The Moral Urgency of Degrowth w/ Timothée Parrique & Yusra Bitar

Elia is joined by French economist and researcher Timothée Parrique and Lebanese researcher Yusra Bitar to talk about why tackling our world’s most pressing challenges must include conversations around degrowth.

Timothée Parrique is a researcher at the School of Economics and Management of Lund University (Sweden) and is the lead author of “⁠Decoupling debunked – Evidence and arguments against green growth⁠” (2019), a report published by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). He is also author of ⁠Ralentir ou périr. L’économie de la décroissance⁠ (September 2022, Seuil), a wide-audience book adaptation of his PhD dissertation.

Yusra Bitar is the Lebanon Research Fellow with the Environmental Politics program at the ⁠Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)⁠.

Yusra and Elia are also both Fellows of the ⁠Post Growth Institute⁠ (2022 and 2023 respectively).

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Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Artin Salimi
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Why are we wiring our economies to churn out a maximum and increasing amount of goods and services that requires an increasing amount of hours that we should and could spend doing other things?

Timothée Parrique: Hello! I’m a researcher in ecological economics, currently at the School of Economics and Management at Lund University in the southwest of Sweden. I wrote my PhD dissertation, which ended up being titled “The Political Economy of Degrowth,” in 2019—it is a broad, wide, and atrociously long theoretical work, the aim of which was to define what degrowth is and what its economic implications are. I’ve been translating that work into a shorter French book—soon in German and Spanish, and then, I hope, English. 

I’m also conducting research on the issue of decoupling and the impossibility of “green growth,” and the financing of welfare systems without economic growth.

Yusra Bitar: Hello, I am a research fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative, in their environmental politics program. I am also a Post Growth affiliate fellow; I joined as a fellow last year. I am also someone who researches degrowth and how it applies to the Middle East region, and last year I wrote a piece on degrowth in the Lebanon context, and what degrowth within the realm of economic collapse means, and what the ideation can mean, and what the the recession we’re experiencing is right now and how it differs from degrowth—and how we can build off of what’s coming out within the cracks of the collapse, and transition.

I’ve used Timothée’s work for that piece, so thank you for that.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thank you both. Yusra, do you want to talk more about the difference between degrowth and recession? I think it’s a good angle to this conversation.

YB: Sure. To give a bit of context, there has been an economic crisis in Lebanon since 2018, although arguably the roots of it are decades old, and that has translated to hyperinflation, which has meant an inability to access particular resources that maintain a particular standard of living, in addition to accessing electricity, accessing healthcare, and so on.

In the context of the piece, what I was experiencing was extremely dark streets, just like everybody else in the country, because there was no money to purchase fuel for the electricity grid. I was walking with a friend who has heard me blab about degrowth for years, and he told me, Are you happy now? This is happening; degrowth is here. You got degrowth! That statement was him teasing, but it was also one of the narratives that we know very well as thinkers around degrowth: that recession and degrowth are the same, that degrowth implies the opposite of prosperity.

I wrote the piece to explain what the difference is, and also to see what solutions coming up as a response to the catastrophe could create an alternative. Some examples I gave were initiatives stemming out of different parts of Lebanon that were creating a food sovereignty network, trying to create a sustainable food system. Another is a faster shift to renewables; there was a form of transition to solar and wind energy, but it wasn’t happening as fast as it has since the collapse and since the hyper-necessity of immediate energy access. So another example I gave was the renewables initiative happening all over the country.

But this needs to be implemented on a policy level, and not by haphazard initiatives here and there by those with the material ability to initiate those alternatives.

EA: I have personally experienced this reflex as well: you say “degrowth” and an image of scarcity comes into people’s minds. Of course, the idea of degrowth and post-growth is actually post-scarcity thinking.

Timothée, you published your PhD in 2019; the timing was pretty good, for unfortunate reasons, with COVID in 2020, and this idea of degrowth was arguably being taken more seriously in “mainstream” thought. What has your experience of that been? What can you share with us? 

This is on the back of a post you published as a response to the Economist, because they had covered the Beyond Growth conference in a rather ridiculous way.

TP: That piece from the Economist was titled “Meet the lefty Europeans who want to shrink the economy.” The first thing is exactly what you guys were talking about: Look! There’s no growth in Europe, you should be happy! and they point to Italy, which has been in what we macroeconomists call secular stagnation, very low or stagnant rates of economic growth (this is also famously happening in Japan), for a few decades. They’re like, That’s the utopia you’re calling for! 

