There are a few common rejoinders to arguments for degrowth. I'd like to look at a pair in more detail - "automation will allow consumption to continue indefinitely" and "you aren't against consumption, you're against capitalism." These are closely related and both relate to the concept of "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" - the idea that with sufficient automation, the benefits of the techno-consumer world can be made available to everyone.
Consumer society innately depends on a few things. One is availability of raw materials. The constant demand for new toys means a constant need for cheap material and cheap labor to make them. This is usually, but not always, outsourced to the developing world, where ecological regulations are fewer, state institutions are weaker, and labor is cheaper. The latter is worth looking at more closely on its own.
Consumer culture can't work if production costs are too high. This innately requires an imbalance in economic power between those consuming goods, and those producing them. Profits on consumer goods are derived from that imbalance - from the buying power of developed-world consumers being sufficient to pay for the labor of resource extraction, *and* the labor of assembly/production, *and* capital goods and logistics needed for all of the above, *and* a cut of profit for the company selling the consumer goods.
A semi-common argument from self-identified ethical capitalists is that supply-side labor in the developing world actually improves outcomes, and ultimately will result in a level playing field between the developed and developing worlds - in other words, "sweatshops are good." While I understand their argument, it ignores the fact that the consumer model only works with the availability of cheap labor and materials, and therefore doesn't have an incentive to improve developing-world quality of life over time. "Right now they're wholly dependent on Western money, but eventually everything will miraculously even out as those places develop" is a big promise that has not historically shown any sign of holding true - and it is not obvious how the system would even continue to function.
The easy solutionist response to all of the above is simple: "Make robots do it." Why reduce consumption? We can keep going as long as we like! We just need to replace mining and factory labor with machines - then we can all live in a golden age of cheap goods produced by robot factories with no human misery needed. The techno-optimistic wing of the left is fond of this model - and who wouldn't be? It requires no sacrifices and allows us to continue our pace of consumption forever. Unfortunately, a closer look makes it clear that this future is neither likely to happen nor as pleasant as it sounds.
"Automation will result in an end to human labor" has been argued for over two hundred years. The predicted reductions in working hours have not happened. In fact, the boom of automation in the early 19th Century resulted in the destruction of professions, a vast increase in the amount of factory labor required, and a decrease in the quality of goods produced - but an increase in their quantity. Since then, reductions in heavy labor have happened in the West, but not by eliminating the labor performed - but by shifting it to cheaper places.
It also doesn't solve the issue of extractivism. Resources will continue to be needed, proportionate to consumption. This is where the automation proponents argue for additional miracles - either automated recycling or asteroid mining. (Yes, really.) The level of proposed magic here shoots well past the limit of plausibility - "Robot God will eliminate all our unwanted labor, and bring us side-effect-free raw materials forever!" is not a compelling argument. Even if it miraculously occurred, the Jevons Paradox means that ultimately, scarcity would catch right back up.
This is not a strong argument for the continuation of immense levels of consumption - it's neither plausible nor desirable.
"With UBI, automation wouldn't be scary anymore."
"It's capitalism that makes people afraid of AI, not the AI itself."
"Don't fight the tech. Fight the owners."
If you've been around any spaces discussing automation in the last two years, you've probably seen some variation of the above arguments. The gist of it is that if we're not afraid for our livelihood, automation ceases to be a threat. In an attempt to be reassuring, I've seen folks argue that artists could still make art, musicians could still make music, writers could still write, and programmers could still program - for their own fulfilment, not for anyone else.
This is downright ghoulish.
Outsourcing human expression to machines is a fundamentally silly thing to do. It doesn't solve real problems that exist. Those are things humans enjoy doing, and are fulfilled by doing. They make us more human. Furthermore, they're inherently social and community activities - things we do to bond with other humans. These are things we should do *more* of. "Sure, we outsourced all human intellectual and physical activity (except that which is too cheap to automate) to machines, but we cut you a check every month so you can keep consuming" is not a reassuring future.
Since the industrial revolution, there have been numerous attempts to quantify "standard of living" or "quality of life" in numerical terms. It is an indictment of the growthist system that these attempts have frequently attempted to correlate wealth or economic productivity with living conditions. Per-capita GDP is the most frequent example, and easiest target, but various combinations of metrics - per capita income, national Gini coefficient, employment rate, and so on - have plagued us for the last two hundred years.
