tl;dr: Stefan Laurin’s painting of Degrowth into the right-wing nationalist corner is lazy armchair journalism
The ideas of a Degrowth-oriented society are a crude mixture of environmentalism and National Socialism – says German journalist Stefan Laurin in a recent blog article. Laurin, who is writing for German outlets like the conservative high-brow magazine ‘Cicero’ as well as the left-wing ‘Jungle World’, focuses his critique on Niko Paech, German economist and Degrowth researcher. It was Paech who introduced the Degrowth debate to Germany by translating the French ‘Décroissance’ into ‘Postwachstumsökonomie’. Laurin takes on Paech and his writings, placing him in close proximity to ethnopluralism – the right-wing concept of racism without races, focused on keeping cultures separated from each other in order to maintain their ‘original’ form – and Walther Darré, the Nazi’s agrarian minister affiliated with the Nordic Ring and author of ‘Blood and Soil’. After reading Laurin’s article you start wondering what just has happened.
Laurin starts off with a more tuned down critique of Paech and his ideas on Degrowth, that center around a reduction of working hours to 20/20, meaning that people would be working 20 hours a week in a reduced sphere of industrial production and market provision of services, while spending the other 20 hours in various forms of community and neighbourhood services outside of the market. The initial critique of Laurin aims at the success story of economic growth in the past 40 years, how much it raised incomes and lifted people across the globe out of poverty. The notion of Degrowth, according to Laurin, is then only attractive to over-saturated high-income societies, a luxury for people wanting to ‘decelerate’ themselves: an ascetic ethics for people already having more than enough. From this critique, that is quite commonly levelled against notions of Degrowth and Postgrowth, Laurin then takes the intermediate step before going full Hitler. He accuses Paech and German social psychologist Harald Welzer, another eminent advocate of Degrowth in Germany, for having an exclusive national perspective only focusing on a ‘Green Germany’ while neglecting the global context. From here it is just a small logically inconsistent leap to place Degrowth and Postgrowth thinking next to Nazism and a ‘völkisch’ ideology. Laurin concludes that Degrowth is an inhuman ideology against all principles of enlightenment, with origins in a brown-green swamp of ‘völkisch’ environmentalism. Its adherents are ignorant, historically blind and turned stupid by living in a luxury that most people on the planet can only dream of.
You could argue of course, why pay attention to a German journalist no one has heard of before, writing on a blog hardly anyone reads? Because in discussions about Degrowth and Postgrowth, I myself encountered similarly structured arguments and I see the danger that they might form a narrative against Degrowth by discrediting it through a whole chain of logical inconsistent arguments, linking Degrowth to Nazism and its inhuman ideology. And then there is that nagging feeling I have had for a long time, that some discussions within the Degrowth and Postgrowth movement are sometimes blind to the very real dangers of escapism and localism and their connection to uglier ideological forms on the far right and left. But lets start first with Laurin’s arguments.
The connection he draws between Nazism and environmentalism, the ‘brown-green swamp’, is a tired old trope that has been debunked many times yet still reemerges in discussions trying to smear green ideas. Kyle Bridge gives a nice overview on the arguments. Environmentalism started out in the 19th century in Britain and the US along with industrialization and with a strong conservationist perspective. In the 1920s and 1930s, environmentalism was instrumentalized by the Nazis but never really embraced. Environmental initiatives were never fully ‘gleichgeschaltet’ and the war preparations had clear dominance over any nature conservation efforts. The seemingly green Walther Darré was first and foremost a ‘blood’ thinker, not a ‘soil’ advocate and his imaginative grasp on the blossoming green movement in postwar Germany is non-existent. Quite differently, environmentalism became a left-wing project, first championed by the Social Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, with politicians like Willy Brandt and Erhard Eppler, then with the formation of the German Green party born out of communist K-groups, feminists, internationalists, and anti-nuclear protesters. Framing environmentalism as closet Nazism is like calling vegetarians fascist just because Hitler liked his vegetables.
Laurin’s lazy journalism continues when he frames Paech and his ‘Postwachstumsökonomie’ as a nationalist concept, totally ignoring the international debate on Degrowth and in fact its international conception, with the first Degrowth conference in Paris in 2008 that I had the great pleasure to attend. Moreover, Degrowth is not a concept for the over-riched societies of the global north but a truly global discourse on alternative development paradigms as can bee seen in the cross-polination of various concepts from Buen Vivir to Radical Ecological Democracy. While it is true that Paech and also Welzer focus in their writings on the German situation, this is very much understandable as both are Germans and refrain from giving well-meant suggestions to ‘developing’ countries on how they should organize their societies and economies. Degrowth is a multi-cultural and multi-contextual concept that needs translation and enculturation. To accuse German thinkers for focusing on the German context for Degrowth appears a bit odd. Especially given the case that both appeared on many podiums and panels on the 2014 Degrowth conference in Leipzig, actively engaging with international scholars and activists. What Laurin shows here is a lack of research as a journalist, a form of lazy armchair writing for armchair salons. To be fair, the blog he wrote the article is titled ‘Salonkolumnisten’.
I do give Laurin credit though for raising an issue that the Degrowth community needs to address more full on. It does have a certain escapist streak, favoring localism over globalism, being overtly critical of a more liberal economic order and sometimes siding with nationalist arguments, be them from Syriza or Podemos (and thus too easily labeled ‘good’). I myself have argued that Degrowth is at its heart a conservative perspective on humanities future stemming from its focus on contraction thus being too much focused on retrenchment and reduction. My plea would be to focus more on hope and also reclaim the notion of ‘progress’ and ‘progressivism’ for Degrowth. A wise move might be to apply Ivan Illich’s concept of conviviality and its focus on individual autonomy realized in interdependence with our personal, social and natural environments – in short to hijack the very modernist term of ‘freedom’ for the Degrowth movement. It might also be an opportune move to draw a clearer distinction between Postgrowth and Degrowth, with Postgrowth being a larger umbrella for a diversity of approaches not focused on economic growth, while Degrowth is a more forceful concept with a clear political-economic idea for a contraction-based society. Postgrowth can then also entail some aspects of green growth or the green economy in a form of ‘minimum beyond growth’ policy program. Another issue that should be debated more openly is the connections of Degrowth and Postgrowth with the wider discourse on Sustainable Development and its inherent global(ist) outlook. Ashish Kothari, Alberto Acosta, Federico Demaria and I had an exchange of arguments about that and together with colleagues from the Institute of Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at KIT I organized a workshop on these and other issues for the future of Postgrowth. One of the results is a German article on how to realign Postgrowth and Degrowth with Sustainable Development.
So what to make of Stefan Laurin and his article? Not much, as I pointed out here. Most of what he says can easily be debunked and it has to. The concept of Degrowth and the idea, that there is a multitude of positive Postgrowth futures for all humanity, is too important to let it be smeared by false accusations. And we as a community of scholars and activists should more strongly raise our voice against those who harbor ideologies of retreat, illiberalism and anti-globalism. We as Postgrowthers have a ‘Bringschuld’, one of those hard to translate German words, to bring a positive vision for a future beyond growth to the table – and not be silenced and ridiculed by people who sit in their comfy chairs.