We should be worried about this. You’re a journalist reporting on a conference where there are five thousand people, including all the world’s experts that work on the topic, and you don’t even manage to understand the first thing about the concept? It’s pretty worrying.

But the way I usually explain it is to really make the difference: recessions and degrowth do have something in common, the reduction of production and consumption—but during a recession that reduction is accidental. It’s undesired. It comes with deleterious social outcomes like unemployment, austerity, poverty, a lack of investment in environmental projects, all of that. Degrowth, on the other hand, the way the concept is discussed by academists and activists, describes a planned, selective, and equitable downscaling of economic activities.

Here you can really make the difference. Recession—unplanned and unwanted. Degrowth—designed and desired.

My favorite analogy to really make the difference is the following: associating degrowth with recession just because the two involve reduction of GDP is absurd; it would be like arguing that an amputation and a diet are the very same thing, just because they both lead to weight loss.

Science is complex. We are using a concept that means more than just saying the word. Degrowth is not just degrowing everything, in the same way that communism is not putting everything in common, or sustainable development doesn’t mean sustainably developing everything. There’s a bit of a subtlety, especially for a concept that has existed since 2002 at least.

Our responsibility as experts on the topic is to explain, but it’s also the responsibility of journalists, when you attend a conference, to cover what is being said. This piece published by the Economist is not really a critique, it’s a sneer. It’s just saying, A bunch of leftist radicals have hijacked the parliament for three days and they’re talking nonsense. He calls it a pretty wacky “growth-as-the-root-of-all-problems jamboree” among a cast of minor academics. 

This is kind of funny—”minor academics” like Joseph Stiglitz, Vandana Shiva, Johan Rockström, Kate Raworth, Raj Patel? These giants respected by everyone, even outside heterodox economics?

EA: It says a lot. Yusra you can also jump in of course. But I find it a bit baffling that this is still a common attitude among a lot of people in the economics world, whether they are themselves economists or journalists who write on econ, or financial journalists, this idea that questioning growth as a model, questioning GDP, is beyond taboo—it’s too ridiculous to comprehend, you’re almost committing a blasphemy.

I use that word purposefully, because it feels like there’s a religious tenet, or a number of commandments, and the first one is Thou shalt not criticize economic growth. I find it baffling—maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should be more sober about this. But I find it interesting that someone can go to a conference like this one, which as you mentioned was pretty varied as well—there were even some “green-growthers” there (who were not very popular). The first speakers included Ursula von der Leyen herself, who I have a lot of critiques of. It wasn’t, like, an Occupy camp. 

It was pretty straightforward as to what this conference was about and what it was going to explore; the plenaries were pretty different from one another at times; and there was quite a lot to get out of it regardless of what your original take might be—there’s something for you there. That was one of the strengths of the conference.

YB: It’s interesting—when I talk about degrowth and the tenets of degrowth with people at home here, and explain where it comes from as a true response to climate catastrophe—there’s a constant reminder that this is what we’re dealing with in relation to the changing climate—there’s more of an acceptance. I’ve personally found it to be rare that there’s the same kind of response or rigidness in relation to growth here.

It’s probably because in the past few years we haven’t really been growing, when it comes to the measurements of GDP and so on, so there’s a very lived experience of what recession looks like and what happens in recession in relation to degrowth. There’s more of a responsiveness here, despite the fact that the rest of the so-called Global North is more responsible for shrinking so the world can breathe.

EA: Yeah, there’s a different attitude from the examples we’re more familiar with, this idea of You just need to be realistic! but the “reality” of economic growth is not exactly tenable if you’re in a situation where you haven’t benefited as much, or at all, from that framework. It has mostly been a one-way situation with capital and labor being produced for the Global North—this is an oversimplification; there are nuances within the Global South as well, but as a general trend this is definitely true.

The Economist‘s argument, as a symptomatic example, is not a serious one. There are serious arguments in the degrowth and post-growth movement that allow for a lot of nuance as to how to do something, where to do it, an when, but arguments like this aren’t very serious.

But Timothée, you’ve described situations where already-rich countries like Italy and Japan haven’t really been growing (in the GDP sense) in a while now, and despite that, there’s still an obsession with GDP and economic growth—”obsession” was the word used repeatedly at the conference. You’ve argued that this obsession has generated more costs than benefits. Can you flesh that out a bit? 

This is something that still emotionally resonates even with people who wouldn’t disagree theoretically with the premise of what we’re arguing for but for whom it feels unrealistic or too utopic. What does this assumption get fundamentally wrong?

