Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

AnarchoDoom wrote

It's just a "Degrowth" position, whereas most "bourgeois" organizations are still pro-growth nowadays. Not inherently anti-cap tho it's next door to it, as Degrowth is inherently paradoxical to capitalist imperatives and drive.

2

captaindread1 OP wrote

It is not a "degrowth" position.

The confrontation of the two ideas (anti-develpment and degrowth) would be better understood if they were presented as what they really are, the current social critique of modern capitalism and a certain formula for its ecological-administrative stabilisation. Both are about the crisis of the capitalist regime, but one as an enemy and the other as a readaptor. Indeed, anti-developmentalism is one of the appellatives used to criticise capitalist globalisation from the point of view of the struggles in defence of neighbourhoods and non-urban territory, while degrowth is a catechism of orientations and measures with which to confront exclusion and make it compatible with it. The former is based on a critique of the ideology of progress; the latter is based on a critique of the unlimited growth of the economy. One is eminently negative, it comes to life in the heat of confrontations with the system it seeks to abolish; it is therefore the fruit of activists who theorise. The other is fundamentally positive, born in the offices of the university and the administration, and is therefore a product of experts and civil servants who in no way aspire to subvert any order. The references of anti-development are the AntiTAV Assembly of Euskalherria, the ZAD of Nantes, the mobilisation against the Lemoiz nuclear power station or the occupation of villages threatened by the Itoiz dam. Degrowth, on the other hand, will point to ecovillages, social currencies, consumer groups and integral cooperatives.

Original text: https://lapeste.org/2019/04/miguel-amoros-antidesarrollismo-vs-decrecimiento/

3

AnarchoDoom wrote

This is some extreme level of hairsplitting imo. If you oppose one aspect or another capitalist development, this means you're at the same time opposing a reification of its Growth imperative. For an example, some Native people do a blockade against new lithium mining projects.... this literally is striking at the imperative for technological growth to meet growing evergy demands.

Degrowth, on the other hand, will point to ecovillages, social currencies, consumer groups and integral cooperatives.

No , these are just the means of subsistance proposed as alternative to the dominant imperative of capitalist growth. This is still congruent with anti-development views and strategies.

I might have been wrong in writing like the two terms are synonymous, tho. They aren't synonyms, but rather two somewhat different aspects going in a similar direction.

1