3531. On Degrowth

By Kamran Nayeri, July 22, 2021

"The Good Life" mural painted by Amanda Lynn, Forestville, Califonria, 2021. Photo: Kamran Nayeri.

What is degrowth? 

Degrowth is an ambiguous  label used by different currents that have emerged or have been reconsidered as such since the 1960s when the contemporary environmentalist movement got underway.  The bulk of these movements identify as Greens although it includes eco-anarchists (e.g. Trainer 2010; Australian Simplicity Institute) and others.  The ambiguity of what degrowth stands for is a problem both for its proponents and its critics that sometimes misrepresent it.    

I will briefly review and discuss degrowth by focusing on a recent book The Case for Degrowth (2020) by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, and Federico Demaria (herein, “The authors”). Mike Davis has recommended the book as “eloquent and urgent.” The authors themselves declare: “The purpose of this book is to motivate and empower citizens, policy makers, and activists to reorient livelihoods and politics around equitable wellbeing.” (p. 5) 

In their view: 

“Degrowth makes the case that we have to produce and consume differently, and also less.  That we have to share more and distribute more fairly, while the pie shrinks. To do so in ways that support pleasurable lives in resilient societies and environments requires values and institutions that produce different kinds of persons and relations.” (ibid.)

Yet degrowth “does not claim one unitary theory or plan of action. A remarkably diverse network of thinkers and actors experiment with different initiatives and engage in healthy debates about what degrowth, and what form it can or should take un different contexts.” (p. 19)

Thus, degrowth appears as as décroissance in France, decrescita in Catalonia, and sumak kawsay (an ancient Quechua word for “good living”) or Bon Vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in South Africa, and so on.  

Intellectual sources of degrowth

At its core degrowth is about volunteer simplicity as a lifestyle choice. Voluntary simplicity has deep historical roots. In the U.S. its intellectual origins is in American transcendentalism, most directly the teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the more practical example of Henry David Thoreau.  In the Western tradition simplicity is a theme in Christianity. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, God is infinitely simple. The Roman Catholic and Anglican religious orders of Franciscans also strive for personal simplicity. Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) practice the Testimony of Simplicity, which involves simplifying one's life to focus on what is important and disregard or avoid what is least important. Simplicity is tenet of Anabaptistism.

Recent sources of degrowth come from the Club of Rome, a think tank headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland. Meadows, et. al. (1972) published The Limits to Growth a report prepared at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using simulation models to predicate the future of economic growth on a planet with limited resources. In 2012, one of the researchers of the original study, Randers (2012), published the last report 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years.   Intellectually more interesting sources include E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) and  “Buddhist Economics” (1966) as well as Herman Daly’s stationary state economics such as“Towards a Steady-State Economy.” (2008) and others (see, here).   

From ideas to a movement

After the radicalization of the 1960s, volunteer simplicity became a trend in the back to land and the hippie movement.  In the late 2000s, I linked up with volunteer simplicity individuals and groups in northern California to learn about it and the existing intentional communities. Some of the people I met had reduced their material possessions and needs to a minimum and had disentangled themselves from much of the monetary relations.  Intentional communities I visited similarly aimed at finding the sweet spot to maximize communal living based on shared values while leaving sufficient space for individual choices.  However, the history of communal living in the U.S. since the nineteenth century has not been encouraging. (see, endnote 1) The degrowth movement has spread in recent times among Green academics, thus some attempt to “theorize” it. 

Growth or capitalism?

The degrowth literature focuses attention on economic growth defined as annual increase in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and material growth defined as “the increase in the quantity of matter and energy transformed” in the same country in the same year.  As the authors point out, while planetary scientists agree that material growth is detrimental to the ecological health of the planet, economic growth is generally celebrated as good for society almost across the political spectrum.  

As the authors point out there are good reasons to criticize economic growth as measured by GDP. All income or expenditure no matter their source contribute to economic growth hence the GDP increases. Cutting down a forest to sell wood to the lumber market will increase the GDP regardless of its negative impact on biodiversity and climate change and pure human joy of being in the forest. 

