Raymond Williams: principles for a revaluation of growth

The subject of this article is the concept of growth as it appears in the work of British cultural materialist Raymond Williams. While Williams was sympathetic to critiques of economic growth like those that now appear under the name of degrowth, he was unwilling to cede the term entirely due to its association with ‘human cultivation’. Maintaining an alternative usage of the term growth bridged two key aspects of his overall project: to self-consciously develop a residual meaning of culture, as both natural and artificial, into a democratic self-governing socialist society; and to reframe human culture within a dynamic and constitutive nature. Williams frames growth as collective human development, constituted in and through social complexity and ecological variability. Reframing growth as a process of human cultivation—human culture as active, lived, shared, and made—was, from his perspective, a central challenge for socialists, who had ceded too much conceptual ground to capitalist meanings of economic growth qua capital accumulation. This article will argue that for Williams, the keyword culture, understood as a whole way of life that is actively cultivated, selected, and shaped, helps to distinguish between the domination of economic growth (capital accumulation) and an ecological and democratic socialism.