I often complain about texts critical of degrowth being short. And they mostly are. The average degrowth detractor only affords a few paragraphs, often copiously sprinkled with conceptual slur. Collapse-porn addicts, Malthusian maniacs, prophets of climate despair, civilisation-haters, dirty hippies; closer to a rap battle than to an academic dialogue. Imagine my joy when I stumbled upon Kenta Tsuda’s “Naïve questions on degrowth.” Forgive my fetishism for size, but the text is huge: a 20-page read of almost 8,000 words. For someone interested in degrowth controversies, this is not a snack, it is a buffet. Unfortunately, it is a buffet where not all the food is safe to eat.
I have synthetised Kenta Tsuda’s text into seven queries, which I use to structure my response. (1) Why is economic growth problematic; (2) why is anti-consumerism important; (3) how to democratically determine what is socially valuable; (4) why is degrowth ecologically necessary; (5) how to organise a degrowth transition; (6) how to finance public budgets without growth; and (7) what does degrowth change in terms of power relations. In answering these, I am hoping to give readers a quick tour of the now abundant degrowth literature. And as the name “degrowth” hints, it all starts with understanding what economic growth is.
What is economic growth and what is the problem with it?
Kenta Tsuda worries about abandoning all future growth: “even at a decent standard of living, growth can enable more flourishing – a marginal year of health-span, a decision to have an additional child – and a more secure future for existing levels of flourishing: extra resources for R&D on the frontiers of biomedical research of basic science; more investment in state capacity and the processes of need-fulfilment” (p.113). These are all great things, but I am not sure additional economic growth is the best way to get them.
To understand why this is so, we must first grasp what economic growth really is. Too often, the term “growth” is conflated with an increase in wealth in the broadest sense of the term – more of the stuff that makes life better. But in reality, economic growth is a narrower concept only describing an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is not a measure of wealth in general; it is a very specific statistical indicator that estimates the aggregated value of commodity production. Marxists critical of degrowth like Michael Löwy, David Schwartzman, and John Molyneux argue that, one should grow “productive forces,” defined as our general ability to collectively satisfy needs through the production of goods and services. But this is not what so-called growth policies and growth targets are about. They are about increasing GDP, which is only indirectly (and sometime inversely) related to need satisfaction.
Kenta Tsuda acknowledges the limitations of GDP (pp. 113-114) without realising its deep implications. What we measure as economic growth is the expansion of only certain forms of provisioning activities. This reminds me of Gibson-Graham’s iceberg figure where commodity production is the tip of the iceberg, only a small part compared to an array of other activities like self-provisioning, non-market production, and care work.
For certain limited resources like labour time and natural resources, investing in commodity production means de-investing in non-commodity production. A classic example is a burn-out. Working more (measured as growth if one works for a wage) depletes time outside of work (not measured by growth), and translates into time scarcity, stress, and sometimes sickness. GDP grows, but productive forces as a whole deteriorate. When it comes to these finite factors of production (time and attention, but also natural resources), the commodity growth imperative is monopolising resources that cannot be used elsewhere, for example in decommodified sectors of the economy.
Imagine the number of hours dedicated to marketing today. In 2019, the global marketing industry was worth $1.7 trillion, which coincidentally, is exactly the same amount spent in R&D worldwide. There are less than 300,000 scientists in France but more than twice that number of people working in marketing. Relaxing our frantic pursuit of sell-for-money growth would “liberate” many hours currently being dedicated to sell stuff. If all people working in marketing were to suddenly become university scholars, GDP would take a serious dive, but I doubt that society would be worse-off.
Kenta Tsuda argues that “economic growth is a Kaldor-Hicks efficient transaction [economic jargon for win-win], in that it generates sufficient benefits for transactional winners to compensate transactional losers, thus potentially leaving no one worse off and some better off.” I am not sure about that. Some forms of economic growth certainly are. I am thinking of productivity gains generated through better organisation. But other parts are not. This is the part of economic growth that relies on the mobilisation of additional natural resources and labour time.
