Abstract
Despite its mounting contradictions, it is doubtful that the growth hegemony can be overcome by simply drawing attention to is abundant shortcomings. Nor is it likely that engaging in a direct discursive confrontation with growth discourse will prompt the emergence of a plausible post-growth alternative. This is because the growth hegemony is so deeply ingrained in existing understandings and practices that any overt strategy to challenge it is unlikely to be politically feasible.
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Notes
- 1.
Glasson (2015) cites the economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era in China as an example of subversive rearticulation. These measures saw private property and the market effectively brought into the centre of the Chinese state-society nexus without directly discursively challenging communism . This was achieved by using the pivot discourse of ‘modernisation,’ which is compatible with both communism and capitalism and was articulated in binary opposition to ‘feudalism.’ The upshot was that Deng was able to shift the discursive conflict away from the binary communism-capitalism and toward that of modernisation-feudalism, whilst creating a new form of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ that is open to markets, private property and the like. Other documented historical examples of subversive rearticulation include the shift from conceptions of ‘black’ in Jamaica from signifying dispossessed, uncivilised and incompetent, to signifying soul brother, beautiful and solidarity (Hall 1985); and the legitimisation of the pursuit of self-interest from the eighteenth century (Hirschman 1977), which was explored at length in Chap. 3. Glasson (2015) also outlines a set of speculative processes of subversive rearticulation from pro-growth to no-growth; industrialism to precautionary development; consumerism to green citizenship; and national to planetary consciousness, as components of a wider shift from capitalist modernity to ecologism.
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Ferguson, P. (2018). Transcending the Growth Hegemony. In: Post-growth Politics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_7
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