A response to Matt Huber: Facts and logic in support of degrowth

As a social scientist working on degrowth, I got a sudden surge of excitement upon hearing that Marxist geographer Matt Huber recorded a podcast titled Destroying degrowth with facts and logic. But the surge was short-lived. The episode is not really worth listening to, with very little of it actually about degrowth. But this was a good opportunity for me to dive into the work of Matt Huber, whose worth is not fairly reflected in this discussion. Instead of playing the misunderstanding police (the hosts of the show would definitely be sentenced perpetuity for associating degrowth with Malthusianism and neoliberal austerity, and calling it a nicer form of capitalism), I want to share a few facts and logic in support of degrowth.

“What the fuck is growthism?“

Growthism (or the ideology of growth) is the belief that enough does not suffice, that more is always better. Degrowth takes issue with a culture that strives to maximise the accumulation of money regardless of its social and ecological consequences. Individuals striving for exponential wealth, companies chasing exuberant profits, and government hounding fast-and-furious GDP rates are examples of an economistic mindset that considers money-making the be-all and end-all of existence. 

This monetary obsession leads to what Durkheim called “the malady of infinite aspiration,” the troublesome condition of insatiability resulting from having unlimited needs. If some want to become millionaires, the millionaires themselves want to be billionaires, and so on. Companies compete on their ability to generate profits, and not on their social-ecological utility. As for governments, they find themselves prisoners of the logic of capital accumulation since the size of their budget rely on the volume of transactions occurring in the economy.      

Huber says that “the goal should be to have more for the mass of people. But instead, they [advocate of degrowth] flip it. We don’t want GDP growth, we want degrowth! [they say]. They are on the terrain of the ideology of growthism, stuck in that negation.” Degrowth is not the opposite of growth but rather a call for sufficiency. Neither to have more, nor to have less – but to have enough. Enough income for a household to satisfy its needs, enough profit for companies to ensure their financial sustainability, enough revenues for government to guarantee high-quality public services. Eventually, it is a call to rightsize the scale of the market economy to a level where it can secure well-being in a way that is socially just and ecologically sustainable.   

Have we turned economic growth into “a bogeyman”? Yes, we did. But, I believe, for a reason. Before the degrowth movement, economic growth was hardly problematised. Marxists did a brilliant job pointing to the contradictions of capitalism, but their arguments rarely made the headlines. Degrowth has revamped the critique of capitalism, connecting it with a broader critique of productivism, consumerism, extractivism, economicism, and techno-scientism. Income-craved consumers, profit-driven capitalists, and GDP-hungry governments are three cogs of a broader logic of capital accumulation (replace with economic growth if you don’t like Marxist jargon). 

Accounting for injustice 

Huber is right, the concept of “rich country” is deceiving. Countries are unequal entities and national accounting is particularly bad at reflecting that fact (GDP tracks the flow of money changing hands but does not detail the direction of that flow, or in other words, which hands are giving and which ones are receiving). France is considered a rich country, but it hosts 5.3 million people (8.3% of the population) living with less than half of the median income. (Measure poverty at 60% of the median income, and the number of people doubles.) 

There is also an elite class in the global South, but far less than in the global North. Most billionaires live in old capitalist economies. In 2020, there were 142 billionaires in China and 39 in India. Compare this to the 358 billionaires living in the United States, which is 40% of all billionaires in the world (the net worth of American billionaire is more than twice the one of Chinese billionaires). Considering wealth in general: the United States owns 29.4% of global wealth, and almost 70% of that wealth is owned by the 10% richest Americans. As Huber writes (and I agree), “global climate change is a criminal atrocity perpetrated by a small minority of capitalists mainly located in the Global North.”  

We should not be afraid of talking about rich and poor because the biocrisis is a class problem (this is one of the five principles of Huber’s Socialist Climate Politics). We should also make sure that the appellation “the rich” be understood as affluence wherever it is found. But saying that we should not target rich countries because there are rich people living elsewhere would be like saying we should not target SUVs because smaller cars pollute too. They do, but significantly less. In any case, degrowth doesn’t “rely on a major lifestyle shift for the entire population of Earth.” It targets the accumulation of elites wherever they are, and as of today, principally in OECD countries.  

Huber is also right to point out at the helplessness of consumers who have no choice but to fulfil their needs through consumerism. In a world where 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, an ecologically-informed anticapitalism should indeed target those who control production. And most of these firms are from so-called developed economies. (Same distribution for the ten largest mining companies: UK/Switzerland, China, Luxemburg, South Korea, Australia, UK/Australia, Brazil, China, the UK, and China. And same for the ten largest fishing companies: Japan, Japan, Thailand, Norway, Japan, South Korea, United Stated, Netherland, United States, Norward.) These companies may have global span, they are still under the jurisdiction of specific countries. This makes the global North a powerhouse of environmental degradation. 

