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Title: From Development to “Décroissance”
Subtitle: 61<sup>st</sup> congress of FAF (Rennes) Motion of support to the employees of STMicroele ctronics
Date: 2006
Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-02 from [[http://www.i-f-a.org.gridhosted.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/anarkiista_debato.pdf][www.i-f-a.org]]
Authors: Fédération Anarchiste
Topics: France, IAF, Anarchist federation france
Published: 2020-04-03 08:29:19Z

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.

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