The climate and cost of living crises make belief in expanding GDPs look as stale as last year’s mince pies. But when central governments rely on consumerism to shore up spending, it will be hard for ‘degrowth’ to gain any traction
When Kat Butler made her first post-lockdown trip to the high street in 2021, she found herself staring, disorientated, at the aisles of clothes in the Perth branch of Mountain Warehouse. “There was just rails and rails of stuff,” she says.
Before the pandemic, Butler, 36, a freelance graphic designer, had enjoyed browsing clothes shops, touching the fabrics and inspecting garments’ construction. But when she returned after the lockdown months, she was “just overwhelmed by the amount of stuff”. That sent Butler’s mind spinning into worries about the environmental impact of those unending hangers of garments, and led her to re-evaluate her consumption habits.
She is not the only person to have started questioning the idea of shopping as a leisure pursuit. Plenty of consumers report remonstrating with themselves and their friends about the state of the planet, and how that collides with their desire to freshen up their wardrobe with fast fashion and £5 dresses.
With the Christmas shopping season entering its peak, this soul-searching has raised several questions. Is a growing slice of western society finally falling out of love with consumption and growth as an end in itself? And if this phenomenon, described at its most extreme as “degrowth”, is taking hold, how will economies meet their spending needs? Or is it just that surging inflation and a cost of living crisis have placed a speed bump in the way of ever more consumption?….
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Eric Toussaint: Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions
Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism
Robert Urquhart: Capital accumulation as eternal recurrence: theology of the bad infinity
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