And let’s not forget that pledges to cut emissions are made at the country level. Here, it makes sense to argue that the early industrialised countries who are responsible for the bulk of historical emissions (the G8 is responsible for 85% of excess global CO₂ emissions) should assume larger cuts as to preserve some ecological space for countries that have not yet industrialised. This is where “planetary solidarity” is needed, another principle of a Socialism Climate Politics according to Matt Huber. I am all for a working-class ecological politics, but I don’t see why it could not be pursued in parallel to current institutional efforts at mitigating climate change.    

The joys and sorrows of industry 

Here is an enigma: Would we be able to work less in the more frugal, post-industrial society degrowthers envision? Sufficiency-oriented political ecologists talk about shorter working weeks and artisanal craft while luxury eco-socialists retort that this can only be afforded through industrial production. There is a lot of heat surrounding that question but very few facts. (If anyone has done work on this question, please do jump in.) 

Food is key to this question. Do we need to “turn millions of people into peasants,” as the podcast suggests? I don’t know; I hope not. But surely there are a few steps before that worth considering. For instance, we could start reducing the scandalous waste of today’s industrial food system (17% of total global food production). Let’s also consider a change of diets towards plant-based meals, since in Europe, meat, dairy, and eggs account for 83% of food-related carbon emissions. 

This is the sufficiency part of the problem, but there is also an efficiency aspect. Nobody wants to return to labour-intensive local agrarianism. But nobody wants to live on a wrecked planet either, especially not the poorest who are today bearing the brunt of the biocrisis. In between the two extremes, we must find a sweet spot – a combination between the local peasant agroecology praised by degrowthers and the industrial modes of production defended by eco-socialists. (Here I am merely repeating arguments already made by Giorgos Kallis while answering another article from Matt Huber.)  

“We have to care about the planet, but we need to fix economic stuff first,” says one of the hosts. I think that’s wrong. All economic activities have a biophysical dimension. I am writing these very words on a computer made of metals and using electricity, itself connected to the internet and all its material infrastructure. I also need enough food, warm clothes, a secure shelter, among many other things involving materials, energy, and ecosystems. There is no such thing as a purely economic problem. For better or for worse, the economy is unavoidably embedded in nature. 

Let’s not stamp on the seeds of utopian tomorrows 

Bike repair cafés and communal gardens “don’t solve problems for people who struggle to pay rent,” they say. Maybe, but using the same logic, housing cooperatives don’t solve problems for people who struggle to fix their bikes. Needs are diverse. What these initiatives have in common is that they satisfy needs outside of the money-obsessed capitalist sphere. Being able to fix my computer at the Repair Café protects me against the predatory practices of tech companies who profit out of planned obsolescence. As marginal as they seem today, these practices are sending a strong post-capitalist message: no one should depend on money to access the goods and services essential to the enjoyment of human rights. 

These fringe projects are decommodification in practice. Can everything be produced at the local level? Of course not. There would be little use for every village to own an IRM. But certain things can – and should. (Determining what should be produced locally and what requires a larger scale of organisation is another question worth pondering.) Take employment, for example. France is currently running a nation-wide experiment with a locally organised job guarantee (for a description of the scheme, see this section of my doctoral dissertation The Political Economy of Degrowth, pp. 622-630). At first, this project was only a single association in one small city. Now, it is trialled in ten territories, and hopefully, there will be a day where every single city will have its own labour commons.

Certain public utilities should be organised at higher levels. In an article about the decommodification of food, Matt Huber mentions the creation of sectoral councils that would inform larger-scale efforts at social-ecological planning. Unlike today’s capitalist agri-food system, there would be no reason for a food system based on social and ecological needs to keep getting bigger and bigger. The purpose of such planning would be to find the optimal scale at which a production system can satisfy food-related needs in a way that is economically efficient, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and culturally convivial. In economies in situation of ecological overshoot, this requires a double-D process: degrow and democratise production. This would be socialism without growth.     

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Here is a fact: degrowth is indeed getting increasingly popular. I think this should be celebrated by anyone concerned with social-ecological justice, if only because it kick-starts discussions urgently worth having. Am I, like fellow degrowthers, on “Disaster Pornhub all day fantasising about what to do about the climate crisis,” as poetically phrased by one of the podcast hosts? Yeah, kind of. I’m an ecological economist, so it’s my job. (To confess, in an ideal world, I would rather study black holes or Great White Sharks than spending my days watching the world burn.)

And I’m not the only one. Sustainability scientists, political ecologists, environmental economists, geographers like Matt Huber, and many others are investing time and energy into these dismal – yet urgent – topics. I find much to agree in Matt Huber’s work and I don’t think there is much point trying to destroy each other. The biocrisis we are facing is complex and the more concepts and theories we have to analyse it the better. We should value disagreements but let’s make sure they advance the debate and help people solve practical problems. Instead of wasting time trying to destroy one another, let us build upon each other in order to collectively move forward.