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 process the globalization of the market economy, has reopened the debate on the possibility of stabilizing, down-shifting and de-growing of the economy. This article argues that such de-growing is not possible under the established economic rationality. The construction of sustainable societies demands the deconstruction of the prevalent economic rationality and its substitution by another economy, based on the principles and potentials of an environmental rationality. 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, desescalamiento y decrecimiento de la economa. Este artculo argumenta que tal decrecimiento no es posible dentro de la racionalidad econmica establecida. La construccin de sociedades sustentables reclama una desconstruccin de la racionalidad econmica y su paulatina sustitucin por otra economa, fundada en los principios y potenciales de una racionalidad 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 and countercultural movements burst (syndical, juvenile, of students, of gender), the population pump exploded and the ecological alarm sounded. For the first time, since the industrial machinery and the market mechanisms were activated in Capitalism rising in Renaissance, since the West opened history to modernity guided by the ideals of the freedom and reason Illumination, one of the ideological pillars of the western civilization was fractured: the principle of progress impelled by the power of science and technology, turned into the most servile and useful tools of capital accumulation, and the myth of a limitless 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 to dominate 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 the economic rationality, that went forging in the armors of the classic science and that restored a structure, a model; that was establishing the conditions of a progress that was no longer guided by the coevolution of cultures with their environment, but by the economic development, modeled by a production mode that carried 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 economic process keeps with nature degradation, the imperative of internalizing the ecological costs and the necessity to add distributive counterbalances to the disequilibrating mechanisms of the market. In 1972, a study of the MIT and the Club of Rome indicated for the first time The Limits of Growth. From there arose the proposals of the growth zero and of an economy of stationary state. In that same time, Nicholas Georgescu Roegen settled down in his book The Law of Entropy and the Economic Process, the fundamental 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 to grow or to die (unlike the alive beings which are born, grow and die, and of the populations of alive

beings who stabilize their growth). The economic growth, the industrial metabolism and the exosomatic consumption, imply an increasing consumption of nature -of matter and energy-, that not only faces the limits of the resources endowment of the planet, but it degrades in the productive process and of consumption, 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 by the gas discharges of conservatory effect and by the ineluctable laws of thermodynamics that have triggered the entropic death of the planet. The antidotes that have generated the critical thought and the technological inventiveness, have been scarcely digestible by the economic system. The sustainable development 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 the endurable development generated a process of nature merchandising and of over-economization of the world: mechanisms for a clean development were settled down and economic instruments were elaborated 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 the communal 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 of contamination rights in the carbon bond dealing. Today, given the failure of the efforts to stop the global heating (the Protocol of Kyoto had established the necessity to reduce the GEI to the level reached in 1990), there arises again the conscience about 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 and Schumacher return to be evoked by their critic to technology, their praise of the small that is beautiful and the reclamation of the root in the local. The decrease is stated in front of the failure of the intention of dematerializing 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 that the globalized economic process is unsustainable; that the ecoefficiency does not solve the problem of an economy 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. The decrease is not a mere disbelief, but to take conscience on a process that has been restored in the heart of the civilizator process that attempts against life of the alive planet and the quality of human life. The call to decrease nust not be a rhetorical resource to give flight to the unsustainability critic of the prevailing economic 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 the poorest 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 discharges of the United States. To them are added the conjugated effects of the countries of smaller development degree 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 mobilize society against the evils generated by growth, or its fatal end. It is not a countermand to flee from growth as the hippies could dispense of the dominant culture, nor a praise of communities marginalized of development. Today neither at least the more isolated indigenous communities are out of danger or can disconnect themselves from the effects of globalization insufflated by the bellows of the economic growth. Yet, How to deactivate the growth of a process that has restored in its original structure and in its genetic code an engine that impels it to grow or to die? How to carry out such intention without generating 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 the government heads and industralists would desire, to restrain propositively growth is to bet for an economic 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 existing economic rationality, but Another economy, founded on other productive principles. The decrease implies the deconstruction of economy, to the time that a new productive rationality is constructed.

Ecologist economists, as Herman Daly, have proposed to hold the economy so that it does not grow beyond what the maintenance of the natural capital of the planet allows, that is, the resources regeneration and the remainders absorption (thesis of the strong sustainability), but economy simply is not conscious and does not consent with such ecologists prescription. It is not a matter of putting a corset to 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 natural economy-, to generate an ecological and socially sustainable economy. To decrease not only implies dis-climb (downshifting) or to dis-connect from economy. It is not equivalent to de-materialize production, because it would not avoid that the growing economy continued consuming and transforming nature until exceeding the limits of sustainability of the planet. The abstinence and frugality of some responsible consumers do not deactivate the growth mania restored in the root and the soul of the economic rationality, that keeps inscribed the impulse to capital accumulation, to the economies of scale, to urban agglomeration, to market globalization and concentration of wealth. To jump of the train in movement does not directly lead to retrace the way. In order to decrease it is not enough to descend from the fortune wheel of economy; it is not enough to want to reduce it and stop it. Beyond the rejection to natures merchandising, it is necessary to deconstruct economy. 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 the ill body of economy. It is not a matter of reabsorbing its remainders, but to extirpate the malignant tumour. The cirrhosis that corrodes economy will not have to cure itself injecting greater doses of alcohol to 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 the cage of modernity rationality, holding it with the market mechanisms, putting it under the prevailing forms of reasoning and interest, has failed. Of the anguish facing the ecological cataclysm and the disrepute 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-cultural movements inspired in the dialectics, to propose the coming of a post world -post-structuralism, postcapitalism- that announced something new in history, but still without name, because we have only known to name in a positivist manner what is, and not the time to come. The post-modern philosophy inaugurated the des epoch, opened by the call to de-construction. The solution to growth is not the decrease, but the deconstruction of the economy and the transition towards a new rationality that orients the construction of sustainability. The economy deconstruction does not only mean a mental exercise to unravel and discover the sources of thought and social interests that were conjugated to give birth to economy, daughter of reason Illumination and of the commercial interchanges of the rising capitalism, but of a philosophical, political and 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 been institutionalized and incorporated in our subjectivity. The anxiety to have, to control, to accumulate, is already reflect of a subjectivity that has been constituted from the institution of the economic structure and the rationality of modernity. To deconstruct the unsustainable economy means to question the thought, science, technology and the institutions that have restored the cage of the modernity rationality. The economic rationality is not a mere superstructure to be investigated and deconstructed by the thought; it is a mode of knowledge and merchandises production. The economic process is not implanted in the world like a tree that takes roots in the ground and feeds from its nutrient sap. It is like a dragoon that is dredging the earth, nailing its hooves in the heart of the world, absorbing the water of its water-bearing mantles and extracting black gold 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.

