On degrowth politics and strategy

What is degrowth? In 2024, De Gruyter published the Handbook of Degrowth, a rich collection of essays edited by Lauren Eastwood and Kai Heron that highlights the broad range of perspectives within and about the topic. In a social media post reflecting on his experience creating the book, Heron wrote the following: 

 

“Above all else, I’ve learned degrowth is not a single unified tradition of thought or practice. Anarchist, Marxist, liberal, Indigenous, and non-Western viewpoints are all compatible to some degree with degrowth’s ‘propositions’. In fact, I would go so far as to say there’s no such thing as a degrowth politics. Degrowth is a set of propositions about what’s needed to secure a world of human and non-human flourishing from which no particular political perspective or practice necessarily follows. Degrowth therefore becomes a space of political contestation in itself.” 

 

I think Heron is correct in this assessment. This may feel uncomfortable to those within degrowth who want to see it as mostly aligned with their preferred politics, but it is a reality – and should not be surprising for proponents of a position that is explicitly described as “pluriversal”. 

 

The political contestation within degrowth was put on display in a recent post by Anitra Nelson, Vincent Liegey and Terry Leahy. They position themselves as anarchist/horizontalist, which they frame as against the ecosocialist position I described in a recent interview for the Breakdown Journal, and which they reject.  

 

When Liegey and Nelson published their book Exploring Degrowth, they asked me to write the forward. I agreed, signaling my support for their work, even if my own politics take a different direction. I think it is useful to create room for diverse visions. I was surprised when they opted for a more antagonistic stance, but I suppose it was inevitable that the fissures within degrowth would eventually be pushed into the open. 

 

This illustrates part of what I meant when I said it is incorrect to describe degrowth as a movement. I did not mean this in an offensive way, and I don’t mean to overstate the case. To the extent that degrowth motivates a lot of people, and is impacting public discourse, yes we can describe it as a movement.  But it is not a coherent political movement, as Heron notes.  Where it does take the shape of a political movement, it is mostly an idea within movements that are organized around various other political programmes. 

 

More importantly, degrowth is not a movement that has the capacity to implement the kind of broad social and economic transformations that it calls for.  I think we must be honest about this reality, and strategize accordingly.   

 

Degrowth has burst into the popular imaginary in large part because it offers real solutions to the ecological crisis. People who realise that this crisis cannot be resolved within a capitalist system focused on profits and growth are hungry for answers. Of course, some people are attracted to degrowth for various other reasons too – for other aspects of the pluriverse – but the main pipeline into degrowth is from the climate movement. 

 

Degrowth offers practical solutions on this front, which I highlighted in the Breakdown interview.  We know we need to scale down less-necessary production to reduce excess energy and material use, thus enabling us to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization and reverse other ecological pressures, while reorganizing production around meeting human needs.  Degrowth research shows that by taking this approach we can achieve ecological stability while improving social outcomes at the same time. This is good news. 

 

This outlook does not capture the totality and diversity of degrowth visions, nor is it meant to (and it is not my responsibility to represent this diversity in my public communication – that is not a burden I can reasonably be expected to bear).  But while degrowthers may disagree on many things, there is broad consensus on these core objectives. These are urgent and necessary steps if we want to achieve a habitable planet, while also ending the misery and deprivation that so many people currently suffer. 

 

But this brings us to the all-important question of how. What is the strategy?  For a long time, the predominant tendency within degrowth was something like the anarchist/horizontalist orientation that Nelson et al describe as their preference, focused on forming local “prefigurative” alternatives in the interstices of the existing system, or opting to live in communities of voluntary simplicity, experimenting with assemblies and other forms of direct democracy.  Nelson et al cite ZADs as a concrete example (which incidentally also illustrates my point: ZADs are not a “degrowth movement” even if they may take degrowth ideas on board). 

 

I have nothing against this approach.  I have participated in many horizontalist-prefigurative movements myself. But it is also clear that this is not at all adequate to the material reality we face.   

