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Title: Growth and Anti-Growth Author: Miguel AmorĂłs Date: April 2009 Language: en Topics: Capitalism, environment, reformism Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/growth-anti-growth-miguel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: From Resquicios, Vol. IV, No. 6, April 2009. Translated from the Spanish original in March 2013. Spanish original available online at: http://ebookbrowse.com/amoros-crecimiento-y-decrecimiento-pdf-d303692269
Speaking about growth and anti-growth is the same thing as speaking
about capitalism and anti-capitalism, since capitalism is the only
economic formation that is not only based on the acquisition of profits,
but on their increasing accumulation. The fruits of capitalist
exploitation are not for the most part squandered in expenditure but are
transformed into capital and reinvested. In this way capital increases;
it endlessly accumulates. Growth is the necessary precondition of
capitalism; without growth the system would collapse. It is the
indication of the normal function of society; it is therefore a class
goal. Because the bourgeoisie is aware of the basis of its power,
expansion is its banner; even so, it was not until 1949 that growth was
defined as a general policy of the state, in Truman’s famous speech.
Capitalism had by then become more technical, more dependent on
technology, more American. Ideology based on economic growth as panacea,
developmentalism, became the axis of all national policies, of the right
as well as the left, in parliamentary as well as dictatorial regimes.
The primacy of economic growth with regard to political goals
characterized the speeches of the representatives of domination during
the fifties and sixties. Freedom was identified with the possibility of
growing consumption, of access to a greater number of commodities, made
possible by growth. And it was guaranteed by the postwar social pacts
among governments, parties and trade unions, in order to allow for full
employment and the increase of the buying power of the workers linked to
productivity increases.
The emptiness of life delivered over to consumption and manipulated by
the culture industry was revealed by the youth revolt of the sixties,
which affected the major centers of the so-called “developed” countries:
the dissatisfied youth did not want a life where not dying of hunger was
exchanged for the certainty of dying from boredom. The uprisings of the
black ghettos in America added new fuel to the fire of revolt. Those who
were excluded from the enjoyment of abundance displayed their rejection
by way of the looting and destruction of commodities. This nihilist
revolt encountered its theory in May of 1968. But this was not all. The
system itself began to be questioned from within by dissident
specialists, specifically from the camp of economic theory and
environmentalism. Rachel Carson was the first to warn of the danger
posed to life on Earth by industrial production. The economists N.
Georgescu-Roegen (in his essay, “The Costs of Development”, in 1966), H.
Daly and E. J. Misham, contributed a “physical” and holistic perspective
to the discipline, considering the world as a closed system, a
“Spaceship Earth” where everything is related to everything else and
everything has its cost. According to a historical article written by
Kenneth Boulding in 1966, in the cowboy economy success was measured by
the extent of production and consumption, while in the economy of the
“astronaut” success corresponded to the preservation of the environment.
However, the growth inherent to the former is nourished by the latter’s
degradation, so clearly visible from the point when destruction comes to
prevail over the other factors (when the capacity of the planet to
support wastes is surpassed). Pollution, chemical additives, acid rain,
wastes, population growth, predatory urbanism, the proliferation of
automotive culture, tourism, etc., problems that reveal the biological
disequilibrium of the planet, were brought up and debated quite
precociously. At that time, Barry Commoner, in The Closing Circle, and
Edward Goldsmith, in the pages of the journal The Ecologist, criticized
one-sided technological development, the irreparable squandering of
“natural capital” and the increasingly negative impact of modern
industry on ecosystems, health and social relations. Scientists like J.