But the authors do not attempt to establish any systematic connection between economic and material growth because they not consider the sources for economic growth: investment demand and consumer demand. In the global capitalist economy, economic growth is driven by capitalist investment which itself is driven by capitalist profit.  As Marx put it, capital is self-expanding value expressed in its simplest form, money capital, as M —> M’ where M’ > M.   Industrial capital involves a production cycle: 

M —> C (materials + machinery + labor power)—>P—>C’  where C’ > C (final product)

That is, capitalists invest money capital in raw materials, machinery, and labor power to produce commodity C’ which they hope to sell in commodity market at M’ greater than M resulting in a profit P.  This process of valorization of capital requires a consumer market. Thus, the process of capital accumulation (growth) will require an ever-expanding consumer market. (See endnote 2)

There lies the sources of economic and material growth. Ongoing economic growth requires material growth (growth of material and energy use for expanded production). Consumer demand while essential for valorization of capital, is itself conditioned by capitalist system which generates new “wants” and “needs” through propaganda (advertisement and marketing) as well provision of consumer credit to expand effective demand (demand backed by monetary means).  Of course, capitalist cyclical and secular crises intervene. Keynesian economics resulted from the recognition that left to itself, the capitalist market will occasionally fail and that the capitalist state can and must intervene with fiscal and monetary means to bolster sagging investment and consumption demands.  

Presumably, the focus on growth offers a vantage point into the sources of growth. For example, when in the 1970s it was assumed that one third of humanity lived in “socialist” countries (Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, N. Korea, and Cuba), the focus on growth included attention to productivist features of the “socialist” economies which a focus of the “capitalism” would have neglected these.  However, today most observers agree that that humanity lives by-and-large in a global capitalist economy with the possible exception of very small economies of Cuba and North Korea.  

It may be argued that growth in capitalist economies is sometimes mostly driven by consumer expenditure. For example, in the United States 70% of the GDP is due to consumer expenditure.  However, high consumer demand is industrialized capitalist economies of the Global North (and soon China) depend of production for profit and ever-growing capital accumulation, the driver of economic growth.  This reality comes to light in every economic recession and even more so in an economic depression (e.g. the 1930s in thenU.S.). When production slows down significantly or even stops working people are laid off en mass and consumer demand collapses as the result. By contrast, the economic recovery, hence a return to economic growth, follows capitalist investment and subsequently higher employment and perhaps even higher wages hence a renewal of consumer demand.  Thus, the primacy of capitalist accumulation in pursuit of profit in discussion of sources of growth becomes clear. 

Strategy for social change

Because the degrowth movement is part of the Green movement which shuns social theory, in particular, any theory of “capitalism,” its strategy is descriptive focusing on the movements of resistance to aspects of the industrial capitalist mode of social existence. Thus, in the chapter entitled “Making Changes on the Ground,” the authors write: “Here we build a case for degrowth from the ground up, learning from people who embody and perform everyday common senses in the spirit of degrowth. This differs from global programs to curb biodiversity loss and climate change, but we do not see them as mutually exclusive.” (p. 44)

I think there is much value in learning from all existing and past experiences of resistance to the capitalist mode of life including attempt to opt out of it “to produce and consume differently, and also less.”  The authors correctly stress that much of the most basic spheres of life is still supported by non-capitalist provisioning beginning with women and the household.  While noting that “[c]ommoning can be oriented toward growth or degrowth, toward defending the status quo or enacting change through performative re-articulation s of common sense,” they add:

“We urge greater appreciation of forms of care and social reproduction and consumption including communal food gardens, community supported agriculture, agroecology networks; eco-communes, co-living and co-housing arrangement s; peer-to-peer software, hardware, digital commons, and co-parenting and childcare circles.” (pp. 45-46)

Still, the authors realize that “[i]t is naive to think about change , however, as a question of individual volition.” (p. 50) They add: “Taking personal action is a first step toward building societies that implement needed changes in policies and institutions.” (p. 51)

While I agree with their general prescription, the test is in how one implement these concomitant processes of personal and social changes.  For example, their reference to the 2009-16 crisis in Greece focuses attention on how “many Greeks disoriented by prolonged crisis found meaning in cooperative projects…” (p. 53). There is no discussion of the role played by the SYRIZA-led coalition government in that crisis and the Greek left, especially SYRIZA, from the perspective of addressing the root-causes of the crisis in such a way that would have empowered and improved the lives of the Greek working people to resolve the Greek and the planetary crises. (for such a critical approach see, Nayeri, 2015) 

While degrowth urges us to produce and consume less and differently, it still hangs on to the idea of progress linked to advances of science and technology. So the authors write: “…[W]e recognize the role that large-scale high-tech production will continue to play and observe that many smaller processes, including those oriented toward purposes other than growth, are also strengthened by technological innovations.” (p. 59)  While the authors point to the “continued shadow” of power relations in the degrowth future (they cite, racism, sexism, and classicism) they don’t seem to worry about the rising power of technological and scientific elite that invariably follows the high technological society they embrace.  Also, it is doubtful that a high technology society would be compatible with smaller ecological footprint degrowth  aims for. 

