leff e., descrecimiento o desconstruccion de la economia (english)

7/29/2019 Leff E., Descrecimiento o Desconstruccion de La Economia (English)

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De-growing or deconstruction of economy:

Towards a sustainable world*

Enrique Leff**

Abstract: The worsening of environmental crisis and its incontrovertible relation with the economic processthe globalization of the market economy, has reopened the debate on the possibility of stabilizing, down-shiftingand de-growing of the economy. This article argues that such de-growing is not possible under the establishedeconomic rationality. The construction of sustainable societies demands the deconstruction of the prevalent economicrationality and its substitution by another economy, based on the principles and potentials of an environmentalrationality.

Key words: de-growth, deconstruction, economic rationality, environmental rationality, sustainability.

Decrecimiento o desconstruccin de la economa: Hacia un mundo sustentable

Resumen: El recrudecimiento de la crisis ambiental y su incontrovertible relacin con el proceso econmico

la globalizacin de la economa de mercado, ha reabierto el debate sobre la posible estabilizacin, des-escalamiento y decrecimiento de la economa. Este artculo argumenta que tal decrecimiento no es posible dentro dela racionalidad econmica establecida. La construccin de sociedades sustentables reclama una desconstruccin de laracionalidad econmica y su paulatina sustitucin por otra economa, fundada en los principios y potenciales de unaracionalidad ambiental.

Palabras clave: decrecimiento, desconstruccin, racionalidad econmica, racionalidad ambiental,sustentabilidad

Received: 08.11.08 Accepted: 03.12.08

* * *

The bet for decrease

The 1960s marked an epoch of convulsions of modern world. To the time that emancipation andcountercultural movements burst (syndical, juvenile, of students, of gender), the population pumpexploded and the ecological alarm sounded. For the first time, since the industrial machinery and themarket mechanisms were activated in Capitalism rising in Renaissance, since the West opened history tomodernity guided by the ideals of the freedom and reason Illumination, one of the ideological pillars ofthe western civilization was fractured: the principle of progress impelled by the power of science andtechnology, turned into the most servile and useful tools of capital accumulation, and the myth of alimitless economic growth.

The environmental crisis came thus to question one of the most rooted beliefs in our consciences:not only the one of man supremacy on the other creatures of the planet and the universe, and the right todominate and to exploit nature in benefit of the man, but the sense itself of human existence settled

down in the economic growth and the technological progress: of a progress that was setting in theeconomic rationality, that went forging in the armors of the classic science and that restored a structure, amodel; that was establishing the conditions of a progress that was no longer guided by the coevolution ofcultures with their environment, but by the economic development, modeled by a production mode thatcarried in its entrails a genetic code expressed in a dictum of growth, of a growth without limits!

The pioneers of bioeconomy and the ecological economy stated the relation that the economicprocess keeps with nature degradation, the imperative of internalizing the ecological costs and thenecessity to add distributive counterbalances to the disequilibrating mechanisms of the market. In 1972, astudy of the MIT and the Club of Rome indicated for the first time The Limits of Growth. From therearose the proposals of the growth zero and of an economy of stationary state. In that same time,

Nicholas Georgescu Roegen settled down in his bookThe Law of Entropy and the Economic Process , thefundamental bond between the economic growth and the limits of nature. The production process

generated by the economic rationality that nests in machinery of the industrial revolution, impels it togrow or to die (unlike the alive beings which are born, grow and die, and of the populations of alive


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beings who stabilize their growth). The economic growth, the industrial metabolism and the exosomaticconsumption, imply an increasing consumption of nature -of matter and energy-, that not only faces thelimits of the resources endowment of the planet, but it degrades in the productive process and ofconsumption, following the principles of the second law of thermodynamics.

Four decades after the Quiet spring, the destruction of the forests, the ecological degradation and

the contamination of nature have been increased in a vertiginous way, generating the planet heating bythe gas discharges of conservatory effect and by the ineluctable laws of thermodynamics that havetriggered the entropic death of the planet. The antidotes that have generated the critical thought and thetechnological inventiveness, have been scarcely digestible by the economic system. The sustainabledevelopment shows itself as shortly lasting, because it is not ecologically sustainable!