 

The reality is that capital controls finance and the means of production, and organizes labour and resources – on a world scale – around whatever is most profitable to capital.  Capital is not going to reduce the production of fossil fuels, the military industrial complex, or any other highly profitable industry, no matter how damaging it may be to people and planet. And capital is not going to invest in producing what we need (affordable housing, public transit, agroecology) if it is not profitable to do so.  

 

We can create assemblies, intentional communities and ZADs, perhaps even undertaking some local production on a small scale (as several groups have done). But this will not change capitalist control over the broader economy, and will not stop capital from driving destruction and deprivation.  If we seriously believe degrowth is necessary to deliver a habitable planet, and to secure human well-being, we need to be able to address this reality. That’s not to say people shouldn’t pursue prefiguration, just that it is not enough.   

 

The only way forward is to remove the capitalist class from power and establish democratic control over finance and production, aligning it to a new law of value focused on human needs and ecology.  If our political strategy cannot credibly achieve this, we need a new one. 

 

What kinds of political movements could rise to this challenge?  This is one of the questions we are exploring in our European Research Council project (REAL) with Julia Steinberger and Giorgos Kallis, because we believe it should be addressed in an empirically informed way, without relying on ideologically predetermined answers.   

 

My own view – which is informed by this research, although some of my colleagues may draw different conclusions – is that an effective political strategy requires building mass parties (not bourgeois political parties but mass parties, with strong connections to communities and grassroots movements) that can integrate disparate struggles, win elections, take power, and implement democratic ecosocialism (which I have sought to define here, integrating degrowth ideas). To succeed, such parties must be able to appeal to a broad section of the working classes – well beyond degrowthers, the climate movement and the activist left – including with concrete policies that can address the everyday material insecurities that so many people suffer.   

 

This is not to say workers are the only potential agents of transformation, but certainly any movement that cannot empower and mobilize working-class formations will have limited capabilities. 

 

For those who reject such an approach because they wish to eschew state power at all costs, it falls on them to advance a viable alternative strategy for removing the capitalist class from control over the means of production and political power.  A “movement in movement(s)” sounds nice (who wouldn’t support this?), but it is also extremely vague, and furthermore we must grapple with why this approach has so far not succeeded. 

 

When faced with this dilemma, some degrowthers turn to waiting for some kind of societal collapse, hoping to build a better world from the rubble. But this is not a strategy, it is defeatism.  And it is illusory to hope that, in the absence of a powerful left organization, such a scenario would magically play to our advantage and not to the advantage of capital. 

 

I do not share the rigid “anarchist vs socialist” distinction that Nelson et al promote. This is a false dichotomy.  Anarchism is a socialist political ideology that seeks to achieve socialism (in other words, broadly, workers’ control over production).  Within socialism, what mainly distinguishes the anarchist wing is that they reject centralized state control of the economy and top-down planning in favour of democratic worker control.  But the strategy I have outlined above is compatible with these values.  

 

First, a mass party is not a vanguard party; it can and should have broad representation of the people and robust internal democratic mechanisms. Second, an ecosocialist economy can and should be democratically run, and aligned with democratically-ratified objectives. Here are the possible pillars of such an economy: 

 

1.  the financial sector and other commanding heights should be under public control, and investment and production should be aligned with democratically-ratified objectives and social/ecological needs 
2. the foundational economy – essentials for human well-being – should be decommodified in the form of universal public services, which can be democratically determined, decentralized to the appropriate level, and democratically run 
3. a public job guarantee should be established to enable people to participate in socially and ecologically necessary works, which should be democratically determined, decentralized to the appropriate level, and democratically run
4. production units outside the commanding heights and the foundational economy should be democratically owned and managed by workers and/or communities, as appropriate 

 

This is a vision that can accommodate values of democratic/worker control – along with many of the “qualitative” dimensions of degrowth visions (co-ops, conviviality, depense, etc) – and can form the basis of a functional alliance with the anarchist wing.  This is what I mean by democratic socialism.  Yes, this programme involves the state, at least during a necessary transitional period, but there is nothing intrinsically bad about the state. The state is an enemy when it is controlled by the capitalist class or comprador elites.  Controlled democratically, as part of an ecosocialist project, it can be a key tool to overcome the power of capital. 

