5 - Anticipating Degrowth

Summary

Recognizing the many deleterious repercussions of economic growth, many critics of these tendencies have advocated so-called degrowth (Latouche 2009; D’Alisa et al. 2015; Kallis 2018). Giorgos Kallis (2018: 4–8) shows how Serge Latouche’s concept of degrowth in 1972 represented the convergence of perspectives from several sources including the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the philosophers André Gorz and Ivan Illich, and the economic anthropologists Karl Polanyi, Marcel Mauss, and Marshall Sahlins. The relation between visions of degrowth and Marxism, however, remains ambiguous. Although “capitalism” is frequently identified as the main target of critique, proponents of degrowth rarely clarify how they conceptualize technological progress, unequal exchange, surplus production, or the exploitation of labor and nature.