The problem is that neoclassical economists do not include nature and reproductive work as factors of production. So, what may look like growth can also be seen as a transfer of wealth from social or/and ecological capital to financial capital. Cutting a forest looks like value-added in GDP (and is therefore counted as growth), but only because there was no prior value given to the forest. The same situation pertains for a happy volunteer community worker becoming an unhappy food delivering courier – GDP is up, but is society as a whole better-off? Again, the crux of the issue here is about how we measure wealth, and more fundamentally, about how we collectively give different values to different things.
The importance of anti-consumerism
“Degrowthers tend to elide the colloquial meaning of consumption, as something like discretionary ‘retail therapy’, with the term’s economic definition: the final use of a resource as a good or service. The latter sense encompasses not only the ostensibly superfluous resource uses that degrowthers would reduce or ban, but also unambiguously essential ones: nutritious food, commodious shelter, healthcare and childcare” (p.128). The essence of Kenta Tsuda’s argument here is that degrowth is analytically poor if it cannot differentiate between essential and superfluous consumption.
This calls for clarification. Degrowth is not against consumption per se, and people who lack access to food, healthcare, childcare, and housing should obviously consume more of it. The problem has rather to do with a broader culture of consumerism. The trouble with consumerism is precisely what Kenta Tsuda talks about: it bundles the essential with the unneeded. In capitalism, consumption is good because it pushes GDP up, and this regardless of what is being consumed and of the consequences of that consumption on people and the planet.
The core belief underpinning consumerism is that money can buy happiness. A “consumer society” is one where that will to consume is a central determinant of social life. The individual emancipates, matures, and thrives through acts of consumption (one becomes an independent adult by having a car, becomes a serious musician by buying an expensive instrument, and so on). In the commodity-shaped existentialism of capitalism, what people are depends on what they have, and what they have can all too easily be summed up as digits on a bank account.
Putting consumption at the centre of social life quickly turns into a positional competition. Status competition is a zero-sum game because each individual strives to gain advantage, but since all are trying to do so, all remain in the same relative position. This is the “positional treadmill”: displaying status to others by buying stuff is a dynamic process where continuous efforts are required just to preserve one’s current position. If everyone wears a Rolex, then wearing a Rolex would no longer be a source of distinction. Producing more Rolex may boost GDP, but it will leave well-being unchanged.
But there is a way out of this mad consuming war of all against all. The degrowth credo is precisely to render consumption concrete in order to separate the essential from the superfluous. This is the logic of voluntary simplicity, a philosophy of living centred around values of frugality and happiness. The goal is to get rid of the pressure to buy stuff as to regain autonomy over the setting of one’s life purpose; one could say, to decouple well-being from market consumption. Voluntary simplicity is a concrete ethic of consumption that focuses on the need-satisfying power of goods and services, and not on the abstract fact of having and spending money.
After all, the main satisfiers of well-being are of a relational nature, such as love, friendship, and neighbourliness. You cannot buy these things. Unlike the current focus on positional consumption, relational consumption prioritises social use value, that is the direct satisfaction of certain needs through a social activity. We derive satisfaction, not from the goods themselves, but from the bonding that they enable with others. I want a book to discuss it with my colleagues, a flute to play music with my friends, a telescope to enter in communion with comets, and sturdy shoes to visit the pines and beetles of the forest. What I want is not stuff, it is to enter in “resonance” with the world around me. Hence one of the slogans of degrowth: moins de biens, plus de liens (less transactions, more relations).
A predictable objection to this account is that voluntary simplicity is not enough (Kenta Tsuda rehearses this classic protest pp. 114-115). Clearly, this is not only a matter of personal ethics since consumption is always collectively framed. The decision to consume less as an individual is one thing, but the organisation of a system of provision where everybody does so is another. This is why voluntary simplicity is only a small part of the degrowth literature, and why many other institutions are necessary to democratically draw the line between the essential and the superfluous.
