Degrowth key to stopping the exploitative, toxic cycle of capitalism

Economic growth creates scarcity. Saito turns the concept of economic growth on its head. Many people assume that growth makes us richer but what if it did the precise opposite? Gross domestic product (GDP), a monetary measure of production, can rise because someone privatises a common good – what British geographer calls “accumulation by dispossession”. Fence a resource that people could previously access for free and start selling it to them. This might inflate GDP but it doesn’t create anything useful. In fact, by preventing people from accessing the means of subsistence it creates an artificial scarcity. The more money accumulates, the more these snatch-and-sell tricks become possible, whether it’s for natural resources, knowledge or labour. In a world where everything becomes a potential commodity (in other words, something which can be bought and sold), the ruling rationality favours lucrative activities over others. Why would you lend your apartment to someone for free if you can rent it on Airbnb? And that’s the catch: once you need money to satisfy your needs, you are forced to play like a capitalist. An emergency brake This self-perpetuating striving for moneymaking pushes us to turn more and more of nature into a commodity. The money companies can make is infinite while the quantities of nature at disposition are getting scarcer. There may be no clearer illustration than the of fossil fuel companies amid . could act as an emergency brake on this vicious cycle, Saito argues, by “terminat[ing] the ceaseless exploitation of humanity and the robbery of nature”. Academics define degrowth as a democratically planned effort to downscale levels of production and consumption in order to lighten environmental pressures. The democratic part is important: the idea is to do this in a way that reduces inequality and improves wellbeing for everyone. It’s difficult to imagine this happening within capitalism, a system which must continually expand and generate more. And that’s Saito’s point: communism is much more likely to achieve these objectives. He reasons that an economy concerned with meeting human need is more likely to avoid producing junk. Without the get-rich-or-perish imperative, many nature-intensive goods and services would cease to be necessary or desirable. Saito calls this “a conscious downscaling of the current ‘realm of necessity’”. This Marxist term describes what we consider our essential needs. Under degrowth communism, this realm would shrink to exclude things and activities which don’t benefit human wellbeing or contribute to sustainability. Suddenly, it’s possible to organise work differently. Gone is the industrial model of producing something as cheaply as possible while sacrificing safety and the pleasantness inherent in a shared effort. Instead of competing for market share, companies could cooperate to achieve common goals like restoring biodiversity. Reducing the importance given to moneymaking would free societies to improve all these things we today trivialise because they aren’t profitable. Such an economy might be slower and smaller money-wise but it would be more sustainable and more effective in delivering wellbeing, which is all we should be asking from an economy anyway.