Pathways to post-capitalist tourism

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world's largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry's development, while mounting demands for "degrowth" suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism's role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright's innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for "eroding capitalism" to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly "erode tourism" as a quintessential capitalist industry.

Socialisation at scale: Post-capitalist tourism in a post-COVID-19 world

This chapter explores the potential to “scale up” socialisation of the global tourism industry in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development are now greatly exacerbated by the impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Longstanding calls for sustainable tourism development to address such issues still tend to promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry’s development, while mounting demands for “degrowth” suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. Given that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, pursuing touristic degrowth would necessarily entail post-capitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. Recent calls to foreground socialisation in tourism development largely focus on community-level initiatives. While this is important, the bulk of the tourism industry remains translocal in scale. We therefore apply a set of principles for conceptualising post-capitalist and degrowth-oriented tourism development to a series of case studies at different levels to conceptualise potential to scale up socialisation in a post-COVID-19 world within an overarching strategy of “eroding capitalism”. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Adam Doering and Bobbie Chew Bigby.