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Here's a non tracking copy of that Times article on UK food security being at high risk.
https://archive.ph/Q6nUX

Or if you prefer,a gift version on the Times via the zero hour campaign […]

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Original post on mstdn.social

"Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam" –
degrowthuk.org/2025/05/31/degrowth-a-de...
New piece in our #ProspectsForDegrowth series.
Beware diluted, fake, scam "degrowth". Insist on the real thing.
#degrowthUK #degrowth
The […]

Original post on mstdn.social

Beware diluted, fake, scam "degrowth". Insist on the real thing.

New piece in our #ProspectsForDegrowth series.

"Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam" – #degrowthUK #degrowth

degrowthuk.org/2025/05/31/degrowth-a-de...

The […]

Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam Aurora Despierta In the series Prospects for Degrowth This article by the Spanish writer Aurora Despierta is her adaptation (highly summarised for translation into English), for the series Prospect…

Beware diluted, fake, scam "degrowth". Insist on the real thing.

New piece in our #ProspectsForDegrowth series.

"Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam" – #degrowthUK

degrowthuk.org/2025/05/31/d...

#degrowth

Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam **_Aurora Despierta_** In the series _Prospects for Degrowth_ This article by the Spanish writer Aurora Despierta is her adaptation (highly summarised for translation into English), for the series Prospects for Degrowth, of the original article: _Decrecer ¿callejón o salida? La futura estafa del capital’_(2-5-2025) _https://kaosenlared.net/decrecer-callejon-o-salida-la-futura-estafa-del-capital/_ _Translated by Mark Burton and Anna Gregoletto _ For a radically anti-capitalist degrowth that cannot be adulterated and domesticated by capitalism. For a strategy that leads us away from the deceitful ‘green’ and warmongering capitalism that compromises us and leads us leads to total disaster. There was a phrase in the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-late 1960s that said ‘wave the red flag against the red flag’, as a manoeuvre similar to that of the false flag ( _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag_). In the future we could say ‘wave the [false] flag of [scam] degrowth, against the [true] flag of [consistent] degrowth’. **We should be very vigilant that degrowth does not end up doing what has happened to so many social movements: becoming part of the arsenal for the perpetuation of capitalism.** In such a scenario, degrowth discourse and the co-opted or domesticated degrowthers would serve as shiny new draught horses for the bourgeoisie to ride in the carriage of its capitalism as if it were the realisation of degrowth. ## I.- Can the Bourgeoisie avail itself of the Degrowth Discourse? The Triple Condition. Of course it can! If it didn’t, it would be the sign of one of two opposite situations: a) it doesn’t need it to create confusion and division, to justify anything, to cajole us, because it has us totally ideologically dominated and crushed our resistance; or, b) we are so strong that it sees no way it can adulterate our movement. I hope and trust that a) will not happen, but I don’t think we can prevent b), because the bourgeoisie is not stupid when it comes to social struggle, and it will take preventive measures. Everything points to the fact that they will try, and the result will depend on how difficult or easy we make it for them. And that, in turn, will depend on our applying the _**TRIPLE CONDITION**_ : i) W**hether or not we are capable of defending a consistent degrowth is only possible if the causes of capitalist growthism are questioned to their roots** : the exploitation of _**wage labour**_ for the extraction of _**surplus value,**_ the source of profit, which is the motivation and engine of capital, to reinvest it (accumulation of capital) to increase production and labour productivity, and to increase profit in the next cycle, causing economic growth in the process, but with social inequalities, disordered and unsustainable, causing, in the competitive struggle for profit, the whole ecological disaster, crises and economic conflicts (such as the current tariff war) and military conflicts, each one more serious and destructive (up to the risk of nuclear war and ‘nuclear winter’). ii) **Whether or not we are able to make it clear that capitalism cannot degrow** , because, like a vehicle primarily designed to go forwards, capitalism has no reverse gear ‘from the factory’, and if it does go backwards, it is because it is going down a slope with no more control than the brakes. That is, capitalist ‘degrowth’ can only come in the form of economic crises, a war economy, wars and collapse of capitalism (see my article, in Spanish, ‘Collapsing and cannibalistic capitalism’ (11-4-2025) _https://kaosenlared.net/capitalismo-en-colapso-y-canibal/_ – ). iii) **W****hether or not we are able to orientate the mentality of the working class and popular sectors along the lines of the** _**Big Narrative-Framework**_**for this epoch, which, by survival, will push them to question capitalism.