It Could Happen Here - Degrowth with Andrew, Part 1

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Andrew talks with Robert and Mia about the history of Degrowth, and what it offers as an alternative to the cancerous logic of perpetual economic expansion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories,

combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is 3 p.m. in the winter, so it's all of those at once over here. That is true. That is true. It is 76 here. It's regular old evening time here. No winter included, you know, just rain and hot.

That's the two moods of the weather. Yeah, yeah. Which winter is it right now? is it rain winter or hot winter neither there is no winter winter is never well i hope that winter never comes to the island if it does i think we'll be in some deep shit you know if you guys get snow things have really gone south. It's time for us all to reevaluate our practices when that happens. Absolutely. It means the parrots have migrated to Alaska.

Oh, God. They do a lot of movements around the evening time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to pack up and leave us all behind. Well, this is It Could Happen Here, as you might be aware, a podcast about things falling apart. And today's episode is brought to us by Andrew. Hello. Of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Just to avoid confusion with other Andrews, you know, abuse. Oh, I did not realize.

Yeah. That's right. Son of the queen. Yeah. You know, you could talk about Prince Andrew. You could talk about Andrew teeth, you know,

it's like, I distinguished myself, you know? Yeah. You're the best Andrew. I appreciate that. Anytime, buddy.

So I'd like to spend some time today, tonight. What is time really uh and to talk about the concept of degrowth you know where it comes from what it means what it needs and all that other fun stuff are you guys familiar with degrowth as as a concept yeah a little bit yeah i mean and it's uh yeah i i please please i mean it's one of those things it gets a lot of like uh flack on one hand for people saying that it's basically eco-fascism and then you have folks being like no it's a it's a perfectly reasonable response to the kind of endless growth attitude that got us into the environmental catastrophe we're currently experiencing yeah

I think that having released a video on degrowth last week and having read through some of the comments I've received I've come to the conclusion that

there's no getting through to some people. Yeah. Oh, no. People love to listen to like a third of what you say and then get really angry at what they think you said. Every time we talk about like the value of things like, you know, the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, you know, hacking different medicines

or training people to be medics, somebody hops on the subreddit and said, I think it's kind of ableist that they think that, you know, people can replace doctors with street medics. No one's ever made that case. That's not a thing that anyone has ever said. I'm going to make it my entire life mission to

only specifically make this case. Mm-hmm. All we need is a guy with some gauze and water in a bag. Yeah, yeah yeah doctors are bourgeoisie they must all die when the revolution comes they will only be replaced with street medics it's gonna be great i'm texting all of this to our friend kava right now dr hoda yeah it's just it's just ridiculous so people will literally project what they think you said on to what you actually said yeah it's very very obvious when it's

taking place I don't know how they don't feel embarrassed you know a lot of times I barely comment on things I barely like respond to things and when I do I check and recheck and recheck what the person has said then I check and recheck and recheck what I see before I make a statement

because I don't know how you can like how do you not feel embarrassed yeah like everybody who has watched the video can see that you haven't watched it before I make a statement. Because it makes you feel like you're going crazy sometimes. How do I feel embarrassed? Yeah. Like everybody who has watched the video can see that you haven't watched it. They've just done like a term search and then appeared and... Yeah.

And like they come to engage you. Pretty much. Pretty much. But I mean, if I were to be a slave to the algorithm, I would say all that engagement helps right yeah yeah i'm sure it does it helps it helps one thing for sure yeah help get us to a better place unfortunately and speaking of things that do not help us get to a better place i think it's

the growth primarily is about confronting this destructive ideology of growthism. It's something we see all around us, something we interact with on a fairly regular basis. You see the images of the Amazon rainforest being cut down to be turned into soy farms until eventually it's made into cattle grazing fields you talk about the constant expansion of oil infrastructure you talk about the constant expansion of mining operations you talk about the continued rise of fast fashion that people are extremely defensive of whenever you try to criticize it all of these systems all of these industries all of these practices uh are part of part and parcel or rather products of this ideology of growthism that capitalism is driven by and i know it may be strange for some people to sort of deprogram from this idea that growth is like an unadulterated good, uncontroversially positive.