It is telling how few of these metrics measure the things that are important to people, rather than to central banks, corporate boards, or investment managers. What is more meaningful to me - that I contributed a certain number to the economic productivity of the United States, or that my family has a roof over our heads and no food insecurity?
A deeper look at living conditions among wealthy countries continues to confront narratives about national or individual wealth. The United States, the world's largest economy and highly ranked on median and per-capita metrics, has enduring problems with consumer debt, access to healthcare, and availability of housing - to say nothing of the impending ecological collapse. The problems we're confronted with, clearly, are not ones that simply go away with a productive-enough economy or sufficient accumulation of wealth. They are systemic problems, and not ones limited to capitalism.
The solutionist outlook on this is that as long as we execute the correct procedures - implementing the right policy, developing the right technology - these problems are solvable. Ecological collapse can be fended off by building nuclear power plants, or by geoengineering, or by electric vehicles. If we need more resources, there are asteroids to be mined, and a seabed to dig up. Why worry about water use when desalination is available? Surely with the right welfare-state policies and the right technology, exploitation will be solved! No problem exists, it seems, that cannot be addressed with the right series of incantations.
The problem with this approach is that our most serious problems are not ones with technical or policy solutions. In many cases, the problems are themselves caused by people wishing to manufacture a technological solution to supposed problems in the name of "progress." Ecological collapse is a direct product of overconsumption. War is often a result of contention over resources. Exploitation of human beings on a staggering scale is driven by the need to maintain a certain consumer standard of living in the West. The central lie of the solutionists is that if we entrust them with enough power and resources, those of us in the developed world don't need to change how we live. History speaks to the effects of such trust.
The solutionist attitude - with cars, with computers, with consumption - got us here. There is no reason to buy what it is selling now.
Degrowth advocates, for the last fifty years, have been asking us to try something else: to envision a future that isn't just a more productive and more technically advanced version of today. This seems counterintuitive. Surely the frighteningly serious problems we're faced with require solutions of a similar scale - glorious technological and political moonshots to propel us deeper into a future filled with wonders.
Why, though? Which will more reliably reduce resource use - developing exotic new technologies and forms of automation to allow us to consume ever more, or simply choose to consume less? The Jevons Paradox, shown to be correct countless times throughout history, tells us that efficiency will be matched by ever-greater consumption. Degrowth challenges us to ask ourselves what we need, rather than presupposing that we need a future that looks like the current world, only moreso.
What most humans need is, I think, simpler than what the thought leaders, visionaries, and CEOs want us to believe we need. We need homes, food security, access to healthcare, dignity as persons, and a world that isn't on the verge of collapse. There aren't magic solutions to these problems. Automation won't solve them. No new form of technology can fix them. The forces and motivations that created this future won't save us from it. There is no panacea coming. If these problems are to have resolutions, they have to come from people acting convivially and with a willingness to radically re-imagine the structures around us.
"Degrowth" is a scary word. The global system has been growthist for the entire lifetime of everyone currently breathing. A clean transition out of growthism has never happened - never, to the best of my knowledge, even been attempted.
The choice looks stark to me. Either we can try to stay one step ahead - relying on automation to fend off a worst case scenario as consumption rockets forward - or we can try to draw a circle around the things that matter, the ones needed for human survival and dignity, and dispense with the things outside of it. Instead of pushing for more, why not rely on our ingenuity and generosity to walk a different path?
Degrowth doesn't mean some blanket rejection of technology or a return to an idealized primitive past. It does, however, insist that we re-evaluate our relationship with consumption, and instead live in ways that prioritize human dignity and quality of life. The current system - "work in the capital-accumulation machine so you can keep acquiring a steady stream of resource-intensive consumer junk by exploiting someone else" - isn't sustainable, it isn't pleasant, and it isn't inevitable. Conviviality in its simplest form is about people being more important than things.
We are a clever species. We are tool-users, thinkers, art-makers. Surely we can do better than a ravenous need to devour all the resources available to us, no matter the human or ecological consequences.