Degrowth is not just a trend, it is the trend, but in a pathological way : growth is dead and we are witnessing the pathetic efforts of those who seek to revive it : bankers, politicians, environmentalists ... A continuous fever to liquidate society, no longer able to justify itself.
For a long time, growth has been proposed as a way to "mobilize" the world. Growth is both a myth, the ideology of endless progress, and a program : the quantitative increase of goods and their world. Currently, China is still on this catch-up process, facing an ecological and political disaster. The only remaining growth is slavery and speculation.
Quantitative increase has thresholds beyond which the responses are no longer the same. We cannot simply settle for doing more. The extraordinary increase in the human population requires a different approach.
What has not been surpassed rots slowly. The reign of quantity is over. We are in the era of stagnation, crisis, threats, and depression. We are rediscovering the limits that have been forgotten for so long. Are not the ecological, economic, social, moral, and health crises simply due to the fact that these limits have been exceeded ? The oil peak is behind us, industry is contributing to a desperate climate change, finance is 99% speculative, biodiversity is sick, the increase in goods is yielding less and less satisfaction, colonialist imperialism is back, all these signs are clear.
We are far from the bourgeois happiness of 1900, which was already an example of waste.
We are facing the end of this model. Exiting growth will represent a real revolution. The modern state doesn't know how to do degrowth. We know that our choices were strongly dependent on our material conditions. How will we experience the end of growth ? It is widely established that economic growth is also growth in pollution and climate change, not to mention consumer alienation. The "decoupling" of the two growths has been sought in vain for a long time. To pretend to achieve it, one would have to forget about outsourcing. This is the moment to choose between degrowth and recession.
In the face of threats of disasters, our way of life must decrease: we will have to choose between regression and degrowth. This choice may arise without our having time to reflect, so many threats accumulate on the pursuit of current capitalism. It will be a choice between withdrawing into oneself, seeking in the past the remnants of what we will have destroyed, or scientifically building a happy frugality.
Against naturalism that idealizes savagery, probably out of bad conscience, the idea of degrowth is fertile in helping us find the construction of a human nature. We must understand that the attraction to the wild is a healthy reaction against the diseases of civilization but should not condemn the latter.
We need to move beyond pessimism and optimism. Let us keep from the latter the idea that the future is not written and that it always holds opportunities that we are unable to perceive. Disasters are certain, both socially and politically, and of course ecologically. Announcing them allows those who do so to have an audience and to wear it down. The habituation to the idea of an accident is also a powerful enemy.
The awareness that we are heading for disaster remains intellectual; when it becomes sensible, there is a risk of panic and fatalism. Rather than taking refuge in the "survivalists" shelters, degrowth will be the only landmark.
New goods, mainly portable internet, have quickly established themselves, without reducing dissatisfaction. For more and more people, our possessions are invading us. The awareness of a way of life disconnected from human realization in favor of the accumulation of goods continues to grow.
It is up to us to abandon the ideas of the spectacular economy, born out of the victory of bureaucrats over practitioners. We must abandon their models of progress and urbanization that a disparate alliance has fostered since 1750, cleanse these ideas of progressivism, conservatism, capitalism, liberalism, and even socialism with which the media (mis)direct us. It is not a matter of criticizing the Enlightenment, but the artificialization that accompanied it. Progress is not a continuation. There is no meaning to history.
The idea that man could, even should, improve the world is not lost; it must be paired with the care not to denature. Improvement does not mean growth.
We have benefited from abundant energy, but now we must be frugal. The slowdown is unlikely to be pleasant. It is never easy for an addict to heal. The main difficulty, however, lies in the complexity of the process : if we must find a certain simplicity, we must also exchange an evident program: more, for a more demanding horizon : harmony.
Romanticism was the first critique, with its return to nature, certainly artificial, but which allowed hygienists to counteract the unhealthy aspects of the machine, as well as spiritualists to show its poverty. The reign of quantity was contested from this period on. Unfortunately, this protest was not turned towards renewal but towards the past..
The question arises: how to regain confidence in reason ? How to project oneself without increasing ? Growth is so "natural" to man : for his survival, he had to hunt and store. How to accept satiety ?
Degrowth is a difficult idea because, even if it is an ambiguous concept (ranging from bicycles to revolution) like communism, it is also a negative concept: everyone prefers a bright future to restriction. But the explosion of the world's population no longer allows for the ease of responding to dissatisfaction with quantity. Progress has turned against humanity and now demands that it adapt.
Positively, we will have to invent a new frugality, rediscover the civilizations of balance. Just as growth was an objective, always unsatisfied and justifying a supposed imbalance that would bring happiness (and which has actually brought advantages that future generations will be able to evaluate more calmly), degrowth is a tool for dismantling this period and not an end in itself, but rather a means of restoring this search for balance, harmony, which have always been the true object of cultures and civilizations.
