here about the acceptance of the unacceptable, basically because it happens to brown people. Once more, a genocide has been allowed to happen. (Have we allowed it to happen? As a European citizen, I have watched in disbelief as our governments don't react as many of us think they should. As I am writing, the Global Sumud Flotilla is departing from Barcelona, and I find myself hoping, with a renewed belief in our collective agencies, that at least the citizens could succeed in making a difference).
As decolonial authors emphasize, modernity is inseparable from coloniality. Today, global extractivism has become a prominent modality of capital accumulation, making demands on most aspects of late-modern societies. In the concrete case of Palestine we find corporate interests in the occupation and also geopolitical goals for control of the region. One also thinks of A. Mebembe's term "necropolitics", and as he states: "The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine". There, as in many sites, capitalism is deeply intertwined with imperialism and race.
The destruction of our living world and of the Palestinian people are not separate from each other; the activism struggling against both is one and the same. For it is countering capitalism's interests and limitlessness in conquering, extracting and accumulating, while burdening, without second thoughts, the ones which were "covered-up" in modernity/coloniality: nature, racialized people, women.
There is another 'mythical' aspect of modernity, closely related to the 'conquering ego'. "Whereas in the pre-modern past every change was validated by a sacred, biblical past, modernity has an essential characteristic, which is validation by the future", as A. Quijano puts forward. Progress constitutes us deeply as societies. And 'growthism' in its present sense can be seen as a, rather recent, face of progress. Promises of inclusion, of wellbeing, have always been in 'coming soon' status, never really arriving except in the unsatisfying (as never reaching enough) form of consumption --for some.
We can say: it is not a time to believe in the present order. However, the point here is: the infamous totalitarian narrative of 'there is no alternative' (coined by Thatcher), is still quite solid, blocking imaginations. So one important task would be to shock the present matter-of-facts, which hold the "normality" of interests in place, into visibility.
And so we come back to our missile word...
The 20th century saw the emergence of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy and social theory, giving us important tools for understanding how consent to power is produced in society. In Austin's renowned formulation: "words do something": we create, and reproduce, our understanding of the world. And as Foucault showed, power is intimately related to language and what we have accepted as knowledge (and what we haven't).
It could seem ridiculous to lay importance on deconstructing myths while suffering and destruction are happening before our eyes. As has been well said: decolonization is not a metaphor, requiring radical changes in institutions and practices. This priority notwithstanding, discourses such as the one around progress do uphold power relations, north and south (deeply constituting elite control, as has happened in developmentalism), in spite of open contradictions to their logics.
In our imaginaries, abstract 'Growth' is intimately linked to wellbeing. We can try an experiment: go to any newspaper, right or left, and check on articles talking about economic growth (for example this one in The Guardian). You will mostly see that they take for granted a certain 'knowledge' on the side of the reader around the concept and, further, any explanations about why a 'growing' economy is to be celebrated, or the contrary should be lamented, are rendered completely irrelevant. This is the power/ knowledge of language at work. A reader may think that the positive connotation is completely natural. However, 'knowledges' about the understanding and desirability of GDP growth have been naturalized only relatively recently: they have a clear historical origin, as can be seen in M. Schmelzer's fascinating accounts.
As the narrative goes, it seems acceptable to have ever increasing sacrifice zones (invisibilized as such, being mostly in lands of racialized people) for a "green" energy transition that would enable continued overconsumption of some, and Growth. It has even become "sayable" to have the goal of making a Riviera out of Palestinian lands. Growthism as an ideology hinders the questioning of its own ultimate sense: for whom and for what, or at what ("overseen") human cost.
We need shocks that make hegemony tremble, perhaps form cracks which allow for questioning. We do need missile words, for violent times. Degrowth can come in handy for this mission. A word that does something, making the ones comfortably embedded in hegemonic truths stumble, search for arguments for what had been taken for granted (growthism), perhaps lose their tempers wondering how such a ridiculous idea can be defended by anybody.
Overcoming the Growth paradigm is necessary for achieving any kind of global justice. Degrowth's ultimate diagnosis: that exponential, abstract growth as the goal of societies has to be left behind, breaks modernity/coloniality's intimate heart: its validation by the future (again following Quijano), its intrinsic progressivism. And, a curious feature: as Degrowth comes from the Global North, in spite of its unorthodoxy it has its own privileged position in the ranks of production of "truths".
How to re-imagine our own progressive/ modern- colonial selves is of course a complex question. The long lasting arrogant "western" conviction of being the culmination of humankind has made it difficult to even consider different ways of being, of living and of wellbeing. But it is a time to believe in human beings, for we have in us the capacity to create societies which have life and the welfare of all in their center instead of the individual accumulation of capital. Even if other modes of human existence were destroyed or "covered up", we must find them (also in us) again.
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Wow thank you for this 🙏