Degrowth

A Vocabulary for a New Era

Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis, Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134449842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.

This overview of degrowth offers a comprehensive coverage of the main topics and major challenges of degrowth in a succinct, simple and accessible manner. In addition, it offers a set of keywords useful forintervening in current political debates and for bringing about concrete degrowth-inspired proposals at different levels - local, national and global.

The result is the most comprehensive coverage of the topic of degrowth in English and serves as the definitive international reference.

More information at: vocabulary.degrowth.org

View the author spotlight featuring events and press related to degrowth at http://t.co/k9qbQpyuYp.

PART 1

Lines of thought

1

ANTI-UTILITARIANISM

Onofrio Romano

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BARI “A. MORO”

Anti-utilitarianism is a school of thought that critiques the hegemony of the epistemological postulates of economics in the humanities and social sciences. Anti-utilitarians assert the crucial importance of the social bond when compared to self-interest. They outline a gift exchange paradigm that aims to overstep two major frameworks of the social sciences: holism and methodological individualism.

In 1981, the French sociologist, Alain Caillé, and the Swiss anthropologist, Gérald Berthoud, gave birth to MAUSS – Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences). This brilliant acronym reproduces the surname of the author of The Gift (1924), Marcel Mauss. Mauss, together with Karl Polanyi, inspired the work of the group. The two founders made the decision to start up the intellectual venture after having participated the year before in an interdisciplinary debate with philosophers, economists, and psychoanalysts on the topic of “gift exchange”. On that occasion they shared the same frustration towards the other participants, who expressed obstinacy in their profound belief that behind every human action, including gift practices and demonstrations of generosity, we must recognize the strategy of egotistical calculation, and nothing more.

The movement was led from the beginning by Alain Caillé and gathered intellectuals from different fields of knowledge: Serge Latouche (economist and philosopher), Ahmet Insel (economist and political scientist), Jean-Luc Boilleau (sociologist and philosopher), Jacques Godbout (anthropologist), Philippe Rospabé (economist and anthropologist) etc. They first created the Bulletin du Mauss and, in 1988, the Revue du Mauss, printed by the prestigious French publisher La Découverte (initially quarterly and, since 1993, half-yearly).

MAUSS is today configured as a large network of researchers located in Europe, North America, North Africa and the Middle East. It is characterized by a wide variety of approaches, subjects, and application fields. Its main theoretical aim is to establish a new epistemological basis for universalism and democracy. This effort – more systematic and accomplished in the works of Alain Caillé – has developed around three main reflection axes: the individual, the social bond, and politics.

Anti-utilitarians challenge the theoretical approaches that interpret any human action as departing from the pivotal axis of the “individual” and thus oriented towards self-satisfaction:

we qualify as utilitarian any doctrine based on the claim that human subjects are governed by the logic of selfish calculation of pleasures and pains, by their interest only, or by their preferences only; and that this is good because there is no other possible foundation of ethical norms other than the law of happiness for individuals and their communities.

(Caillé 1989: 13)

The object of criticism of anti-utilitarians is an ideological matrix that cuts across thought and the wider culture:

utilitarianism is not a philosophical system or a component among others of the dominant ideology in modern societies. Rather it has become that same ideology; to the point that, for modern people, it is largely incomprehensible and unacceptable that what can not be translated in terms of usefulness and instrumental effectiveness.

(Caillé 1989: 4-5)