The economic system in its spirit for globalization, kept avoiding and denying the deep problem.Thus, before internalizing the ecological conditions of a sustainable development, the geopolitics of theendurable development generated a process of nature merchandising and of over-economization of theworld: mechanisms for a clean development were settled down and economic instruments wereelaborated for the environmental management that have advanced in establishing rights of property(private) and economic values to the environmental goods and services. The free nature and thecommunal properties (water, petroleum), are being privatized, while there are settled down mechanisms

to give a price to nature -to the carbon drains-, and to generate markets for the transactions ofcontamination rights in the carbon bond dealing.

Today, given the failure of the efforts to stop the global heating (the Protocol of Kyoto hadestablished the necessity to reduce the GEI to the level reached in 1990), there arises again the conscienceabout the limits of growth and emerges the reclamation for the decrease. This returns as a boomerang,more than as an echo of aged proposals of a romantic ecologism. The names of Mumford, Illich andSchumacher return to be evoked by their critic to technology, their praise of the small that is beautifuland the reclamation of the root in the local. The decrease is stated in front of the failure of the intention ofdematerializing production, of the project impelled by the Wuppertal Institute that pretended to reduce

by 4 and up to 10 times the nature supplies by unit of product. Thus resurges the incontrovertible fact thatthe globalized economic process is unsustainable; that the ecoefficiency does not solve the problem of aneconomy in perpetual growth in a world of finite resources, because the entropic degradation is inevitable

and irreversible.1

The bet for the decrease is not only a moral and reactive critic; a resistance to an oppressive,destructive, unequal and unjust power; a manifestation of beliefs, tastes and alternative styles of life. Thedecrease is not a mere disbelief, but to take conscience on a process that has been restored in the heart ofthe civilizator process that attempts against life of the alive planet and the quality of human life. The callto decrease nust not be a rhetorical resource to give flight to the unsustainability critic of the prevailingeconomic model, but must settle down in a solid theoretical argumentation and a political strategy. The

proposal to stop the growth of the most opulent countries but to continue stimulating the growth of thepoorest countries or less developed is a deceptive exit. The giants of Asia have waked up to modernity,and only China and India are reaching and will be exceeding the levels of conservatory gases dischargesof the United States. To them are added the conjugated effects of the countries of smaller developmentdegree taken by the hegemonic and dominant economic rationality.2

The call to decrease is not only an ideological slogan against a myth, a mot d' ordre to mobilizesociety against the evils generated by growth, or its fatal end. It is not a countermand to flee from growthas the hippies could dispense of the dominant culture, nor a praise of communities marginalized ofdevelopment. Today neither at least the more isolated indigenous communities are out of danger or candisconnect themselves from the effects of globalization insufflated by the bellows of the economicgrowth. Yet, How to deactivate the growth of a process that has restored in its original structure and in itsgenetic code an engine that impels it to grow or to die? How to carry out such intention withoutgenerating as consequence an economic recession with social-environmental impacts of global and

planetary extent? Then although economy by its own internal crises does not reach to grow what thegovernment heads and industralists would desire, to restrain propositively growth is to bet for aneconomic crisis of incalculable effects. For that reason we do not have to only think in terms of decrease,

but of a transition towards a sustainable economy. This could not be a ecologization of the existingeconomic rationality, but Another economy, founded on other productive principles. The decrease impliesthe deconstruction of economy, to the time that a new productive rationality is constructed.


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Ecologist economists, as Herman Daly, have proposed to hold the economy so that it does notgrow beyond what the maintenance of the natural capital of the planet allows, that is, the resourcesregeneration and the remainders absorption (thesis of the strong sustainability), but economy simply isnot conscious and does not consent with such ecologists prescription. It is not a matter of putting a corsetto the fat economy and to put it under a nature diet to avoid an infarct from obesity. It means to change its

organism, to pass from the mechanized and robotized economy from an artificial and against naturaleconomy-, to generate an ecological and socially sustainable economy.

