💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › federation-anarchiste-from-development-to-decroissance.… captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:51:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: From Development to “Décroissance”
Author: Fédération Anarchiste
Date: 2006
Language: en
Topics: IAF, France, Anarchist Federation (France)
Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-02 from http://www.i-f-a.org.gridhosted.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/anarkiista_debato.pdf

Fédération Anarchiste

From Development to “Décroissance”

The development of ‘productive forces’, conceived by capitalism as the

purpose of History, generated a new religion, that of economic growth.

According to the promises of the liberal ideology, happiness was to be

measured depending on the GNP.

After half a century of ‘improvement’, ‘modernists’’ vast works look

like ruins. Man is affected in his flesh and dignity: alienation through

work, unemployment, lack of job security, stress, loneliness, spleen,

and so on. Social disparities, both between rich and poor countries and

within each nation, have never been striking. Armed conflicts, ignited

and maintained mainly for strategic reasons, germinate on all

continents.

But above all, because it puts the future generations in danger, results

concerning the environment turn out to be an absolute disaster.

Mankind’s impact on global ecology, (that is to say the level of

depletion of resources and the disturbance of regulating mechanisms)

already exceeds by 20% the Earth’s biological capacities. Sooner or

later, if we maintained current tendencies, we should need resources

amounting to several planets. Growth is no longer possible.

To remedy this situation, the ‘sustainable development’ is appointed by

the people in charge (political, economic, media, etc), as well as by

the anti-globalisation minority which dreams of ‘humanising’ capitalism,

as a panacea. But the trickery does not resist to any serious thinking.

The ambiguity of the expression itself is a warrant of success: it

conceals the problem while giving the impression of resolving it. Worse,

it shifts a problem to create another, more acute. For the beneficiaries

of ‘globalisation’, it is by no means a way of questioning the principle

of free-market economy, but of getting the rules of the World Trade

Organisation to be accepted, with the prospect, for hundreds of

multinationals, to privatise vital fields a little more, such as water,

food, health. The market is in charge of remedying the destruction of

the planet by... the market, the only concession consisting in easing

its most visible damages, as long as profits remain.

Since the ecological impact puts in evidence an ‘overheating’ regarding

the resources of the planet, it is necessary to turn towards a physical

‘décroissance’, that is to say gradually reduce the quantity of raw

materials and involved energy. ‘Décroissance’ is not an ideological

choice, it is an absolute necessity.

If no society is ecologically innocent, that is if the development of

Humanity always comes along with a transformation of the environment, it

is indeed the run for profit, for accumulation, together with the

continuous creation of artificial needs that produces a striking

acceleration of the degradation of the ecosystem. The preliminary to the

implementation of this ‘décroissance’ is therefore the disappearance of

capitalism. Because the system needs growth to survive, because its own

logic is a suicidal dynamic, it cannot carry out this ‘décroissance’...

except by massively eliminating poor populations, that is to say to

perpetrate genocides.

The second condition is the suppression of the State, in that this

capitalist dynamic only accelerates with the cooperation of various

governments: multiple subsidies, implementation of infrastructures taken

care of by the public power of training, research, environmental costs,

financial losses, customized legal frame... To not get down the State’s

disappearance would imply sparing a fundamental pillar and a formidable

opponent, this rendering society’s deep-rooted conversion impossible.

Any solution which would avoid disbanding wealth would inevitably be

doomed to failure. In order for ‘décroissance’ to be mastered by the

various populations, so that it does not lead to barbarity within

conflicts for the appropriation of resources or to the drastic measures

of totalitarianism, the problem must imperatively be put into an

economic and social equity perspective, the wantonness of public

services being able to constitute an essential lever in this

construction.

If individual initiative of voluntary simplicity, that is the

undertaking of a different lifestyle may represent the foundation of a

‘philosophical’ society concerned about future generations, it is

self-evident that the addition of ‘responsible’ individual behaviours

would not be sufficient — far from it — to build a society based on

‘décroissance’. If only because the greediest fields of energy and raw

materials (military-industrial complex, transportation, agriculture,

etc) fall within global politics, and thus collective decisions. It

would be deceptive to think we could do without a revolution.

Because of one’s control of one’s own existence, because the meaning of

one’s own needs cannot by any means justify a bulimic production,

generator of alienating work, only a self-managing federalist society

can guarantee jointedly economic equity, social justice and preservation

of natural resources.