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”.