Because, you know, nature's like all about growth, right? You know, when you think of growth, you think of a plant peeking out of the soil. You think of a baby kitten growing up to be a cat you talk about like babies becoming toddlers becoming young children becoming older children becoming you know tweens and teens and then finally adults and then from there joe biden um but you know there's this whole idea of growth and that growth is like a natural part of life and that is true but growth in life does not go on and on and on and on you know organisms grow up to a certain point and then they maintain a healthy equilibrium or at least they try to

um of course health is not necessarily a natural state of affairs because viruses are just as natural as the cells they attack. And then you could also get all ephemeral and talk about personal growth and how life is a constant journey of personal growth and whatever. But speaking materially, speaking physically, growth has a limit. People grow up to a certain height a certain size and so on and when growth doesn't stop that's when we start running into problems as i understand the reason that cancer is so difficult to cure is because your own body turning against you it's your it's some of the many trillions of your own cells deciding okay time to just grow and grow and grow without limit

and what happens in most of those cases in many of those cases rather unfortunately people die as a result so in our bodies in our own bodies we understand that growth is not always positive and yet that sick logic of growth for its own sake is exactly what the global economy relies on it's not just thing has too much growth too much money too much stuff you know you have all these wealthy nations that continue to expand and grow and attempt to hoard uh i heard one person use the analogy i can't remember who it was, talking about how capitalism is now attempting to, the new frontiers for capitalism is to expand and colonize our own minds. And so every economy, every sector, every industry is expected to keep growing, keep growing, keep growing no matter what. no matter what one of the responses that i got on my video on degrowth is that oh well you're saying that growth is this and growthism is this capitalist thing but you know china and ussr and they grew and they industrialized and they are just as susceptible to ecological destruction as any other capitalist country and that is true

but that's also part of why i would consider those countries to be um state capitalist projects and not anything close to what i envision but of course the moment you introduce any idea that sounds even vaguely socially oriented even vaguely ecologically oriented um people automatically assume you're trying to go for like a new united soviet socialist republic but I think we need to explore different paths to improving quality of life to quote-unquote developing and that's a tricky subject I'll get into a bit later but we need to think of ways that we can help people and help people live better lives without relying on decimating the biosphere it's a tricky conversation to be had um because when people think of growth they think of it as a positive and when you criticize that positive they think the inverse they think you're trying to make everybody degrade and go down to like a

worse quality of life to rush back to like a lower life expectancy or to transform our mode of production back to like hunting and gathering but the truth is that degrowth as a movement, as a system of thought, is more so about trying to find that balance between a good quality of life for all, not just this unequal quality of life that we live in a material world we live on a planet that has limited resources we need to balance those resources we need to consider and be good stewards of you know a planet that we share with other living creatures capitalism really is driven by this ideology of growthism because it is structurally incentivized structurally it's a structural imperative in the capitalist system it's not exclusively driven by greed as some people assume i think that's that that this idea that oh it's all up to like personalities uh kind of hampers people's ability to analyze systems because it doesn't matter whether um we suddenly put each and every ceo in a position where

they are all completely 100% altruistic it's not that they're all being driven by greed it's because under capitalism you know capitalists own capital and capital that is stagnant is capital that is losing its value and so they look for things to invest in so they can grow their capital capital being anything from real estate factories machinery intellectual property financial assets or just the money that they use to make more money if it's stagnant it's losing value and so they're trying to increase its value um and so they seek out companies that have growing profits year after year so their capital will grow year after

year and if that growth slows down they pull out and look elsewhere to invest companies that fail to grow will lose their investors and collapse and so companies do everything in their power to maintain growth so they can maintain their investors regardless of how much havoc they wreak upon the world so if any barriers are preventing their growth they had to bulldoze those barriers you know environmental protections are barriers labor laws are barriers protections policies are barriers the commons were a barrier indigenous populations were a barrier and so on and so forth all of these acts of violence open up these new frontiers for growth for appropriation for accumulation and so in comes degrowth or the french term for it is de croissant

um and i know that i likely pronounced that incorrectly it's the french we can disrespect them there are no consequences precisely I think things that sit down reflect on their nuclear empire but anyway welcome