** That is: * CAPITALISM AT WAR AGAINST LIFE (collapsing capitalism, global warming, ecocide, more genocide, nuclear war and extinction). * OUR LIVES MATTER MORE THAN THEIR PROFITS. THERE IS NO FUTURE WITH CAPITALISM, AND THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE (Degrowth defeating capitalism and its bourgeois states). * SOON or IT WILL BE TOO LATE! While once we could perhaps have said ‘we know that capitalism provokes and exploits wars, but we can co-exist with it’, now we can say that we are not compatible with it.. Nothing is more important than life and nothing is worse or more dangerous than that which is an existential threat to life on the planet. And that sets all the alarm bells ringing and calls us to serious questioning and prepare for action for survival. This is the way to immunise ourselves against the poison of adulterated degrowth with which they will try to intoxicate us. If we do not succeed, the bourgeoisie will execute its strategy of appropriating and domesticating degrowth to turn it against us. What there is no doubt about is that some sectors of the bourgeoisie are clever, cunning and opportunist. That is why they are always able to exploit any weakness of ours, whether in theory or in practice and to turn those ideas ‘upside down’, perverting them, emptying them of their critical, subversive content, despite having opposed them at another time, perhaps even in blood and fire. The _liberty, equality and fraternity_ of the late 18th century have fallen in the harsh reality of capitalism and the violence of its bourgeois states. The techno-bureaucracy of State Capitalism disguised itself as socialism and communism (USSR, etc., and still China and North Korea). The ‘social and democratic Europe’, was condemned ‘within an order’, unquestionably neoliberal-capitalist which limits and perverts everything, and throws itself into warmongering militarism, such as against Russia and China. We already have plenty of experience of how they have commodified everything that claims to be natural, organic, ecological, sustainable, etc. ‘Sustainable development’, ‘green development”’ the ‘ecological transition’ end up being little more than the emperor’s latest new (green) clothes to continue doing what he has always done: dominate, enrich himself, and degrade life on the planet (ours and that of many, many other species). **We cannot pin our hopes on the collapse of capitalism** , because there is no guarantee that this will not lead to a nuclear war (the easiest thing to mobilise, without deploying millions of people in troops, vehicles, ships, supplies, fuel…), or to a society worse than capitalism, of a neo-slavery type for example, all the more likely, the weaker we are, which is what we are exposing ourselves to. The bourgeois states have been ‘fighting climate change’ for many years only to achieve the sad result that we have already reached the extra 1.5 degrees Celsius that we were not supposed to. And with Trump it will get worse, since he has already pulled out of the Paris Accords and aims to further drive fossil fuel capitalism. They gain time with false promises and commitments, and make us lose ours, while they go on with their business as usual. They would do the same with degrowth. Trump is brutally reversing the strategy that capitalism and the US bourgeois State over which he presides, with its partners and allies of more than half a century, in economic policy and international relations. So we had better prepare ourselves for other surprises in the future on the issue of degrowth, even if they are no longer come from Trump himself. Using adulterated degrowth would be like a judo manoeuvre, i.e. taking advantage of our own strength and momentum, in order to knock us down. More intelligent than a narrow-minded denialist discourse, because now we would not have to fight against a totally opposite and blatant lie that would quickly unmask itself in the face of the evidence, so that they would not have enough capacity to manoeuvre, and we would corner them, until checkmate (always complicated), but instead against deceitful version of ourselves. It would be enough for them to present themselves as advocates of ‘moderate and realistic’ degrowth as opposed to ‘radical and utopian’ degrowth. That would be the most reassuring and ‘advanced’ message after almost two centuries of saturating our brains with growthism. I would opt for that without hesitation, if I didn’t already know too much to swallow it; but a lot of people will prefer that sedative to the’ truth. It’s as if they are saying, “People may end up supporting degrowth, so let them support us with a version that is easier to accept, and we will prevent them from embracing the original“. In this case the usual, ‘“why accept the copy if you have the original?“ wouldn’t apply, just as you’d rather buy a cool, ‘branded’ bag, even if it’s a fake, an imitation, because it costs a lot less. But in this situation, you wouldn’t think that their degrowth is a scam, but simply realistic, more real than the real thing! **We would be wrong if we thought that we have won the ideological struggle and imposed the terms of public debate, because they have been ‘forced to accept our framework of thought’. In reality, they have appropriated it and sold it in an adulterated form!** And they don’t need to convince everyone, not even the majority, but just a big enough minority to prevent us from being able to gain the ‘critical mass’ and the dynamic that generates change. It would be enough for them to have enough confusion (not total), enough people (not everyone), just for the necessary time (not forever), to defeat us and impose themselves definitively, until they drag us into their collapse and there, demoralised and without a future, end up in some dystopia. It would be nothing more than the last or penultimate scam of capitalism before its final collapse, if it doesn’t first lead us into nuclear world war so that we don’t have to worry about the future any more: how thoughtful!. ## II Scam degrowth in practice The general danger is that the bourgeoisie will want to present the forced and inevitable ‘degrowth’, because the collapse of capitalism has already begun, as a deliberate degrowthist political choice, and that we will think “they are dealing with it, they are solving it!