I became inspired to start this blog while watching the talk "Degrowth is coming - be ready to repair" of the year 2019 (lecture-entry in event-wiki, video with engl. translation. The talk is originally in German.
In this talk Anja Höfner and Nicolas Guenot by Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie e. V. in Leipzig, Germany, are introducing the degrowth movement, thus the ecological critic aswell as counter models.
For this blog post I summed up what was most important for me in the first part of the talk:
- What is degrowth?
- What trends are there?
- What effects and mechanisms of our economy made the idea of eternal growth took on a life of its own?
I already published this blog post in German here and appreciated the wide reach I supposedly have aswell as the reactions.
What is degrowth?
Degrowth is cosidered to be a transformational path towards a kind of econmy and social (self)organisation, wherein everyone's wellbeing and the preservation of our eclogical foundation are most important. This includes a fundamentally change in the way we deal with each other in our daily routine, a cultural change aswell as overcoming of the capitalistic method of production and its necessity for growth, competition and profit. Source
CPL Sam Shepherd/NZ Defence Force Crown Copyright 2011, NZ Defence Force – Some Rights Reserved
What trends/waves are there?
Degrowth is the general term for different trends/waves within one movement:What they have in common is an ecological critic on the ongoing way our economic works, thus the preservation of our ecological life foundation aswell as the transformation of our daily routine and the overcoming of capitalistic methods of production.
1. Ecological criticism, critics of economic growth
In general the economic growth is criticised, because it destroys the ecological foundation of humans and can not be ecological sustainable. On a transient planet there is no eternal growth. There is no second planet, however practically this would might be.
2. Global justice, South-North criticism
The economic growth in countries of the global north goes along with a peripheral status of the countries of the global south. They are used as dependent raw material suppliers and are getting exploited to ensure a supply of cheap labor.
Degrowth is about global justice, on a ecological and social level, but in terms of the production and disposal aswell as the usage of digital equipment, this isn't the case at all.
3. Feminist critism of economic growth
The feminist critism of economic growth states, that the dominating economic growth is based on a degradation and exploitation of reproductional work (care, upbringing, house work), that is mostly considered to be female and is often done by women. Economical growth profits from inequality between the sexes and reproduces it again and again.
4. Critics of capitalism
This trend or wave criticizes, that growth is based upon capitalistic exploitation aswell as accumulation and therefore cannot be changed or understood independantly by them. Therefore it believes, that an emancipatory degrowth society must be a postcapitalistic one.
5. Cultural critic
The cultural critic is researching processes of estrangement and the thought of eternal growth, that people have internalized. It tries to understand how people are formed by proceedings of growth and optimization and thus become a growth driver themselves, wanting to make more, beeing more productve and producing everything faster.
What effects and mechanisms of our economy made the idea of eternal growth took on a life of its own?
1. Rebound effect
Meaning the increasement of the efficiency of equipment or technology, that, on the one hand helps us saving energy, but on the other hand results in us making it up again by spending the saved energy in some other way.
For example
- increased demand of the same product
- more capital --> more ressource consumption
- less ressource consumption --> increased demand
2. Separation
Separation means the idea, that the economic is able to grow withouth the increase of ressource consumption. The idea of dematerialisation (i. e. by digitalisation) often misses the material basis of digital equipment. There are no digital services without a material infrastructure running it.
3. Network effect
The network effect describes, in what way the benefit a user may gets out of a products changes with the number of other consumers of the same product. Since I benefit more by a product that is used by many others, market power concentrates on a few tech gigants such as Facebook. The downsite of this power concentration is the blockage/complication of alternative solutions, i.e. considering the high start-up costs.
This is the English version of @postwachstum/was-ist-postwachstum-bzw-degrowth by 
Image sources
1kamiel79@ pixabay
2 Attribution 3.0 New Zealand (CC BY 3.0 NZ), Sam Shepard, NZ Defence Force.
3 CC BY-SA 3.0
4 114768867 © Artur Balytskyi | Dreamstime.com)
