Degrowthism in Power

xsampa

Banned
The degrowth movement is an environmental movement that seeks to create society on a "human scale" and oppose economic growth in favor of more socially and environmentally focused goals like stronger community bonds and less pollution. Examples include the Transition Towns movement and the writings of E. F Schumaher. How this movement _somehow_ take power and what would its consequences be?
 
Very interesting! It would probably require a revolution, but we've never really seen a revolution with this kind of motivation before. Communism may have been anti-capitalism, but it was never presented at anti-growth. There are elements of some right-wing movements that remind me a bit of this in a very very warped way. Certain anti-capitalist tendencies of Father Coughlin's platform in the US. The German Youth Movement and certain nationalistic, protectivist welfare tendencies in various European countries between the wars. And honestly, for an extreme example from fiction, we're given a depiction of Gilead- at least in its own propaganda- of an anti-capitalist society rebuilt around the search for, er, a very narrow and specific kind of..."joy." Gilead and the world of Handmaid's Tale couldn't possibly maintain its focus on growth, what with the fertility crisis.

So one unhelpful answer would be a real fertility crisis. Another would be some sort of early financial crisis (preferably in the 19th century) that shakes the world's faith in the gold standard before fiat currencies are strong enough to take its place.

Then there's the incremental approach. Just beef up the intellectual bona fides of the ideology as early as possible, have its appeal grow slowly as other ideologies fall by the wayside, and just let them permeate the culture at-large. Until millimeter by millimeter it's mainstream.
 
In the German context, these ideas are closely linked with the Green Party (and smaller ecological parties / movements), and they were among the things which the Greens discarded from their electoral agenda in the 1990s in order to make themselves "electable". They keep coming back, though, and now the political culture is a lot more open towards them than it was twenty years ago. So it might look like not discarding the idea back then could have been a suitable PoD - but I don't think it would have become policy under a chancellor Schröder (and neither would it have become under a chancellor Lafontaine). Takeover in a revolution is ASB here.

Really, I think the extent of agreement degrowthism enjoys today has a lot do with the development of post-materialist culture. It's obviously still a minority position, but even the support it now has mostly has arisen throughout the 21st century.

How things turn out really depends on what kind of measures are implemented in what manner. There doesn't even have to be a stock market crash if you can manage to decouple things.
 

xsampa

Banned
In the German context, these ideas are closely linked with the Green Party (and smaller ecological parties / movements), and they were among the things which the Greens discarded from their electoral agenda in the 1990s in order to make themselves "electable". They keep coming back, though, and now the political culture is a lot more open towards them than it was twenty years ago. So it might look like not discarding the idea back then could have been a suitable PoD - but I don't think it would have become policy under a chancellor Schröder (and neither would it have become under a chancellor Lafontaine). Takeover in a revolution is ASB here.

Really, I think the extent of agreement degrowthism enjoys today has a lot do with the development of post-materialist culture. It's obviously still a minority position, but even the support it now has mostly has arisen throughout the 21st century.

How things turn out really depends on what kind of measures are implemented in what manner. There doesn't even have to be a stock market crash if you can manage to decouple things.

I was thinking of a scenario where environmentalism never really takes off, leading to degrowth as a radical response.
 
How this movement _somehow_ take power
Somehow present themselves as part of the moral majority and ally with organize religion (in a USA context), in other words co opt or hijack and established major political force.

and what would its consequences be?
If they fail, the become the just another face of the orthodoxy and nothing really changes.
If they succeeds, things go south very quickly and they get thrown out of power one way or another. People don't like it when they have to suffer for some abstract goal (however noble). If they manage to hold on to power they will being their country into ruin, and be out compete by those countries that decided to go with more conventional routes.
 
There are a lot of leftist who think that getting rid of economic growth would be a big step in creating a greener economy. In my view this is a folly. In any historical transition, from the moment agriculture produced enough to afford people not growing food but becoming a priest or builder, there is necessary a surplus for research and development and replacement of old goods by new, efficient ones. We need a big surplus to develop better solar collectors, more efficient batteries, everything we need for a transitiin.

Getting rid of growth would be a disaster. Rather than ecotopia emerging, it would mean things like driving 30- and 40 year old belching cars until they are fully used up, industrial accidents and spills of leaking pipes caused by neglect and poor maintenance, etcetera.
 
. . . it would mean things like driving 30- and 40 year old belching cars until they are fully used up, industrial accidents and spills of leaking pipes caused by neglect and poor maintenance, etcetera.
Yes, we could clearly go too far.

I’d almost be more interested in what I think I’ve heard called the balanced scorecard approach, in which economic growth is viewed as, say, one of the eight most important measures of the economy, but also such things as education, health, self-reports of happiness, are measured and taken seriously.

And maybe a couple of indirect measures of whether people are staying at their current jobs because they like them, or rather do they feel stuck?
 
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