What are the impacts of a shift away from the traditional growth economic model on the framing of environmental and development policy research? (Miriam Lang)
The crisis we face is civilizational, the are components beyond the byproducts of our social metabolism that are clearly problematic. The separation of nature and culture, individualism, and especifism are traits that push lifestyles and decision-making against life and well-being.
The lack of criticism to existing technologies and the expectation that innovations, particularly industrial ones will solve all our problems, reducing philosophy, politics and humanities as a lower category tool to drive transformations is very ideological and far from neutral.
The lack of purpose and our addiction to growth are symptoms of a system that is sick and needs to be overthrown.
As Philip Lepenies says, GDP is the most powerful statistical measure in the
history of mankind. To this day, it largely defines the world’s economy and politics. Growth
logics have permeated our societies, our minds and even our habits.
The average income growth has reduce class conflicts, mainly in the global North, and it is widely accepted (despite being axiomatically wrong) that the only way to ensure employment and public services we need it.
It would seem that the main question that underlies political answers is “what can we change
in the relation with our environment in order to preserve economic growth by all means?”
And: “How can we restore control over nature in the face of disaster, while saving the
perspective of profit”?
What we should ask, rather, is “How can we change the system of social and economic
organization we have built around growth and profit, in order to sustain life, all kinds of life,
on this planet, and how can we do this in a peaceful, democratic and just way?”
Degrowth scholars tries to diagnose the problems of capitalism and growth, while providing a prognosis beyond planned gdp reduction.
Degrowth is really about a just distribution and democratization within any process of transition toward more sustainable modes of living, and a social reorganization around care. It contemplates the
implications of gender, race, and, importantly, of the coloniality that shapes global relations
until present times.
The pluriverse helps degrowth to scape western economy, by recognizing existing alternative modes of living, like those of indigenous or peasant societies, which have persisted at the margins of capitalist logics and today account for protecting 80% of the remaining biodiversity, will be exposed to new, intensified pressures of extinction.
A global justice perspective has to contemplate the whole metabolic cycle of matter and
energy use from extraction to disposal in whatever is needed for the transition, and take
responsibility for every stage of it.
The degrowth transition in the global North cannot rely on massive raw material
extraction elsewhere, it cannot rely on cheap labor elsewhere, nor can it consider shipping
toxic waste to elsewhere. It is a perspective where all world regions are involved in equal
terms, and “elsewhere” does no longer exist.
A globally just transition in the 21st century also requires to restate the question about who
owes who, and acknowledge historical or colonial debt, ecological debt, climate debt, and
technological debt. This necessary reorientation of the dominant debt narrative brings me to
share some thoughts about development.
It would be a huge mistake to think that while countries in the global north need to degrow,
so-called developing countries in the global South need to grow. Abstract economic growth
as reflected in GDP is not generating human wellbeing anywhere in the world, it is
generating profit which is increasingly unequally distributed. Macroeconomic growth attends
the interests of capital, and not those of concrete, place-based communities.
Instead of being compelled to so-called “catch-up” development, every society should have the chance
to assess democratically which parts of its economy should grow, in order to achieve better
living conditions, and which parts should degrow, because they cause more harm than good.
The problems we face are so manifold that we cannot expect what we used to from scientific
and technological progress. There is no doubt that to understand our incapacity to solve
them, we need more dialogue between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
But I am also referring to an inter-epistemic dialogue with those societies who have actually
managed to live within planetary boundaries, like indigenous or peasant societies. Human
groups who center their notions of a successful life around the quality of relations, around
reciprocity, and do not consider themselves as superior to nature, but as a part of it. And while our growth-centered system of values still categorizes them as poor, primitive, and irrelevant.
What if we would politically target the eradication of big fortunes, instead of focusing
on poverty as the main problem? What if we would acknowledge that who threatens our
collective survival are not the poor, but the rich – which, on the contrary, we still take as
successful role models? What if we could design such mechanisms of ritual redistribution for
the benefit of all, instead of worshipping accumulation?
This kind of self-limitation questions the idea of considering environmental problems in terms
of a technocratic challenge. It gives the responsibility back to humans. It also supposes a
paradigm shift, from understanding the world as bounded to seeing it as abundant, as long
as we limit ourselves collectively to make space for others. Boundaries are not objectively
given, they are always relational and depend on human intention and sociopolitical
processes.