Macro level changes

The authors recognize that micro-level changes must be complemented with macro-level transformations.  They propose five such “reforms” to the present capitalist societies in the Global North: “Green New Deal without growth; universal incomes and services; policies to reclaim the commmons; reduction of working hours; and public finance that supports the first four.” (p. 65)

They correctly criticize promises of “green growth and propensity, widely understood as increased income and material wealth” including in Green New Deal (p. 67) as running counter to degrowth vision of producing and consuming less and a shrinking economic pie. 

The authors urge other reforms such as universal incomes and services because they provide “freedom to say ‘no’ to exploitive wage relations.” (p. 70). A similar approach is offered for reclaiming the commons (citing sanitation, health, care commons as most important), reduction of working hours, etc.  Degrowth as the authors outline it “…is a collective endeavor to make life viable through material and meaningful support not driven toward profit.” (p. 71)

Here again, they do not penetrate below the surface of socioeconomic reality. No amount of “universal incomes and services” in any capitalist society will undo “exploitive wage relations.” As Karl Marx has shown in volume 1 of Capital (1867) exploitation of wage labor is baked into the capital-labor relations at the point of production. That is, a worker’s wages falls short of the value of what she/he produces plus the value of means of production and any raw materials used by the amount of surplus value (profit). That is, profit is equal to unpaid labor time.  As long as workers work in capitalistically run economy, they will he exploited no matter what reforms are made to their working conditions.  This provides yet another example of how the authors as well as the intellectual basis of the degrowth movement side step the reality of the capitalist world economy as they shun any social theory. 

Society-wide-strategies for change

Citing Erik Olin Wright, the authors name three strategies for socioeconomic transformation (p. 87): interstitial (building alternatives in the cracks of current system), symbiotic (working within the system for reforms), and ruptural (disrupting or revolting against dominant systems).  I have already discussed the first two of these.  But there is a paucity of discussion in this book about strategies for a revolutionary (not evolutionary) transformation.  The closest they to “revolutionary action” is the Arb Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Spanish Indignados (anti-austerity movement). None of these have resulted in degrowth where they have occurred. Moreover, none of these have explicitly challenged the prevailing capitalist order much less transcending it. 

The authors talk about building alliances for society-wide transformation.  They include: “…nature lovers, care providers, families with children, biking fanatics, vegans, overworked professionals, hippies, unemployed people, indebted families, climate refugees, back-to-the-landers, senior citizens, people engaged in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements, and more.” (p. 98)  They also add as “vital allies” “workers, feminists, anti-racists, and members of low-income communities.” (ibid.) And there is more: “People working in manufacturing, construction, traansportation, schools, hospitality, groceries, and other sectors….and worker organizations ranging from conventional trade unions to online communities are central to mobilization.”  (ibid.)

There is more to this laundry list of actors for transformational social change in the direction of degrowth.  But the authors themselves have  even the authors themselves have wisely elsewhere cited that commoning need not be inconsistent with growth. Why any of these actors and their actions be in necessarily anti-growth?  

Realizing they have no clear idea of who would be mobilized and how to affect a society-wide transformation in the direction of degrowth, the authors admit: “You still might not be convinced that a politics of degrowth is feasible. We have our doubts too.” (p. 108)

Concluding remarks

Degrowth shines a light on the problem of growth on a planet with finite resources. It also envisions an smaller human society living on a shrinking economic pie by producing and consuming less and in ways ecologically  more sustainable and argue not only for its necessity but also its desirability as expressed by many forms of resistance to it and utopias to avoid it.

However, degrowth movement as the authors of this popular book demonstrate consciously shun any theory of society in particular the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Thus growth appears as a cultural choice instead of a systemic compulsion.  

A few statistics should make the problem degrowth avoids quite clear. According to the Credit Suisse report (2016), the richest 3.5 million people worldwide (o.7% of world population) control $116 trillion or 45.6% of the world’s wealth (Of course, even in this tiny group wealth is highly concentrated in an even tinier subgroup).  The share of the poorest 3.5 billion people (73% of the world population) is only $6.1 trillion of wealth or on average less than $10,000 in wealth each (Of course, a majority in this group have no wealth or even have negative wealth, debt).  

On the other hand, According to the World Bank about 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day and 63% live on less than $10 per day. Clearly, much of the world resources are used in the Global North by the well-to-do population. 