Anti-utilitarians criticize utilitarianism because it reduces the human being. The battle to be waged, they claim, should insist on the recognition of the complexity and the plurality of forms of life. Anti-utilitarianism, far from qualifying itself as anti-modern thought, aims at rediscovering the true meaning of modernity, restoring the scientific spirit against scientism, reason against rationalism, democracy against technocracy. Caillé resumes, in this sense, the Brahmanic classification of man’s goals (purus․aˉrtha): pleasure (kama), interest (artha), duty (dharma), and dissipative liberation from all aims (moksha) (Caillé 1989: 89 ff.). According to Caillé, utilitarianism has reduced a multiplicity of goals into the sole kingdom of artha. But he also criticizes other schools of thought that translate the ontological multiplicity into one of the three sacrificed motives: the Freudian school devoted to the kama, the holistic school pointing to dharma, or the existentialist mood (à la Bataille) in search of moksa. The counter-project proposed by anti-utilitarians is a contemporary citizenship to all Brahmanic levels of existence, i.e. to all “multiple states of the subject.” This claim is articulated on both an analytical level (the multi-teleology of the human being has an ontological connotation) and, as we shall see later, on a political level.

The second pole of reflection, the social bond, coincides with the re-evaluation of gift logic. Following Mauss, the gift is here understood as a “total social fact.” Just like the “underlying unconscious structure” envisioned by Lévi-Strauss, the gift becomes the archetypal performer or the universal symbolic matrix of the alliance between individuals and groups. It acts on a micro-sociological level by the device of the triple obligation – “to give, to receive, and to return” – but it can be extended to the meso-sociological scale of the “association” and, finally, to “politics,” i.e. the macro-sociological frame. “Each one of these three terms – gift, association and politics – is a metaphor, a symbol and a tool for interpreting the others” (Caillé 1998: 236).

In the second half of the 1990s, the political inclination of the movement gets more accentuated, starting from the “thirty theses for a new and universalist left” (discussed in various issues of the Revue du Mauss, starting from n. 9/1, 1997). On the political side, anti-utilitarianism identifies with the project of “democracy for democracy”: the democratic ideal can be revitalized only by doing away with any aims or interests, especially egotistic, from the collective discussion. According to Caillé, the main obstacle to democracy, and the main reason for the decline of politics, is a lack of alternate social life patterns so that, for instance, even discussion or selection of said preferences is precluded by the utilitarian ideology (see depoliticization). Democracy must enhance diversity by offering a variety of lifestyles, increasing public space for discussion, and pluralizing the possibilities of self-realization. One key proposal in this would be a basic income that would become “radically unconditional.” It is necessary to decouple income from specific social benefits, as this coupling limits the freedom of citizens to experience the irreducible plurality of human aims. Instead, the largest number of citizens possible should have the chance to realize themselves, and to express who they are and what they want to be.

Due to Serge Latouche, the so-called Anti-Pope of MAUSS (given his differences with Caillé) the anti-utilitarian movement also produced one of the main strands of degrowth. Latouche is less indulgent toward Western capitalism, which he approaches mainly through the lens of criticism to development. While Caillé aimed to restore the “true” meaning of modernity against its perversions, Latouche pleads for a radical re-thinking of modernity, in order to cut off its genetic link with utilitarianism.

Degrowth is fully part of an anti-utilitarian framework insofar as it pursues the ideal of a society decolonized of the ideology of unlimited growth, an ideology that supposes a direct correlation between an increase in GDP and collective happiness. According to Latouche, there is an explicit inverse correlation between well-having and well-being. Nevertheless degrowth does not mean a deliberate decrease of GDP, but merely a-growth, i.e. the liberation from a productivist obsession, in order to re-discover other human dimensions, first and foremost the relational one.

Most anti-utilitarians reproach Latouche for the choice of the term “degrowth”: the reference to the productive sphere of social life (evoked by the term “growth”) – even if reversed (“de-growth”) – implicitly embeds the alternative into the economic imaginary. So, similar to the ethical discipline that characterizes Western capitalism as Weber first noted, all alternatives inspired by degrowth entail, in the end, a sober lifestyle and economic restraint. Many anti-utilitarians call, instead, for a “political” critique of boundlessness and excess (Dzimira 2007), uprooting the discourse from an ethical level. Rather, they advocate a political project that metabolizes the principles of “reversibility” (i.e., against the externalities of progress that threaten collective existence) and of “reciprocity” (i.e., against the power of most developed societies, which limits and threatens the chances for life and action of less developed societies and future generations). The risk they see in the degrowth discourse is that the emphasis on the imperative of the preservation of life stands as yet another translation of the “neutralitarian” root of utilitarian political philosophy: politics becomes a mere function for preserving citizens’ “biological” life (“life for life’s sake”). To them, this does not differ too much from the main goal of the development age, i.e. fertilizing life (“growth for growth’s sake”). In both cases, assuming that it is the exclusive domain of individuals and their networks, the political and collective construction of the meaning of life is not on the agenda. The strategy changes but the goal is always the same: life, without any political meaning.

