One of the appeals of free-market capitalist theory when it first arrived on the (British) scene in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was that it appeared to be natural, and so consonant with many of the new scientific assumptions of the time. Leaving an economy untrammelled would enable it to develop, advance and grow in the same way that nature does – plants, animals, humans, diseases, humanity as a species (after Darwin), societies (often as empires), the universe, knowledge… and indeed, almost everything. It was an optimistic view of life and of history, adhered to by Marxists as well as by the free marketists, albeit with the adjustments to the mechanics of economic ‘progress’ that were insisted upon by Karl. (His, remember, was a ‘scientific’ socialism.) And it arguably still prevails in the political discourse of today, and especially in all parties’ emphasis on the necessity for economic growth.

That’s what they nearly all promise; on the assumption that material progress is the main measure of a government’s success, with ‘are you better off now than you were under the last lot?’ being a key question in many politicians’ rhetorical armoury. If people don’t feel ‘better off’, then the previous government will have been deemed to fail in its main mission; if the answer is ‘yes’, the incumbents will have a good chance of getting back into power. Barring major interruptions like wars, economic ‘progress’, measured in monetary terms, is seen as the natural way societies should go. That is why ‘growth’ is so much emphasised in election manifestos today; certainly in Britain, and probably in other countries too.

I don’t know how apt the analogy with ‘nature’ is to this way of thinking; but if it is a factor there seems to me to be an obvious flaw in it. Yes, everything in nature does evolve ‘naturally’; but that isn’t the end of its story. After growth, in every case, comes death, often fired by the same evolutionary mechanisms that powered that self-same growth. Another way of putting this is that every living and evolving thing contains the seeds of its own destruction; as Marx predicted in the case of capitalism, and could be seen in the way capitalism – and indeed the world – are developing today.

If this is so, then we obviously ought to pause before giving capitalism or any other kind of ‘development’ free rein, and perhaps consider better ways of measuring ‘progress’. Another rationale for the free market was always supposed to be that the wealth it created for the rich would invariably ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us; but that no longer seems to be happening, with the gap between the (very) rich and the (pretty) poor widening in most capitalist societies. There’s already enough ‘wealth’ washing around in the world – certainly in Europe and America – to satisfy and motivate everyone if it were shared around more fairly; which of course would require socialism – of a sort – to effect it. Then we shouldn’t need ‘growth’, but only a better distribution of the wealth we have already accumulated; which among other advantages might temper social and political unrest, and even – it could be said – make people nicer. So let’s have done with ‘growth’ as a desideratum, or as a measure of ‘progress’, and manage better with what we’ve got.

Of course this analysis is somewhat simplistic, and not particularly new. As I was composing this post Kajsa came across a reference to a book by the Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, who calls himself a ‘degrowth Marxist’, which could well express more rigorously what I’m getting at here (see https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/kohei-saito-marxist-pro-degrowth-and-pragmatic). I’ve not yet read the book, but will try to get hold of it. In the meantime, let’s hope that 2025 – growth or no growth – turns out better than 2024.