Interpersonally, care is both an activity and an attitude. An important goal for degrowth is rejecting the Western binary implications of care work so that “caring about” and “taking care of” are no longer masculine, and that “care-giving” and “care-receiving” are no longer feminine.
Structurally, then, unlike today’s economy which systematically wastes life, degrowth would establish a care-based economy predicated on restoring life. This world would be one where the value of labor comes from time dedicated to oneself, to family, friends, and to activities in which one’s humanity is affirmed and confirmed.
Jamie Tyberg (pdf) Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization for Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, NY May 2020. Tyberg writes of three degrowth principles:
Care | Autonomy | Sufficiency
Autonomy is the ability to give laws and rules to ourselves, not imposed on by others, but by and for us, collectively and consciously. Different from independence, autonomy can only be conceived of as a collective project, because autonomy requires self-limitation, a collective restraint from pursuing all that could be pursued. It would mean living by nature’s limits and designing into every layer of society a community-centric, ecologically-balanced, and culturally-responsive process to promise future generations clean air, water, and soil. The principle of autonomy also argues against technological solutions to the crisis, so as to veer us away from eco-apartheid.
Sufficiency is a rule of distributive justice stating that everyone today and tomorrow should have enough to satisfy their fundamental human needs, and that no one should have too much in relation to planetary boundaries. In other words, sufficiency would not be possible without the self-restraint required by autonomy or the culture of care that fosters those self-limitations.