Of needs and democracy
It is this issue we now turn to: How to draw the line between what is essential and what is not? This question sounds complicated, and yet, it is a question we are answering more often than we think. In fact, every time something is consumed, produced, organised, or regulated, a line is drawn.
Companies draw the line when they decide what to produce and how to produce it. Today, most of them do so to make a profit and so decisions are skewed towards that end. But it could be different. I am thinking of not-for-profit business models organised around a concrete mission. For example, Collective Interest Cooperative Companies (scic) in France only produce goods and services that contribute to the achievement of a mission of social utility. This mission is defined by a democratic board including different stakeholders like workers, customers, residents, volunteers, public authorities, funders, associations, and other businesses.
Consumers draw the line when they decide what to buy. Advertisement wants us to believe that every single product is essential, but people still manage to make the difference between food and selfie sticks. Limiting advertisement, planned obsolescence, among other drivers of consumerism will improve consumers’ autonomy in making that choice. The goal is to escape “the tyranny of externally manufactured neediness.” We are back at the idea of voluntary simplicity and its constant Socratisation of consumption: Does earning more money and having more possessions advance or impede the attainment of my life’s purpose? If not, then why bother.
Communities draw the lines when they decide to self-organise the provision of certain goods and services, prioritising the things they like to other activities they consider less essential. This can take the form of communal food gardens, childcare circles, object-sharing networks, or the more traditional concerts and sport games. These initiatives result from communal decisions concerning needs and means of satisfying them. A perfect example would be the municipal job guarantee currently being experimented in parts of France. In order to create meaningful, useful jobs, they identify unmet needs in the community, and then match them with the skills and aspirations of the job-seekers, all of that in the most democratic way possible.
Governments draw the line every time they regulate. Different categories of Value Added Taxes, for example, represent lines between essential and superfluous. In France, the reduced VAT rates apply to certain drugs, feminine hygiene products, books, renewable energy, and services for people with disabilities. A wheelchair is less taxed than a private jet, and this is not a random decision. There are taxes on luxury products like yachts and swimming pools and subsidies for essential goods like energy, museums, and public transportation. (I have chosen taxes as an example of a line-drawing policy, but many other non-economic instruments exist.)
The notion of needs is ambiguous and contextual. I am afraid it will always be so. Degrowth does not call for a grand, bureaucratic process of inventory to draw an absolute and definite line between the essential and superfluous (an arguably impossible task). Degrowth aims to democratise decision-making at all the levels where it occurs, which translates into a number of specific proposals, like limiting advertisement, opening-up the governance of companies, giving resources for communities to self-organise, and making public governance more participative.
The ecological case for degrowth
For Kenta Tsuda, “material throughput” is a placeholder term – “while material throughput may be a fruitful category for thought experiments, it is deeply flawed as a basis for effective environmental policymaking” (p.119). The term ecological economists actually use is biophysical throughput, to refer to all the natural resources that go through the economy and are disposed back in nature. This is a theoretical category, which can be divided into several more measurable indexes.
Ecological footprint looks at how fast we consume resources and generate waste compared to how fast nature can absorb our waste and generate new resources. Material footprint estimates the global quantity of materials like biomass, fossil fuels, and minerals consumed by a country. Water footprint measures the amount of water used to produce goods and services. Carbon footprint sums up the amount of carbon being emitted by an activity. There are many others, all of them useful for evidence-based, environmental policymaking.
Kenta Tsuda appears surprisingly unaware of the range of ecological indicators used in the degrowth literature: “the ecological rationale for degrowth boils down to necessary climate action” (pp.123-127). It does not. A “sustainable” economy in any meaningful understanding of the term must consider all the complex interactions it has with ecosystems, and not only carbon. Economies should be carbon neutral, but also remain within the regenerative capacities of all renewable resources, within the acceptable stocks of non-renewable resources, and within the assimilative capacities of ecosystems.
