Capitalism and degrowth: an impossibility theorem.

• Author: Foster, John Bellamy

In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world's foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: "Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril ... The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself--and the timetable is shorter than we thought." (1)

In making this declaration, however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the planet, namely, climate change. Recently, leading scientists (including Hansen) have proposed nine planetary boundaries, which mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle) have already been crossed, while others, such as fresh water use and ocean acidification, are emerging planetary rifts. In ecological terms, the economy has now grown to a scale and intrusiveness that is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing apart the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. (2)

Hence, almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of "the limits to growth," the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge. (3) What is known as "degrowth economics," associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on "Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity," and has since inspired a revival of radical green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 "Degrowth Declaration" in Barcelona.

Is degrowth feasible?

Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (decroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society; and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?

According to the web site of the European de-growth project, "degrowth carries the idea of a voluntary reduction of the size of the economic system which implies a reduction of the GDP." (4) "Voluntary" here points to the emphasis on voluntaristic solutions--though not as individualistic and unplanned in the European conception as the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the United States, where individuals (usually well to do) simply choose to opt out of the high-consumption market model. For Latouche, the concept of "degrowth" signifies a major social change: a radical shift from growth as the main objective of the modern economy, toward its opposite (contraction, downshifting).

An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment. (5) The unavoidable conclusion--associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project--is that there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution.

As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: "Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the [economic and population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries." (6)

Given that wealthy countries are already characterized by ecological overshoot, it is becoming more and more apparent that there is indeed no alternative, as Sweezy emphasized, but a reversal in the demands placed on the environment by the economy. This is consistent with the argument of ecological economist Herman Daly, who has long insisted on the need for a steady-state economy. Daly traces this perspective to John Stuart Mill's famous discussion of the "stationary state" in his Principles of Political Economy, which argued that if economic expansion was to level off (as the classical economists expected), the economic goal of society could then shift to the qualitative aspects of existence, rather than mere quantitative expansion.

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