Then You Win: A Review of "The Future Is Degrowth" and Interview with the Authors

The new book argues that “degrowth” contains a pragmatic set of strategies and tactics that have a real chance of succeeding throughout many parts of the world.

Degrowth encompasses a broad range of scholarship, communities, and ideas. Generally speaking, it aims to achieve an ecological political economy by drawing down overproduction and overconsumption in an egalitarian way. While this basic idea is not new, the increasing urgency to achieve it has broadened engagement: in the past few years, degrowth has rapidly expanded beyond academic and activist margins and into mainstream discourse.

Some of the recent mainstream attention directed toward degrowth has been fairly positive, while some of it has been dismissive, negative, and bizarrely hysterical, with some in between. The most common criticism comes from political pundits writing from strict ideological positions that are, perhaps unsurprisingly, committed to liberal economic tenets, like corporate governance structures, markets, and economic growth. Rarely have these critics engaged seriously or comprehensively with new degrowth research, which is unfortunate since constructive criticism can help hone ideas into their best shape. Instead, criticism has gotten as extreme as arguing that, instead of limiting harmful extraction, humanity should simply maintain infinite growth by uploading trillions of minds onto the Metaverse’s supermatrix (here’s a counterpoint to having people’s brains uploaded to supercomputers so that the imaginary money line can keep going up). Degrowth is one of those ideas that inspires hysterical excess from its critics.  

When people do engage in good faith with the idea, even skeptics and mainstream commentators find it difficult to avoid accepting many of the basic premises of degrowth scholarship, without resorting to denial of the existence of climate change and biodiversity loss. But even as many accept degrowth on theoretical grounds, some still reject it on practical ones. When many analysts engage earnestly with degrowth, it can sometimes appear like stages of grief: Stage 1—Dismissing: “What’s this ridiculous thing that goes against everything I know and believe?” Stage 2—Questioning: “Ok, maybe it’s right about some things, but growth is necessary for prosperity, right?” Stage 3—Panicked Hedging: “Fine, growth may be causing inequality, climate change, and extinction, which are killing everything rapidly and threaten to make prosperity accessible to only a few super wealthy individuals for another generation, but what about decoupling?” Finally, Stage 4—Back to dismissing, but this time on pragmatic rather than theoretical grounds: “Fine, entropy and thermodynamics are real, the economy can’t and shouldn’t grow forever, ok, but, even so, degrowth proposals would never be implemented in today’s political landscape.”

This is not unusual; growthism, or the belief that growth is essential for improving well-being, is a deeply embedded ideology that many simply take for granted. To undermine it entails dredging into deeply buried worldviews and value systems. Speaking personally, I’ve been an avid environmental activist and political-ecological researcher for much of my life, deeply resentful on a visceral level of infrastructure development that destroys habitat, and I still had to go through a process of being convinced of and accepting the need for degrowth, or something like it, on a practical level. So I can sympathize with commentators, analysts, and others who don’t start from an environmental position and approach it skeptically. But the facts are the facts, we won’t solve any problems denying them, and, happily, a new book lays them out with comprehensive precision. Hopefully, it will help many people go through that processing and to a more constructive relationship to growth(ism). 

The Future is Degrowth (Verso 2022), by economic historian Matthias Schmelzer, journalist Andrea Vetter, and co-founder of Uneven Earth Aaron Vansintjan, is the one of the latest contributions to this flurry of new thinking. The book provides convincing and accessible data and theory while offering an in-depth look at pathways to achieving degrowth goals. For skeptics who struggle to accept both the theory and practical obstacles to achieving degrowth goals, this book should be fairly persuasive. It persuades less through polemic or advocacy, and more through an honest, open appraisal of degrowth scholarship, spotlighting debates within the field and offering clear-eyed analysis of its targets of critique, primarily growth/ism and capitalism. In a recent review, economist Timothée Parrique, a major voice in degrowth scholarship and activism, wrote that the book “is to degrowth what the IPCC is to climate science: the best available literature review on the topic.” (Parrique’s review linked above provides an excellent distillation of the book.) Indeed, with increased mainstream interest in degrowth, the book should be required reading for any commentator who feels compelled to publish their opinion on the concept.