TP: There’s a concept I like from American economist Herman Daly called “uneconomic growth,” which is growth, extra production, that bears more social and ecological cost than financial benefits. When we talk about economic growth at the macroeconomic level, the discussion gets very abstract, and we fall within this obsession with “growthism” or the ideology of growth, where we assume that everything should exponentially increase forever.

But imagine you’re the owner of a small bakery. You’re just making bread, and selling your bread. You’re starting out, you don’t have enough customers, you haven’t reached what microeconomists would call an “optimal scale” where you can sell enough bread to be in balance and you can pay the rent, you can pay your workers, and for other factors of production. So then you might be in a bit of an upscaling mentality, a growth mentality.

But then imagine putting yourself in a situation where you need to exponentially sell more every year! After some point, you’re going to realize that if you want to do this, first you will need to work more. You’ve realized the first trade-off we have—it’s true at the micro scale, it’s true at the meso scale, it’s true at the macro, national scale; it never disappears: the day was, is, and will forever be twenty-four hours long. 

If you want to sell more bread, you will have to focus on that. Maybe you’ll have to open another place, maybe hire more people—that means more time. And if you want to do this, you’ll need to make your oven function longer, you’ll need more flour and more raw materials; your material footprint will increase, because you cannot make bread out of nothing.

In that very small experience of what should be considered a very instinctive economic activity, we understand that labor time, energy, and materials are the real limiting factors of the growth of any economic activity. These are not present in that overall discourse about economic growth.

I’m writing a piece where I analyze the speeches of the five people who came from the European Commission, which all showed perfect examples of We want economic growth! We need to make it green and sustainable, whatever you hippies want, but we won’t give up growth, because growth is progress, growth is the future, growth is modernity, growth is civilization! But I realized that this is just dumb. It shows a misunderstanding of what growth is, on the results side of things: if that extra income ends up in the pocket of those who are already rich, it has no effect on well-being; actually it increases inequality, and since inequality is correlated to unwell-being, we know that it will decrease quality of life.

And if that income both drives inequality and also the stuff you produce is not really necessary production—bullshit firms doing marketing to sell stuff you didn’t need in the first place—that’s a lot of economic agitation, but for literally zero well-being.

So right now in these high-income countries that are so desperate to stimulate their economy, they are refusing to accept that at some point your economy reaches an optimal scale: You know what? We’re good. We don’t want to work more. We don’t want to mobilize more energy and materials, because we can’t, because we will need these materials in other countries—and we also have enough if we organize ourselves equitably, intelligently, to be content, to be satisfied, to be sufficient.

This mentality of sufficiency is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the ideology of infinite growth.

EA: With this, lead us to what you and others have called a “steady-state” economy.

TP: I like to link it up this way: degrowth is a transition towards a steady-state economy. Picture a country like France, Germany, Sweden, the US, Australia—countries whose capacities for production as well as consumption are so beyond the carrying capacities of their ecosystems. We realize that you cannot “green” that. You can’t green it even if you have no growth; even if you just maintain these levels, you won’t be able to get back within safe planetary boundaries.

The only way to make it work is to reduce production and consumption. You do so until you manage to get back within your biocapacity. Once you’re there, then you stabilize your change. You’ve done your diet, now you’re back into full health. You know that this infrastructure, like the use of energy and materials over time, won’t be able to grow forever. It can change a bit; it can oscillate—the dynamic concept of steady-state economy is not an economy that is stagnant or that has stopped, like a game of musical chairs. It’s rather something that, within the same material infrastructure, manages to focus on quality activities, on well-being as an objective.

We know from social science that this does not derive from the quantity of stuff you own. It derives from the quality of experiences you have. You can have twelve cars in your garage, but if you have no friends you’ll be miserable. You could have no car, but a bunch of bikes; you could have many friends and go on picnics and have time to nap and go to the theater, play music—you’d be the happiest human on Earth.

If that’s true—if we know this from psychology, from sociology, from anthropology—why are we wiring our economies to churn out a maximum and increasing amount of goods and services that requires an increasing amount of hours that we should and could spend doing other things?

EA: This idea of sustainability—the very idea of “to be sustained” sounds very good in principle, of course. What is it about the term “sustainable development” (in the way it is usually framed) that feels like an oxymoron?

Why would you want to go through so much effort just to produce and consume things that are not needed, that are completely decorrelated from quality of life?

TP: The term “décroissance” in French came as a critique of sustainable development back in 2002. The people who coined “décroissance conviviale”—convivial degrowth—were criticizing sustainable development as being a Western, capitalistic, growth-obsessed paradigm, a paradigm that instead of touching the root of the problem was actually trying to “green” an imperialist global form of unsustainable exploitation.

