I have argued against using the degrowth name for two decades within the degrowth community. It misleadingly implies using the same metric of GDP but in reverse, which would be irrational -- perhaps even more irrational than the conventional "rising tide trickles down" usage. A variation, "post growth" attempts to avoid the negative connotation of degrowth but retains the focus on growth, which was always a euphemism for something else. That something else, "full employment," was also a bit of a euphemism but at least it implied that there were various alternative policies that could achieve the objective.
In "The Political Aspects of Full Employment," Michal Kalecki spelled out why industrialists and financiers would never go along with that goal. He was, of course, right. So we got "economic growth" instead as a euphemism for a surrogate for yet another euphemism. Economic growth, we were told by the economists, will achieve full employment by encouraging business investment. There is a catch. "If employment gets too full it will cause inflation." Actually, it's the other way around. The so-called growth policy uses inflationary means to stimulate investment that creates the jobs. So the jobs are the effect, not the cause, of the inflation. The alternative to this game of three-card monte was spelled out by Karl Marx in Capital and the Grundrisse. One sentence from the latter sums it up: > > The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that > the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the > appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must > themselves appropriate their own surplus value. > What contradiction is that you may wonder? The tendency of capital, "on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour." If capital succeeds "too well" capital becomes unable to realize the surplus value created and "necessary labour is interrupted" -- that is to say, unemployment. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#35494): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/35494 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/111387198/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