The Future is Degrowth is more academic than a typical popular science book—sometimes dry for sustained casual reading—but is more accessible than a typical university press monograph. The first half begins with a thorough examination of what growth means. Since many growthist pundits have obfuscated the conversation with vague, ever-shifting characterizations of “growth” as something fantastical, almost divine, rather than as an extant physical phenomenon reflected in scholarship and the real world as it is, the book’s comprehensive definition of growth is welcome. Instead of the simplistic line-goes-up graphs put out by data visualization websites, the authors explore growth and growthism with far more nuance: growth as an ideology with a complex history, growth as a social and cultural process that exploits some groups while benefiting others, and growth as a material process by which geographically situated economies move energy and physical mass through sociotechnical metabolisms—that is, the social and political mechanisms by which physical things get extracted, produced, distributed, and finally excreted.

The book provides an overview of the primary critiques of growth put forward by a variety of literatures, including ecological, socioeconomic, cultural, anticapitalist, feminist, industrial, and Global South-North critiques. This overview is helpful. Casual readers can appreciate the comprehensiveness, though some may find it gets breezy in some spots, as most critiques and concepts receive fairly equal airtime. The analysis could have benefited from more authorial decisionmaking in emphasizing some concepts over others.

The second half of the book is dedicated to addressing the question raised by many who may otherwise be sympathetic to critiques of growth: what are degrowth’s goals and how do we achieve them? This section runs through a gamut of both concrete and abstract goals. Being, as the authors write, a “contested vision” in which many scholars and activists are still trying to sort out goals to rally around, the book does not point definitively to one or two primary policy packages or outcomes. Instead, it distills myriad aims into six “clusters.” These include outcomes like working toward economic democracy through increasing commons and working class solidarity, capping wealth and income while broadening welfare and redistributive policies, and equitably dismantling and repurposing production (see Parrique’s review for a condensed list). This section digs into literature around these and other goals, though probably could have benefited from more concrete analysis and examples.

Finally, a section called “Making Degrowth Real” runs through some specific strategies for achieving degrowth goals. This section includes some good concrete examples and a variety of scales of change—ranging from the radical and local to institutional reforms and the global—that should convince skeptics that degrowth is not just a utopian dream, but also contains a pragmatic set of strategies and tactics that have a real chance of succeeding throughout many parts of the world. While this section may not satisfy the most hard-nosed realpolitik skeptics on the likelihood of achieving its utopian vision, it provides a good foundation on which to build that discussion.

While the book is clear, thorough, and makes a valuable contribution to this new movement, like any finite manuscript, there are gaps worth addressing in greater detail, and follow-up questions some readers may be left with. To consider just a few of those, I spoke with the authors by email:

Samuel (interviewer): The current reception to degrowth ideas goes something like this: there are a small handful of pundits and other non-experts with large platforms who are very vocally opposed to degrowth, some of whom are self-described leftists, others who are economic liberals, and all of whom seem to lack interest in, or knowledge of, ecological science. On the other end, there’s a relatively small, dedicated core of scholars, activists, and analysts who are promoting degrowth as a major pathway to addressing climate, ecological, and humanitarian crises. Then there’s a big mass of the public and academy who are generally ambivalent about degrowth, neither particularly hostile nor excited, probably mostly ignorant of it, who are convincible one way or the other. Does this generally align with your understanding of the landscape, and if not, how would you amend?

Matthias: It’s true that the hegemony of growth in our societies is generally still very strong, on all sides of the political spectrum. But it seems that cracks are widening, in particular in climate justice circles, progressive social movements in general, but also in the wider public. Polls in Europe for example show a lot of support for prioritizing ecological questions before growth and even for sacrificing further economic expansion if this is to the detriment of climate stability. And wherever citizen’s assemblies have been instituted to discuss climate policies for the future—i.e. randomly selected citizens, informed by experts, deciding on the broad contours of politics—they came up with proposals broadly in line with degrowth: Significantly limiting energy consumption in households and industry, making ecocide a crime, prohibiting planned obsolescence, stopping the constructing new airports, prohibiting advertisements for carbon intensive consumption, encourage people to consume less, stopping suburban sprawl, prioritize other modes of transport than the private car etc. So next to a rather academic debate, the basic proposals of degrowth, beyond the specific term, have gained considerable traction in recent years, and even the term is used more and more in social debates. The focus on growth, however, is particularly strong among economic experts, within government circles and, that should be no surprise, among those who risk having their privileges constrained by degrowth, the fossil fuel interests and the wealthy,  and it will need strong social movements to move towards degrowth practices at a societal level.