Clearly, to effectively end growth it is necessary to transcend wealth producing economies, in particular the global anthropocentric industrial capitalist economy.  If we stop accumulation of wealth by a tiny fraction of people on the planet (0.7% of total world population) and provide this ruling elite with all they can consume for a very comfortable existence for the rest of their lives, we can use the bulk of the existing wealth to improve the lives of the 85% of the world’s population whose basic needs are not met.  Second, the simple act of refusing to produce in order to accumulate immense wealth for a tiny fraction of the world population (and for anyone else in the future) will reduce the ecological footprint of the humanity radically and immediately, a giant step towards restoring the health of the ecosphere.  

Moreover, by not recognizing the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization as the source of our crises, the degrowth movement cannot identify social actors who could contribute to the effort to end growth by transitioning to a steady state economy in line with what degrowth movement envisions and a culture of being as opposed to the culture of having. 

I believe degrowth movement can learn a few things from the socialist and ecological socialist movements just as these movements that often have not considered the necessity of a smaller world population and the need for a shrinking of the economic pie and in some cases even the need for producing and consuming differently. 

Last and most central is the problem of culture and nature relationship. Degrowth movement while an offshoot of the Green movement seem oddly uninterested in directly tackling humanity’s malignant relations with the rest of nature as reflected in anthropocentrism.  Historically all wealth comes from expropriation of nature through exploitation of working people.  Ecocentric Socialism theory and practice which I have developed (Nayeri, 2018, 2020, 2021) shares a similar vision of a much smaller humanity producing and consuming  very differently and much less in mostly local economies. But it is also centrally focused on healing our pathological relationship with the more than human nature.  In this it draws on the cultures of hunter-gatherer and wisdom of indigenous peoples such the culture of reciprocity and gratitude which view humanity as deeply rooted in the web of life on planet Earth.

Endnotes:

1.  Many lasted very briefly at most a few years due to internal strife. A few religious sects that have lasted but they have not proved attractive to the big majority of people. “According to the Census Bureau, fewer than three people lived in the average American household in 2010. Single-person households only made up about 13 percent of all American households in 1960. The 2019 American Community Survey counted 139.69 million housing units, up 1.15 million from 2018, and up 7.90M from 131.79 million in 2010. (See also Strauss 2016)

2. Strictly speaking, there are three types of markets, consumer market which in the U.S. constitute 70% of the GDP, capital market (e.g. machinery), and luxury goods market (which caters to the capitalist class and its immediate periphery)

References:

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1, The Process of Production of Capital . 1867. 

Meadows, Donella H; Meadows, Dennis L; Randers, Jørgen; Behrens III, William  W. The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind.  1972. 

Nayeri, Kamran. “Greece: The Road Forward As If the Planet and People Matter.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. June 20, 2015. 

————————. “The Crisis of Civilization and How to Resolve It: An Introduction to Ecocentric Socialism.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 15, 2018. 

————————. “The Coronavirus Pandemic as the Crisis of Civilization,” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. March 19, 2020. 

------------------. "The Case for Ecocentric Socialism," Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. July 4, 2021. 

Randers.Jøgen.  2052 – A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. 2012. 

Strauss, Ilena E.. “The Hot New Millennial Housing Trend Is a Repeat of the Middle Ages.” The Atlantic.  September 26, 2016.

Trainer, Ted. The Transformation to a Sustainable and Just World. 2010. 

3530. The Hot New Millennial Housing Trend Is a Repeat of the Middle Ages

 By Ilena E. Strauss, The Atlantic, Septmber 26. 2016

For most of human history, people were hunter-gatherers. They lived in large camps, depending on one another for food, childcare, and everything else—all without walls, doors, or picket fences. In comparison, the number of people living in most households in today’s developed countries is quite small. According to the Census Bureau, fewer than three people lived in the average American household in 2010. The members of most American households can be counted on one hand, or even, increasingly, one finger: Single-person households only made up about 13 percent of all American households in 1960. Now, that figure is about 28 percent.

Belonging to a relatively small household has become the norm even though it can make daily life more difficult in many ways. Privacy may be nice, but cooking and doing chores become much less time-consuming when shared with an additional person, or even several people. Water, electric, and internet bills also become more bearable when divided among multiple residents. There are social downsides to living alone, too. Many elderly people, young professionals, stay-at-home parents, and single people routinely spend long stretches of time at home alone, no matter how lonely they may feel; more distressingly, many single parents face the catch-22 of working and paying for childcare. Living in smaller numbers can be a drain on money, time, and feelings of community, and the rise of the two-parent dual-earning household only compounds the problems of being time-poor.

It wasn’t always like this. Living arrangements have been changing for thousands of years, and the concept of the nuclear family originated relatively recently. Even as the economy has moved away from the sort of agricultural labor that would encourage large households, people still have just as much of a need for the support of friends, family, and neighbors. Perhaps that is why so many people today—from young coders to lonely septuagenarians to families—are experimenting with communal living, a way of life that, whether they know it or not, echoes how things worked for most of human history. This sort of experimentation is all too appropriate at a time when, for the typical American child, having two married parents is on the decline, and there is no longer a single dominant family structure as there was a half-century ago.

