To deal with a polycrisis of climate collapse, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the overlapping social and political realities of rising inequality and authoritarianism, we don’t have to change the way we live. The good news, according to the politically and economically powerful, is that we just have to wait for the right technological fix to come along.
This hubristic technosolutionism, premised on the belief that we can outsmart nature, is embedded within the very structures of our modern world. As we bump up against the limits of our physical environment, we are increasingly living in the social and political fallout of capitalism’s firm grip on a shrinking pool of finite resources – food shortages and famine, mass migration, authoritarianism, fascism, and war. Radical, urgent change is needed if we are to limit warming to the 1.5 C (or even 2 C) recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change so we can better mitigate its impact.
But there is a clear place to start: using less. We can and must begin to meaningfully consider how we use resources, who is using them, and to bring that use in line with planetary boundaries.
Degrowth is a useful political framework for taking up that challenge – a simple, though not easy way forward. Degrowth seeks a planned reduction of energy and resource use in targeted ways that prioritize justice, decolonization, redistribution of wealth, and bringing the economy into balance with the planet’s ecological limits. It is a critique of hegemonic economic thinking, and as a political project it is both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
The term itself has its critics – many made in bad faith without engaging with the movement’s theories and specific policy proposals, which include radical reductions in working time; repair centres; provisions of basic services; participatory planning; co-operative workplaces; and larger transformative strategies to combine policies, transitional electoral strategies, and social movements. An oft-repeated criticism is that degrowth is inherently anti-progress and akin to austerity. Yet the term’s extreme perception can also be its strength as it directly challenges the ingrained ideology of growth and the capitalist logic of accumulation and makes it harder to co-opt. It resists common conceptions of growth as an unquestioned good. It makes explicit the need to transition out of capitalism as essential for the health of the planet and all the living things on it.
Degrowth does not advocate for a complete absence of growth globally, but for powerful settler-colonial states to drastically decrease their emissions and energy use; thereby making space for states in the Global South to develop more social and physical infrastructure and to reduce inequality worldwide. Degrowth is intertwined with the movement to cut colonial ties and prevent the Global North from further looting labour and materials from the Global South.
A more interesting concern is how degrowth movements can meaningfully engage existing labour movements; rather than replacing socialist efforts, degrowth marries them to climate movements. Anti-capitalism is a central tenet of degrowth; that is, any approach that does not centre redistribution becomes a policy of austerity and perpetuates our unjust colonial and imperialist systems.
Incorporating degrowth can strengthen socialist movements by prioritizing the reality of climate collapse and addressing the anxiety and lived experiences of those concerned with climate change. It also makes space to reconsider what makes a good life. Instead of envisioning only sacrifice, degrowth imagines positive visions of the future, of more considered ways to conceptualize pleasure (eg. Kate Soper’s “alternative hedonisms”), and, importantly, new theories of abundance. There is research showing that after a certain standard of living is met, “more” has diminishing returns at best. Instead, how can we shift to thinking about an abundance not of things, but of education and health care, of leisure time, of space for regeneration, care work, and community?
As far-fetched as degrowth may sound, the world we are living in now is predicated on myth. In fearing change, we are clinging to what Greta Thunberg identifies as “fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” of that rising tide that will lift us all. Meanwhile, we’re living in an inherently exploitative capitalist economic system that relies on imperialism and colonialism, continuing to create enormous wealth disparity both globally and within the Global North. It is quite literally stealing from the future.
Change is coming, but that change will not come for all of us equally. While the richest will not only be insulated from climate collapse, but profit off of it; the world’s poorest are already experiencing its devastating effects. Degrowth soberly confronts the future and is putting forward ways to better manage it.
We can have a beautiful future. Getting there requires doing the work to enact a mess of alternative paths forward. Even if many don't work out, every failure will be evidence of hope, of a vulnerability to try, of believing in our own agency, and of knowing that another world is possible.
Degrowth is not a perfect term, and it is not a perfect solution. Rather, it is a radical way forward that imagines a long-term future that is both socialist and within ecological limits.