Lovelock and L. Margulis formulated the “Gaia Hypothesis” concerning the
planet as a self-regulated system, and revealed for the first time the
rise of the greenhouse effect due to emissions of gases into the
atmosphere by industry and automotive transport. Another expert, Donella
Meadows, of MIT, under the aegis of the Club of Rome, wrote a report
entitled The Limits of Growth for the Stockholm Conference (1972), which
broached the irreconcilable contradiction between infinite development
and finite natural resources. Economic expansion had disorganized
society and forced it to create an increasing number of hierarchies and
regulations. It took place to the detriment of the ecosphere and if it
were to continue it would end with the depletion of resources. All
economic policies had to contend with the environment if we really
wanted to know their real costs. Furthermore, the exponential growth of
population would end up provoking a food crisis (as Malthus had said)
and within one century would lead to a social collapse and the
disappearance of human life. The solution was supposed to reside in
“zero growth”. Recalling the recommendation of John Stuart Mill, a
stationary economy would reestablish the equilibrium between industrial
society and nature. Finally, Goldsmith and a group of his colleagues
published A Blueprint for Survival in 1972 that recapitulated and
systematized the previous critiques. Its message: economics and ecology
must be reconciled, in order to give way to stable, autarchic and
decentralized social forms.
These critiques that emphasized the underestimated role of nature in
social history were ignored by almost all the dissidents of the time
with the honorable exception of the anarchist Murray Bookchin, because,
first of all, they questioned the dogma of development of the productive
forces, the sacred foundation of socialism. And secondly, because, far
from intending to carry out a revolutionary transformation by attempting
to unite a majority of the population behind a radical
anti-developmentalist program, their advocates only sought to convince
the governments, the employers and the politicians of the world of the
need to confront the facts revealed in their exposés with measures that
did not exceed the bounds of taxes, fines and subsidies. The scientists
and the other experts were the victims of their own positions as members
of a subaltern and auxiliary class of capitalism, who by no means
questioned capitalism, which is why they closed their eyes to the
consequences for action of their objections to growth and denied their
essential anti-capitalist significance. Restricting themselves to
playing their role of advisors, they committed the error of trusting
their leaders, that is, those responsible for the planetary degradation
that they had themselves denounced. The environmental movement would
always be encumbered by this original sin and in the eighties its
“green” projects would converge with capitalist innovations. The
neoliberal flight forward towards growth and degradation—the rising
price of oil, Bhopal, Chernobyl, dioxin, the hole in the ozone layer,
pollution, etc.—confirmed the accuracy of the critiques and the failure
of untrammeled development converted the majority of world leaders to
environmentalism. The concept of “sustainable development” of the
Brundtland Report (1987), presented by the World Commission on the
Environment and Development, and especially by the Rio Conference
(1992), marked the fusion of environmentalist ideology and capitalism,
which was accepted first of all by the advocates of state regulation of
growth, the former “left”. It was an attempt to preserve growth, rather
than an attempt to replace growth with sustainability; to manage the
noxious effects of development, rather than to abolish them. This is why
an attempt was made to harmonize the environment with the market
economy. The ozone layer and the consumerist lifestyle could be
compatible thanks to a new accountability that would take environmental
impacts into consideration. The market would reward “clean” production
and punish polluters. Recycling would be rewarded and waste penalized.
Nonetheless, the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change (1997) revealed the
insoluble problems presented by the environmental reconversion of
production and consumption. Despite the rise of an increasingly more
important environmental industry and the savings implied by the
dismantling of the state’s social services, the market was incapable of
assuming responsibility for this transformation because it was so
burdensome for industry. Basic measures such as scrubbers for gaseous
emissions endangered growth, the central pillar of the contemporary
capitalist system. The preferred solution, the globalization of trade,
and its primary consequence, the relocation of industries and the
exponential growth of transport, led in the opposite direction. This
solution demanded that intensive agriculture must continue to feed the
world, but now with the aid of genetic engineering, that the chemical
industry should determine human metabolism, that the children of Asia
should work in factories and that the High Speed Train should lacerate
Europe. The same thing could be said about nuclear power or genetic
engineering. If destructive growth required an environmentalist
disguise, destruction would have to be presented as the environmentalist
act par excellence.