We see this today: look at the “sustainable development goals,” and you’re like, Okay, why not? Hunger, education, climate, water—yeah, we like this. And then you’re like, Economic growth, what is this about? We’re completely confusing the means; agitating your economy is not an end in itself—it’s not a goal, it’s a means. You agitate your economy and mobilize labor, time, and materials to produce something that you need, and then you use that thing. That bike to go from A to B is mobility, and you derive some satisfaction from that.

That satisfaction can be liberty, access to healthcare and healthy food—that’s the goal we should be measuring. Economic growth should not be a goal. Today the degrowth and post-growth discourse provides a more sophisticated vision of sustainability, because it allows you to talk about differentiated responsibility and differentiated lines of action. To summarize it: countries that overshoot in the Global North should degrow. If that is the case, better to plan it democratically so that it can be a just and convivial degrowth: so that degrowth to a steady-state, for countries in the Global South who find themselves in a situation where they still have a lot of unmet needs, they can have access to energy, material, and labor time so they can upscale.

I try not to use the word “grow,” because it implies a linear infinite. But they can upscale and develop the productive capacity they need to reach sufficiency. Both these trajectories meet in the middle in a sustainable, steady state where everyone can satisfy their needs under planetary boundaries.

YB: The challenge for sustainable development, and what development and the measurement of development means—it always brings up the same images for people. It’s often images of a city or an image of a lot of activity. The dominant idea of what progress means is still there, and the challenge is trying to find a way to create alternative images so that’s more of a commonality.

Going back to what you’ve been working on a lot, Timothée, the idea and fallacy of green growth: why can’t growth be green? Is there no way that economic growth can take into consideration ecological laws and still somewhat grow?

TP: I would say no. There are three ways of approaching this. The strongest rebuttal, and this is consensual now, is that all experiences we’ve seen of growth in the past have never been within planetary boundaries. If you take a multi-impact perspective—take into account not only carbon emissions, but soil, impact on biodiversity, fresh water use, emissions of pollutants, material footprint, all of that—we realize that when you produce and consume more, that puts a strain on these resources. 

That derives from a very simple biophysical truth, which is that no economic activity is possible without time, energy, and materials. Everything requires a human; even the most dematerialized service will require someone who will need to eat food, be warm, wear clothes, and move themselves to go to work. This is why we can decouple, to a certain extent, certain things. If you produce services instead of heavy industry, of course, you’re going to have a different impact, and that overall impact can be lower.

It can be lower, but it cannot be null. And if it cannot be null, it means that if you keep growing your economy, then necessarily, mathematically, unavoidably, at some point your total impact will overbalance the efficiency impact of each of the things you produce. This is what we see historically in all the countries in the world we’ve been looking at in all the empirical studies we have on decoupling—which is almost a thousand studies. That’s the first part, looking at the past.

Then some people come and say, Yeah, but in the future… The future is already there. Europe’s “Fit for 55” means to reduce emissions by fifty-five percent by 2030—that’s in the coming seven years. So the second part of the argument is that even if green growth were theoretically possible (I will soon show it’s not), it would be foolish to think it is feasible. Because it involves a speeding up of all the things that allow us to add decoupling to a point that is unrealistic, especially since certain impacts have not even started to decouple, even in the most progressive countries in the world (in terms of environmental policy).

The only way to have green growth at this point would be to completely change the way we measure economic growth. Then there’s no point, because economic growth is supposed to be a measure of production and consumption. Statistically, we could just do a bit of magic and start counting different things that we did not include before, and that means GDP would be bigger, and call it growth. But that would be stupid. Because the goal today for sustainability is to decrease environmental use, the use of natural resources. This is what needs to go down.

When we talk of green growth, we focus on the wrong end of the stick, because we’re like, Yeah, we want to grow, and we want to do it as green as possible. No! Actually, what’s important is the “green.” What we need is green. The other problem with green growth is that even if you were to show that it has been happening before and therefore we expect it is feasible to happen in the near future, and it is theoretically possible to completely decouple so that it’s a viable strategy for sustainability—even if you manage to do this…I’ve been looking at this since 2018, every day, and I’ve not found a single person on Earth who manages to put together that proof.

And even if you were to do this, then you still face this very powerful argument: Why would you want to go through so much effort just to produce and consume things that are not needed, that are completely decorrelated from quality of life?