To decrease not only implies dis-climb (downshifting) or to dis-connect from economy. It is notequivalent to de-materialize production, because it would not avoid that the growing economy continuedconsuming and transforming nature until exceeding the limits of sustainability of the planet. Theabstinence and frugality of some responsible consumers do not deactivate the growth mania restored inthe root and the soul of the economic rationality, that keeps inscribed the impulse to capitalaccumulation, to the economies of scale, to urban agglomeration, to market globalization andconcentration of wealth. To jump of the train in movement does not directly lead to retrace the way. Inorder to decrease it is not enough to descend from the fortune wheel of economy; it is not enough to wantto reduce it and stop it. Beyond the rejection to natures merchandising, it is necessary to deconstructeconomy. The excrescences of growth -the pus that buds of the gangrened skin of Earth, when the sap of

life is being drained by knowledge sclerosis and the imprisonment of the thought-, do not feedback to theill body of economy. It is not a matter of reabsorbing its remainders, but to extirpate the malignanttumour. The cirrhosis that corrodes economy will not have to cure itself injecting greater doses of alcoholto the combustion machine of industries, cars and homes.

From the decrease to the economy deconstruction

The economic-oriented strategy that tries to contain the underflow of nature containing it in thecage of modernity rationality, holding it with the market mechanisms, putting it under the prevailingforms of reasoning and interest, has failed. Of the anguish facing the ecological cataclysm and thedisrepute of the effectiveness and moral of the market, restlessness for the decrease is born.

The transition of modernity towards postmodernity meant to pass from the anti-culturalmovements inspired in the dialectics, to propose the coming of a post world -post-structuralism, post-capitalism- that announced something new in history, but still without name, because we have onlyknown to name in a positivist manner what is, and not the time to come. The post-modern philosophyinaugurated the des epoch, opened by the call to de-construction. The solution to growth is not thedecrease, but the deconstruction of the economy and the transition towards a new rationality that orientsthe construction of sustainability.

The economy deconstruction does not only mean a mental exercise to unravel and discover thesources of thought and social interests that were conjugated to give birth to economy, daughter of reasonIllumination and of the commercial interchanges of the rising capitalism, but of a philosophical, politicaland social exercise much more complex. Economy not only exists as theory, as supposed science.Economy is a rationality -a form of understanding and performance in the world- that has beeninstitutionalized and incorporated in our subjectivity. The anxiety to have, to control, toaccumulate, is already reflect of a subjectivity that has been constituted from the institution of theeconomic structure and the rationality of modernity.

To deconstruct the unsustainable economy means to question the thought, science, technology andthe institutions that have restored the cage of the modernity rationality. The economic rationality is not amere superstructure to be investigated and deconstructed by the thought; it is a mode of knowledge andmerchandises production. The economic process is not implanted in the world like a tree that takes rootsin the ground and feeds from its nutrient sap. It is like a dragoon that is dredging the earth, nailing itshooves in the heart of the world, absorbing the water of its water-bearing mantles and extracting blackgold of its oil wells. It is the monster that devours nature to exhale by its gaudy gullets flaming whiffs of

smoke to the atmosphere, contaminating the environment and heating the planet.


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It is not possible to maintain an economy in growth that feeds of a finite nature: mainly aneconomy founded on the use of petroleum and coal, that are transformed in the industrial metabolism, oftransport and familiar economy in carbon dioxide, the main gas causer of the conservatory effect and ofthe global heating that today threatens human life in the planet earth.

The problem of the petroleum economy is not only, neither fundamentally, the one of its

management as public and/or private good. It is not the one of increasing its bid, exploiting the reservesstored in the deposits of the seabed, to again lower the price of the gasolines that have surpassed the 4dollars per gallon. The end of the petroleum epoch does not result from its increasing shortage, but fromits abundance in relation to the absorption and dilution capacity of; of the limit of its transmutation anddisposition towards the atmosphere in form of CO2, gases of conservatory effect. The search of theeconomy equilibrium by a hydrocarbon overproduction to continue feeding the industrial machinery (andagriculturist by the agro-bio-combustibles production), puts in risk the sustaintability of life in the

planet and of economy itself.The economy depetrolization is imperative before the catastrophic risks of the climatic change if

the threshold of the 550 ppm of conservatory effect gases is exceeded, as predicts the Stern Report andthe Intergovernmental Panel of Climatic Change. And this raises a challenge to the economies thatstrongly depend in their oil resources (Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela in our Latin America), not only for their

internal consumption, but for their contribution to the climatic change by feeding the global economy.

