A response to Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling: Snails Don’t Bite or: Why you should not worry about degrowth turning imperial

I must confess: I spend way too much time reading criticisms of degrowth. While there is plenty to go around (here is a list for fellow aficionados of conceptual brawl), it is – unfortunately – rare to stumble upon a constructive critique. But every now and then, something shiny ends up in my sieve, like the piece I would like to discuss today: Degrowth and the pluriverse: continued coloniality or intercultural revolution? by Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling.   

Their main argument is straightforward: the rise in popularity of degrowth could come to threaten cultural diversity by smothering other worldviews. In their own words, “degrowth can inadvertently re-enact the presumed superiority of Modern developments over alternative topologies of the pluriverse.” If I understand them correctly, they worry that degrowth’s recent fame might create a sense of supremacy and therefore lead to alienation for those who might be pushed – or feel coerced – into what authors call a “lighter degrown modernity.” 

They are not alone. Recently, Padini Nirmal and Dianne Rocheleau wrote about the need to “decolonize degrowth” by shrinking its sense of universality. Likewise, Corinna Dengler and Lisa Marie Seebacher are concerned that “degrowth reproduces neo-colonial asymmetries by setting the agenda on what ought to be done to solve problems of global relevance.” Same critique for Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos et al. who decry that “once again, an idea is launched to the world with an undeniable Eurocentric (or Northern) origin.” Should we worry about degrowth going imperial?  

Imperial anti-imperialism? 

Economic growth is an imperial phenomenon. Part of what is being recorded in high-income countries as a seemingly benign rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is in fact an unfair and unsustainable appropriation of labour time and natural resources from around the world. David Harvey calls it “accumulation by dispossession” to remind us that what we label as “growth” is more akin to a reshuffling of already existing assets. Let’s not be shy and even speak of “accumulation by contamination” to acknowledge the toxic trail that economic growth leaves behind. Here is the situation: the macroeconomic expansion of affluent regions of the world acts like a giant vacuum that treats the global South as both a resource pool and a waste dump.

These patterns of appropriation are sustained through a variety of more or less violent actions, from military intervention and trade browbeating to structural adjustment programmes and more diffuse ideological sway. Everything must be done to keep the vacuum going, even though it means that some people must sacrifice their social-ecological health to service Northern GDP. Of course, this is not the official story of growth. In public discourse, economic growth is sold as the pinnacle of civilization, a win-win process of “development” that leaves all parties better off, a true force of betterment. The ideology of growth is the ultimate structural adjustment programme, forcing everyone to abide to the capitalist standards of commodification, wage labour, private property, and for-profit competition.       

Degrowth, on the other hand, means turning off the vacuum. It aims to neutralise a Western worldview that is being imposed onto other nations. In Degrowth in Movement(s), Corinna Burkhart et her co-authors speak of “freedom from the one-sided Western development paradigm, in order to enable a self-determined shaping of society and a good life in the Global South.” I like the phrasing because it acknowledges that degrowth is not a universal model coming with blanket prescriptions, but the liberation from one. Degrowth has no ambition to become a neo-colonial doctrine; it is a strategy of independence from the global enforcement of neoliberal capitalism. 

Many of the Southern discourses often categorised as allies of degrowth (buen vivir, ubuntu, and ecoswaraj, for example) promote similar values such as autonomy, self-constraint, sharing and mutual aid, and stewardship. As diverse and unique as these are, all of them embrace the view that there should be social and ecological limits to economic activities. If anything, this multitude of alike-ideas supports one of the most important messages of degrowth: the fact that there is something universally wrong about the ideology of economic growth. Regardless of where, when, and how, growth-oriented economies organised for money-making unavoidably lead to situations of social-ecological exploitation.

Escaping quantitative magnitudes 

There is a second point I would like to respond to. Arora and Stirling open the piece by arguing that degrowth “fixates on quantity at the expense of qualities.” The specific term they use to describe the qualitative is “topologies,” which they define as the “patterns of social relations – both among people (as mediated by discourses, institutions and practices) and more materially with ‘nature’ (as mediated through technologies, economies and ecologies).” They worry that “by overly fixating simply on magnitude (as material output or throughput), different patterns of relations can be overlooked.”

