Structural Change: Grassroots Practices & Institutional Reform
Pathways to Degrowth (2 of 4)
The second dimension of social change identified by Macy & Johnstone (2012) is structural changes which strive to replace or transform the current system. When it comes to the vision of degrowth, there are two complementary avenues through which the development of alternative structures may arise: institutional reforms and grassroots economic practices. The specific institutional changes embodied in a degrowth transition were discussed in article 7. The alternative economic practices will now be presented.
Grassroots Economic Practices
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of such initiatives, as conventional state and market institutions fail to provide for people’s basic needs. Among these grassroot practices are co-housing and eco-communities, the Transition Town Network, community currencies, urban gardens and alternative food networks, open sourced software and digital commons collectives, restore and recycling shops, time banks and barter markets, communities of ‘back-to-the-landers’, not-for-profit cooperatives and self-organised forms of education, childcare and healthcare (Dittmer 2015; Johanisava et al; 2015; Kostakis et al. 2018).
These alternative economic practices can be seen as seeds, or pockets, of societal change emerging from within the current system (D’Alisa et al. 2015). Although not all the grassroots initiatives I visited during my field research identify as part of the degrowth movement, they prefigure many of its key principles. First, the majority of them have no for-profit orientation. They are geared to the production of use value, rather than exchange value and can therefore be categorised as non-capitalist (Gibson-Graham 2006). Secondly, the decision-making processes of these projects is highly democratic, generally taking place on a consensus basis in assembly settings.
Third, these initiatives can be seen as efforts to ‘exit’ the economy (Fournier 2008). Their focus is on constructing social and ecological value and patterns of production and consumption that operate outside the reductionist logic of the market economy. The various projects I engaged with promoted the commons, relationships, care and the logic of ‘gift’ (see Mauss 1954), thereby diminishing the role of the market and private property. Fourth, wage labour was often substituted with equally distributed voluntary activity, de-commodifying and de-professionalising work. Fifth, these grassroot activities also involved shorter production-consumption-disposal circuits. Finally, whilst the individual projects and services they provide might expand, there is no structural imperative for continued accumulation and growth within these individual initiatives.
Gramsci’s Integral State
Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) concept of the ‘integral state’ provides a useful lens through which to view the potential role policy reforms and grassroots practices can play in a degrowth transition. Gramsci’s theory makes a distinction between civil and political society. Civil society encompasses ‘non-coercive institutions’, such as schools, voluntary associations and the family. Grassroots initiatives fall under this realm. Political society, meanwhile, encompasses state institutions that hold powers of enforcement. Police and military services, bureaucracy and judicial and legislative systems compromise this level. Taken together, civil society (the realm of consent) and political society (the realm of power) constitute the integral state (D’Alisa & Kallis 2016).
As Kallis (2018) argues, no ruling class or system can survive indefinitely through coercion alone; it must also dominate the space of civil society ideologically. In other words, it must establish a hegemonic common sense over civil society. Gramsci (1971), refers to common sense as the “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding the world that has become common in any epoch”. From a degrowth perspective, the prevailing common sense of contemporary capitalist societies is the taken for granted desirability of economic growth.
Shifting Common Senses: Grassroots Practices & Institutional Reform
As illustrated above, grassroot economic practices challenge and develop concrete alternatives to this common sense. In doing so, they provide spaces for the cultivation of value systems that run counter to the dominant value forms of growth-based capitalist economies. It is in this sense that grassroots initiatives can be seen as a form of prefigurative politics (see Boggs 1977). They are not mere microcosms of a degrowth future, but incubators of one — spaces where individuals embody, or pre-figure, the alternative world they would like to produce and inhabit through their daily actions, rendering its logic common sense.
As Kallis et al. (2012) substantiate, engagement in alternative economic initiatives can be seen as a value-changing practice which leads to the formation of new political subjects. Put differently, grassroots practices have the capacity to contribute to the development of counter-hegemonic narratives that can reorder the common senses of civil society. As these initiatives ripple out, they deconstruct the logic of the growth paradigm, advancing ideas and values that are fitting with a degrowth future by illustrating that a different economy is possible. In doing so, they create the conditions “for a social and political force to change political institutions in the same direction” (Kallis 2018).
It is then the role of political society to reinforce these new common senses through the development of alternative institutional structures, such as those proposed in article 7. Seen in this light, societal change in the direction of degrowth might be brought about through a twin movement of grassroots initiatives and institutional reforms, or, in Gramsci’s terms, through the mutually reinforcing levels of civil and political society.
Both these processes are insufficient without the other. Grassroots initiatives not only build a demand for institutional change in the direction of a degrowth transition, but also create the necessary conditions for such proposals to have their intended impact. For example, the introduction of a UBI in a society with strong alternative economic initiatives is likely to help these programmes flourish. Whereas the introduction of a UBI in a heavily consumerist society is likely to simply lead to increased consumption.
In the same vein, the transformative capacity of grassroots projects is limited by structural barriers. Examples abound, from alternative food networks being restricted by access to land and subsidies favouring industrial agriculture, to the risk of cooperative housing initiatives leading to gentrification in the absence of rent controls. Institutional reforms can therefore be seen to have a crucial role in opening up space for alternative economic practices to flourish and ripple out. There is therefore a synergetic interaction between grassroots actions and top-down policy reform.
Although they currently exist as small niches on the margins of contemporary capitalist economies, grassroots practices and degrowth policy reforms represent concrete steps in the political realisation of degrowth. Ultimately, however, fundamental cultural change at the societal level is necessary if the hegemony of the growth paradigm is to be broken. While the development of new structures play an important role in reordering the common senses of those who participate or come into contact with them, wider shifts in consciousness are necessary if degrowth is to move from the very outskirts of political discourse into its centre. This theme is picked up in the following article.
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