There is a risk of stagnation, which is compounded by the natural tendency of older people to consider that yesterday was better. There is also nostalgia for progress. Degrowth is neither a reaction nor a conservation. It is the pursuit of growth that is a regression. It should be recalled that respect for the immobile is also an adventure, if only for peace. This respect is not evident in a society that has made movement its heart.
Let us recall that capitalists have not been conservatives but progressives.
There is currently a critical stance on growth or globalization that only aims at recovery. This is the famous "sustainable development". As the conditions for this recovery are difficult to find, they are capable of calling the recession that is coming "degrowth". But for degrowth, we have no model, especially not a modern one. We will not return to an imaginary past either. Our contact with reality, with life, is at stake: we are already too "disconnected from the ground", it cannot last. The "ecological transition" is coming too late: a reversal awaits us. Let us prepare ourselves so that it does not happen through war or any mobilization... We will have to reinvent our autonomy. We denounce their control, or rather their appearance of control. We will invent our path: the joy of living against artificial survival...
There is also a risk with a sudden "degrowth". This world is really at the end of its course. A reactionary and warlike totalitarianism is possible, we see some prototypes, which are only waiting for their green paint... This collapsology would present itself as the only alternative to a crazy technophilia, as we see it in transhumanists.
Growth is necessary for this world, for its organization and its (dis)equilibrium. This forward flight has lasted too long for its cessation to occur peacefully.
Degrowth is also necessary to regain control of institutions and companies that have become too large, too distant, too artificial. It is the remedy for the individual flight of abstentionists.
Degrowth is situated at the historical moment of the end of accumulation. It is not a return to an idealized pre-robot era. It is not the opposite of growth. While there are certainly things that must decrease, such as waste, it is rather the positive search for a new balance, a healthy relationship with activity and achievement. This certainly implies less support and less comfort (but it depends on what we are talking about).
Despite the image of equal distribution, the globalization of the 20th century has oriented the planet toward metropolises and continuously created abandoned territories, "developing" or more often forgotten. It is growth, and the belief in its limitless nature, that is pathological. It is because it was thought of in a non-dialectical way, as a pursuit without negativity, that we have these disastrous results. It is the "progressives" who look back and would like to reconnect with the "thirty glorious years".
There are several difficulties in promoting the theme of degrowth: it involves a decrease, a regression, at least an apparent refusal, and negativity. If negativity is always the most powerful factor at work, if degrowth is already in most people's minds as a necessity, it is not pleasant to watch. Moreover, it has the false friends of aging populations, reactionary or even paralyzing tendencies, and passivity.
To achieve degrowth, one must identify the enemy. It is not only the liberal-libertarian morality, which is just the current dress of decomposition, it is not only capital, that old tiger that has no teeth and only serves to mask governance, it is not only growth, which is the crazy movement of the quantity of a world that has refused quality.
Not only quantitative limits must be taken into account, but also qualitative limits. Our civilization, especially since the post-'68 counter-revolution, has sanctified desire, taking up the analyses of Deleuze and Marcuse, but unbridled desire is not human fulfillment. The characters constructed on these ruins are recognizable : they are the targets of marketing ; people satisfied with consuming, happy that merchandise takes an interest in them, but incapable of the old human qualities, such as perseverance. It is to reassure them that society spends all these salaries on salespeople and prospectors.
Human condition exists only if it accepts its limits, even if it opposes them. It is to avoid this work that antispéciste or transhumanist fantasies develop, as well as political correctness: it is the idea of an infinite, pure, perfect, and perfectly inhuman world. It is not enough to pay, vote or parade to make constraints disappear. These are opportunities to grow. We can disagree with Nietzsche or Saint-Exupery without succumbing to ease.
Degrowth is likely to be painful, like the creeping deflation of recent years. The entire social organization needs to be re-examined, or it will continue to decay. It is not guaranteed that the change in direction represented by the abandonment of growth can be achieved peacefully.
Let us not forget that technical progress has accompanied human liberation from religion. We will need a new spirituality.
Degrowth is primarily a reduction of waste, and more generally of the economy. The impermeability of the soil, with urban sprawl, shows a lack of respect and knowledge of reality. The debate on nanoparticles would do well to remind us that we have already encountered them three times: diesel fumes, asbestos dust, and coal dust, all responsible for millions of deaths.
Degrowth represents a change in direction, not a return to the past. Degrowth rises against a decomposed world: of course unlimited consumption, but also relocation and reification. Each cause must be surpassed : the unlimited by the achievement of a total human, globalization by a happy and supportive re-rooting, objects by a reconquest of the subject. This is a program of overturning. It is not simply a quantitative change, as growth has achieved, but a reinvention of the qualitative.
We have been conditioned by the Bible: "Be fruitful and multiply", by Descartes: "to become the master and possessor of nature", by the myth of progress, which allows for demagogic gifts and promises that make us wait. It has become natural for us to prefer the future to the past, the new to tradition, youth to experience. The peak of oil production was surpassed in 2008. Since then, growth has been artificial: it takes refuge in speculation, from metropolises to the artificialization of life, and is only sustained by the financial flow of banks creating a currency without backing. This forward flight cannot last.