People first: Getting to the root of degrowth in South Africa (Part Two)

This is Part Two in a two-part series. Part One can be read here.

John F Kennedy’s environmental adviser, the economist Kenneth Boulding, once quipped that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”.

Boulding saw the slow rise of consumerism during his early childhood in England and when he moved to America, he witnessed first-hand how manufacturers and advertisers constantly pushed the envelope to get people to buy and consume more stuff every day. 

Belief in the Keynesian concept of continued population growth and productivity was unshakeable.

Boulding’s contemporary, the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter, would later develop a theory on production known as “creative destruction” — the tendency for new innovations to rapidly replace old ones and render them obsolete. 

American firms leveraged America’s post-World War II global dominance to export GDP obsession, rapid innovation, hyper-consumerism, privatisation, supermarketisation, Macdonaldisation and other free-market policies to the rest of the world.

As free-market GDP growth became the dominant orthodoxy globally, hyper-consumerism led to two things: 1) ecological collapse with kneecapping of ecosystems’ capacity to renew themselves; and 2) rising wealth inequalities around the world.

In “Laudato Si on Care for our Common Home”, Pope Francis says this about the global economy’s “rapidification” and throwaway culture:

“Each year hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources. The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, which starts with an analysis of the Marikana massacre as a symbol of wealth disparity in South Africa, shows that the wealth gap between the rich and the poor has increased exponentially over the past two decades. 

He believes that without major interventions, this trend is set to continue.

Another one of Boulding’s contemporaries, John Maynard Keynes, noted before Piketty that free markets do not really possess self-balancing mechanisms, and so the state (or some other countervailing force) has to intervene to make proper adjustments for the good of society in general.

In the face of environmental degradation, pollution and accelerated privatisation of commons (with the dramatic rise of private water companies for example), some people started calling for a new kind of society in the 1960s. 

The degrowth movement was born precisely to amplify the calls for this new society.

Although the word degrowth causes consternation in some quarters where people link it to regression, deprivation, post-growth and even stagnation, it is really about a new relationship between humankind, its environment and the commons, as André Gorz once noted, and as I showed in the definitions section (Part One) here in Daily Maverick. 

It is definitely not a call for the abolition of free markets, but rather a call for a different type of free market.

From Gorz to Serge Latouche, José Bové and even Nicolas Hulot, what degrowthers want is really a more just and inclusive society where there is less ecocide and more deliberate focus on human beings’ wellness.

And this brings us to economics and accumulation in a South African context. South Africa’s economy is driven largely by fossils and intensive agriculture that is heavily reliant on water, pesticides, capital, fertilisers and mechanisation.

The problem with this accumulation logic is that most of the generated wealth is funnelled to a tiny minority while large swathes of the population remain poor. The three richest South Africans own wealth equal to the poorest 28 million. 

There further has to be greater investment in and more efficient use of commons (water, electricity, public transit systems, parks, recreation facilities, etc) with community members playing an integral part in managing all these resources. 

The precious stones, mobile phones and cars we buy also have human costs. Every time we replace a mobile phone we probably invest in conflict minerals from eastern DRC.