De-growth as Counter-Hegemony ? Lessons from Turkey

Degrowth, as a concept as well as a political mobilizer, acquired increasing force in motivating both intellectual/analytical thinking and activism-practice around imagining and enacting alternative ways of organizing society-economy-environment relationships. The literature on degrowth has reached an impressive volume and scope, ranging from issues of infrastructural adjustment to the governance of agrofood systems, from the architecture of new currency systems to social enterprises. Although it strikes a close chord with demands and mobilizations in favor of non-capitalist futures, the fact that degrowth has not taken an explicit stance vis-à-vis the organization of the economic relations has been a point of sharp criticism. It has been argued, time and again, that degrowth cannot be a viable trajectory under the systemic drive for accumulation within capitalism, and that the degrowth agenda should be pushed hand-in-hand with anti-capitalist politics. Proponents of degrowth, on the other hand, often respond by pointing out that non-capitalist economies can also be –and indeed did— growth-oriented, and that there is nothing inherently degrowth within socialism. Perhaps more significantly, these critiques reveal the ways in which growth figures as a fundamental pillar of the economic and political systems that govern our lives. While the critiques have predominantly emphasized the material role of economic growth in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, we argue that the notion of growth also functions as a powerful ideal –a constituting element of hegemony — that shapes state-society relationships and social-collective imaginary that might prove hard to dispense with. We demonstrate our argument by discussing the case of state-making in Turkey and the fundamental role played by the ideal of growth-oriented modernization in shaping state-society relationships. Growth Fetishism and the Unbearable Charm of Modernization in