In December 1912, six years before she was assassinated by the soldiers
of a social democratic government, Rosa Luxemburg published a
controversial book, The Accumulation of Capital, in which she claimed
that the extended reproduction of capital, that is, “growth”, could only
be ensured by incorporating into the orbit of the commodity the backward
sectors of the modern countries and the population of the rest of the
world that was still ensconced in pre-capitalist or incipient capitalist
production relations. The existence of an outside world was vital for
the existence of the capitalist world, so that the latter would have a
source of consumers, raw materials and cheap labor power. The
difficulties that the process might encounter were solved by force: “In
the overseas countries, its first act, the historical act with which
capital was born and which henceforth never ceased for even one minute
to accompany accumulation, is the subjugation and annihilation of the
traditional community. With the ruin of these primitive conditions, of
the natural, peasant and patriarchal economy, European capitalism opened
the door to exchange for commodity production, it transformed its
inhabitants into compulsory customers for the capitalist commodities and
simultaneously accelerated, in gigantic proportions, the process of
accumulation, directly and shamelessly seizing natural wealth and the
treasured riches of peoples subjected to its yoke.”
Luxemburg’s book was forgotten, perhaps because it contradicted Marx,
but her point of view was resuscitated in the seventies by certain
critics, who shared in common their status as former high officials—Ivan
Illich, in the Church; Francois Partant, in French Finance; Fritz
Schumacher, in English industry—who were involved in “Third World”
development programs, as well as the fact that they proposed, unlike the
environmentalists, the abandonment of capitalism. In effect, books like
Tools for Conviviality (Illich), The End of Development (Partant), Small
Is Beautiful (Schumacher) or The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency (John
Seymour), exposed the absence of any relation between economic
prosperity and social well being, rejected productivism, the new
technologies, bureaucratic and authoritarian systems, mass consumption,
monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, uncontrolled
urbanism, etc., and advocated a locally-based economy founded on
community bonds, decentralization, traditional technology, diversified
crops and natural fertilizers, self-sufficiency, the reduction of the
size of the cities…. Theoretically, this implied a break with at least
two essential aspects of Marxism (and of revolutionary syndicalism): the
fully industrialized society as an emancipatory alternative, that is,
the unlimited unfolding of the socialized productive forces as the basic
precondition for a free society; and the role of the manufacturing-based
working class in the project of liberation from capitalist servitude,
that is, the function of the industrial proletariat—with its work ethic
and its trade union docility—as the agent of history and as the
revolutionary subject. Since freedom depends on the stability of the
ecosystems within which it exists, it cannot be born from a universal
socialized developmentalism but from a return to the self-sufficient
community and local production; it arises not from the seizure of the
capitalist means of production, but from their dismantling. It is not
more consumption and therefore more production that must be assured, but
material subsistence. The needs of the communities must be defined in
terms of resources, not in terms of buying power. Therefore, we must not
organize this society in another way, but transform it from the bottom
up, abolish all dependencies, destroy the machinery that renders
hierarchy, specialization and the wage system necessary. In convivial
society no activity would impose upon anyone who did not participate in
it any task, any consumption or any training. Autonomously and
horizontally organized society would have to dominate the conditions of
its own reproduction without thereby running the risk of changing its
own nature. Exchanges would not compromise its existence. A society of
that kind would have to be a society where the social fabric would
replace the state, controlling its technology and dispensing with the
market. Following the thread of this discourse, in order to achieve a
society of this type—we shall add—the workers will have to fight not in
order to get a better position or even simply to preserve themselves in
the labor market, but to find a way out of the economy. They will have
to destroy the factories and the machines, not subject them to
self-management. And, since in contemporary capitalism consumption
prevails over production, the terrain of the conflict will reside less
in the workplaces than in everyday life. This combat will require the
will to live in a different way, which is why it cannot be waged by
satisfied wage earners and consumers. Those who are destined to wage
this struggle will be the precarious workers, the immigrants, the
unemployed, the marginalized—the excluded in general—who will act not in
the framework of capitalist production, but on its margins, that is,
with one foot outside the system, and therefore they will be more likely
to unite, by means of self-organization and self-sufficient consumption,
in a perspective oriented towards undermining the economy and the state.