This misunderstanding is a curse that degrowth has been carrying since always. I suspect it has to do with the word itself. “Degrowth” sounds quantitative, like turning a volume button down. It is not surprising then that degrowth is often accused of quantitative fetishism – a “mere stretching or squeezing of material throughput,” as in the authors (mistakenly) put it. In fact, I remember a three-part paper from Andy Stirling from 2016 on this precise point – it was titled “outgrowing the twin simplifications of growth and degrowth.”    

Stirling’s argument goes something like that. Degrowth is guilty of the same simplification than growth: it fails to differentiate between the desirable things that should increase and the undesirable things that should shrink. The crux of his critique is that one should differentiate qualitative growth (growth in health, justice, liberty, education, quality of life, etc.) from quantitative growth(hospitals, prisons, courts, books, etc.). “The choices lie not just in growth or degrowth, but in vibrant democratic struggles for many-growths,” Stirling believes. 

This narrative suffers from a number of serious flaws, starting with a problematic definition of growth. Here, the general understanding of the term (the process of increasing in size, or developing physically, mentally, or spiritually) is conflated with a very specific kind of growth: an increase in Gross Domestic Product. Andy Stirling wants to see growth in initiatives that are good for the world, and who would blame him. But this is not what economists have in mind when they speak of growth. What they mean is to make monetary value grow (because remember, prices are the only things recorded in GDP). 

That’s when degrowth kicks in, as a missile word to criticise the economistic belief that more GDP is necessarily a boon. This is why “degrowth” sounds daunting. The raison d’être of the term is to help us escape the fetishism of growth, a modern addiction to forever rising money points (the malady of the infinite, as Yves-Marie Abraham would say). This is why I like to think of degrowth as a conceptual crowbar to open up possibilities; it liberates the future from the narrow worldview that sees the difference between yesterday and tomorrow in money terms only.   

Degrowth is an emancipation yes, but the term also has a utopian side. It has become a vision of an alternative world; not less of the same, but simply different. “The objective is not to make an elephant leaner, but to turn an elephant into a snail,” writes the authors of Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era. One would be wrong to associate degrowth with the film Downsizing (2017)where people shrink themselves down to being five inches tall in order to live in gluttonous consumerism. As I have tried to show in my PhD dissertation The Political Economy of Degrowth (2019), the economy of a degrowth society differs from a proportionally shrunken one with mini malls, tiny bullshit jobs, and cute little corporations. Not less of the same, but simply different. 

In fact, degrowth is exactly what the authors describe as a change in topology. As a discourse, degrowth aims to decolonise the imaginary of growth, involving anti-utilitarianism, eco-feminism, post-extractivism, and a variety of other revolutionary -isms. It involves a transformation of both institutions (e.g. replacing some markets with commons, introducing local currencies, running self-managed cooperatives, broadening our perception of valuable work beyond paid employment) and practices (e.g. voluntary simplicity, sabotage, and work time reduction). This concerns both relations among people and relations with nonhuman nature (I am thinking here, for example, of ecocide laws, resource sanctuaries, and the many practices informed by a sense of ecological sympathy and stewardship). 

This is not my personal take on the matter, but a reflection of steady trends in the literature. Degrowth has come to question our relation with time, business frameworks, education and spirituality, food, healthcare, indicators of prosperity, alternative money, the role of the state, activism, property, technology, tourism, marine conservation, and many other things (for more, see this repertoire of degrowth articles). The concept is increasing used by scholars from different disciplines and cultures, each enriching the degrowth toolbox with novel analytical insights. What is certain is that the discussion has long moved beyond the simplistic more-or-less debate that Arora and Stirling stigmatise.   

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Degrowth is getting increasingly popular. As exciting as this may be (at least for some of us), people like Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling are right to stay on toes. Even if their piece does not do justice to the full spectrum of degrowth ideas, I think we should celebrate these forms of precautionary criticism. Like them, I believe that “degrowth can be part of a truly intercultural revolution, helping to build a convivial pluriverse, in which not one but many worlds are sustained.” This is precisely the goal. And this makes me think of Game of Thrones, when the houses of Westeros unite against the White Walkers. Today, the imperial discourse – and practices – of economic growth is the White Walkers, and all the diverse modes of existence opposed to that (degrowth in Western Europe, steady-state economics in North America, buen vivir in South America, ubuntu in some parts of Africa, eco-swaraj in India, and many others) should form a revolutionary alliance to defeat that enemy.