The economy decrease not only implies the theoretical deconstruction of its scientific paradigms,but of its social institutionalization and the subjectivization of the principles that intend to legitimize theeconomic rationality as the supreme and inevitable form of the being in the world. Nevertheless, thediverse reasons to deconstruct the economic rationality are not reflect directly in a thought and in strategicoperations capable to deactivate the capitalist machinery. It is not only a matter of ecologizing economy,to moderate consumption or to increase the alternative and renewable sources of energy according to theniches of economic opportunity that become profitable given the costs increase of traditional energies.These principles, even turned into social movement, do not operate by themselves a deactivation of

production in crescendo, but a normativeness and an escape of the system, a crosscurrent that does notstop the overflowed torrent of the growth machine. For that reason we need to deconstruct the economicreasons through the legitimation of other principles, other noneconomic values and potentials; we must

forge a strategic thought and a political program that allows to deconstruct the economic rationality whilean environmental rationality is constructed.

To deconstruct the economy turns out to be a more complex enterprise than the dismantling of awarlike arsenal, the collapse of Berlin wall, the demolition of a city or the casting of a metal industry; it isnot the obsolescence of a machine or of an equipment or the recycling of its materials to renew theeconomic process. The creative destruction of the capital that Schumpeter praised, did not aim at thedecrease, but at the internal mechanism of the economy that takes it to program the obsolescence andthe destruction of the fixed capital to re-estimulate the economic growth insufflated by the technologicalinnovation as bellows of the extended capital reproduction.

Beyond the intention to dismantle the dominant economic model, it deals with unraveling theeconomic rationality interweaving new matrixes of rationality and bailing the ground of the

environmental rationality. This takes to a strategy of deconstruction and reconstruction; not to make thesystem to explode, but to re-organize production, to come unhooked of the the market mechanisms gears,to recover the shelled matter in order to recycle it and rearrange it in new ecological cycles. But thisreconstruction is not simply guided by an ecological rationality, but by the cultural forms and processesof natures resignification. In this sense the construction of an environmental rationality capable todeconstruct the economic rationality, implies nature reapropriation processes and reterritorialization ofcultures.

The economic growth drags with itself the problem of its measurement. The emblematic GIP withwhich the success or failure of the national economies is evaluated, does not measure its negative externalframework. But the fundamental problem is not solved with a multiple scale and a multicriterial methodof measurement -with the green accounts, the calculation of the hidden costs of growth, or an index ofhuman development or an indicator of genuine progress. The task is to deactivate the internal device(the genetic code) of economy, and to do it without triggering a recession of such magnitude thatgenerates greater poverty and destruction of nature.


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The decolonization of the imaginary that sustains the dominant economy will not have to arisefrom the responsible consumption or of a pedagogy of the social-environmental catastrophes, as couldsuggest Latouche when putting in sight the bet for decrease. The economic rationality has beeninstitutionalized and incorporated in our form of being in the world: the homo economicus. Then it dealswith a change of skin, to transform at flight a missile before it explodes in the mined body of the world.

The really existing economy is not deconstructable by means of an ideological reaction and arevolutionary social movement. It is not enough to moderate economy incorporating other social valuesand imperatives, to create a socially and ecologically sustainable economy. The deconstruction impliesstrategic operations to not stay in a mere theoricism, giving blind beats. For, if we have luck we hit the

pitcher and candies fall to us of the sky but we also take the risk that the pitcher falls in our heads. Forthat reason it is necessary to forge Another economy, founded on the potentials of nature and thecreativity of cultures; in the principles and values of an environmental rationality.

The limit of growth, the resignification of production and the construction

of a sustainable future

The limit is the final point from which life is constructed. From death we reorganize our existence.The limit law has refounded sciences. The world is sustained by its limits, from the infinite spacesuspended in the limit of the light speed that Einstein discovered, in the law of the human culture withwhich Oedipus tripped, that Sfocles staged, and that Freud and Lacan resignified as the law of humandesire.

