Carnegie’s Ghosts

Degrowth: Putting the economy back in its place

In France, where the concept originated and where it has had considerable impact, it is decroissance; in English it is degrowth, and in any language it is a significant symbolic challenge to the “tyranny of growth.”

TAKIS FOTOPOULOS

The degrowth project

At a time when the greenhouse effect and climate change have become front page news, following the IPCC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fourth Assessment Report, which definitely links the clear signs of global climate change with increases in man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the degrowth project developed by Serge Latouche[1] and others was a significant development in Green politics and thought. This is because it showed that the Green movement, after its rise as an antisystemic movement in Germany in the 1970s and its subsequent integration into mainstream politics as a kind of reformist Left party or lobby (taking part in the process –or supporting in various degrees-- the criminal wars of the transnational elite in the 1990s and beyond), could still play a role at the boundaries between a reformist and an antisystemic movement. As I will try to show below, the degrowth project could be said to represent a dialectical synthesis between the antisystemic Green approaches of the German “fundos”, which have nowadays almost completely disappeared and the reformist approaches of the mainstream Green parties, which have by now proven bankrupt