Andrea: In addition, it’s also key to focus on where the huge majority of academic and state programs for a fast energy transition are going (at least in Germany and Europe). The funding of these programs and research receive shows overall state priorities, which is almost entirely based on (green) growth. So there is still an overwhelming consensus by the executive class in finance, state bureaucracies and academics that growth is the priority (which of course has to do with them being caught and following the promise of an imperial mode of living) and degrowth is still a framework that most of this class has never heard of and is not interested in (because it is “unrealistic”, while the only realistic position is their own neoliberal or neo-Keynesian thinking). And then there is the vast majority of working class people or precarious people who do not really believe in growth and struggle with the economic structures. And I think there is a big gender gap here too. Working class women, who are socialized into values of care and compassion and social techniques of subsistence like gardening, upcycling etc. are “natural” allies to degrowth, whereas working class men are more likely to be opponents of degrowth because the values of working class masculinity are much more in line with growth ideas.

Samuel: To what extent do you see this current landscape as an opportunity for degrowth advocacy, versus a major hurdle?

Andrea: I think it is important to look at degrowth allies and opponents not only in the twitter bubble (the chattering class) but also in the offline world of social debates, public funding and policy programs (and the people who execute these programs) and in organizing in the neighbourhood, the factory, and so on. I think with the actual crises reaching major parts of middle class people in the Global North now there certainly is a momentum for degrowth.

Matthias: I would argue that the strong reactions from pundits against degrowth is a sign of degrowth’s growing strength: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” In these controversies, I hope that we can move from strawmanning opponents—something that is constantly done with degrowth—to more honest and constructive debate. Our book is, in fact, partly written as an attempt at such a constructive dialogue with critics of degrowth. In these discussions, I think it is key to emphasize the solid scientific grounding of degrowth research, which is by now also reflected in several passages in the newest IPCC report, and also the important ethical and global justice foundations. One final thought on these controversies: We should also see them as part of the larger social conflicts that are necessary if we want to achieve the transformation. Overcoming the imperial mode of living and ending growth as a priority are not a win-win politics, but bring forth real contradictions that need to be addressed if we want to achieve global climate justice, such as conflicts around private property of fossil fuel infrastructures and corporate interests in ever-increasing consumption, but also around aviation, private cars, or industrial-meat-based diets. Degrowth, we argue, is a provocative term that can actually help with addressing these conflicts productively.

Samuel: You begin your book with a call to replace the neoliberal consensus with degrowth programs. One of the things that neoliberals did very well early on was make their ideology look like cutting edge economic science. Liberal commentators, who’ve built careers on presenting themselves as the most impartial, pragmatic, well-informed experts, could parrot its very simple tenets and sound—at least to each other—like sages. Many such commentators today who are filling similar roles and attempting to self-brand as “serious” in the same way don’t seem to think degrowth has the same sheen of cutting edge economic science; why do you think that is, and is it a problem that’s important to fix?

Andrea: I think this depends on whether one assumes that economics will stay the scientific branch that is most influential in forming policies (like it was since the 1950s). One could also build the hypothesis that with Covid and global warming natural science (like climate scientists, virologists etc.) have taken the lead of most influential sages forming policies while people and politicians do not care as much as they did what economists say whatsoever. Or military experts …

Aaron: Also, degrowth is serious, cutting edge science. There is a vast, and growing, body of peer-reviewed literature in leading scientific journals on degrowth. They span the fields of economics, environmental science, economic history, international development, and more. But not only that, degrowth arguments themselves are based on cutting edge science outside of the field of degrowth itself. This includes heterodox economics, climate science, technology studies, empirical research on happiness and wellbeing, and much more. That degrowth has a strong basis in science can be clearly seen by the fact that the latest IPCC report could no longer ignore it, and so degrowth was, for the first time, discussed as an option on the table (even though not in the summary for policymakers), in great part because it is based on conclusive empirical research.

Then again, putting aside whether degrowth is scientifically rigorous or not, it poses a challenge to a particular understanding of what “science” is. The elite class and technocrats are interested in promoting an aesthetic of modernity that does not consider certain practices and knowledges as being scientific. This aesthetic dimension of modernity tends to label, for example, Indigenous knowledge or peasant agroecologies, as “unscientific” and therefore “backwards.” Degrowth seeks to move beyond this conception of modernity. For degrowth, technology is not an aesthetic but a socially mediated artefact. Agroecology is no less scientific than, say, carbon capture and storage. Thus, it is not about accepting any new technology or rejecting them because they are new, but about the ability to democratically assess and reject certain technologies. Degrowth is very much influenced by the approach of ‘Post-Normal Science’, which recognizes that as the complexity of systems increases (e.g. from engineering problems to climate change), the development of scientific knowledge must weigh conflicting value judgements and involve deliberation from many parties and stakeholders in society.