Collective self-limitation is the condition for achieving not only justice, but also “freedom not
only for the few, but for all”. Freedom rooted in taking responsibility for the social (and
environmental) impacts of our actions on others. It not only considers limiting consumption,
but also transforming systems of provision, production, and industrial conversion of
especially problematic branches. It encompasses discussing the role of private property and
expanding social and collective property, in order to reduce the realm of profit and expand
the realm of collective commons.
Social Justice and Civilizational Crisis: Clues for Rethinking Poverty Eradication
Based on Sustainability and Interculturality (Miriam Lang)
According the information provided in June 2017 by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) in Geneva, more than 65.6 million people have been forcefully displaced at the time of
writing (UNHCR, 2017). A sad historic record. Only half of them come from war zones such as
Syria, Sudan or Afghanistan. Millions have been expelled due to the externalities of a way of life
that seems normal to some and desirable to others.
Usually, the justification is that there is no alternative to modernization, to progress, or to
development and that this irresistible avalanche of megaprojects is necessary to fight poverty
and include the excluded. This justification labels as miserable, poor and therefore eradicable
those ways of life that live with little, that practice a true sustainability within their territories,
that consider themselves a part of nature, and that extol virtues other than profit, efficiency and
the accumulation of material wealth.
It is, therefore, necessary to identify, preserve and protect, and, above all, learn to speak with
vital spaces, social processes, and communities that have not been entirely permeated by the
dominant logic, be they Amazonian or agroecological communities in Europe, Japan, or the
United State of America
The way in which, in recent years, fundamental ecological concerns were reintegrated into the
profit imperative via the green economy (Brand and Lang 2015)—which subjected the
sustainability of life itself to the need for accumulation—suggests that it is impossible to achieve
the objective of constructing sustainable conditions for life on the planet without transformation
the dominant civilizational pattern through a political project of critical interculturality.
In existing global exchanges where everything is provided without anyone having an overview of the value chains, the energy and matter invested in the transport, and of the working and environmental conditions involved elsewhere in the production of a particular product. When one buys a product, that information is not present. This abstraction, which separates the history of the product from its function as a commodity, is characteristic of practically all areas of modern societies.
This principle of external supply brings us to a world without responsibility or accountability, where the only possible link between production and consumption is money, in turn, another abstraction. It hides the relational fact that we all belong to the same metabolism with nature—making building sustainability all the more difficult.
In the planet’s northern hemisphere, we are undoubtedly well supplied in material terms, in many
aspects we are even saturated, and yet we have shortages. We lack human contact, a sense of
closeness and belonging to a community that can provide us with security, as production for life would require. The great problems of our time are personal detachment, loneliness, existential
anguish, as well as, for lack of emancipatory alternatives, the refurbishing of racist and nationalist
imaginaries of communality (Bennholdt-Thomsen 2006, n.p.).
These effects have reached alarming levels: while in Germany, 2,700,000 workers have
experienced periods of burnout, in July 2015, the same phenomenon was experienced by 62% of
the US work force, more than 45% of the medical doctors and 69% of male professionals in
finance. A sixth of the German adult population live with panic attacks that interfere with
their daily routine. In Japan and China, there is specific terminology for exhaustion related
deaths or suicides and these countries have been forced to design public policy in response to
these phenomena. At the same time, France and the USA are among the countries with the
highest rates of depression. This data invites us to at least place some doubt on the quality of
life offered by the path to success within the hegemonic model.
The postcolonial development critic Ilan Kapoor (2009)
has shown that the needs discourse ends up acting as a colonizing tool. According to him, just the
concept of ‘basic needs’ is an ethnocentric construction: it presupposes a human being devoid
from social and cultural links, who is left with ‘the most basic things’—a fiction of the ‘state of
nature’—while it is well known that many societies prioritize the sacred over the profane. Even
under situations of material deprivation, they prioritize, for example, the construction of
religious sites that give sense to their lives. This is corroborated by a peasant proverb from
Burkina Faso “a full stomach fills neither the heart nor the soul. Instead, when the soul and the
heart are in peace, they can calmly wait for food” (cited in N’Dione 2001, 49). The very notion of
‘need’ naturalises a particular conception of the human that is quite simplistic and
monodimensional as a being who lives to ‘satisfy needs’.