Tens of thousands of years ago, all living was communal. Being a hunter-gatherer meant being free of many of the distinctions that govern life today. “There’s no division between your social life and your private life,” says Mark Dyble, a postdoctoral researcher at University College London who studies modern-day hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. “Your whole life is open to other people. There’s no way to be isolated.” The hunter-gatherer camps Dyble studied, whose members change week by week, consist of anywhere from five to 18 deeply interdependent “households,” each usually made up of parents, their children, and perhaps another relative or two. These households are involved in virtually every aspect of each others’ lives.

While relatives often stick together, these families are anything but self-sufficient. “A chimp mother is capable of feeding herself and her offspring. That’s not the case with humans,” Dyble says, pointing out that human children take a long time to mature and take care of themselves. “By our biology, we are obliged to have support from others. You couldn’t survive as a single-family household among hunter-gatherers.”

The Middle Ages, when homes were essentially gathering places for small groups of revolving residents, represent a conceptual midpoint between hunter-gatherers’ living arrangements and those common today. As the historian John Gillis described in his 1997 book A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values, people in medieval Europe lived with a mix of friends and extended family. At that time, single-family households were uncommon in most of the world, and Western Europe became, around the 12th century, one of the first places where households were organized around monogamous couples and their children. But these households still didn’t look much like today’s nuclear families. In addition to parents and their children, medieval households frequently included various townspeople, poor married couples, other people’s children, widows, orphans, unrelated elderly people, servants, boarders, long-term visitors, friends, and assorted relatives.

On top of that, people moved constantly among houses. “Home was the place that sheltered you at the moment, not the one special place associated with childhood or family of origin,” Gillis writes. Single people sometimes ran households, and marriage was not as narrowly defined as it is today. Most kids spent time living away from their families, especially as teenagers. Living with strangers was common, and locals would often treat houses like public property. “People entered without knocking, even without acknowledgement,” writes Gillis. “It was often difficult to tell which family belonged where … In big as well as little houses, the constant traffic of people precluded the cozy home life we imagine to have existed in the past.”

By the 1500s, the idea of a household as a father, a mother, and their biological children caught on among Europe’s new urban middle class, at least as something to strive for. This “godly household” owes a lot to the Protestant Reformation, in which religious leaders started rejecting the Catholic Church as the center of life and replaced it with a domestic divine: the father as a stand-in for God, the mother for a priest, and the children for congregants. It’s around this time that nativity scenes became popular, emphasizing Jesus’s role as a member of a nuclear family rather than as a lone preacher.

For all its popularity as a comforting idea, the godly household was hardly common 500 years ago. It was completely unrealistic for most people to find the time, money, and resources to run a household on their own. Even those who did usually had big households full of unrelated people; they relied on the larger community far too much to survive as a single-family unit.

It wasn’t until the 1800s that people began drawing a sharp distinction between family and friends when it came to who they lived with. So, during the latter half of the 19th century, the godly family started to take shape in reality. Industrialization made extended communities less vital for earning a living. When societies were mostly agricultural, production was centered near the home, and families needed all the labor they could get to run the farm during busy seasons. But as industrialization took hold, people started leaving home to go to work, commuting to factories and, later, offices. Something communal was lost, and by the early 20th century, industrial efficiency permitted a lifestyle of domestic privacy: Households shrank down to nuclear families, much more closed-off from relatives and neighbors than ever before.

Homeownership is still viewed as a central component of living out the American dream, but the ways that many present-day Americans are pushing back on modern living arrangements closely resemble what came centuries, even millennia, before in other parts of the world.  Family members, relatives, neighbors, and strangers are coming together to live in groups that work for them—a bit like medieval Europe. “Today, all across the nation, Americans are living the new happily ever after,” writes the social psychologist Bella DePaulo in her 2015 book How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century. “The ‘new’ part is that people with whom they are sharing homes and lives are not just spouses or romantic partners.”

Instead of limiting their households to children, parents, and grandparents, plenty of people are going a step further, making homes with friends and even strangers. Cohousing, in which a large community lives together and shares household duties, is gaining popularity. In cohousing, individuals or families generally have their own houses, bedrooms, or apartments but share things like kitchens and community spaces. They’ll commonly trade off on responsibilities like cooking and chores. Milagro Housing, for instance, is a cohousing community located in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. There, families, couples, and single people live in 28 homes in a tight-knit community that shares a kitchen, laundry room, library, meeting room, playroom, and storage rooms.