“ But it will be a con. For our degrowth is not to live with a shrinking, perverse and sadistic capitalism, but to get out of capitalism, to overcome it. As has been seen with so many social movements (including that of the working class) it may well happen, at least in certain cases, and seen as a theoretical hypothesis, not as anyone’s concrete prediction, that the bourgeois state, through elections, parliamentarism, promotion and financing of associations, etc., manages to get a good part of the leading members and activists of degrowth to become appendages of the bourgeois state, providing the discourse it needs in exchange for projects that will end up conforming to the ‘realism’ of what capitaism can admit. Meanwhile, the social movement will be deprived of once valuable members, and forced, if it wants to be true to itself, to confront those who have gone over to the other side. This will create confusion and harm the reception of its message among ordinary people, seeing the movement divided, and with tempting expectations that will seem more comfortable on the side of the bourgeois State, as opposed to the risks of those who will confront it. ‘Divide and rule’, the oldest principle in the world. The most important thing is not to imagine the concrete ways in which we can be swindled by the scam degrowth. _It would be useless to know all their tricks if we had not taken measures to immunise people against this poison._ So that’s the most important thing, as I have set out in the previous section. But let’s do that exercise, without further pretensions. As you will have already concluded, the most blatant lie that the bourgeoisie can tell us is that, being in economic crisis, in a war economy, in war, or already collapsing capitalism, they want to disguise it by saying that everything is going well, ‘we are in control’, because we are ‘degrowing’, more or less voluntarily, and although that demands sacrifices, it would be fundamentally good, so, patience and resignation. In the face of this, we must be clear that if it is capitalism and it is contracting, it is capitalism, but it is not degrowth, it’s a crisis of collapsing capitalism, involuntary; like neither anorexia nervosa, nor starvation are the same as being on a diet’. I will start with the issue of the moment, which is transcendental and which summarises all the problems we will be confronted with. That of ‘rearmament’ (arms escalation, to be added to what already exists, which is enough to destroy us), the consequent austerity policies (killer austerity), and the growing risk of war, including nuclear war. **Some governments would argue that increased armament will not result in cuts to social budgets . Perhaps not in the immediate term, but certainly down the road because the public debt repayments that will result will come from somewhere.** And how to justify militarism with farcical degrowth? Well, to justify the reduction of civil production, killer austerity, even the imposition of the rationing card for some products, they could say that “it is due to the need to degrow but, in an unfavourable international context, with enemies who endanger our degrowth strategy and who aspire to take advantage of our weakening to plunder us, too bad, and that for this reason we have no choice but to defend ourselves by also investing in security, that is to say, in military spending”. The slogan would be ‘let’s shrink but be safe’, who wouldn’t want that? In fact, the bourgeoisie, especially the European bourgeoisie, is already realising that the electric car industry it had hoped for is unviable, so it will not invest as much and the automobile sector will continue to shrink. The same is true for the wind turbine industry for large wind farms, because they cannot compete with Chinese industry. And part of the automobile industry is already known to be converted io produce military vehicles such as tanks. This could be presented as an understanding of the need to degrow in private and individual transport,1 but that, “nevertheless, we need to defend ourselves (degrow, but safely)”. Making a virtue out of necessity. But none of this is _**our**_**** degrowth, because **their criterion, for whether to degrow or not, is whether or not they make money, how much money, for how long**. As long as the money rains, even if it is on account of public indebtedness (we will pay for it in the future with austerity), as long as they can do business, they will go ahead, although it is already very clear that this is pure speculation, yet another ‘bubble’ (remember that in Spain of real estate construction: unsaleable houses, or airports without planes, or roads without cars…), a false solution that should stop NOW, not when they can continue no longer, when all the evil is done and irreparable. The higher we climb, the harder the fall will be, the greater the waste of natural and social resources, and the waste of time, which will not have been allocated to the necessary adaptation. The capitalist class will want to present the reduction of production, the lay-offs of workers, the closures of companies, as something inevitable, a requirement of the decline ‘of the economy’, as if it were everybody’s business (‘economy’, from the Greek, administering the household), so as not to question its class nature, of the capitalism which, despite knowing for decades what was going to happen, has brought us here, nor the how and when of the measures to be taken, etc. While there were profits, they did not want to rethink the future to make the landing as painless as possible for ‘those at the bottom’; when the losses come, it will be up to us to bear the brunt and make a living as best we can saying “That’s the way it is”. “Even socialism should degrow!