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This idea of degrowth really first was developed i have to say that i appreciate what the intellectuals have come up with they're good at sitting down and thinking about stuff i'll give them that i'll give them that um so this one intellectual a guy named andre gorse uh in 1972 coined the term de consens french for degrowth gorse basically posed a question that remains at the center of degrowth is the earth's balance for which no growth or even degrowth of material production is a necessary condition compatible with the survival of the capitalist system i would venge to say no it is not in any way compatible with the survival of the capitalist system because we have seen that in the short period of time that the capitalism has existed it has rapidly uh triggered the capitalocene or as some people

regrettably call it the anthropocene uh it has rapidly triggered the sixth great mass extinction event um and so i do not believe that the earth's balance is compatible with its survival and so décroissant a movement of activists mainly flourished in lyon in the early 2000s in the wake of protests for car-free cities communal meals in the streets food cooperatives and campaigns against advertising they went from france to italy where green and anti-globalization activists mobilized against this whole concept of capitalism's constant encroachment and Spain in 2006. It eventually built up to the size where it could sustain a movement, a magazine rather, called La Decroissant, which currently sells a few thousand copies a month. Around the same time in 2004,

a research and activist named Francois Schneider took a year-long walking tour on a donkey to disseminate degrowth throughout France and that received some media coverage. an academic collective known as Research and Degrowth, along with Denis Bayon and Fabrice Filippo. And they eventually began international conferences, one in Paris in 2008 and a second in Barcelona in 2010. So the English term degrowth was officially used for the first time at the Paris conference, which really marked the birth of the international research community around degrowth following the success of the conferences in paris and barcelona other

conferences were held in montreal in 2011 venice in 2012 leipzig in 2014 and degrowth as an idea spread to groups in flanders switzerland finland poland greece germany portugal norway denmark czech republic well i guess it's czechia now mexico brazil puerto rico canada bulgaria romania and elsewhere degrowth as an idea as in some movement has been gaining ground despite the criticisms that some have that oh well you can't call it something negative like degrowth because people won't be you know happy with it or whatever. And I'll get to that criticism in a bit. But it's been steadily growing since it was first, you know,

developed in the 1970s. At this point in time, if you go on the degrowth website, you'll find thousands of articles and studies in their library and of course this is not to say that or because a concept has a lot of followers or thinkers or published works it's automatically uh a-okay ultimately correct but at this point in time i think a lot of people are looking at direction we are going in and recognizing that we cannot continue along this path of growth and so they are actively looking for a way out looking for a way to find that balance recognizing that capitalism is not compatible with the earth's balance and so

degrowth ultimately rejects the illusion of growth it calls to re-politicize the public debate that has been colonized by the idiom of economism that has been driven toward as a social objective economic growth. Degrowth is a project advocating for the democratically led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability i think when some people care degrowth uh despite all the explanations out there despite even consuming those explanations they might still have this idea in their head that degrowth is this thing where a bunch of armed government-sponsored environmental activists roll up and take your car and your house and force you to live in a cave um but degrowth and how we degrow our economy is going to rely on the popular um involvement of the people you know it's not like you could just snap your fingers or just

decree it and make it so um it's not meant to be like how it is under neoliberalism we have all this austerity degrowth is supposed to be all of us coming together to this to figure out how we can live in alignment with our biosphere with our bioregion with the planet scaling down our individual and our community supply chains and localizing our consumption in order to reduce the reliance on this highly extractive highly growth capitalist, global capitalist economy. Degrowth also signifies a direction, a desired direction, one in which societies use fewer natural resources and organize and live much differently than they live today. The ideas of sharing, which is something that we teach to preschoolers, simplicity, conviviality,

care, and the commons are primary concepts in terms of what a degrowth society should look like. In one of my previous podcast episodes, I would have discussed the commons a bit so if anyone's curious about what the commons are they can check that out um and of course on my channel i also speak about the commons as an institution and about libraries of things and so degrowth has offered a sort of a framework that connects all these different ideas, concepts, proposals,

with the criticism of growth, with the criticism of GDP, with the criticism of commodification, the process that converts social products and socio-ecological services and relations into commodities of the monetary value. On the constructive side, because degrowth is not just limited to criticism, degrowth imagines reproductive economies of care, the reclamation of old and the creation of new commons,

man-made and natural. Caring for commons in communal forms of living and producing liberating our time from work and making it available to caring for our communities and caring for ecology because if you think about all of the activities that are currently so needed at this point in time uh in terms of ecological restoration in terms of um degrowth they're not profitable you know planting mangroves to shore up our shores to defend our shores from erosion and from storms is not profitable replanting forests and sparking nature's processes of ecological restoration not profitable and of course there is a whole sort of ecosystem economic political ecosystem dedicated to these kinds of projects with all the NGOs and government organizations involved in replanting the Sahel region in Africa

