The dialectic future of de-growth.

Utopian fiction oremancipatory project?

Abstract

In the past few years we have observed the emergence of socio-economic, political and environmental alternatives that aim to subvert the hegemonic languages and narratives that guide us to a permanent crisis. This is the case of degrowth, a political-economic and socio-ecological transformation project that seeks to "decolonize" the social imagery based on infinite growth. In this paper, we conduct a critical review of the main ideas and proposals of degrowth through the literary fiction of Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, an ambiguous communal utopia of frugality. We use the case of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative and some of its initiatives as real-life example to illustrate the examined ideas. We argue that degrowth can be understood as a "dialectical utopia": it is spatio-temporal; it maintains a tension between the opening and closing processes; and it is eminently subversive, questioning deeply entrenched notions such as "scarcity". Despite degrowth may have some theoretical and practical issues, we argue that it can make an important contribution to critical economic thinking.