What makes degrowth complicated is that it aims to reduce several patterns of resource use at once. It is a response to the “Great Acceleration”: rising curves in primary energy use, ocean acidification, fertilizer consumption, marine fish capture, water use, and many other indicators of environmental stress. One of the key assumptions underpinning the degrowth argument is that further economic growth in rich countries will exacerbate these trends. There is room for debate about how much that is so, and whether these countries can decouple a smaller or larger part of their GDP growth from environmental pressures in the future. But the literature on the topic is clear: today, economic growth is still a driver of environmental disruption.
If I understand him well, Kenta Tsuda agrees that degrowth might be necessary at some point (because he does acknowledge that there are absolute, material limits to production), but not today. This is a strange claim that goes against what we know about the biocrisis, starting with recent reports about global warming and biodiversity loss. These reports never bring good news, as often reminded by the recurrent calls by scientists demanding urgent action. Many of the problems are definitely getting worse, and any delay in addressing them will imply faster, more difficult changes in the future.
Questions of policy design and transition management
“What does the administration of a planned contraction look like?” (p.119). Kenta Tsuda complains about the inexistence of “clear administrative proposals.” This is indeed a naïve complaint because there are many. In my PhD dissertation, I counted a total of 232 policy proposals in the degrowth literature. If anything, the problem of degrowth is not that it lacks proposals but that it has too many of them. In the third part of my dissertation, which I titled “Recipes for degrowth,” I tried to articulate these changes together, ending up with a programme made of 9 goals, 32 objectives, and a number of policy instruments. Kenta Tsuda writes a bit fast when he claims that “degrowthers fail to describe how they will administer the managed economic contraction.” There is a growing scholarship on the matter, with events dedicated to this very question like the degrowth conference of Spring 2020 in Vienna, which was themed “Strategies for social-ecological transformation.”
There are good reasons to question the division between degrowth and the Green New Deal that Robert Pollin makes. Several degrowth scholars are actively engaged with the question and have proposed degrowth-oriented Green New Deals. For example, Riccardo Mastini, Giorgos Kallis, and Jason Hickel participated in the crafting of the DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe, injecting degrowth policies into the agenda. A year later, the three same authors published A Green New Deal without growth?, a paper arguing that “degrowth policies could be incorporated into a ‘Green New Deal without growth.’” Degrowth does not call for making tabula rasa of every single institution existing today. Rather, it points to a number of instruments in order to make the economy more sustainable, more just, more effective in delivering well-being, and more democratic. The proposed strategy might be different, but these end goals are similar to what you would read in a Green New Deal agenda.
Of course, one should unbundle social policy and environmental protection (here Kenta Tsuda makes the mistake of reducing degrowth to an ecological concern only). But degrowth is about more than just ecological sustainability – only of the four essential features of degrowth, among social justice, democracy, and well-being. There is no silver bullet policy to such a broad agenda; complex and diverse issues require complex and diverse interventions. The diversity of policy goals and instruments in the degrowth literature is a reflection of that approach.
Even though discussing the design of the transition matters, one should be careful that calls for policy precision do not come to be perceived as valid delay for action. It would be a mistake to think that any complex transition should be perfectly crafted on paper before it can start in reality. Degrowth is a political project, not a spaceship. Most of what a democratic transition is about should be figured out during the transition. This is why it is futile to plan an entire itinerary to a distant, precise destination; rather, we should be focusing on how to take the first couple of steps.
For example, the author worries that “any calibration error will have grave consequences. Undershoot, and humanity experiences the strife of contraction but still ends up with an uninhabitable, wasteland Earth. Overshoot and the Earth remains habitable, but with a ‘deadweight loss’ paid in unnecessary human suffering, mostly by the poor, and a foregone alternative future of social investment and scientific developments” (p.118). Here, he falls back into the confusion between degrowth and recession (this comes on top of another prior confusion between GDP growth and living standards). But, in the affluent countries concerned by degrowth, economic growth is no longer coupled with well-being. If fluctuations in GDP have no effect whatsoever on well-being, then where would the “human suffering” come from? Economic growth currently widens inequality, and it has been shown many times that it is possible to degrow and reduce inequality at the same time (2016; 2018; 2020 ; 2021). Besides, let us not forget that many developed countries are already experiencing a lack of growth, the so-called “secular stagnation.” In this situation, the ideal of post-growth (an economy that can thrive without growth) is rather timely.
