Satiation
Discussion
Degrowth is focused on Satiation
Federico Savini:
"Degrowth is commonly understood as a radical project of socio-cultural transformation. To question the degrowth transition’s depth is to identify the social norms targeted by degrowth strategic action.
Degrowth has been largely (even if not always explicitly) associated with post- or anticapitalism. The growth economy is rooted in enclosures of the commons, colonialism, and the exploitation of labor (D’Alisa et al., 2014; Feola, 2020; Schmelzer et al., 2022; Schmid, 2019). Because capitalism requires incessant surplus accumulation – hence its exploitation of labor and nature – degrowth is generally understood as anticapitalist (Vandeventer et al., 2019). Yet there is no consensus about what specifically a postcapitalist degrowth strategy should imply. Schmidt, for example, argues that postgrowth must target institutions that keep individuals and organizations dependent on competition, profit, and financial transactions (Schmid, 2023). Feola argues that degrowth is anticapitalist because it unmakes capitalist institutions (Feola, 2019). Others identify private property (van Griethuysen, 2010) or the exploitation of socially reproductive labor (Barca, 2019) as the key institution. Anarchist approaches to degrowth focus instead on hierarchy and the state (Trainer, 2019).
The first strategic challenge is therefore to identify the actual strategic target of a degrowth agenda. Bellamy Foster (2011) has argued that degrowth (particularly of the Latouchian stamp) does not sufficiently question imperialism and class inequalities. Degrowth, he claims, should be understood as ecosocialism. In response, Kallis has argued that a transition to socialism hardly ensures the downscaling of material throughput. In fact, ‘growth can continue in so far as the workers refrain from consuming all of the product for the satisfaction of their immediate human needs, and instead invest it to increase production, to satisfy their higher needs of tomorrow’ (Kallis 2015: x). As Saito echoed, ecosocialism ‘does not exclude the possibility of pursuing further sustainable economic growth once capitalist production is overcome’ (Saito, 2023: 209) and he advances the notion of degrowth communism. In sum, the recognition of the environmental limits to growth is distinctive trait of a postgrowth alternative but this does not necessarily translate into one single political theory (Wiedmann et al., 2020).
Degrowth envisions a shift in the social norms that sustain the compulsion to grow, accumulate, exploit, and prioritize productivity (it rejects economism too). In their place, it calls for social relations to revolve around the principle of satiation (Bilancini & D’Alessandro, 2012; Pettini & Musikanski, 2022). Satiation, a core principle of degrowth, refers to a society meeting all its essential needs. This focus on satiation promotes reducing excess production and consumption. As a social value, satiation shapes how people interact with each other and their environment, replacing competition and exploitation with symbiosis, acceptance, and stability (Rosa, 2019; Buch-Hansen & Nesterova, 2023). By prioritizing satiation as a political goal, degrowth seeks liberation from the compulsion to consume unnecessarily. This pursuit opens pathways for different socio-political structures, urging degrowth scholars (and activists) to explore context-specific means to achieve a socio-political transition.
As a social norm, satiation can affect social relations only insofar as individuals see it as legitimate (Goldmann, 2005). Because it is seen as legitimate, it can produce new institutions and regulations (e.g. resource caps or moratoria). For this reason – and others that I explain later – degrowthers have strongly advocated for forms of prefiguration that nurture degrowth values (Trainer, 2019). As Soper puts it (2023), degrowth is primarily a transition towards an ‘alternative hedonism’: a form of self-fulfillment that rejects pure utilitarianism in which voluntary limitation and simplicity are motivated by immaterial pleasure, happiness, and satisfaction. Satiation thus connects a larger universe of degrowth values, such as care for others and nature (Muraca, 2012). The degrowth imaginary’s anticapitalism derives from its rejection of accumulation and acceleration as logics of social organization – the very logics through which capital exists. Satiation become, in turn, thresholds beyond which excess, overconsumption, luxury, profit, and accumulation (of land, assets, housing, etc.) can be identified as ‘unacceptable’ or ‘immoral’ against the backdrop of human consumption transgressing planetary boundaries (Gough, 2017)."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14730952241258693)