“ the cynics will tell us. If they have already achieved our resignation with the arguments of ‘lack of profitability’, ‘lack of competitiveness’, ‘excessive costs’, ‘obsolete facilities’, etc., then why not with ‘we are doing it to save life on the planet and avoid greater economic evils’? Then there will be resignation and no demand for accountability from capital. We will see that they will be capable of trying to sneak in the relocation of companies on account of degrowth. “We do need to shrink, but other countries still need to grow“, they will say, repeating the message of degrowth and claiming exemplary “social responsibility” and “international solidarity”. To move the enterprise to a country with much lower wages, fewer labour and social rights, much lower taxation of capital, and much less environmental rigour; so that the production of these goods does not decrease, but even increases, taking advantage of the competitive advantage? How does this contribute to global degrowth, if the result is zero subtraction: “what I take away here, I put there; what I don’t emit here, I emit there“. Isn’t this all about making more profit and nothing to do with degrowth? If we are going to give up jobs here, let’s close the company (not just the plant here), eliminating dispensable and unsustainable production. And in the reverse case, i.e. to re-shore an industrial company, to bring it back to the country? Although their main motive will be monetary profit and geopolitical-military interests, not ecological considerations, they will try to legitimise this, following the very slogan of degrowth to relocate. They will justify it on the grounds that it reduces the impact on international transport. But what if the least important thing is to relocate this production because it means maintaining a production that should be decreasing because it is not that necessary and is not sustainable, and what if, on top of that, it is largely focused on export, so that the savings in transport through relocation are largely recovered through export? In this, the bourgeoisie can more easily gain the support of the working class with the prospect of job creation and economic growth, which will be disguised by saying that at the same time it is ‘degrowing’ where the company was previously located. **They will talk to us about degrowth, but the products and economic branches that will be reduced, disappear or be preserved will not necessarily be the ones that suit us, but according to whether or not they are profitable, although in some cases they will coincide.** Thus, what they will try for as long as possible not to degrow is the set of branches and objects (including Artificial Intelligence) involved in the production of armaments which, however, is the most socially useless production, a total waste, since its products are condemned to destruction in an exchange with other similar ones, but also of human lives (military and civilian), of agricultural fields contaminated by military components, the massive planting of anti-personnel mines, the destruction of cities, vital infrastructures and services (roads, bridges, dams and hydroelectric plants, fuel reserves, water, gas and electricity pipelines, sewage systems, schools, hospitals, etc.). …). Without going any further back in time, one need only look at what they have done to Gaza, where it is no longer possible to live without international aid to simply eat and drink, and even that is being denied. That is accelerated ‘degrowth’ via genocide – a sample of what awaits many on the road to collapse! And what about the financial crises? Remember the disasters that followed the one that began in 2007-8 and its long tail of austerity. Decreasing expectations of profit in productive reinvestment will drive surplus value into financial speculation, where it will provoke new ‘bubbles’ that will eventually burst. Will they tell us that this is a “natural” consequence of degrowth and that we must endure it as we endure the inevitable consequences of an illness, and that ‘every cloud has a silver lining’, that ‘a good purge cleanses the organism’, because that is how we will degrow? But aren’t they already adding fuel to the fire because the necessary measures have not been taken, putting an end to all the deregulation of the financial world that brought it about; will the banks and their large shareholders have to be rescued, with the excuse of rescuing individual savers, for whom other measures could be implemented; or will these savers be sacrificed while there will be hardly any consequences for the managers of private and public entities and institutions clearly implicated as being responsible for the disaster? Will we continue with compound interest, which will have contributed to the crisis, because it is a boost to growth in addition to the spontaneous accumulation of capital (more surplus value, because it must also be shared with the bank in the form of interest)? Why not impose simple interest or compensation for inflation or take even more radical measures? The austerity measures they take with an unjust social criterion (with the maximum impact for the