Slow down or die (degrowth, collapse, strategy)

Vlad Bunea: After re-reading your book Slow Down or Die, The Economics of Degrowth, I felt emboldened to go out in the world and tell everyone that a better way to organize our economy is possible. At the same time, it seems that degrowth has not yet made its entrance into the vocabulary of most politicians. Some even associate Trump’s trade policies with degrowth! Some continue to say degrowth is not a cool word, and that it needs better marketing. Meanwhile, the bottomline is clear: capitalism’s obsession with economic growth at all costs is destroying the environment, is creating wealth for few and massive suffering for the many. Should we mince our words when we talk about degrowth with our friends, family, and neighbours, or just tell it like it is?

Timothee Parrique: An appealing revolutionary concept is a contradiction in terms. If nobody disagreed with “degrowth,” it would probably involve little change from the status quo. As a scientist, I feel that it is my duty to tell it like it is. If you calculate what high-income countries must do to get back within planetary boundaries, you get some pretty steep curves, both for ecological and economic variables. I’m an ecological macroeconomist, so when I see a significant downscaling of production and consumption, I’m more tempted to call it “degrowth” than “ecosocialism” or a “wellbeing economy.”

In my academic work, I tend to favour a minimalist definition of degrowth that focuses on a unique feature: the intentional slowdown of an economy. Some people might find it hair-rising but that’s exactly the point. Let’s not put the cart before the horse. We are not going to move from ecologically overshooting capitalism to steady-state ecosocialism with the snap of a finger. Talking about “post-growth” today, while we are immersed in a growth economy, is jumping the gun. It’s like calling Alcoholics Anonymous the “sobriety and abstinence club.” Yes, we want an economy that can prosper without growth. But for it to do so without destroying the environment, it will have to be a lot smaller than it is today.

VB: Degrowth touches directly at the core design of capitalism, at how power, property, and capital relations act as causal vectors for most economic behavior. Is there a minimal set of policy instruments that would undo these fundamental relations in capitalism?

TP: Capitalism is an accumulative economic system, which by design cannot either degrow or even remain steady without crashing. “Capitalism can no more renounce growth than a crocodile can go vegetarian,” writes John Molyneux. This has to do with its core features: private ownership of the means of production, individual appropriation of profits, the hegemony of markets as means of coordination, growth objectives at the level of individuals, businesses, and governments, wage labour, and a commercial monetary system. If we want to slow down gently and prosper without growth after that, we’ll have to make significant changes to the way the economy is organised.

Instead of organising production through for-profit, privately-owned businesses, we could transition to not-for-profit, socially owned ones with a fairer distribution of added value. Instead of organising allocation mostly with markets and commodities, we could favour commons, convivial rationing, as well as gift and reciprocity. Instead of organising activities through wage work and a labour market, one could imagine an economy where the majority of employment is created via local job guarantee programs. Instead of letting for-profit, private banks handle the monetary system, one could treat money as a public service supervised by democratic institutions. And instead of obsessing over purchasing power, profits, and GDP, one could imagine a completely different system of accounting that values need-satisfaction, social utility, and collective wellbeing.

Put all these things together and you get a radically different system – something we call describe as post-capitalist. These changes might be bold, but I find them less utopian than hoping for the continuation of the current status quo. Plus, all these different elements are already in place somewhere in the world, even though they remain niche. By articulating them together, we can show that another economy is possible – that will be the topic of my second book.

VB: Almost all definitions of degrowth, including yours, talk about democratic planning. It seems that world-wide democracy is dwindling rather than expanding, which makes the deployment of degrowth even more difficult. Do we need to keep looking for the best strategy or is there one already that only needs more attention?

TP: We all wish we go “slower by design, not disaster,” as the Canadian economist Peter Victor writes. But the chances for a harmonious degrowth are slowly vanishing and most governments are rather choosing the second option: collapse first and adapt after. It’s tragic because we know that the costs of ecological inaction are larger than the costs of action. Even those who only care about GDP are starting to freak out because they realise that letting ecosystems die is bad for growth.

Fact is, the great majority of people on Earth would be better off if we were to slow down least essential and most polluting economic activities in high-income nations. That’s true even within a single rich country where the growth-at-all-cost model is failing to improve wellbeing while degrading the fabric of life itself. If we had well-functioning democracies, we would have implemented the kind of policies being discussed in the growth-critical field long ago. The fact that we have not should make us pause to have a hard look at what is currently blocking democratic decisions.

There might be a number of obstacles but there is one I find particularly problematic: economic inequalities. Taking France as an example, I don’t think we can have real democracy in a country where the richest 20% own 65% of national wealth. Without some form of limitarianism concerning how much wealth and income someone can own, democracy will remain a utopia.

VB: David Suzuki, a famous Canadian environmentalist, has said recently that the fight against climate change is lost. How much time do have left to attempt to implement degrowth on a large scale?

TP: I’m not a big fan of doomsday clocks. Even in the violent, barren deserts of Mad Max, people continue to organise as best as they can. It’s the depressing part. We’re pushing so hard against planetary boundaries that the very habitability of the Earth is under threat. We could have acted in the 1970s and every single year after that. Most people, especially those with power, decide not to. Megafires, new viruses, killer heat, insectageddon, these blockbuster-sounding concepts that kept scientist at night a few decades ago are now common occurrences, each with devastating consequences for humans and non-humans. That’s the reality we have inherited.

The most likely scenario is that, scholars and activists will continue to research and whistleblow and corporations will continue to deny, misinform and disinform. It is the outcome of this David versus Goliath battle that will determine the fate of the Earth. But waging a war requires resources, and that’s where it gets tricky. The wealthy minority that is currently blocking the transition can buy companies and media, create think-tanks, flood social media with fake news, and finance political campaigns. On the other side, activists have to work for free under heavy police repression while scholars struggle to keep it together between burn outs and budget cuts.

I think we’ve been losing that battle for a while, but the tide might be turning. Fairy tales of green growth and trickle-down have been falsified so hard by researchers that hardly anyone dares to mention them anymore. The growth-critical literature is thriving and ideas like degrowth and post-growth are becoming more popular, even outside of university. We’re following the classic sequence: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

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