Degrowth, a shared reflection of these new social movements

Before going fully into the idea of degrowth, a little historical context. There were some years of macroeconomic demands, such as the foreign debt, the global resistance movement and the various summits which we had in Europe, and especially in Barcelona between 2000 and 2002. These were initiatives which started from a clear “No” to the way in which states and the international financial institutions operate, and gave the idea that what we wanted was a different society although we didn’t explain it in any detail. From this period we can remember slogans which can still be heard, such as “another world is possible” and “a world where many worlds fit”.

From this period of big mobilisations, in many places, and very especially in Catalonia, many collective initiatives appeared such as those discussed above, initiatives which, refusing to be just negative, affirmed that their daily activity was already an alternative.

For that reason, before the system collapses, taking us with it, we have discovered that the idea of degrowth is very useful for joining forces in a proposal which, more than an alternative, is a path. This path fuses the global demands we have been making for years with these concrete alternatives which we put into daily practice and pulls them together into a very broad and deeply significant political project.

Degrowth is not recession. The proposal of degrowth has nothing to do with what might occur in the present economic crisis. As the saying goes, there is nothing worse than a growth-based society with no growth. So the degrowth movement doesn’t propose a reduction in GDP, but rather a change of system.

Degrowth doesn’t need to be a negative idea: just as when a river bursts its banks and we all want it to diminish and for the waters to return to their course, the same thing occurs with the unsustainability of the current situation. Degrowth isn’t something negative, but rather something necessary.

Degrowth attacks the myth of growth. It proposes abandoning the parameters of productivism and consumerism, and ultimately leaving the capitalist system. In order to do this, it proposes re-localising our ways of life.
Degrowth consists in abandoning the process of economic globalisation and re-localising the economy —production and consumption — thus reducing transport. In order to do that we must re-localise politics, thus putting it back under the control of people.

Re-localising politics means, for example, that the levels of sovereignty go from the bottom upwards. Everything that can be decided at the municipal level should not be decided at higher levels; only things that affect the whole country should be decided at that level. Living in that way would allow us to liberate ourselves from the power of the transnational companies and global economic forces.

This transition to the local ambit should be put in practice together with a radical reduction in consumption, which could in turn lead to a reduction in production and transport. Things which are considered necessary should be produced according to increasingly ecological principles and completing the cycles of the materials used.

The reduction in consumption, which has for decades been promoted using advertising which should be ended, requires an important cultural change in which we gradually cease to base our well being on property and on the consumption of material goods, and value relational goods, such as human relations, much more.

And one of the keys to applying these economic, political and cultural changes is to rebuild the community as a fundamental element which allows us to put in movement new forms of coexistence. Those of us who come from the individualism which has predominated over recent years, can thus learn to cooperate as neighbours to help each other with our needs, and so evolve into a community which is autonomous from the state and from the market, in resolving things from day to day.
These ideas have a lot in common with the social vision which is leading more and more people to launch collective alternatives, such as all those which we presented above, as well as with many of the demands we’ve explained of mobilisations and social struggles, to the extent that the word degrowth has become an excellent common umbrella, helping these initiatives to gradually converge in an ever stronger and more diverse social movement.

In fact — and as we explain in the pages on the energy crisis and the food crisis — degrowth, ecologically speaking, will come anyway, due to the lack of the mineral and natural resources required to maintain the rhythm of consumption that there currently is on our planet. Whether degrowth comes by force — imposed by the present economic powers when there are no longer enough resources for the Western middle classes to continue living as now — or whether degrowth is something we carry out ourselves — through learning collectively to live in another way, at the same time as trying to stop powerful minorities from taking the wealth that belongs to the whole of humanity and threatening the lives of the rest of the inhabitants of the earth — depends on us.

We are entering fully in a key epoch of history, in which we will face great convulsions and changes. Degrowth, as a good synthesis of the recent period of mobilisations and of the new alternatives, has become an appropriate strategic and ideological road map for pulling together a wide range of synergies in the face of what is to come.
How do the social movements come together to promote this important transition towards another way of living? We’ll explain that below.