And Milagro Housing isn’t all that unusual; the Fellowship for Intentional Community, an organization that champions communities "where people live together on the basis of explicit common values," lists 1,539 cohousing communities around the country, some already formed and others in the process of forming. That’s likely a low estimate, since plenty of shared-living communities aren’t reported to any national databases. While some residents hire developers to build cohousing villages from scratch, most have turned already-existing houses and apartments into shared communities.

Cohousing has shown itself to be a useful living arrangement for groups of people with all sorts of priorities. In Silicon Valley’s hacker houses, dozens of computer programmers, most of them very young, bunk together while they work at start-ups or on their own projects. The website CoAbode links single mothers who want to live and raise children together. In Los Angeles, about a dozen young adults live together in one large house called Synchronicity LA. There, they make art together, hold salons, divide up chores, and trade off cooking communal meals four days a week. “It really feels like living in a big family,” Grant Hoffner, a longtime Synchronicity resident, told me.

Cohousing models can get pretty creative. In Hope Meadows, a neighborhood near Chicago that DePaulo describes in her book, retired people live together with at-risk foster kids. There, retired folks, many of whom used to describe their lives as boring and lonely, raise the kids together. And in Deventer, a town in the eastern region of the Netherlands, that model is flipped: Some college students there live in nursing homes alongside elderly people, who they socialize with and assist with various chores.

The modern cohousing movement began in Denmark in the 1970s, and there are now more than 700 “living communities” in Denmark alone, according to DePaulo. In each, dozens or even hundreds of Danish families live in homes built around shared spaces and common houses. “The residents wanted to see each other over the course of their everyday lives, and be there for each other in ways large and small,” writes DePaulo. The idea spread to several other countries, and Sweden even has a number of state-owned cohousing buildings, each populated by hundreds of residents. And that’s just this particular brand of shared living; 120,000 Israelis live in communal villages called kibbutzim, which originated about 100 years ago.

Developers are starting to see how appealing cohousing is to some people. Commonspace, for instance, is a company that designs and runs apartments consisting of about 20 small units around a common area occupied mostly by young and single people, sort of like a dorm for adults. The first distinctive cohousing setup in the U.S. was built by developers 25 years ago, but the concept hasn’t gained much traction, as there are now only 160 American cohousing communities built from scratch. Perhaps that will change as developers court young people who envision a lifestyle different than the one they’ve inherited from the 20th century.

Among other things, many residents are drawn to the company that cohousing offers, which DePaulo says is the main reason people choose to live like this. Cohousing can feel a bit like summer camp, with people always around to talk to and spend time with. But it also provides deep support systems. “If someone is hospitalized, cohousing friends are there to visit,” writes DePaulo. “When a cohouser is ailing at home, neighbors show up with chicken soup and the latest news from the community.”

One anthropologist DePaulo interviewed decided to live with more people after being unhappy on her own, even though her boyfriend lived nearby and she had some friends in her building. “I would come home and cry,” Leanna Wolfe, the anthropologist, told DePaulo. “I was just so lonely.” She wasn’t the only one: Americans have fewer close friends than they used to. Since 1985, the number of Americans who have no friends to confide in has tripled, reported a 2006 American Sociological Review study.

In addition to the sense of community it builds, there’s an obvious upside to shared living: saving time and money. In a typical American house or apartment, individuals or small families are in charge of each meal themselves. But cohousing communities can divide up cooking schedules. Many residents only cook once a week and come home to cooked meals everyday.

One of cohousing’s biggest draws is that it eases the burdens of child-rearing. It takes a village to raise a child, as the saying goes, and most modern-day parents could use the help. Among the Efe, a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo, some infants more than three weeks old spend 80 percent of their time with someone other than their mothers. By comparison, the majority of American communities are designed to keep people apart. “I like to think of dwellings as people: If a group of people wanted to get to know each other, they would not line up facing each other in two straight, rigid rows, too far apart to really see anyone else clearly,” writes DePaulo. “That’s how houses are arranged on many conventional streets.” Under other housing models, a village really could raise a child.

DePaulo argues that it would be particularly helpful to integrate cohousing into public-housing policy. “People who work on housing for the poor have to deal with people’s whole lives,” she argues in her book. “They can’t just give them a place to live and forget about them.” Keeping rent affordable is the foremost concern for people in charge of managing public housing, but cohousing can fill in other difficulties of living without much money: Splitting cooking, childcare, and household expenses can save lots of time and money. For these reasons and others, Danish and Swedish governments have long supported cohousing. American governments (especially local ones) could do the same, perhaps by converting abandoned hotels into mixed-income cohousing, building affordable shared-living buildings, or even just by connecting interested locals and helping them refashion their neighborhoods into something that better fosters community.