It is not possible to maintain an economy in growth that feeds of a finite nature: mainly an economy founded on the use of petroleum and coal, that are transformed in the industrial metabolism, of transport and familiar economy in carbon dioxide, the main gas causer of the conservatory effect and of the 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 reserves stored in the deposits of the seabed, to again lower the price of the gasolines that have surpassed the 4 dollars per gallon. The end of the petroleum epoch does not result from its increasing shortage, but from its abundance in relation to the absorption and dilution capacity of; of the limit of its transmutation and disposition towards the atmosphere in form of CO2, gases of conservatory effect. The search of the economy equilibrium by a hydrocarbon overproduction to continue feeding the industrial machinery (and agriculturist 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 and the Intergovernmental Panel of Climatic Change. And this raises a challenge to the economies that strongly 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 the economic rationality as the supreme and inevitable form of the being in the world. Nevertheless, the diverse reasons to deconstruct the economic rationality are not reflect directly in a thought and in strategic operations 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 the niches 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 not stop the overflowed torrent of the growth machine. For that reason we need to deconstruct the economic reasons 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 while an environmental rationality is constructed. To deconstruct the economy turns out to be a more complex enterprise than the dismantling of a warlike arsenal, the collapse of Berlin wall, the demolition of a city or the casting of a metal industry; it is not the obsolescence of a machine or of an equipment or the recycling of its materials to renew the economic process. The creative destruction of the capital that Schumpeter praised, did not aim at the decrease, but at the internal mechanism of the economy that takes it to program the obsolescence and the destruction of the fixed capital to re-estimulate the economic growth insufflated by the technological innovation as bellows of the extended capital reproduction. Beyond the intention to dismantle the dominant economic model, it deals with unraveling the economic 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 the system 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 this reconstruction is not simply guided by an ecological rationality, but by the cultural forms and processes of natures resignification. In this sense the construction of an environmental rationality capable to deconstruct the economic rationality, implies nature reapropriation processes and reterritorialization of cultures. The economic growth drags with itself the problem of its measurement. The emblematic GIP with which the success or failure of the national economies is evaluated, does not measure its negative external framework. But the fundamental problem is not solved with a multiple scale and a multicriterial method of measurement -with the green accounts, the calculation of the hidden costs of growth, or an index of human 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 that generates greater poverty and destruction of nature.

The decolonization of the imaginary that sustains the dominant economy will not have to arise from the responsible consumption or of a pedagogy of the social-environmental catastrophes, as could suggest Latouche when putting in sight the bet for decrease. The economic rationality has been institutionalized and incorporated in our form of being in the world: the homo economicus. Then it deals with 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 a revolutionary social movement. It is not enough to moderate economy incorporating other social values and imperatives, to create a socially and ecologically sustainable economy. The deconstruction implies strategic 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. For that reason it is necessary to forge Another economy, founded on the potentials of nature and the creativity 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 space suspended in the limit of the light speed that Einstein discovered, in the law of the human culture with which Oedipus tripped, that Sfocles staged, and that Freud and Lacan resignified as the law of human desire. Before this panorama of culture and knowledge of the world, we ask ourselves which would be that strange aim that has caused that the economy has tried to deceive the limit and wanted to plan over the world as a mechanical system of equilibrium between production and circulation factors of values and market prices. The limit to this wild process of accumulation has not been the law of value-work nor the cyclical crises of overproduction or subconsumption of the capital. The limit is marked by the law of entropy, discovered by Carnot to make efficient the machine operation, reformulated by Boltzmann in the statistical thermodynamics, and put to work as limit law of production by Georgescu Roegen. The law of entropy advises us that all economic process, in as much productive process, is imprisoned of an inevitable 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 low entropy, that in its transformation process it generates consumption goods with a remainder of degraded energy, which finally is expressed in the form of heat. And this process is irreversible. Despite the advances of the recycling technologies, the heat is not reconvertible in useful energy. And this is what is manifested 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 common atmospheres (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 the fictitious and the speculation of the financial capital. Nevertheless, while the economic process must produce material goods (house, dress, food), it will not be able to escape to the law of entropy. This is what 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 and endurable ecotechnological and neguentropic productivity are constructed. On this sense, the new economy 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 with the sustainability conditions of the planet. However, from the environmental rationality not only emerges a 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.

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 of dematerialization 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 Desarrollo Sustentable, 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, Independent Ecological Network of the Cuenca of Mexico, July 24, 2008. ** Independent National University of Mexico, Mexico D.F., Mexico. Email: enrique.leff@yahoo.com 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 of Political 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 they really grew, the benefits went disproportionally to those who are in the summit of society.