EA: You mentioned writing a piece responding to people from the European Commission. I’m curious if you could give us a preview of that. Within the Beyond Growth conference at the European parliament in Brussels, there was a panel that I have been told was a bit cringey, a debate between the positions of degrowth, post-growth, and green growth—that was how it was framed, which I find a bit bizarre. And it’s not just this panel, but there were a few people here and there, including Ursula von der Leyen herself, saying green growth is possible. 

I’m repeating the religious aspect a bit, but it feels a bit like a mantra: if you repeat it enough, maybe if you say it a hundred times, it becomes true. And on the other side there are all these climate scientists and ecological economists and other folks who are saying, This is the data; this is why this cannot work! Also it makes a lot of sense why this won’t work, and here are a thousand examples of things you agree are true that show why!

TP: The panel you’re referring to was the focus panel that happened on May 15 in the morning; you can watch the replay. It was called “Which Prosperous Future? Confronting Narratives of Growth.” Michael Jacobs, professor of political economy at the University of Sheffield in the UK, was the one representing green growth. You can have a look at this and make yourself an opinion. 

There was also a very good debate between Samuel Fankhauser and Jason Hickel moderated by Kate Raworth at the University of Oxford from [late last] year. And I find when we compare these two, there is the scientific aspect: the burden of proof should be on the one believing that we can do something that we’ve never done. Very often these people will tell you: Look, we’ve never done degrowth either, so you have to prove that it works!

That’s silly. Do I need to mathematically demonstrate that if you don’t fly a plane, you don’t emit the emissions compared to someone who argues we can fly more planes and emit less? No. It’s like you’re a flat-Earther. If you’re a flat-Earther, the burden of proof is on you! You have to show us that your theory is stronger than that the Earth is round. Green growthers are unjustly passing the burden of proof onto degrowthers, where what we argue is a very common-sensical argument: the most sustainable resource is the one you don’t need to use.

Again, we’ve seen this historically, also during COVID: lockdown is a very good way of reducing environmental pressures. That’s more of an amputation-like strategy; we should explore the possibility of recreating the same consequences but in a convivial, more just and more democratic fashion. 

The first thing that comes to mind is that the narratives don’t have the same depth. Green growth is not a utopia. When I debate green growth, usually with an economist (usually economists or entrepreneurs defend this view—or officials, and we’ll come back to your example of the European Commission), it’s not a utopia. It’s people saying, Let’s keeping doing what we’re doing, and it will be green if you add a carbon tax! I mean literally, it’s only this.

You can watch the debate between Sam [Fankhauser] and Jason Hickel, and you’ll see the only thing Sam is advocating for is putting a tax on carbon and that will change behaviors and we’ll phase out fossil fuels. I’m like, This is your solution? It sounds a bit like one bullet, one ring to rule them all. Whereas when you look at degrowth, there is a diversity of strategies and policies.

In an article we wrote with Nick Fitzpatrick, published in 2022, we identified 380 instruments in the degrowth literature; degrowth is connected to a utopia, like Solarpunk and ecosocialism, and social and solidarity economy, and a commons-based economy—it’s a much richer paradigm. Whereas green growth is basically just trying to decarbonize the economy. That’s all they’ve done. They’ve not even looked at other environmental impacts. 

No one in the green growth discourse has anything to say about biodiversity, for example. Say “biodiversity” to an economist, and they’ll look at you like you’re an idiot. Are you talking about my dog? Yeah, I like my dog. We walk in the park on Sunday. But what does this have to do with the economy? 

This is what the economy is! Animals, energy, labor.

EA: Yusra, you wanted to ask a question. I’ll just quickly say that the image this brings to mind is of policymakers, economists, and others who want to square that circle by having the answer they want and trying to fit the question to the framework, to squeeze in that answer—and that’s just not how science works. We may have a suggestion or a hint; if we think something might be the case we have to test it against the evidence. And if the evidence doesn’t stack up, we change the conclusion, we don’t change the evidence.

YB: It makes me really wonder: is it a question of ideology? Is it unwillingness to understand the severity of the climate catastrophe? Is it fear of accountability at some point for those who are still benefiting from fossil fuels? I really don’t comprehend this rigidity to sticking to business-as-usual, given the severity of the crisis. It’s just difficult to accept as a playing field, despite the fact that there has been a lot of progress.

There has been a lot of progress when it comes to seeing more people thinking of post-growth and degrowth. For me, I’m curious, Timothée, when it comes to your work and the conversations you have in your network, when it comes to the “Global South” in contrast to the “Global North” in relation to degrowth—as we said before, it is an idea that so-called “developed” countries need to shrink for the rest of the world to grow. But I do wonder if more conversations of how that relates to the rest of the world have been coming up: conversations on degrowth in the Middle East, for example, or just in general?