Another risk of perfectionist decision-making is to confuse the tool with the task. Focusing too much on policy details runs the risk of letting the how question smother the questions of the why and what. It is important to make degrowth administratively viable, but not if it means giving up on what degrowth is about (sustainability, justice, well-being, and democracy). In fact, it is a good thing that degrowth is considered unrealistic. If everyone was on board with it, the degrowth agenda would probably bear little change to the status quo. Degrowthers can be called utopian only because they explore the borders of the unimaginable. They think and act as if it was possible for degrowth to exist and through opposition and brave leaps of social eccentricity, they create the conditions of its own feasibility. Degrowth is, in that sense, an impossible goal but an impossible goal worth having.
Kenta Tsuda points out, with some justice, that the degrowth literature has remained silent about issues of international coordination. “International coordination of degrowth, however, threatens to reproduce the domestic coordination problem within the anarchic dynamics of inter-state politics” (p.122). But this is true for anything. International politics is famously complicated, whether we are talking about international trade, the management of the Euro, or the mitigation of climate change. But again, degrowth is not a great reset of everything. There is no need to launch a whole new process leading to a “Global Degrowth Pact,” as the author suggests. Instead, let us use the mechanisms that already exist: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, the Biodiversity Convention, the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, the European Green Deal, etc. See degrowth as a more ambitious set of objectives – and sometimes a more radical design – for each of these initiatives (compare for the example the European Green Deal with the more radical, degrowth-inspired Green New Deal for Europe).
The risks that the author foresees, degrowth falling “into a spiral of bureaucratic mismanagement and international conflict,” are unjustified. If anything, imagine how less bureaucratic and conflictual the global economy would be if rich countries decided to limit their consumption of natural resources, thus putting an end to the patterns of neo-colonial extractivism and unequal exchange that enable the “imperial mode of living” of a minority of rich people.
The welfare paradox
There is a paradox at the heart of the degrowth strategy, argues Kenta Tsuda. “In a contracting economy, the state would inevitably command a shrunken tax base, an emptier treasury and tighter constraints on public financing. All else being equal, its capacity to act would be weaker with each year of deepening contraction” (pp.118-119). The thing is: all else must not necessarily be equal.
Let me start with a preliminary remark: a more active state is not necessarily a more expensive state. The implementation of degrowth requires a diversity of legislative actions, for example to enable the emergence of alternative currencies, to allow higher rates of income taxation, or to encourage work time reduction. But a law to legalise local currencies is not more expensive than a law to ban them. The state is not only a purse, and certain changes are actually cost-neutral for the public budget.
Now, to the important bit. Increasing the state budget is not in of itself a good thing. Military expenditures, for example. Kenta Tsuda writes, “military emissions account for, to say the least, unproductive ‘negative utility’ activities, squandering trillions of taxpayer dollars to devastate […] the lives of innumerable civilians…” (p.128). It would make little sense to argue that we need economic growth to sustain – or even increase – things like military expenditures, fossil subsidies, or the servicing of odious debts.
The question of public debt is crucial. Debt servicing is often a significant portion of the public budget (13% of the 2021 public budget in France). Financing a public debt is expensive because most countries cannot finance themselves by borrowing from their central bank (I am thinking here of Eurozone nations) and so have to borrow funds from private investors demanding an interest. But this does not have to be so. First, the part of the debt that is illegitimate should be repudiated (the NGO Attac estimates than 59% of the French debt results from excessive interest rates and unfair fiscal advantages). Then, the government must find another way of funding its activity. The growing popularity of Modern Money Theory (MMT) and proposals such as Positive Money or Sovereign Money open new possibilities concerning the financing of a post-growth welfare state.