In the “developed” countries the current degree of exclusion is minimal,
although it is increasing, but in the so-called “underdeveloped”
countries the excluded are legion.
The destruction of the working class milieu in the eighties is
responsible for the fact that this critique is still anchored in the
circles from which it originally derived and from which, fifteen years
later, it was recuperated by the ideologists of anti-growth. In the camp
of radicality, we can at least mention the reflections of the following
sort: Bookchin, Freddy Perlman, Theodore Kaczinski, L’Encyclopédie des
Nuisances, Fifth Estate…. The least that can be said about these circles
is that they were not the most appropriate means for purging this
critique of its contradictions and disseminating it. In accordance with
this critique, the extended reproduction of capital and labor power was
assured by growth, but the reproduction of the environment that provided
the resources was not assured by the former, nor was the reproduction of
society as a whole. It was then fitting to ask if the conflicts that
necessarily resulted from environmental deterioration, the catastrophes
and social decomposition, favored a transformation of the system or, in
other words, if they permitted the emergence of a credible alternative.
The ideology of anti-growth attempted to be this alternative.
The name itself is a simple label taken from Georgescu-Roegen. At first
it consisted of an apparently coherent whole of ideas such as the ones
we can find in Illich, Partant, Mumford or The Ecologist, elaborated by
experts from the agencies for international development and cooperation,
universities, NGOs and “social forums”, the same milieu that gave birth
to the civil society ideology of “alter-globalization”. There are,
however, important differences between these two movements: the
anti-growth movement is anti-developmentalist and clearly condemns
eco-capitalism and the role of the new technologies. It disapproves of
zero-growth just as much as it disapproves of sustainable development.
It therefore advocates a departure from the market system, not a
controlled global market; furthermore, it does not trust the state as a
system of centralized and hierarchical power that cannot be justified in
a society without a market, preferring instead the Gandhian ideal of a
federation of self-sufficient villages. In terms of theory, we have a
libertarian conception that is similar to that of naturism, or
communalism, but in practice it is nothing but citizenism. If we need
proof of this we only have to cite the support for this movement
displayed by ATTAC, Ecologists in Action or Le Monde Diplomatique. The
goals may vary, but the goals do not matter, since “convivial
anti-growth” aspires to peacefully curtail mass production and
consumption “by means of the democratic control of the economy by
politics”. Arnau, “from a little corner in Collserola”, specifies that
what is required is the formation of “transitional governments, with
unyielding ethical standards, monitored from below”. And how is this to
be achieved? By means of “convivial” action, which will lead us, by way
of the inanity of symbolic and festive actions “in order to raise
awareness in society”, to official politics, to the consumers
associations, to municipal candidates and trade unionism. And the
transition to the autonomous economy must be carried out without
friction, because disagreements with power endanger “democracy”. The
supporters of the anti-growth movement, as an enlightened
lumpenbourgeoisie, experience panic at the prospect of “disorder” and
much prefer the established order to popular unrest. The ideas have
changed, but the methods are those of the civil society movement. We
must “exercise the citizenry” and move forward in “democracy”, we are
told by the ideologue Serge Latouche. In order to exorcise the specter
of the social crisis the anti-growth party attempts to replace the
economic apparatus of capitalism while preserving its political
apparatus. Since in the final accounting the proclaimed way out of the
market is not a real break but a smooth transition, they want to
separate from the economy without separating from politics; they accept
all the mystifications that they have rejected in their theory. We shall
not overlook the fact that for Latouche escaping from growth does not
mean the renunciation of markets, money and the wage system, since he
does not want to stir up the oppressed but to convince the leaders of
society. His discourse is that of the technocratic expert, not that of
the agitator. By calling attention to climate change, the bursting of
the financial bubbles, increasing unemployment, the indebtedness of the
impoverished countries, droughts and other catastrophes, he attempts to
inspire the leadership class to renounce growth. It is thought that the
leaders, faced with the impossibility of controlling the crisis and