TP: The first theorist of degrowth in France was Serge Latouche, who wrote Le pari de la décroissance in 2006, and Serge Latouche was a rather mainstream economist at first, and he did his PhD thesis fieldwork in Africa, in Congo. That’s where he got the idea of degrowth. He was like, This development strategy is just pure social and ecological exploitation; it’s pure accumulation by dispossession and deterioration. So we’re calling it growth, but actually it’s just enslaving the Global South for the interest of the imperial mode of living in the Global North. And we dare call it economic growth even though the benefits of that aren’t even increasing quality of life and are so unevenly spread even in the North.

He came back being like, Wow! This development paradigm is really imperialism. In his book, he likes to remind readers that his thoughts on degrowth started in the Global South. It was not a reflection on shopping malls in Luxembourg and the experience of consumerism in the North. It was rather starting from the impact of these lifestyles, like a detective tracing back: Why are we extracting so many minerals in Africa? What are we exporting, what do we do with this and that?

All the microexperience—within the family, within friendships, within the municipality, with the people on your street—anthropologically, for thousands of years, it’s been based on this: we do this fairly, we try to make it work. Now, weirdly, at the macroeconomic level, we’ve reached a situation where we’ve organized a system where if you don’t have money, you don’t eat.

Planned obsolescence is another topic he spent all his life working on, as a way of connecting these two: the development perspective to enslave the Global South to become all-you-can-eat buffets for the rich of the Global North—that then lets for-profit capitalist companies use planned obsolescence to make profits out of creating a dependency among consumers on always replacing their phones and computers every year. That gave him a systemic perspective of growth as an ideology and as a phenomenon of exploitation. 

It’s a critique of development and a critique of capitalism, but the prism of growth is very powerful because it’s a discourse today that is so important—when we talk about degrowth, the media gets all riled up. The Economist feels like it needs to defend its ground. If we were to call it a critique of capitalism, they’d be like, Oh, just another Marxist. There are many. So there’s a bit of novelty in this. 

And you’re right: the concept of degrowth was translated into English in 2008; before that it was very European. It was very present in Italy, and Catalonia in Spain, in Belgium, in Quebec. But when it gets translated to English, it moves to other countries, and now it’s moving beyond. There are activists and scholars who are very active in these circles who are from South America, from some parts of India, and other countries where they connect with other discourses: Buen vivirin South America; Ubuntu in Africa; eco-Swaraj in India. There’s a bit of a convergence that some scholars call a “pluriverse” of concepts.

Around the Mediterranean and western Europe, we have décroissance, degrowth, but that connects with the “voluntary simplicity” of the people in Quebec and maybe the “minimalism” of some people in the US, and the “buen vivir” of people in South America, and other concepts, each in their context, that share a number of values: a certain relation to nature, sufficiency, justice, care, these kinds of things. That’s why we can include them in a pluriverse of shared values. 

What they also have in common is their contestation and criticism of global capitalism as a system of exploitation. That’s also what brings them together, and that makes it into a very strong Avenger-like alliance. At this conference in parliament, we saw the diversity of these concepts—and it’s not a competition to see which concept is best; it makes us realize that the thing we’re criticizing is more specific than we thought. It’s not human nature, it’s not demography, it’s something very specific: it is growth-obsessed forms of profit-seeking capitalism based on a very particular and culturally-situated relation with nature that is imperialistic, commodifying, and all of that.

It’s a good way of realizing that here there is no risk of degrowth becoming a new imperialism, becoming the new “sustainable development” where we will have sustainable degrowth goals and we’ll impose it on everyone in the world. It’s rather a shut-off button for global capitalism. Guys, just shut up and let the pluriverse live.

EA: I love this idea of the pluriverse. I attended a summer school last year in Portugal, “The Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice,” at the University of Coimbra. It was largely Spanish-speaking oriented. There were quite a lot of Latin Americans, and that vision wasn’t as much like, Here’s this thing that has been cooked up in the Global North, what do you think? It was more like ecology and climate science are responding to the pressing needs of the present moment.

There are these other frameworks and worldviews in Indigenous politics in what is called Latin America that have reached an equilibrium, or at least have advocated for an equilibrium, for much longer periods of time. Now it’s like, How can we find ways to link all of these up and accept a pluriverse rather than a one-size-fits-all model which everyone should do? That has always been part of the problem anyway.