Mutual charges between anti-utilitarians and their degrowther descendants are all well-grounded. Both may fail, but for different reasons, in their attempt to produce an epistemological discontinuity with the utilitarian foundations of our society. A more solid path towards anti-utilitarianism and degrowth might be built, on the one hand, by integrating the theoretical stream opened by Bataille with his notion of dépense, and, on the other hand, by a wider look on the numerous and unnoticed anti-utilitarianist practices and experiences that go on inside and outside Western societies (Romano 2012).

References

Caillé, A. (1989) Critique de la raison utilitaire. Manifeste du MAUSS, Paris: La Découverte.

Caillé, A. (1998) Il terzo paradigma. Antropologia filosofica del dono, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Dzimira, S. (2007) «Décroissance et anti-utilitarisme», Revue du Mauss permanente, 26 mai. Available online at www­.jo­urn­ald­uma­uss­.ne­t/.­/?Ant­iutilita­risme-et-d­ecrois­sance (accessed October 4 2013).

Mauss, M. (1954) The gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, London: Cohen and West.

Romano, O. (2012) “How to rebuild democracy, re-thinking degrowth,” Futures, 44(6): 582–9.

2

BIOECONOMICS

Mauro Bonaiuti

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF TURIN

Bioeconomics is a field of study mainly connected to the figure of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (hereafter G-R), who first and most radically enquired into the consequences of an integration of the physical and biological sciences into economics (Bonaiuti 2011: 1–48). As far as its field of studies is concerned, bioeconomics is no different from ecological economics, although some of the preanalytic premises that characterise G-R’s bioeconomics are significantly different from those that prompted the founders of ecological economics (Daly, Costanza etc.). These premises explain the considerable differences between G-R’s standpoint and that of most ecological economists, particularly as far as the paradigm of sustainable development is concerned his statements against the new formula are so forceful that there can be no doubt about what he thought: “sustainable development is one of the most toxic recipes” (Bonaiuti 2011: 42).

His sharp criticism to sustainable development explain also why G-R’s bioeconomics was taken from the very outset as a pillar of the basis for degrowth. Opposing this neoclassical reductionist approach, in the second half of the 1960s, G-R opened up economics to twentieth-century developments in physics and natural sciences, starting with the thermodynamic revolution (Georgescu-Roegen 1971).

The term ‘bioeconomics’ was used for the first time at the end of the 1960s by Jirì Zeman, of the Czechoslovakian Academy, who adopted this expression in a letter to mean a ‘new economics’ in which precisely ‘the biological substance of the economic process in almost every respect’ should be adequately acknowledged (Bonaiuti 2011: 158). Georgescu liked the term and, from the early 1970s made it the banner summing up the most important conclusions he had come to in a lifetime of research.

The first insight is that the economic process, having physical and biological roots, cannot ignore the limitations imposed by the laws of physics: in particular, the law of entropy. This leads to the consideration that the fundamental aim of economic activity, unlimited growth of production and consumption, being based on finite sources of matter/energy, is not compatible with the fundamental laws of nature. The community of ecological economists today accepts this conclusion, however shocking it may have been at the time when it was first announced.

The second insight concerns methodology: the circular, reversible representation of the economic process, presented at the beginning of any textbook on economics, showing how demand stimulates production, which in its turn provides the income necessary to feed new demand, in a reversible process apparently capable of reproducing itself indefinitely. This must be replaced by an evol...