Democratic Crises and Degrowth

The health-cum-economic crisis of COVID-19 has exposed many weaknesses of contemporary governance. These weaknesses are associated with representative democracy, which simply offers citizens a right to vote every few years, a mere choice between a small number of often lack-lustre and look-alike candidates, mainly streamlined and disciplined by competing mainstream political parties. Other weaknesses relate to the peculiarly economic power manifested within capitalist polities, where economic matters and economic forces dominate politics in crude and obvious, as well as subtle and complex, ways.

Democratic deficiencies can be seen in the banal simplicity with which the powers that be interpreted what was quickly becoming a pandemic. Moreover, the ‘COVID-19 crisis’ was, rather, a crisis of under-resourced and undervalued health sectors due to neoliberal policies favoured by political and economic elites. As the coronavirus spread, on 28 February 2020, Guardian Australia quoted former president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Dr Simon Judkins warning that, ‘Part of the pandemic plan is “hospitals opening their surge capacity”’. He went on to say, ‘Now, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but there is no surge capacity … We’ve been saying this for years.’ (Quote in Feik, 2020).

Indeed, health, education and welfare sectors in general have been starved for funds as neoliberal policies favoured material, growth-oriented wealth creation to increase the gross domestic product (GDP). Exploitation of non-renewable energy and other material resources continued apace in sectors such as mining, construction, agri-farming and forestry. Meanwhile, as is characteristic of ‘growthism’, human and humane policies related to sectors such as the arts and immigration were downgraded, and serious environmental concerns were ignored and even trivialised.

Chasing GDP growth as their ideal, capitalist state policies have conspired to enhance the rich at the expense of the poor, leading to heightened inequalities (Piketty, 2017). In a market-based democracy, economic inequality is commensurate with political inequality as demonstrated by the ecological crises we face. Climate change due to rising carbon emissions is simply the tip of the iceberg of environmentally unsustainable practices and processes that threaten the future of human life on Earth. These carbon emissions result from activities directly tied to growth economies. Even though a majority of citizens want action on climate change, the vast majority of national and international leaders and parties have not responded adequately. As such, this is a crisis of democracy.

Degrowth: A grassroots response to the crisis

A plethora of global movements have risen up, in recent decades, against capitalist states and the mundane features and failures of contemporary forms of democracy, including movements such as Occupy, the 15-M actions of Indignados in Spain demanding ‘Real Democracy Now’ and the so-called Arab Spring. Another is the degrowth movement which emerged in the early 2000s in France to spread through Europe and beyond. The degrowth movement advocates for direct democracy and local economies that meet our basic needs to diminish inequalities and allow citizens to make decisions and take responsibility for their everyday livelihoods. ‘Autonomy’ is at the very heart of this form of democracy.

The twentieth century Greek-French intellectual, economist, social critic and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis (1991) has been very influential within the movement. Castoriadis considers ‘agency’ — people directly exercising their free will and ability to act — as central. Equally ‘subsidiarity’, whereby central authorities devolve power to the most local level feasible, is paramount. As such, in the degrowth movement ‘autonomy’ refers to collective self-organising with cultural and productive re-localisation to benefit humans and ecosystems. Moreover, following Ivan Illich (Smith, 2019) who developed the degrowth concept of ‘conviviality’ as cooperative, mutual, sociable and sharing approaches and practices — in contrast to experts and technocrats — degrowth advocates seek convivial tools to create post-industrial and post-development formations. These formations are prefigurative clusters of degrowth activities within which direct democracy is practiced and basic needs are satisfied. As such they involve food self-provisioning, shared and environmentally economic housing, creativity and celebration, all interacting to develop emerging societal microcosms.

The work of John Holloway (2010) similarly confirms the movement’s instinct to maintain an open, decentralised, horizontalist organisation — degrowth has no headquarters and no president — and his distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ supports demonstrative action as the most powerful way forward. As such degrowth might seem amorphous but, in fact, is a vibrant grassroots movement showing that we can exercise direct democracy, we can develop low carbon lifestyles and move beyond capitalism. In Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (Liegey and Nelson, 2020) we show how practising degrowth in such ways cuts across four complementary and interconnected spheres.

The individual sphere focuses on ‘frugal abundance’, practising voluntary simplicity which, ironically, is no simple task. Indeed, the limitations of singular action demand that we operate in the sphere of collective activities, such as food, housing and maker cooperatives. Both spheres lead action in the third sphere of resistance to the ideology and lived imaginary of growth: resistance to over-consumption fuelled by overpowering advertising; resistance to the sharp inequalities built into production for growth; resistance to ‘working for the man’.

