The beauty of degrowth
An interview with Stan Cox
Stan Cox is the author of seven books, including Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (2010), The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020), and The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic (2021). His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis has been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, Al Jazeera, Yes!, the Progressive, and local publications across 43 U.S. states. In 2012, The Atlantic named Cox their “Readers’ Choice Brave Thinker” for his critique of air conditioning. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan.
Vlad Bunea: You wrote the book, Anthropause. The Beauty of Degrowth, for which I have been waiting a long time! A book that shows how degrowth is, in fact, a very positive vision for a post-capitalist economy. What prompted you to write the book?
Stan Cox: I have been writing against growthism for twenty years or so, and in recent years have been cheering the degrowth movement from the sidelines. One day, my editor, Greg Ruggiero, suggested that I consider writing a book under the one-word title ‘Anthropause’—a term coined by ecologists to refer to the reduction in environmental damage and the flourishing of the natural world that occurred when restrictions on human activity were imposed in the early months of the COVID19 pandemic.
After reading some of the papers that had been published about the anthropause, I decided that it could serve as a good opening parable for a book on degrowth. Not to advocate [for] pandemic-style lockdowns, of course, but to engage in a thought experiment in which the United States (or any other rich, over-consuming country or region) puts strict, declining caps on the quantities of extracted resources, focuses resource use on equitable satisfaction of basic human needs, and refrains from resource use for profit and growth. I then would consider some of the evils, harms, dangers, frustrations, and annoyances—some small and mundane, others catastrophic—that such a society would necessarily leave behind in the trash can of history.
VB: A recent survey showed that degrowth, once properly explained and understood, is quite popular. Can we say that degrowth has won the battle of narratives?
SC: Those survey results were striking. When people were asked whether they favored degrowth without being given a description of what degrowth would mean in practice, about three-fourths said no way would they want degrowth. Not surprising; we’ve been told all our lives that endless growth is essential to civilization’s survival. But when, instead, the features and practices of a degrowth society were described to them without using the word “degrowth”, about three fourths said, yes, they would like to see us move toward such a society.
Many have worried that the degrowth label is an obstacle to acceptance of the concept. But degrowth scholars and advocates have always maintained that the term is intentionally provocative, to help strip away growth’s shiny aura. And I think the label has become a clear asset in recent years, as the devastation caused by growth and the violent competition over resources has become more starkly obvious.
The movement has also gained ground by making it clearer that degrowth is for affluent countries and populations, not for societies that do not have sufficient resources to meet basic human needs. In fact, one of the big ways in which our rich countries can help resource-poor countries is to end our own plunder of the Earth and exploitation of human beings.
It seems even the experts—often the hardest nuts to crack—are being won over. Another survey, this one of almost 800 climate-policy researchers, found that 73 percent favor degrowth or no-growth over green growth.
VB: Your book gives many examples of how life can be lived with a genuine sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, without such a high environmental impact. Can you give us some of these examples?
SC: I like to introduce these lists of examples with a statement of what the book is not arguing. I’m not saying that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is to work our way through individual problematic features of our society, one by one, and fix them. It’s the precise converse: When societies deeply cut resource use and overall ecological impact, while focusing on sufficiency and justice for all, they will naturally have to stop causing such problems, and we’ll realize myriad benefits.
In the book, I start with some seemingly minor harms and irritations that would be jettisoned on our way to a future with lower resource extraction and use and that will greatly improve wellbeing. With less industrial energy available, for example, we’ll produce far less noise pollution (for which I use the leaf blower as a poster child) and light pollution (for which I use the blotting out of the night sky and human and ecological health problems that have been caused by the huge increase in outdoor lighting over the past decade and a half).
We can also say goodbye to one of the most widely despised features of the capitalist economy: commercial advertising. With the economy aimed at producing necessary goods and services, there will be little need for an industry whose purpose is to convince people that they need or want stuff they would not otherwise buy. Another burden lifted, along with its harmful psychological and social effects, would be the overabundance of material goods that plagues American households, in particular.
Reduced fossil fuel supplies will also mean fewer vehicles on the road. As during the anthropause, such a reduction in traffic will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in many ways, it will also improve quality of life (and could even preserve the lives) of people who walk from place to place in and around US cities. Pedestrian deaths on our roadways have leaped by more than 70 percent in the past 15 years, as deaths of people struck by increasingly tall, heavy pickups and SUVs climbed a whopping 140 percent. As if that’s not bad enough, in a 16-month period during 2020-21, US drivers intentionally rammed their vehicles into groups of protesters 139 times.
With private vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. Urban and suburban dwellers won’t face the health dangers of air and noise pollution from heavy vehicle traffic. With less need for parking lots and multi-lane roadways, much of the pavement now blanketing our cities can give way to green space, reducing the summertime urban heat island effect.
VB: In a degrowth-like economy, as you have pointed out, we could work for as little as 21 hours per week and have the rest of time to ourselves. How would work be defined in a degrowth-like economy, and how would it relate to the notion of care?
SC: It appears that cutting the work week by half is among the most popular degrowth ideas! And the degrowth vision goes much further, calling for a complete overhaul of paid employment, workplaces, and working time, both paid and unpaid. Simply by not producing superfluous, harmful, unjust, or ecocidal goods and services, a society can deeply reduce the total number of hours worked. Adapting to that, it is said, would be best achieved through worker-owned cooperatives. And universal basic income and services will be needed to ensure sufficiency and fairness.
Reduced time spent in paid employment will leave people more time for doing things themselves for which they now have to pay someone—childcare being the prime example. There will be more time for household self-provisioning and joining in community efforts of all kinds.
Just as much of what is now paid work may become unpaid, some currently unpaid work may become paid, to redress the unfair distribution of paid and unpaid work time. More equitable allocation both between the sexes and among racial and ethnic groups will be especially important.
Such shifts will probably be most dramatic when it comes to care work, much of which involves taking care of family, friends, or the home and is unpaid. Care work outside the home, in childcare, elder care, education, health, social services, and other areas, is often badly underpaid. Degrowth visions always stress the need for an overhaul in the way care work is allocated and compensated.
VB: Would you say that degrowth is ideological in nature, similar to socialism?
SC: Degrowth is absolutely inherently anti-capitalist, because a capitalist economy can’t survive without growth. Most degrowth advocates foresee radically egalitarian societies with governance through small-d democratic processes and workers’ control of production. With that, we are into uncharted territory. No self-identified socialist or communist states of this or the previous century have eschewed growth, much less worked to reverse it. (Rightly so in most cases, because they started out needing to deal with extensive poverty in their country). Instead, most have prioritized increasing production.
I agree with Kohei Saito, the author of the Japanese bestseller Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (available in English translation), who argues that the society we’re envisioning here would most accurately be termed “degrowth communism”. Indeed, degrowth could finally provide a way to achieve the kind of small-c communism originally envisioned by Marx and Engels, in which everyone’s equal and produces what they can and gets what they need. Degrowth communism would even do their vision one better by creating a society that can be sustained long into the future without ruining the ecosphere that sustains us.
VB: Thank you, Stan.