Capitalism's ecological crisis: Degrowth as a social alternative

One of the most serious challenges facing humanity in the era of multiple crises is undoubtedly the destruction of the world's ecology. Given both its irreversible process and its potential to bring about the end of civilisation, it is important to mobilise urgent solutions to the ecological crisis. The degrowth movement, which came to the fore within the ecological movements in the early 2000s, is now increasingly occupying a theoretical space. This study analyses the development of the theory of degrowth in 3 different phases. The process that began in the 1970s and lasted until the end of the 1990s refers to the process of emergence as a social idea, in which scattered thoughts are transferred to the present. Between 2000 and 2008, this phase developed into a movement-oriented structure with the new social movements that emerged. The period after 2008 refers to the theoretical breakthrough of degrowth and the process of ideas becoming a coherent whole. In the first part of the study, against the tendency of mainstream theories to see the ecological crisis as an external problem, the coordinates of our ontological and epistemological position are proposed, which will show the ways to understand the problem internally and relationally. The second part attempts to understand from a historical perspective, how the theory of degrowth, as a social response to the ecological crisis, continues its adventure as a theory that began as an idea. In the third part, the problems raised by the anti-growth stance of the degrowth approach, due to the fact that it treats growth as a phenomenon different from capitalism, are re-examined and re-evaluated in the context of both capitalist commodity production and neoliberal production of subjectivity. The concluding section discusses the possibilities of re-examining the links between the theory of degrowth and capitalist social relations, and the solutions to these problems. Keywords: Ecological Crisis, Degrowth, Growth Society, Marxist Degrowth