You discuss the idea of universal basic services. Most folks listening to this have heard of universal basic income, and maybe they’ve heard of a jobs guarantee framework. Can you put these three things in conversation?

TP: These are some of the many policies being discussed to organize degrowth as a temporary phase, and then post-growth, the long-term running of a growthless economy. Of course, that remains an economy, so we just have to take care of welfare provision—the ability of people to exist, the goods and services necessary to satisfy certain needs. When you’re hungry, you want to have access to food. If you cannot, you’re in an economy that sucks, that doesn’t work.

Universal basic services is facilitating access to a certain basket of goods and services. Today we live in a predominately capitalist society where most of these goods and services are commodified. This means they are market commodities. If you want to have access to them, you need to buy them. If you want a bike, you need to buy one. You go to the shop, you give them money and they give it to you. You don’t have the money, you don’t have a bike. You want to live in a city, you have to pay rent. You want to buy food, you have to give money.

The problem is, if you live in a society where you don’t have enough money, or if you live in a society that goes through a transformation where some people have less money, then you’re going to find yourself in a strain and you’re going to have unmet needs, which is not good. What about we take care of some of these services collectively, like we already do for education and healthcare? Instead of US-style, where you go to the hospital and if you want something you need to pay, and if you don’t have the money you don’t get it, what if we say there is a social guarantee of access to healthcare?

We’ve been developing this in many welfare states; the question is just to expand it. Housing, energy, telecommunications—all these things should be guaranteed rights of access. And when it comes to financing, that should be collectively organized—not by individual users’ purchasing power, but through collective purchasing power. 

You can see the relation between UBI and UBS. UBI is a more market solution, because it’s still I give you money and you do whatever you want. But if you live in a capitalist society where all these goods and services are sold by for-profit companies that use every single opportunity to push up their prices, I’ll give you dollars or euros and you’ll just give them to these companies; they’ll make profit and they’ll give it to very rich people who will just reinvest it into more privatization of public infrastructure and more environmental degradation. So it doesn’t really work. UBS is a very good way of making sure you’re giving access to goods and services, and by doing so you preserve access. There is no monetary leakage. 

There’s also a middle ground, where you give a basic income in an alternative currency—not the euro, not the dollar, not Bitcoin, but some local green currency with which you can only buy certain things, or that can be delimited to certain territories, so you’re sure the green euro you’re using here is not leaking into the financial sector or anywhere else, like a tax haven.

We cannot talk about a jobs guarantee without talking about worktime reduction. These two go together. The way it works is, if you want to contract production and consumption in an economy, you’re going to contract the amount of hours you spend working. One good way of avoiding unemployment, which is undesirable currently, is to share the available time better. If you have to produce fifty percent, instead of firing half of your people and having half of the people working full time and half of the population working zero time and being miserable, then you put everyone part-time. We all work fifty percent, we are all employed, you keep your colleagues, you keep your work space, and we all have more free time.

Macroeconomically, there is no difference between these two scenarios. But socio-politically, we clearly see that we would prefer to live in a society where everyone has access to employment, because it’s also an important social function. So worktime reduction is a very good reactive policy to avoid brutal undesirable unemployment. It’s also something we should treat as a goal. Working less is what an economy is for: to liberate free time, to do stuff you can autonomously decide.

A job guarantee articulates with this, because the problem today is labor itself is being commodified. For-profit companies today, commercial companies, they’re the ones paying you to do stuff, they’re the ones creating jobs, mostly (if we’re not talking about public jobs). And they’re creating jobs only for activities that are lucrative. That predetermines what kinds of jobs exist. A lot of jobs we would like to have—people specialized in ecological reconstruction, people specialized in satisfying unmet needs when it comes to creating new medicine or doing childcare and eldercare we don’t have enough people doing today—won’t be created, because all the hours will be focused on doing marketing and bullshit jobs and jobs in the financial and banking sectors, and stuff that might not be necessary.

The job guarantee is guaranteeing access to a job as a right. That’s the first thing. But the way it’s being organized and practiced, it gives the community—which could be the state or the territory; a job guarantee I like that we are experimenting on in France happens at the municipal level. We decide, Okay, everyone has access to a job. If you cannot find a job in the labor market, if no companies will hire you, then we will work with you in finding one of your aspiration, one for the stuff you want to do with the skills you currently have. We will find a way of matching this to unmet needs.

That’s something that happens outside the market. It’s a political decision. And what we’ve seen on the ground is that the jobs being created, most of them, are focusing on social care and ecological needs—things that are not fulfilled today by for-profit jobs being created by commercial firms.