for example creating the great green wall but those projects tend to be rife with issues and a lack of maintenance because they do not involve local communities in the decision making surrounding that process of restoration and on top of that of course these projects are not embedded in a broader project for degrowth so a government might be planting trees and planting forests in one part of the country and extracting and drilling in another part of the country and so there needs to be an integration of all these different projects with a broader push and direction towards de-group towards D.Crew. Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to circle back around to this idea that degrowth is a critique of GDP as a concept um degrowth is not necessarily the same as negative gdp growth but when you consider how gdp is measured as it's counted it's about financial transactions and not necessarily the non-financial ones and so if we were to green our economy, if we were to de-grow our society, we're not going to be seeing the yearly gross domestic activity increases

of two or 3%. Yeah, there's an old 2011 slogan that's if the bank takes your house, that increases GDP. Right, that is true that is true a lot of uh positive and constructive and beneficial actions that people do on a regular basis do not contribute to gdp whereas entire destructive industries contribute significantly to GDP. Rent every month. We started this by comparing the quest for endless growth to a cancer, but I almost think a better comparison is like, there was that article earlier this year about how specific kinds of people,

particularly rich weirdos in the tech industry, are paying thousands of dollars to have their legs broken and like lengthened so that they can like be three inches taller like that's that's that's that's a shitload of how at like it's yeah i mean it's weaker they can never we can never run again but you are technically taller so we'll count it as growth. Yeah. For real. Line go up. I'm too much of a coward to wear platforms. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have the chutzpah to be a short king.

Unbelievable. Sometimes I do think that, like, when anthropologists unearth our civilization, they'll wonder why we were so fascinated about line go up. Mm-hmm. But, like, then they'll realize that the whole point of the civilization was line go up. Like, that was our deity. but like then they realized that the whole point of the civilization was line go up like that

that was our deity truly truly it's it's it's i don't know my eyes my eyes bleed sometimes thinking about how this whole system is structured and how it just continues to chug along but um that's why i spend so much time writing and reading and talking about these issues right uh trying to find a way out and so that is also what degrowth advocates are looking to do they're looking for a way out you know a way for a better life of all which brings me to the whole criticism of degrowth that is essentially optics right they say it's not appropriate to use a negative word to signify

desired positive changes but degrowth advocates deliberately choose i mean in my video i said that i'm fine with either calling it degrowth or calling it post growth or whatever but degrowth advocates have chosen the term degrowth for a reason the use of negation for a positive project is aimed towards creating that sort of aimed towards creating that sort of um questioning you know towards getting people to reconsider this idea of growth as a ultimate good to decolonize an imagination that has been dominated by this whole capitalist conception of the future consisting of you know line go up it's this automatic assumption and association of growth with better that the word degrowth wants to dismantle wants to deconstruct and so degrowth is a deliberately subversive slogan and of course degrowth is not aimed at you know deconstructing the most necessary sectors devolve in the most necessary sectors we're not talking about degrowth in education degrowth in medical care

degrowth in you know well renewable energy is kind of a tricky subject but degrowth in renewable energy um it's more so about primarily and first of all targeting the most dirty and destructive industries you know the financial sector um we would prefer to see institutions like health and education flourish rather than grow or develop we want a change that is qualitative not necessarily quantitative we want to see a flourishing of the arts a flourishing of philosophies a flourishing of um vernacular architectures a flourishing of the creativity of people that's qualitative it's not about oh well line go up so things more good you know it's not about we have 10 industrial

outputs last year now we have 12 that's so good you know we want something we want qualitative change and if most people really sit down and think about what they want in their life, I don't think a lot of people are going to think of, oh, well, I want next year's iPhone to have a 12% increase in the camera quality. You know, it's more so that you want better you know rest um more um connected communities uh healthier commute or healthier um i guess city layout um that's more conducive to interaction it's more conducive to small scale movement it's not about like i said you know it's not about trying to get line to go up i think cryptocurrency as i think about it is like perhaps the best example or like

nfts right like they created a bunch of value that literally created nothing i had nothing other than exchange value exactly exactly it's just nonsense yeah pretend money i also want to talk for a moment about like development as a concept right because another common criticism of degrowth is that oh well what about the global south what about the third world what about all the poor countries and poor people of the world you just want to leave them behind and for one i i find it strange because the person in question at least the video response i got implicitly assumes that i am from like a global north nation and i'm just fine sitting down with my you know um same day amazon delivery and starbucks and