Finally, we elaborate on the sphere of the degrowth project: the degrowth agenda, degrowth futures and the future of degrowth. The degrowth project offers pathways for a politics of degrowth. This means ‘re-embedding’ the economy so that people and their means of provisioning are treated as one, holistically, rather than broken into commodities. In short, self-governance replaces rule by monetary and market-based logic. The degrowth project means going beyond private property relations to create various forms of collective self-governance for ‘commoning’, whereby resources and products are shared. Such practices value social and environmental justice. Similarly, an ‘unconditional autonomy allowance’ — in kind or monetary and ideally managed at a local level — is coupled with a ‘maximum acceptable income’ and other distributive measures related to local production by locals (Liegey et al. 2013).

Confronting the crises with action

The degrowth movement has flowered with a panoply of collaborative experiments of living more with less as in ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher, 1999) and ‘small is necessary’ (Nelson, 2018). Such experiments are crucial to confronting our many environmental crises, most associated with over-production, over-consumption and a global market requiring environmentally costly trade and transport. An example of a burgeoning degrowth formation is Cargonomia, a centre for research and experimentation, a social cooperative for sustainable logistical solutions, and distributor of local food to urban residents using cargo-bikes. Here local production, distribution and governance shows strong ecological efficiencies. Cargonomia evolved from combining three social and environmental enterprises in Budapest and its surrounds — Cyclonomia DIY Bicycle Social Cooperative; the Zsamboki Biokert organic vegetable farm, sustainable agriculture community and education centre distributing vegetable boxes weekly to Budapest food communities; and Kantaa, a self-organised bike messenger and delivery company.

Cargonomia attracts individuals and groups interested and active in producing sustainable food, promoting and using low carbon transport, bikes and a bike culture. Operating on sustainable, convivial and fair trade principles, food is distributed via direct marketing and by cargo bikes made by Cargonomia that members can borrow. A self-organising open space for community activities oriented to sustainable transitions, conviviality and degrowth, Cargonomia hosts DIY and self-sufficiency building workshops, discussions and cultural events. It has produced research reports and members were key organisers of the Fifth International Degrowth Conference in Budapest (2016). The formation incorporates ‘open (re)localisation’, welcoming initiatives and collaborators in local production for local basic needs. Thus, autonomy is exercised in material, political and cultural processes and structures.

Other degrowth-driven initiatives include an Italian example of communal self-management of agricultural production and food acquisition inspired by the community supported agriculture (CSA) model of prosumers, food eaters and farmers in beneficial and engaged relationships. CSA Veneto began in early 2018 on an historic organic farm Biofattoria Didattica Rio Selva in Preganziol, located near Treviso. With 40 to 50 shares, some held by farmers and many co-owned, there are more than 100 members. CSA Veneto is embedded in the social and solidarity economy district OltreConfin (‘beyond borders’), which includes other organic farms ‘in the vast urban sprawl of the Veneto region, but also involves local networks and associations, including one of the two Italian associations for degrowth, Associazione per la Decrescita’. Degrowth activist-scholar members of CSA Veneto (Cristiano et al. forthcoming) continue:

“This CSA is a conscious act, one of a set of experiments directed towards socio-economic transformation associated with agro-ecological regeneration and urban food ecology with tools and policies adapted and tailored for this specific context. This orientation can neither be described as a market strategy nor does it represent a niche marketing operation but rather the genuine outcome of real everyday processes of aware and self-organised inhabitants-producers pursuing self-determination.”

These examples of degrowth initiatives are pertinent to contemporary challenges. There is strong evidence that broadscale industrial agriculture, on cleared land eradicating habitats for struggling wild life species, raising standard breeds in crowded conditions, has created environmental circumstances that favour such animal vectors transmitting diseases like COVID-19 to humans (Mukherjee and Sen 2020). In contrast, degrowth practitioners work with nature using organic and low impact practices that minimise such risks. Even in the case of a pandemic, the degrowth emphasis on care and compassion would enable the valuing of life and health rather than human lives being traded off for economic benefits. Local sufficiency protects communities so locking down and isolation measures are less likely to impact on fulfilling local basic needs. In the COVID-19 crisis in Budapest, the cargo bikes continued as a safer form of transport than buses or trains. The solidarity and participatory direct democracy inbuilt in degrowth cultures and polities means mutual support can be rapidly ramped up in the face of such challenges.

In short, in contrast to the just-in-time, crisis-inducing supply chains and policy machinations of our growth and market oriented political system, degrowth aims to enable direct democracy, self-organisation and self-provisioning. The approach to limits is to respect them with artful skill and style, seeking richness in the deeper meanings of life, in solidarity, friendship and love. Degrowth means living, steadily working with and thoroughly enjoying, the bounty of planetary nature. Despite popular misconceptions, degrowth visions and practices are neither austere nor recessionary but instead, convivial and celebratory.