 

Finally, I want to make a point about degrowth and development.  Nelson et al say that my position is “distant from global South delinking analyses”.  This claim suggests either a partial knowledge of my position or a partial understanding of delinking.   

 

I came to degrowth from a background in anti-imperialist politics. My first and most important commitment is to Southern struggles for liberation, as defined for example by Amilcar Cabral.  My main research focus is imperialism, globalization, and unequal exchange in the world economy. My objective is to help create strategies that global South countries can use to escape these arrangements and reclaim control over their own productive capacities and development trajectories: in other words, delinking, as described by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin. 

 

Samir Amin, who I had the honour of meeting at the World Social Forum in Tunis, was a socialist – like most of the Southern liberation icons of his era.  He defined delinking as the process by which global South economies can reduce their dependence on imperial capital, increase economic sovereignty, and organize production around human needs and national development, including – as others have added – the process of ecological planning.  This is the vision that continues to animate delinking.   

 

In this respect, the tradition of post-development that grew up alongside degrowth has a fundamental discontinuity with delinking, even if the two share some of the same values and goals.  Proponents of delinking have criticized post-development for failing to propose realistic pathways toward economic sovereignty and providing for human needs, noting that this requires state-led development of a sovereign industrial base, the infrastructure to deliver decent living standards for all (housing, sanitation systems, medicine, mobility, etc.), and the ability to deter or resist imperialist attack.   

 

Recognizing this does not mean embracing “productivist” or “growthist” visions for socialism in the global South.  On the contrary, development along these lines is fully compatible with planetary boundaries.  It requires a process of reorganizing production (outside subordinate positions within global commodity chains dominated by Northern firms), and increasing certain forms of production where necessary, which may entail a process of growth – increased aggregate output – although growth as such would not be the objective and would certainly not be indefinite.  

 

This brings me to an important point.  Many degrowthers are under the impression that the Southern socialist, developmentalist and dependency thinkers of the 20th century were growthist and should therefore be rejected.  But this is not true.  Some perhaps had productivist orientations, but many key figures including Franz Fanon, Thomas Sankara, Julius Nyerere, Celso Furtado, Marta Harnecker and Leopold Senghor were critical of growthism, rejected Western economic paradigms, called for development focused on human needs and ecology, and understood the value of simplicity as a strategy for self-sufficiency and economic independence. 

 

In other words, we don’t need to reject socialism in order to hold these values.  They are already developed within the socialisms of the global South. Southern socialism is already pluriversal.  

 

In fact, one of the most powerful features of socialism as an economic system is that – unlike capitalism – it does not require constant growth to remain stable and meet human needs.  This is what creates space for the pluriversal possibilities that have been elaborated under the umbrella of socialism.  Yes, some socialist projects did pursue growth as an objective (alongside other goals), but that was a political choice, not a structural requirement.  In fact, in some cases the socialist societies of the 20th century succeeded in managing prolonged periods of declining output – under brutal Western sanctions and blockade – while at the same time improving social outcomes. 

 

I align with the tradition of socialism and delinking articulated by Cabral and Amin. This is the pathway to overcoming imperialism, achieving economic sovereignty, and meeting human needs within planetary boundaries.   

 

Indeed, a process of delinking in the periphery will further impel a degrowth transition in the imperial core. To the extent that capital accumulation and growth in the core relies on appropriation from the periphery, delinking – and the dismantling of the imperial arrangement – will provoke a crisis that will intensify domestic class conflict, galvanize revolutionary politics, and sharpen the need for a transition to socialism such that human needs can be met with lower levels of throughput. These pressures are already arising.  

 

The old world is dying and the new struggles to be born.  The world-historical task that faces our generation now is to build political power that is capable of achieving the transformation we need.