Think also of all the reparations that are caused by the “toxic trail of economic growth,” like public spending on climate adaptation or overwork-related mental health. What if kindling GDP growth costed more than it is worth? One way to address this welfare puzzle is to remove the need for the state to repair the damages created by economic growth. This is the preventive approach of degrowth. This means focusing on prevention and the social and environmental determinants of well-being. Social security is not about money but about protecting individuals against a range of risks having to do with health, employment, housing, and so on. The more risks, and the less individuals are able to handle shocks, the more “expensive” social protection becomes. But what if these risks were lower?
Let me illustrate with two examples: cars and working time. Reducing the use of cars would avoid certain health issues (traffic accidents, air pollution, lifestyle diseases, etc.), thus lowering the cost of medical treatment – and improving well-being. Same logic for work hours. Overwork is associated with a variety of ills, either direct like injuries, exhaustion, and depression, or indirect ones linked to maladaptive behaviours such as alcohol abuse, lack of exercise, and unhealthy diets. Work time reduction is a means towards better health and well-being, and it also frees resources from the public budget. Decompose degrowth into more specific proposals like these two, and you realise that many of them are actually more financially sustainable than proposals to boost economic growth.
Another way of downscaling the public budget is to decommodify certain services. Take a privatised service provided by a for-profit firm and ask: How much cheaper would this service be if the same firm was run as a not-for-profit, as a state firm, or as a commons? For example, Kostakis et al. (2018) compare the costs of prosthetic devices manufactured either by for-profit businesses or commons-based peer production cooperatives. While the prices of the former are between $10,000-30,000 (sometime as high as $100,000) for a prosthetic hand, the cost of production averages $200 in the OpenBionics project they study.
Let us take a last, more concrete example. How can a poor municipality finance the building of renewable energy infrastructure? The usual solution would be to borrow from a commercial bank, but there is another option: creating an alternative currency designed for that purpose. The municipality would sell energy vouchers which grant access to a specific number of kWh after the energy plant starts to produce energy. This is basically a loan except lenders get repaid in energy services. Even after the energy plant is finished, the municipality can still issue energy-backed notes which inhabitants can use for other non-related exchanges. It would just function like a normal local currency, with the extra safety of knowing that the tokens can always be used to pay energy bills. The same logic can be applied to transport, a community garden, or a water treatment plant.
What these examples show is that there is nothing theoretically impossible about providing high-quality public and communal services in an economy whose market sphere does not grow. And this is because what happens in markets is only a small part of an economy’s productive forces.
The issue of power
Another classic critique of degrowth: “Degrowthers in fact rarely discuss political power or those who wield it” (p.127). This is not new, and I already have an entire section on this controversy in my doctoral dissertation, Chapter 7: Misguided, classless, escapist, and anti-revolutionary? The Marxist critique. This question echoes with an old and unsolved debate for many regarding degrowth’s capacity to shift power structures.
And yet, transforming exploitative power relations is precisely what degrowth is about. Let us not forget that the term comes from the discipline of political ecology. It is not called “political” ecology for nothing. Kenta Tsuda’s criticism is ironic given it accuses degrowth of the precise same thing that degrowth reproaches to mainstream environmentalism: its apolitical treatment of the biocrisis. Of course, “the political crisis transcends the ecological domain” (p.128). Why do you think degrowthers spend so much time talking about alternative systems, involving structural changes in government, companies, community organisation, consumer culture, etc. This is because it is about much more than just ecological sustainability.
“[…] degrowthers have it backwards: the specific character of the environmental crisis and climate change arises not from out-of-control economic dynamism but its opposite: the politics of stagnation” (p.130). This commentary misses the point entirely. I guess what the author wants to say is that the crux of the problem is political, and that it is useless to try to address economic matters without changing the political system (or more broadly, power relations) that governs it. But the two tasks are not fully detached. Here is the degrowth take on the matter: power relations today (including the very structure of the state) are organised in order to facilitate the enrichment of a minority at the expense of social-ecological health. Criticising the hegemony of growth is a new, powerful leverage point to highlight and problematise the unfair and unsustainable power relations of capitalism.