YB: Thank you so much. I don’t really have another question, but as you were speaking I was trying to think of how this applies to the SWANA region, especially given that most of the states here are autocratic and hyper-decadent (the Emirates, Saudi—there’s a lot of hyper-consumerism), and how that relates to the demands of people over the past few decades. I’m thinking about how most of the demands fall within the framework of universal basic services; at the core of it, it’s about liberation and freedom, but also access to healthcare, access to green spaces, just the ability to breathe.

There is an overlap between the two—I’m thinking of the pluriverse in this region, and how these solutions that you’re proposing come within the context of hyper-autocratic-decadence regimes.

TP: I’m going to say something that seems very naive, but I think it remains true. We saw that there is this divide between something that is true at the microeconomic level, with the example of the baker; we experience that limitedness every day: if you want to do more, you need to find more factors of production. This never disappears. There is something else that never disappears. Imagine you’re organizing a picnic with your friends, or you’re on holiday and you’re just making food, and someone forgot to bring food. What are you going to do? Well, you don’t eat; that’s just how it works? No. You’re going to share the food fairly and equitably, and we’ll make it work. We’re humans, that’s what we do. We’ll find an arrangement that works.

All the microexperience—within the family, within friendships, within the municipality, with the people on your street—anthropologically, for thousands of years, it’s been based on this. We do this fairly, we try to make it work. Now, weirdly, at the macroeconomic level, we’ve reached a situation where we’ve organized a system where if you don’t have money, you don’t eat. If you don’t have money, you don’t live anywhere. If you don’t have certain skills that a for-profit company wants, you don’t work. This is a very weird anthropological outcome.

We would never run a small event or anything else like this! The fact that we have an economy with these kinds of rules that emerge at the macroeconomic level shows us that we really need to rewire the software we use to run our economies.

EA: We would not act this way in any kind of relationship that any human finds meaningful. There’s always an exception; even in situations where you’re the CEO of a company, unless you’re a horrible person you wouldn’t treat your spouse or your children or your friends or your parents in the same way you treat your employees.

This is quite interesting. I’ve dedicated several episodes to thinking about this, what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism. It’s this idea that there are no alternatives, and because of that, the dominant society has an answer that it “wants” to have, and they’re trying to square that circle, they’re trying to fit everything within that. And given that it doesn’t work on a basic, physical level, then the strategy is a combination of denial and delaying, minimizing the threats that we’re facing.

We’ll slowly wrap up. I’ll ask both of you to reflect a bit on this conversation, and you can tell folks where they can find you and what you’re working on. Also I end by asking guests to recommend three books.

TP: I have a website, and I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon, and I’m doing the best I can to display the stuff I do on these platforms. I am doing many events in French, because my book was quite popular in France. We’ve sold over thirty thousand copies, which is good news for a book in French. It’s called Slow Down or Perish: the Economics of Degrowth. I’ve got a few academic articles coming out soon, including one on how to finance public services during a period of degrowth.

For the books, I’ve got a little gem I was just thinking of. It’s a translation of a French novel published in 2017; the English title is A Journey Through Misarchy: An Essay to Rebuild Everything. You can find the PDF for free at the Anarchist Library. It’s a utopian novel written by a law professor at a university here in France. In the book, a guy is flying to a conference in Australia, the plane crashes, and the guy finds himself in Arcadia, a country of eighteen million people that has implemented a system of government called “misarchy,” the hatred of power. It’s a nice little degrowth-oriented, post-capitalist, anarchist economy. 

Because the guy is a law professor, the institutions he talks about, like melting property prices and specific labor contracts in cooperatives, are so precise. It is outstanding. The world this guy has created is so interesting that I am writing an academic article called “Educating our Desire for a Post-Capitalist World: The Economics of Misarchy,” describing the economic system of that novel as if it really existed, because I think it could.

That’s my first book. If you want to do a bit of work, The Future Is Degrowth came out last summer, written by top scholars in the field. It is my favorite introductory review of degrowth; if you read this you will know it all. It’s full of lists and so well organized. And then of course these is Jason Hickel’s Less Is More, which is my favorite to go into the topic of degrowth if you want a well-written, riveting book.

EA: I think Yusra went to work stuff. This happens on this podcast; it is what it is.

Timothée, thank you for doing this. Yusra, when you hear this, thanks for joining us and sorry we couldn’t have you in the end.

TP: Thank you so much for the invitation. See you next time!

Elia J. Ayoub

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