Vandana Shiva, Indian ecofeminist, confirms that the modern and reductionist understanding of
poverty that resulted from this process confounds two radically different realities:
It is useful to separate a cultural conception of subsistence living as poverty from the material
experience of poverty that is a result of dispossession and deprivation. Culturally perceived poverty
need not be real material poverty: subsistence economics which satisfy basic needs through
self-provisioning are not poor in the sense of being deprived.
Yet the ideology of development declares them so because they do not participate overwhelmingly in the market economy, and do not consume commodities produced for and distributed through the market (Shiva 2004: 3).
In this way, people are labeled as poor who grow their own food, build their own houses with
local inputs, produce their own clothing instead of buying them in markets, and use traditional
technologies. Nevertheless, not only can these practices support a good quality of life, but are
also preferable, according to the author, to the solutions offered by modern capitalism, for
example in terms of sustainability:
This cultural perception of prudent subsistence living as poverty has provided the legitimisation for
the development process as a poverty removal project. As a culturally biased project it destroys
wholesome and sustainable lifestyles and creates real material poverty, or misery, by the denial of
survival needs themselves, through the diversion of resources to resource intensive commodity
production
All of this implicitly insinuating that overcoming indigenous ‘poverty’ requires access to the
‘benefits’ of ‘modernity’, which path is ‘market integration’, the path that leads to
development. For this, indigenous peoples must stop insisting in their ‘non-profitable
traditions,’ give up their local means of self-subsistence and forget about their capacities of
autonomous management, to become a labour force, to allow free access to extractive activities
of the subsoil and biodiversity, and to become dependent on the State, so that it solves their
needs (Viteri Gualinga 2002: 4).
The actually existing Marxism, when adopting the conceptions and practices of truth, science and
technology that have been dominant in the western world, has encountered insurmountable
limitations in its capacity to critique capitalist society, not only as a way of organizing property or
exercising power, but also as civilisational model. In spite of its depth and radicalism, the Marxist
critique of the world of capital—for adopting the notion of progress, the idea that Western
civilization is the major expression of man’s creative potential, for believing that European society
represents the highest point of the inexorable process through which historical laws are deployed—
was not capable of distancing itself from the particular cultural option offered by the West and by
capitalism. It accepted capitalist society as a historical inevitability and as a historical progressive
step towards liberation and human happiness. This lack of critical distancing from the dimensions
and basic constitutive aspects of capitalist society [...] led the actually existing Marxism to the
impossibility of thinking a global alternative to the highly centralized and unidimensional
productivist technological society that has been historically developed by the regime of capital
(Lander 2008, 11).
The political practice of the soviet bloc towards the different ways of life that existed in its area
of influence was based on universal and culturally hegemonic pretensions—in the same way
that the capitalist policies of the time were.
In this way, these social policies orchestrated by the state and oriented toward modernisation and developmentalism caused a significant loss with respect to ways of life that prioritised sustainability and social relations not entirely permeated by capitalism. It was implemented without consultation with Indigenous communities. The definition of the needs of these communities was in the hands of ministerial bureaucrats, aligned with international parameters to combat poverty and their respective indicators. They dispensed with an authentic open dialogue with the supposed beneficiaries, who were
established as ‘poor’ and given no voice. In this regard, Praise Be to You says:
In the case of Ecuador (as in other Latin American progressivisms), the promise of the welfare
state, on the contrary, was conditioned on a deepening of the extractivist model, as it was to be
realised with an increase in oil and mining income. What is obvious in this logic is that, firstly,
the modern/Western or imperial way of life, which is sold to us as a generalisable ideal, was only
possible in the North at the expense of the peoples of the geopolitical South.
Can social justice really consist in everyone receiving exactly the same quantity of goods,
services and resources? How to include into this outlook the diversity of needs according to
context, in accordance with the construction of transformative interculturality and Buen Vivir in
plural? Instead of redistribution in the terms of capitalist society operated by the liberal state, it
would seem more appropriate to think of restitution, or better yet a reappropriation from below,
of the materiality necessary for the reproduction of life based in diverse ways of life—and in the
respective terms that these ways of life pose.
It is in this sense that a redistribution of money, such as the conditional cash transfers and funds
that prevailed in Latin American progressivisms, only reinforces and expands capitalist relations
and thus deepens the civilizational crisis. The redistributive paradigm as central of the left is
typical of the post-war era, of Fordism, and of the welfare state.
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