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Rethinking Labour/Work in a Degrowth Society

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The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies

Abstract

The aim of the chapter is to give a critical overview of how work and labour have been conceptualized within the heterogeneous degrowth discourses. While degrowth has articulated a sophisticated critique of capitalist growth not only from an environmental perspective but also with respect to its structural function for welfare democracies, (re)thinking and framing work/labour in an envisioned degrowth society remains one of the biggest challenges within the degrowth discourses. After a detailed overview of the different perspectives on work/labour in the degrowth scholarship, the chapter focuses on the specific contribution of materialist ecofeminism. It concludes by indicating possible cross-fertilizations and alliances between degrowth and materialist ecofeminism with respect to social-ecological reproduction and the rethinking of labour/work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Because the two terms are used differently in the literature, it is difficult to maintain a coherent use in the chapter. Generally, however, work is used as a general term referring to socially necessary activities, while labour indicates the specific form of work under capitalism aimed at generating income and profit, both as wage labour and as independent labour (thus including precarious forms of self-employment).

  2. 2.

    Degrowth is close to the tradition of strong sustainability (Muraca and Döring 2018), but strongly critical of the neoliberal direction that sustainable development has taken (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015). Sustainability and Sustainable Development descend from two different traditions of thought. The latter is the more growth-oriented approach (Caradonna 2014).

  3. 3.

    This position is rooted in a lack of trust in a green growth path and implies an overall smaller economic scale. While a supposedly growing green economy would be less capital intensive than a fossil-based economy and possibly create more jobs, a mere shrinking of the economy under current conditions implies a loss of jobs.

  4. 4.

    While we adopt the language used by the authors, we italicize the terms because we are critical of developmentalist terminology.

  5. 5.

    See for example: www.degrowth.info/en/feminisms-and-degrowth-alliance-fada/.

  6. 6.

    Biesecker and Hofmeister (2010) have coined the term (re)production to point out the (material) inseparability of human so-called productive activities as well as human and non-human reproductive activities and processes.

  7. 7.

    By women we do not mean a biological or essentialist category, but a social role that is functional to the reproduction of capitalist relations in the bourgeois family and for subjectivities in general (Federici 2012). This includes care, emotional, and sexual work.

  8. 8.

    Salleh calls a certain group of people meta-industrial, because they work not within industrial production, but before and beyond it, as its very condition. Through their work, they mediate the society-nature metabolism and contribute largely to the production of use values from/with nature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Anna Saave

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Barbara Muraca

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  1. Anna Saave
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  2. Barbara Muraca
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Correspondence to Anna Saave .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Nora Räthzel

  2. Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Dimitris Stevis

  3. School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    David Uzzell

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Saave, A., Muraca, B. (2021). Rethinking Labour/Work in a Degrowth Society. In: Räthzel, N., Stevis, D., Uzzell, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71909-8_32

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