I wasn’t actually familiar with this guy, but I have had degrowth explained a bit better to me by some people in my DSA chapter. In typical fashion, we are terrible at naming things. “Degrowth” makes it sound like it’s pro-austerity, which makes people who are already struggling to get by nervous.

But in the simplest terms as I understand it, degrowth is about reorienting the economy around satisfying human needs over generating profit. Corporations MUST sell things to survive and in order to grow (which they need to do thanks to the stock market) they must sell more and more things. So what do they do? They keep trying to sell more stuff. There’s advertising and the culture of consumerism it contributes to. There’s planned obsolescence. There’s cheating out on production despite any negative externalities that creates. Things that could be done better with new technology or as a public service are blocked by entrenched interests that MUST do everything they can to make sure they are able to keep selling more and more. Any economic opportunity that could be exploited for a profit MUST be taken. Some undeveloped land? There could be a building there generating rent. The cost to the ecosystem isn’t even a part of the equation unless govs make it.

And to what end is all of this for? Are we happier or healthier? It sure doesn’t seem that way. So we have an economic system that is destroying the environment while also failing to meet basic human needs, all because the incentives and metric for success wholly excludes those values in favor of purely focusing on profit.

So the goal is to reorganize the economy through collective ownership of the means of production and use the resulting democratic control to place the values that we actually care about front and center. This can mean a lot of different things, many of which would actually improve people’s lives even setting aside the environmental benefit. There are some things that may require some less pleasant sacrifices, but we’ll be at least able to make those decisions based on what we want rather than always maximizing profits.