‘Is it possible for machines made from industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?’- Planet of the Humans General complaints against ‘industrial civilization’ in its various forms have always been the most reactionary of sentiments. Indeed, for a long time that was the very point. Longing for the days of pre-industrialization and was always the realm of aristocracies,[Read More…]

This article is part of a series on degrowth.info discussing strategy in the degrowth movement. The introduction to the series and an ongoing list of contributions can be found here. In a previous piece in this blog series, Joe Herbert and colleagues pointed out the “how to move towards a degrowth society” gap in degrowth discourse. As I have also come[Read More…]

  The economist Branko Milanovic recently wrote a blog post titled “The illusion of degrowth in a poor and unequal world.”  He penned it, he says, following a conversation he had with a proponent of degrowth. As it turns out, that proponent was me. First, let me say that I have a lot of respect for Milanovic’s work on inequality. [Read More…]

The notion of economic growth as a regular, ongoing, self-sustained process no longer holds up to critical analysis. Even during what’s been called “The Glorious Thirty” – the years between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis – growth occurred almost solely in industrialized countries and involved a minority of the world population; it was built[Read More…]

In the 1970s, the emphasis was on resource limits. The French term décroissance (later translated into English as degrowth) was used for the first time by French intellectual André Gorz. In his book Ecology and Freedom, published in 1977, he wrote that “lack of realism consists in imagining that economic growth can still bring about increased human welfare, and indeed that[Read More…]

‘Houston, we have a problem’. On the one hand, there is growing acceptance among environmentally conscious people that rich nations and affluent regions of the global economy must dramatically reduce overall resource and energy consumption levels – that is, undergo a process of ‘degrowth’ – if humanity is to bring about a sustainable world order. On the other hand, we[Read More…]

Degrowth has been described as a “movement” rather than an ideology1, and as such it presents several variations. For some of its proponents, degrowth is a proxy for sustainable consumption, and to a lesser extent production2. A second group of degrowth advocates are those for whom an emerging discussion of “sufficiency” as a societal norm is taking shape, as a[Read More…]

Sam Bliss (author of the wonderfully-named blog ‘The Bliss Point‘) and Aaron Vansintjan recently wrote a blog called Degrowth is Punk as F*ck which defended the term “degrowth” as “a little middle finger to the establishment” and urged the reader to “take your positivity and shove it”. It’s a fiery and passionate defence of degrowth, and contains much, in its[Read More…]

“Very serious people often tell us that the word “degrowth” is too negative. People like happy, positive, nice things. Sure, the economy is systematically destroying life on earth. But nobody wants to degrow it. Instead, these critics prefer words like “post-growth,” “a-growth,” “re-growth”, even the mythical “green growth.” They want to create a circular economy, a green economy, a new[Read More…]

We are being told that we need still more economic growth in order to overcome the present multi-layer crises. Actually we have been hearing this for quite some time now. Both right and left, capitalist and socialist governments, offer their theories about how we need more production and consumption, in order for our societies to progress and overcome the present[Read More…]