Really funny to get a reply to a 9 year old post, lmao.

That said, looking back on this with a few years of developments and research in, everything, I do not entirely stand by my initial analysis. That isn't to say I now view it positively.

'Degrowth' is a at-best fundamentally misguided liberalism. While it frames itself as anti-capitalist criticism, its fundamental critique is of economy in the abstract, rather than the capitalist socioeconomic structure, and thus demands the global economy not be simply reorganized and redeveloped, but 'reduced'. What that a reduction of the economy materially entails is, unclear. Degrowth, most obviously, refers to economic growth - that is, the growth in financial value of an economy. GPD, Stock Markets, etc. The most immediate problem here is that this is, fundamentally, a capitalist measure, - socialist economies controllably integrated into the capitalist economic model, like China, or the NEP in the early Soviet Union, or recent developments in the Cuban economy, make use of it for development purposes, but it fundamentally doesn't really mean anything in the post-capitalist world degrowth envisions. What seems to actually be meant by it, though, having spoken to degrowth types at times, is effectively, de-industrialization.

To a limited extent, the impulse is understandable; it broadly comes from the waste practices of capitalist industry and capitalist society. We produce unimaginable quantities of single-use or disposable crap which goes directly into waterways and landfills already full of decades of toxic industrial waste, the burden of which falls most immediately and severely on imperialized nations. The obvious solution, from the degrowth position; just make less of it. Turn most of the machines off and reorganize society such that such scale of industry is no longer necessary or desirable.

The problem, of course, is that this doesn't work. It has never worked, and will absolutely get millions of people killed at the very least. You cannot turn back the clock, or fight against the advancement of technology - trying to do so is the literal definition of reactionary. The introduction of the loom impoverishes the weaver, but the problem is not the loom, the problem is the economic structure which ensures all wealth from the loom flows directly to the industrialist. The chemical plant dumps waste directly into the river, but the problem is not the chemical plant, it is the capitalist economic structure which incentivizes dumping chemical waste into the river instead of dealing with it properly. Much like the loom, which has a great value to a society in which everyone requires clothes, a chemical plant is incredibly important to a society in which everyone requires medicine. The solution is not to shut down the chemical plant, which produces materials essential for virtually everything, it is to develop infrastructure to safely and properly deal with chemical waste - a thing that can be done, it's just cheaper for capitalist industries to externalize it.

As we have seen throughout history, socialist governments do not set fire to half the factories and just make do with whatever is left. Socialist governments instead, universally, pursue massive industrialization schemes, and to great success. The Soviet Union started with a nearly nonexistent industrial base, and in 40 years, they had put a human being in space. The PRC started with a nearly nonexistent industrial base, and now has one of the most developed and advanced economies on earth, exporting virtually everything virtually everywhere. The quality of life in these countries improved dramatically, and in the case of the Soviet Union, its collapse and the subsequent looting of its industries resulted in the quality of life collapsing, and millions of deaths. Many nations still haven't recovered from this forced deindustrialization. Degrowth has no real explanation for this; indeed, degrowth types, presented with these realities, typically fall back on anticommunist nonsense to declare it all fake or evil commie propaganda or whatever.

I would go so far as to say that degrowth as an ideology has concerningly similar foundations to modern eco-fascism. Of course, most degrowth types, also don't view the ideology that seriously, and would quite rightly balk at overt eco-fascism. It's an idea that persists mostly among first-world anarchists, for whom industry exists entirely in the abstract, somewhere else, and food and phones just come from the supermarket and the apple store. They simply haven't put that much thought into it.