working class and popular sectors; to affect as little as possible or even increase the privileges of the rich) just as in the last decade they justified them because “we live beyond our (economic) means“, now they will say that “we live beyond the sustainability of planetary life“. They will present them as policies that are necessarily degrowthist, environmentalist, sustainable, etc., even though they affect the most basic things (food – ‘more guns, less butter’ , health care – sacrifice of public health care for the benefit of private health care, education, housing, insufficient unemployment insurance for the unemployed, especially if they are long-term unemployed, reduction of pensions ….), and we could have done it in a much better way, even if we had to give up many things that until now seemed necessary to us, but are really unsustainable, and we will be able to do without them. The incongruence with true degrowth will not matter. What is more, to the confusion they will create, will be added the distrust and discredit with which they will manage to infect real degrowth, because the bourgeoisie always plays with both hands. The left hand, will adulterate degrowth and make the most of it, but since it will not be possible to avoid all the discontent, the right hand will denounce the bad impacts as if they had nothing to do with this adulteration saying instead that is came from to with the original degrowth. The ultra-right will also take advantage of this situation to blame real degrowth for being the supposed inspiration for everything, and that ‘being more radical, it would be even worse’, as they already do with the ecologists and the real energy transition. What does it matter that the discourse has neither head nor tail if it makes ours explode, and that we run like headless chickens, ending up in their casserole? The capacity for deception and demobilisation by this scam-degrowth, however crude it may be, will be all the greater the weaker we are at that stage of the class struggle, and therefore the lesser the scope and impact of our work of unmasking it. Prior to scam-degrowth, it is very likely that they will resort to an even weaker version of degrowth, barely distinguishable from ‘sustainable growth or development’, in fact whitewashing ‘green’ capitalism, embellishing it in the eyes of the people. This could be the so-called post-growth2, which dissociates itself from degrowth (arguing that that word produces rejection among the people, etc.), and which has already been put forward in a Spanish candidacy (that of the left coalition, Sumar3, for the European Parliament elections of 9 June 2024 [and many times too in the English speaking world]. As it becomes more concrete in terms of arguments and proposals, it will be worthy of another article. There will be no real degrowth, that is to say, one that is not an expression of the crises, war economy and war itself, and the collapse of capitalism, at our expense, if it is not an anti-capitalist and voluntary degrowth, led by us, because we are overcoming capitalism. But this requires, whether we want to see it or not, a revolution. To remain permanently on the defensive, in the face of the permanent offensive of the bourgeoisie and the social breakdown and tendency towards chaos that the collapse of capitalism will bring, is only a guarantee of total defeat. And if we do not succeed, what will be imposed will be the most complete and ferocious of the dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (whether with a ‘democratic’ mask or overtly fascist), which will not even ensure our survival, but will expose us to the worst of dangers: nuclear war and ‘nuclear winter’. In effect, we have got deeply into a trap from which it will be very difficult to get out. But the longer we let time pass, the worse things will be for us. 1E.g. https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/03/rheinmetall-mulls-converting-german-vw-facility-into-military-vehicle-production-site/ https://www.babcockinternational.com/what-we-do/support/frontline-support/vehicle-armouring-and-conversion/ 2E.g. Raworth trying to discourage the term degrowth, https://www.kateraworth.com/2015/12/01/degrowth/ and see Kallis’s reply https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/youre-wrong-kate-degrowth-is-a-compelling-word/ For a comparison of post-growth and degrowth see https://thisvsthat.io/degrowth-vs-post-growth [Eds.] 3Although certain leaders and activists within Sumar have embraced the problematic of degrowth https://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2022/05/12/interview-with-alberto-garzon-and-eva-garcia-on-the-evolution-of-the-spanish-united-left-party-towards-degrowth/ [Eds.] ### Share this: * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to print (Opens in new window) Print * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Like Loading... ### _Related_

Beware diluted, fake, scam "drgrowth". Insist on the real thing.

New piece in our #ProspectsForDegrowth series.

Degrowth: a dead end or the way out? Capital’s future scam – degrowthUK
degrowthuk.org/2025/05/31/degrowth-a-de...

Call for articles – Prospects for Degrowth As much of the world takes a sinister turn on several fronts, not least in the UK with the re-vindication of GDP growth and militarism, DegrowthUK is inviting timely submissions on the topic…

As much of the world takes a sinister turn on several fronts, not least in the UK with the re-vindication of GDP growth and militarism, #DegrowthUK is inviting timely submissions on the topic #ProspectsForDegrowth.
degrowthuk.org/2025/04/04/c...

#degrowth