We need mass parties in order to implement a degrowth agenda, as earlier contributions to ongoing strategy debates on degrowth.info have argued. However, these mass parties can and must still draw from the bottom-up, rather than being top-down institutions. What debates have not covered so far is what the character of degrowth-aligned parties should be. The following points outline what I believe should be core pillars of mass parties capable of implementing a degrowth agenda.  

 

Governance based on qualified sortition  

 

Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Insulate Britain recently said to Novara Media that he is a strong advocate for sortition. Sortition, which is basically a formation of governance through various forms of selection by lottery, has been discussed by many authors e.g.: Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance edited by John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, The Trouble With Elections by Terry Bouricious, and George Monbiot in a Guardian article.   

 

In a degrowth-aligned party, the qualification part (i.e. who can be sortitioned) should be something determined by the entire collective, such as a minimum time spent in the organization, or not working in executive capitalist jobs. People who meet these qualifications would be placed on sortition lists from which governance bodies would be selected at random, while observing desirable demographic representation. 

 

If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished, to be replaced by direct democracy. Getting degrowth done would require a separation of policy writing from policy selection. People who write policy should not be the same people who vote on turning policy into law.  

 

Popular platforms centred on limitarian policies

 

Free buses, rent freezes, and free healthcare are policies that can win elections. However, all policy ideas, no matter how good or popular they are, can be co-opted by right-wing media and capitalist elites. Degrowth itself is painted as a red scare as well as being associated with austerity by capitalists. A mass party should lead, loud and clear with the idea that having too much is a really bad idea that carves into the liberties and wellbeing of decent citizens and into the resilience of life on Earth. A mass party must lead with anti-capitalist policy proposals and the degrowth label, which is the most accurate label to describe the  transformations required by the global economy. Moreover, since degrowth owns such a wide canvas of policy instruments, the ones that hit the right-wing ethos hardest are those from the limitarian space: limits on wealth and rationing.  

 

Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction continue to be the most popular policies from the degrowth toolkit.  The Job Guarantee may be the easiest to promote, even if it is at $15 hourly pay as suggested for the US by prominent MMT scholar L. Randall Wray. They are not exclusionary but rather should be advanced together in the agenda of a mass party. In all cases, the mass party must also include caps on wealth and forms of material rationing. 

 

Standing candidates in jurisdictions where centrists often rotate with right-wingers

 

In countries such as Canada, the UK, and many more, there is no real alternative to the centrist status quo that has won elections. If a mass party that leads with degrowth policies ran candidates in jurisdictions like these, they stand real chances at winning local and general elections. Perhaps the Green Party UK and Your Party UK are poised to fill this gap. They should be infiltrated by degrowthers and swayed onto a committed path for degrowth. 

 

We should not have to read more books such as More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz about the delusions of the energy transition, or The Long Heat by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton about the perils of techno-optimism, to be finally convinced that owning the degrowth label and the toolkit of degrowth policy instruments requires courage and vision. 

 

An international political alliance, such as DIEM25 or Progressive International

 

We already have the International Degrowth Network (IDN) but it does not function like DIEM25 or Progressive International. It does not collect membership fees, it does not have paid staff, and it does not run political candidates. Upgrading the sociocratic aims of the IDN to develop a political organization could be the strategy to be considered. Alternatively, IDN members and degrowthers at large could join DIEM25, Progressive International or various ecosocialist parties and infuse these organizations with degrowth.  

 

Leaders untainted by perceptions of elitism and credentialism

 

A sortition-based governance structure would weed out opportunists and status seekers. Socialist parties are not immune to corruption and special interests. Only sortition can mitigate these risks. Policy making cannot be, as a matter of principle, an affair run by the elite policy wonks. In the Bouricius sortition model that is comprised of six institutions, experts can still offer significant input into policy making, but they cannot be elected into leadership positions.  

 

Popularized ethics of sufficiency

 

Before sortition is realized, and while we accept the compromise of representative democracy based on elections, our political leaders should recognize ethics of sufficiency that are shared by humans that have not been duped by consumerism and material status signaling. The imperial mode of living is something real, even if we choose to place responsibility on the design of capitalism instead of individual lifestyle choices. The imperial mode of living refers to a way of life in the Global North that relies heavily on the exploitation of resources and labor from the Global South, leading to ecological and social inequalities. It highlights how everyday consumption practices are intertwined with global power dynamics and the unsustainable nature of capitalism. 

 

In this approach, degrowth can be presented as an ethic of liberation from the oppression of material status signaling, and an expansion of social agency (more personal freedom in a social context). Work Time Reduction, for example, is a great public relations tool for degrowth but it must be framed in a dematerialized and decommodified economy. The same applies to UBI, UBS, and JG. 

 

Nifty memes and bitesize ideas to complement storytelling and policy unpacking 

 

A mass party should not be afraid to embrace simple ideas that can capture the imagination of the people. What if all products imported from the Global South had QR codes on them that would take you to a website where you could see the working conditions of the humans who made that product, their names, their salaries, their living conditions, their health status, how much free time they have with their families? What if the same QR code showed you the wealth of the owners of those companies, their names, and their living conditions? Would you still buy that thing? Would you still want to keep this economic system? Moving the imagination of supporters for the mass party toward empathy and an egalitarian global ethic may be the key towards the much-needed delinking of the Global South from the Global North, as I understand them in their geographical sense. 

 

Policy that subverts the fundamental causal structure of capitalism

 

In the bottom-up vs top-down integrative approach, the bottom-up part is experiential and the top-down is structural. The mass parties must offer the experience of a new kind of politics and society, by actually showing up for local causes, listening to their members and citizens at large, and being influenced by them via crowd-sourcing policy proposals. I have suggested a tool for such purpose in the form of a crowd-sourced policy cloud. 

 

Mass parties should be friendly and welcoming, not exclusionary and dogmatic. At the same time, they must aim at redesigning the structure of the economy by attacking and dismantling capitalist hierarchies, by decoupling power from property, and by halting the dispossession of private and common property by capital. Even if Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction were all implemented, they may remain confined within national borders. Decolonisation and delinking must also be at the center of strategy.  

 

Where could these mass parties start? 

 

In Romania, my country of origin, where the far-right party leads in polls by close to 40% and there is no party on the left, not even center-left? In Germany, France, Italy? In India or China? Once we deploy the heavy anchor of reality, we are hit with terrifying apparent impossibilities. The answer is all of the above, with various caveats. Some countries have parties that may be swung further towards degrowth, others need the invention of new parties from scratch, such as Romania and Canada. In all cases, a political strategy for a mass party must emerge from the mass of people that it is supposed to serve. 

 

----- 

NOTE:  A longer version of this piece is available on Vlad’s Substack.