Humans have never lived the same way for long, and many people are finding today’s urban and suburban neighborhoods, which are based on an idealized version of home that is by now hundreds of years old, to be lacking. Humans may never return to the days of having strangers and distant relatives dropping in to live for extended periods of time, but it’s clear that a group of people are tapping into the past that John Gillis wrote about: “Until well into the nineteenth century, heaven was represented not as a community of families but as one large community of friends.”

3529. Thousands March in Cuba in Rare Mass Protests Amid Economic Crisis

By Ed Agustine and Daniel Montero in Havana, The Guardian, July 12, 2021

US sanctions and coronavirus crisis lead to food shortages and high prices, sparking one of the biggest such demonstrations in memory

Thousands join rare anti-government protests in Cuba – video

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Ed Augustin and Daniel Montero in Havana

Mon 12 Jul 2021 11.40 EDT

The biggest mass demonstrations for three decades have rippled through Cuba, as thousands took to the streets in cities throughout the island, demonstrating against food shortages, high prices and communist rule.

The protests began in the morning, in the town of San Antonio de los Baños in the west of the island, and in the city of Palma Soriano in the east. In both cases protesters numbered in the hundreds.

With millions of Cubans now with mobile internet on their phones, news of the protests quickly swept to Havana. By early afternoon, thousands marched through central Havana, chanting “homeland and life” and “freedom”. 

“I’m here because of hunger, because there’s no medicine, because of power cuts – because there’s a lack of everything,” said a man in his 40s who didn’t want to give his name for fear of reprisals.

“I want a total change: a change of government, multiparty elections, and the end of communism.”

The protesters were met by uniformed and plainclothes police officers, who bundled hundreds of demonstrators – many of them violent – into police cars. Youths tore up paving slabs and hurled them at police; police used pepper spray and beat protesters with truncheons.

One policeman, hit on the head with a cobblestone, was sped away in a car that nearly ran over a protester.

With a rock in each hand, Yusniel Pérez, 17, said: “We’re here because we’re hungry and poor. We don’t have food. We don’t have anything.”

At 3pm local time all television channels were interrupted with a broadcast from President Miguel Díaz-Canel who said that “destabilisation in our country” would be met with a “revolutionary response”.

“We call upon all the revolutionaries of the country, all the communists, to take to the streets.”

A game of cat and mouse ensued, where young anti-government protesters tried to occupy iconic parts of the capital, only to be blocked off by older government supporters, state security and the army.

Aylin Guerrero, 52, was one of thousands who came out to support the government, in central Havana. “We are the people and we have come out to support our conquests”, she said, surrounded by thousands of government supporters some bearing wooden clubs. “Even if we’re not communists, we’re patriots.”

Government supporters accused anti-government protesters of being mercenaries paid by the United States, which spend approximately 20 million dollars a year on “democracy promotion” on the island.

As evening fell, state forces and supporters had reclaimed the streets.

Government supporters gathering at the Máximo Gómez monument in Havana on Sunday. Photograph: Eliana Aponte/AP

The protests were concentrated in Havana’s more impoverished municipalities. The underlying grievance of those interviewed was longstanding scarcity and privation.

Cubans are living through the gravest economic crisis the country has known for 30 years. The Trump administration hammered the island with more than 200 new sanctions aimed at sabotaging the island’s’ economy and stirring discontent, measures that have so far been left untouched by the Biden administration.

Since the pandemic, which has gutted tourism revenue, Cubans have become accustomed to waiting in line for hours to buy basic goods like chicken and detergent. Pharmacy shelves are barren.

People take part in a demonstration in Havana against the government of the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images

The protests were the biggest since 1994, when tens of thousands demonstrated at Havana’s Malecón promenade amid an acute economic crisis brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union.

An official in the Biden administration tweeted support for Sunday’s demonstrations. Julie Chung, acting assistant secretary for state for western hemisphere affairs, tweeted: “Peaceful protests are growing in Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising Covid cases/deaths & medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.”

 This article was amended on 12 July 2021. The original agency caption on the image of people on the Máximo Gómez monument incorrectly described them as anti-government protesters. They were actually supporters of the government.

3528. Cuba: A Scream

Byy Leonardo Padura, La Joven Cuba, July 16, 2021 (English translation by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews).