“Who imposes [the] climate crisis on whom,” asks the author. The situation is clear (at least in the degrowth literature): the rich. The bottom half of the world population owns less than 1% of global wealth. Compare this to the richest decile that owns 85%, or even the top centile that claims half of all existing wealth. With their crumb of world wealth, the poorest 3.5 billion people cause only 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions while the richest 10% (780 million people) generate half of all emissions. This has been going on for a long time. The world richest 10% accounted for 46% of total emissions growth between 1990 and 2015 while the poorest 50% barely increased their consumption emissions at all. Go further in the past and the picture gets worse. G8 nationsalone (representing less than 15% of world population) are responsible for 85% of global CO2 emissions in excess of the carbon budget that would limit global warming to 1.5°C. So much for a “shared” responsibility.
But this is not only an issue of consumption (I have learned this valuable point through my debate with Matt Huber). In a world where 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, it would be naïve to believe that this is a consumer problem only. So, of course I agree with Kenta Tsuda when he castigates fossil-fuel corporations. Let it be in energy production, mining, fishing, these giant corporations from rich regions of the world are the powerhouse of environmental havoc. Instead of appealing to consumer choices to incentivise greener production, why not directly regulating (and democratising) the governance of these polluting giants? (We are back here to democratising the drawing of the line at the company level.) One consequence of this process is degrowth – this would be a form of socialism without growth.
It is also clear who suffers from this: those who are most vulnerable today. Developing countries will shoulder an estimated 75-80% of the cost of climate change. This takes the form of a greater exposure to flood, erosion, salinity, diseases and pests, mudslides, drought, heatwaves, water scarcity, among other climate hazards. Not only are disadvantaged groups more exposed, but they are also more susceptible to be harmed and have a lower ability to cope with and recover from the damage. To this should be added all the environmental consequences of the fast and furious extractivism on which affluent lifestyles depend. This means air pollution, exposure to toxic on-farm chemicals and waste, water pollution, among an array of other ills. The situation is simple, and unfortunately not new: the global North is having the party and the global South pays the bill.
Another grand question: “how will humanity change who wields political power, displacing the forces that veer towards civilizational destruction?” (p.130). Here is the degrowth answer. If economic growth is a vector of inequality (that much is clear since Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century), then the pursuit of GDP just makes the problem more and more difficult to solve (and with more and more problematic consequences, for example on nature). This is not a “humanity” problem though. The crux of the social-ecological crisis lies in discourses and practices that come to legitimate and enable the enrichment of a minority at the expense of human and non-human others. Again, we are back at the root of what degrowth is about, understanding the biocrisis as a class issue.
*
This is the end of the tour. Navigating throughout the seven queries Kenta Tsuda posed in his article, I have made a number of points about degrowth. I started by identifying economic growth as an – often undesirable – process that is narrower than most people believe. This allowed me to show that the productivist and consumerism culture of growth was neither socially desirable nor ecologically sustainable. To reassure sceptics, I have showed that degrowth was not a castle in the sky, to be implemented all at once like one would mount an IKEA furniture. Degrowth describes a complex social-ecological transition with structural implications in terms of political economy. As radical as this project is, I have argued that much work had – and is – been done on the question of the how.
I opened this response by celebrating Kenta Tsuda’s piece, but I am no longer sure. Announcing questions as “naïve” is too light an excuse for misunderstanding a concept to such an extent. I am curious what literature the author has read in the writing of this article. How many of the 500 academic articles on the topic? How many of the thirty books published in the last few years only? How many of the hundreds of podcasts and lectures available online? My guess is (based on the many misconceptions concerning degrowth): not many. Such naïve criticism is problematic because it does not advance the debate; it only creates a burden for those who are familiar with degrowth to clarify what it means. If anything, I hope I have at least done that.