Authors

Discussion

Contemporary scholarship often emphasizes degrowth’s capitalism-based intellectual genealogy, omitting significant contributions from activists from socialist societies. Following the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, East German ecosocialists and Christians debated slow-, zero-, and degrowth concepts and practices throughout the 1970s and 1980s, presenting alternatives to growth from within socialism itself. Ecosocialists like Wolfgang Harich and Rudolf Bahro published systemic theories of slow- or zero-growth to address the ecological crisis, with Bahro emphasizing spiritual rather than economic growth as key to humanity’s future. Simultaneously, researchers based in the Ecclesiastical Research Center in Wittenberg, funded by the East German Protestant Church, also discussed slow-, zero-, and degrowth works at their biannual seminars beginning in 1978. Yet as the ecological crisis in the GDR worsened in the 1980s, Church activists went beyond discussion, exploring grassroots activism and voluntary simplicity based in Christian ethics, while petitioning the party-state to reverse its growth-first policies. Both ecosocialists like Harich and Bahro, and eco-Christians like those at Wittenberg, hoped that the 1989 revolution would also introduce a more ecologically sustainable economic system to East Germany, or a unified state. While their efforts were unsuccessful, their perspectives offer unique criticisms of, and solutions to, the most destructive practices driving the Anthropocene - namely, the pursuit of growth at the cost of our natural world.