Leonardo Padura; Cuban novelist and journalist

(Photo: Eliana Aponte / AP)

It seems very possible that everything that happened in Cuba since last Sunday, July 11, has been encouraged by a greater or lesser number of people opposed to the system, even paid some of them, with the intention of destabilizing the country and causing a situation of chaos and unsafety. It is also true that later, as often happens in these events, opportunistic and regrettable acts of vandalism occurred. But I think that neither evidence takes one iota of reason from the scream that we have heard. A cry that is also the result of the desperation of a society that is going through not only a long economic crisis and a punctual health crisis, but also a crisis of confidence and a loss of expectations.

To this desperate claim, the Cuban authorities should not respond with the usual slogans, repeated for years, and with the answers that these authorities want to hear. Not even with explanations, however convincing and necessary they may be. What is imposed are the solutions that many citizens expect or demand, some demonstrating in the street, others giving their opinion on social networks and expressing their disappointment or disagreement, many counting the few and devalued pesos that they have in their impoverished pockets and many, many more, queuing in resigned silence for several hours in the sun or rain, including a pandemic, queues at markets to buy food, queues at pharmacies to buy medicines, queues to reach our daily bread and for everything imaginable and necessary.

"(...) the Cuban authorities should not respond with the usual slogans, repeated for years ..." (Photo: Canal Caribe)

I think that no one with a minimum feeling of belonging, with a sense of sovereignty, with a civic responsibility can want (or even believe) that the solution to these problems comes from any type of foreign intervention, much less of a military nature, such as some have come to ask, and that, it is also true, represents a threat that is still a possible scenario.

I also believe that any Cuban inside or outside the island knows that the US commercial and financial blockade or embargo, whatever you want to call it, is real and has become internationalized and intensified in recent years and that it is too heavy a burden for the Cuban economy ( as it would be for any other economy). Those who live outside the island and today want to help their relatives in the midst of a critical situation, have been able to verify that it exists and how much it exists when they are practically unable to send a remittance to their relatives, just to mention a situation that affects Many. It is an old policy that, by the way (sometimes some forget it) practically everyone has condemned for many years in successive United Nations assemblies.

And I don't think anyone can deny that a media campaign has also been unleashed in which, even in the grossest ways, false information has been released that at the beginning and end only serves to diminish the credibility of its managers.

«(…) Neither one nor the other evidence takes away an iota of reason from the scream that we have heard. A cry that is also the result of the desperation of a society… »(Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP)

But I believe, along with all of the above, that Cubans need to regain hope and have a possible image of their future. If hope is lost, the meaning of any humanist social project is lost. And hope is not recovered by force. You are rescued and fed with those solutions and changes and social dialogues, which, by not arriving, have caused, among many other devastating effects, the migratory anxieties of so many Cubans and now provoked the cry of despair of people among whom there were surely paid people and opportunistic criminals, although I refuse to believe that in my country, at this point, there may be so many people, so many people born and educated among us who sell themselves or commit crimes. Because if it were, it would be the result of the society that has fostered them.

The spontaneous way, without being tied to any leadership, without receiving anything in return or stealing anything along the way, with which a notable number of people have also demonstrated in the streets and on the networks, should be a warning and I think it is an alarming sample of the distances that have been opened between the leading political spheres and the street (and this has even been recognized by Cuban leaders). And it is only in this way that it is explained that what has happened has happened, especially in a country where almost everything is known when it wants to be known, as we all also know.

To convince and calm those desperate, the method cannot be the solutions of force and darkness, such as imposing the digital blackout that has cut off the communications of many for days, but that nevertheless has not impeded the connections of those who want to say something, in favor or opposing. Much less can the violent response, especially against non-violent people, be used as a convincing argument. And it is already known that violence can be not only physical.

"Much less can the violent response, especially against non-violent people, be used as a convincing 

argument." (Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP)

Many things seem to be at stake today. Perhaps even if calm returns after the storm. Perhaps the extremists and fundamentalists will not be able to impose their extremist and fundamentalist solutions, and a dangerous state of hatred that has been growing in recent years will not take root.

But, in any case, it is necessary for solutions to arrive, responses that should not only be of a material nature but also of a political nature, and thus an inclusive and better Cuba can address the reasons for this cry of despair and loss of hope. that, silently but with force, since before July 11, many of our compatriots had been giving those laments that were not heard and from whose rains these muds arose.  

As a Cuban who lives in Cuba and works and believes in Cuba, I assume that it is my right to think and express my opinion about the country in which I live, work and where I believe. I know that in times like this and trying to express an opinion, it often happens that "You are always reactionary for someone and red for someone," as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz once said. I also take that risk, as a man who pretends to be free, who hopes to be more and more free.

In Mantilla, July 15, 2021.