threatened by unforeseeable conflicts, would prefer social peace and the
“deconstruction” of the commodity society. This explains why this party
does not contemplate the possibility of a revolutionary social change
that would be carried out by the victims of growth, and that in practice
it proposes a set of reforms, taxes, subsidies, moratoria, laws, etc.,
that is, a “reformist transitional program”, that is to be implemented
by the currently existing political institutions. And we do not have to
point out that this is the same thing that is proposed by the civil
society movement platforms, the environmentalists, the fake
anti-globalization activists and even the integrated “left”. Forgive us
for saying that the promotion of a marginal economy without any real
autonomy or any possibility of being transformed into a real alternative
is only an alibi. Peasant agriculture, the reduction of consumption and
of mobility, giving priority to human relations, healthy food, local
barter networks, non-competition, non-accumulation, etc., are
anti-developmentalist ideas that forfeit all their meaning when the
purpose of their effective implementation is not a social disruption
that must be provoked when their generalization seriously transforms the
conditions of production and exchange by endangering the existence of
the market, dominant institutions and privileged social classes. Under
the pressure of the need for peaceful relations, all alternative
measures are subordinated to capitalism. Thus, certain types of marginal
economies are nothing but zones of reserve manpower for self-sustaining
industries; renewable energy leads to gigantic wind or solar farms in
accordance with the industrial model; recycling and re-use lead us to
the major industry of the export of digital waste; the oil crisis
inaugurates the era of vast bio-fuel plantations. The interest expressed
in the concept of convivial anti-growth by NGOs, trade unions,
legislatures or the United Nations as regulatory and “monitoring”
bodies, stands in stark contrast to the lack of interest shown by these
same institutions for the idea of communal assemblies and more generally
for the reconstruction of an autonomous public sphere. They do not want
to do away with leaders, which is why they have to carefully preserve
the political machinery that makes them necessary, although in order to
do so they have to prevent the emergence of any real democratic
experience in their own backyards, since such things are fine when they
take place in Mali, Bolivia or the Lacandon Jungle, but not in the
western heartlands.
Cooperative production and profitless exchange cannot be born from
reaching a consensus with power but only from the imposition on the part
of the oppressed of social conditions that proscribe industrial
production and profitable trade. The struggle against oppression—which,
as Anders said, takes place between victims and perpetrators—is the only
struggle that can establish the foundations for a “local ecological
democracy” and social autonomy, in the outskirts of Kinshasa and
everywhere else.
The ideology of anti-growth is the latest mutation of the civil society
movement in the wake of the miserable failure of the counter-summit
movement; a renewable illusion, as Los Amigos de Ludd would say. As the
trivialization of protest and the suppression of conflict, it is an
auxiliary weapon of domination. In our time, capital has emerged
victorious, just as it did from the class struggle of the sixties and
seventies. With nobody and nothing to stop it from pursuing its course
of endless destruction, this time thanks to the contributions of the
environmentalists and the civil society movement. A free society cannot
be conceived without its abolition, which, in the eyes of the
anti-growth party, would entail social chaos and terrorism, something
that we have an abundance of already and that will gradually assume the
form of an eco-fascist regime. In view of the scale of the ecological
catastrophe, to fight for a free life is no different than to fight for
life itself. But the struggle for survival—for networks of regional
exchange, for public transport or for clean technologies—means nothing
in separation from the anti-capitalist struggle; instead, the power of
the struggle for survival is rooted in the intensity of the
anti-capitalist struggle. It is a movement of secession but also a
movement of subversion, whose impulse depends more on the depth of the
social crisis than on that of the ecological crisis. In other words, it
depends on the transformation of the ecological crisis into a social
crisis, and therefore its transformation into a class struggle of a new
kind. If the latter reaches a sufficient level, the forces of the
oppressed will be able to replace and abolish capitalism. Then humanity
will be able to be reconciled with nature and will be able to repair the
harm inflicted on freedom, dignity and desire by the attempts made to
dominate nature.