sprawling suburbs and whatever it is that you know they imagine my lifestyle is like but i think first and foremost parts of the whole move for degrowth is to consider um like i said raising improving people's quality of life worldwide which capitalism is not interested in capitalism will maintain a perpetual underclass because they're easier to exploit and so there's this whole idea of development right it has this baggage um this very colonial baggage but it's development is really like growth it's meant to have like a limit it's an unfolding towards a predetermined end you know an embryo towards a predetermined end you know an embryo eventually develops into a fetus so she eventually develops into a baby she eventually develops into a child she eventually develops into an adult who then ages and dies but development for the sake of development with no end with no end, with no aims, with no goals, with no sense of self-critique or questioning. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

I can look at my own country. I'm from Trinidad and Tobago, for those who don't know, and think of things that need to get better, right? Things that would really improve people's quality of life. To think about the fact that we really need to get rid of our reliance on cars and bring back our train system um that was dismantled so long ago i could think about the fact that we need to improve our food autonomy because we are extremely reliant on food imports things like that i can think about that would improve people's ability to live

well and sustainably on this island but those things those aims those are those are goals right i'm not just thinking oh development development development i'm thinking okay there's point b how do i get there from point a how are we going to meet people's basic needs and this whole and the whole degrowth project is really about that whole conversation between the global north and the global south right the global north needs to reduce the demand for a lot of the resources and goods so that they're more accessible to the global south but in making those things more accessible places in the global south are not meant to follow the same path that the global north took that put us in our mess the whole

idea is that we need to find a different path we need to find a different trajectory we need to think for ourselves instead of trying to keep up with the joneses in order to determine what a good life would mean for us in our ecological niche in our uh geographical situation yeah a lot of us is like we did we did we did this in china right like we we did the entire development thing and the product is now like people literally walking 18 miles on foot after having broken out of a foxconn factory they've been locked in and forced to make iphones because someone had like three people had gotten covid so they just like locked everyone in the factory. So like, you know, it, yeah, I think it's also sort of like briefly worth mentioning

that like development as a concept and the sort of like developmental economics field was like, this was like specifically developed in sort of the bowels of the American state department as, as a response to like, basically as like basically as like as a way as a kind of like simplified capitalist version of marxist theory they could throw out to sort of like explain what was happening in like as a way to sort of an alternative to marxism for like all these sort of like newly uh post-colonial nations and you know it's gone about as well as you would expect this thing cooked up in the bowels of the state department to be alternative to marketing pretty much yeah it's like well this has been fun um i love i don't know thinking about capital i mean this is it's this is important because like

we always need to be thinking about what comes next. This is constantly, like, a problem that the left has and certainly a problem the liberals have, which is that the vision of the future is very rarely anything more than fighting against kind of the demons of the moment, as opposed to, like, what does it actually look like to get ourselves to a better place, to a place that's more sustainable, both in an environmental level and in like, in a manner of human ecology too. And yeah, I think this is like, this is kind of the hard work that people need to be thinking about wherever you wind up landing on degrowth as either a concept or as a term, like, these are the paths we have to start beating out of the bush. Exactly. So there are many potential paths that have already been thought up and there are many that have yet to be imagined.

imagined in ecuador the project of sumac cose in really the rest of latin america the idea of buen vivir in much of south africa the concept of ubuntu in india the kandyan economy of permanence all of these projects and more explore alternatives to quote-unquote development alternative trajectories to a good life that is rooted in environmental justice that is based in a retreat from the narrow confines of the global north's imagination and what that imagination has promoted worldwide and forced upon the rest of the world

degrowth requires us to think for ourselves to think creatively about how we plan on creating a good life in the context of capitalism's degradation the earth's degradation due to climate change and what that will mean for our future is we really need to sit and think about what our future as a species what of our future as regions our future as communities our future as individuals is going to look like, what trajectory, what path we want to take and how we begin that journey. And so in the second part of this two-part series, I intend to discuss what concepts are essential for degrowth, the steps we can take to move towards degrowth, and how we can integrate degrowth in anarchist politics. All right.

And that's going to be the end of part one. Come back tomorrow for part two, and probably more discussion of that weird surgery rich people get to have their legs broken repeatedly until they're taller. rich people get to have their legs broken repeatedly until they're taller. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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