Before this panorama of culture and knowledge of the world, we ask ourselves which would bethat strange aim that has caused that the economy has tried to deceive the limit and wanted to plan overthe world as a mechanical system of equilibrium between production and circulation factors of values andmarket prices. The limit to this wild process of accumulation has not been the law of value-work nor thecyclical crises of overproduction or subconsumption of the capital. The limit is marked by the law ofentropy, discovered by Carnot to make efficient the machine operation, reformulated by Boltzmann in thestatistical thermodynamics, and put to work as limit law of production by Georgescu Roegen. The law ofentropy advises us that all economic process, in as much productive process, is imprisoned of aninevitable degradation process that advances towards the entropic death. What does this mean? That all

productive process (as all metabolic process in alive organisms) feeds on matter and energy of lowentropy, that in its transformation process it generates consumption goods with a remainder of degradedenergy, which finally is expressed in the form of heat. And this process is irreversible. Despite theadvances of the recycling technologies, the heat is not reconvertible in useful energy. And this is what ismanifested as the limit of the capital accumulation and economic growth: the destructuration of the

productive ecosystems and the saturation as far as the dilution capacity of polluting agents of commonatmospheres (seas, lakes, air and grounds), that in last instance are manifested as a global heating process,and of a possible ecological collapse when transferring the thresholds of ecological equilibrium of the

planet.

While the bioeconomy takes root of production in the conditions of nature materiality, the

economy looks for its exit in the dematerialization of production. The economy escapes towards thefictitious and the speculation of the financial capital. Nevertheless, while the economic process mustproduce material goods (house, dress, food), it will not be able to escape to the law of entropy. This iswhat marks the limit to the economic growth. The only antidote to this inevitable way to entropic death,is the process of neguentropic production of alive matter, that is reflected in renewable natural resources.

The transition towards this bioeconomy would mean a reduction of the economic growth rate just

as is actually measured and with time a negative rate, in as much the indicators of a sustainable andendurable ecotechnological and neguentropic productivity are constructed. On this sense, the neweconomy is based on the ecological potentials, the technological innovation and the cultural creativity of

people. In this way there could begin to design a post-growth society and an economy in equilibrium withthe sustainability conditions of the planet. However, from the environmental rationality not only emergesa new way of production, but a new form to be in the world: new processes of natures signification and

new existential senses in the construction of a sustainable future.


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Bibliography

Daly, H. E. (1991), Steady-State Economics, Island Press, Washington.

Goergescu-Roegen, N. (1971), The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press,Cambridge.

Hinterberger, F. y Seifert, E. (1995), Reducing material throughput: A contribution to the measurement ofdematerialization and sustainable human development en J. van der Straaten y A. Tylecote (eds.),Environment, technology and economic growth: The challenge to sustainable development, Edward Elgar,Aldershot.

Latouche, S. (2003),Por una Sociedad en Decrecimiento, Le Monde Diplomatique, Pars.

Leff, E. (1994), Ecologa y Capital; Racionalidad Ambiental, Democracia Participativa y DesarrolloSustentable, Siglo XXI Editores/UNAM, Mxico (sptima edicin, 2007).

Leff, E. (2004), Racionalidad Ambiental. La Reapropiacin Social de la Naturaleza. Siglo XXI Editores,Mxico.

Meadows, D. et al. (1972),Los lmites del crecimiento, FCE, Mxico.

Schumacher, E. (1973), Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered, Harper & Row, New York,.

Schumpeter, J. (1972), Capitalisme, socialisme et dmocratie, Payot, Paris.

Notes

* Text prepared for the V Colloquy, The Energy Transition in Mexico: towards the postoil era, Ecommunities, IndependentEcological Network of the Cuenca of Mexico, July 24, 2008.

** Independent National University of Mexico, Mexico D.F., Mexico. Email: [email protected]

1 Following Georgescu Roegen the Institut d' tudes Social conomiques Et Sociles pour la Dcroissance Soutenable has been

founded; a Congress on the Sustainable Decrease was held in Paris on April 18 and 19, 2008; number 35, the most recent ofPolitical Ecology magazine was also dedicated to the sustainable decrease.

2 As Stiglitz has recently indicated, the countries that applied neoliberal policies not only lost the bet of growth, but, when theyreally grew, the benefits went disproportionally to those who are in the summit of society.

leff e., descrecimiento o desconstruccion de la economia (english)

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