Samuel: Your book is full of concrete proposals, solutions, and vision: what do you think it would take to present those proposals and visions in such a way as to capture policymakers and convince the wonk class to support it (or, again, should we bother? Are other aims more important)?

Matthias: It will be difficult to convince the elite class, and even technocratic policymakers and economic experts of degrowth, mainly because degrowth very much goes against their interests. But that's also not the approach to transformation that we take. While degrowth does include many concrete policy proposals, from maximum income and universal basic services to a shortening of the working week or caps on resource and energy use, the transformation is not conceptualized as a top-down technocratic process. Rather, we think of these policies as non-reformist reforms, to use a term by Andre Gorz, that expand the space of transformative mobilizations and work alongside the expansion of nowtopias and more rupture strategies of building counter hegemony.

Andrea: I think the case of degrowth is going much deeper than to propose some measures within the existing economic and state structures. Degrowth advocates for a restructuring of our mode of living as well as the dominant public and economic frameworks. So naturally within the existing frameworks this will always sound foolish, because it follows completely other premises, namely that our whole existence is not about being individuals making profit but about co-living on this common planet, about interdependence and care. So we should rather form a movement with all those who feel similarly and organize together. I think of feminist movements, BLM, Indigenous movements, care revolution etc. instead of wasting too much time trying to convince the executive classes full of toxic masculinity in the universities, public offices and parties. Of course, we have to cooperate with some of them for strategic reasons, but this is more a question of intelligent interface design.

Samuel: Your book opens with a brief history of how neoliberalism became a hegemonic ideology. That process took several decades. We don’t (necessarily) have several decades if we’re talking about degrowth as a means of climate/ecological crisis mitigation. It also has massive momentum working against it, including lots of money, big surveillance and carceral states, militaries, and so forth, none of which the neoliberal movement had working against it. How can we reconcile these facts?

Matthias: As the climate crisis escalates much faster than most of us had thought, even than the science said, we also need to escalate our strategies. There is now  more and more discussion of the real possibility of mass death and extinction. Scientists are calling for more research on the possible extinction of humans… so yes, the process needs to be much faster. And it cannot depend on alliances with and support of broad factions of capital, as neoliberalism did, or transformation from above. Rather, it will likely depend on action from below and social tipping points. We’ve wasted decades by hoping that the alternative strategy of green growth would lead to rapid mitigation. Finally, in the energy transition, it's not an either or: we need both a rapid, publicly financed roll out of renewables, Green New Deal-style, and drastic demand side reductions.

Aaron: In the book we also discuss how, quite practically, degrowth could become relevant in moments of crisis. This is not to say that we have to wait for crises to do anything, but rather to say that there is a realistic possibility that moments of crisis open the door to new possibilities which we can take advantage of.  It is in the midst of crisis—the collapse of an energy grid, a recession, or a global pandemic—that we can implement far-reaching change. During the pandemic we saw policies put in place that would have been unimaginable months before such as basic income. Following the energy crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany made public transit nearly free. Again, this doesn't mean that we need to wait for a crisis: we can start laying the groundwork now. For example, without developing Nowtopias now, those in the midst of an unexpected revolution may not have a prototype for what they might want a new social structure to look like. We can try out degrowth policies now, they can educate our desire for more and help inform a new imaginary, and in moments of tremendous change, they can become universalized.

I would also say that the role of imagination is big here. Things move slowly until they move very fast. It is at those moments of rupture that a sense of imagination, of where we want to go, can help enact a new world. People think things subconsciously, as a daydream, before they suddenly become common sense. It is then that what we previously thought of as a static desire—a desire for an Imperial mode of living, for winning the rat race—melts away into something new.

Samuel: We might see two strands of degrowth emerging, one that focuses on big state and transnational implementation of degrowth policies and another that’s more localized and distributed, eschewing centralized or top-down approaches for a broad based ecological ethic. Do you think these views are reconcilable? Even complementary?

Andrea: We need both exactly because of the urgency of the crisis. It is rather unlikely that we can change the big state, but we should try nonetheless. In the meantime, it is very important to start here and now with bottom-up building. It is even thinkable with the world heading for 3+ degrees that our international state system and maybe even the states in the centre of world economy will not survive for more than a few decades from now on (and we already see a lot of failed states now at the periphery). Then the survival of people will depend on those alternative common infrastructures we start building now.

Aaron. Yes. There is a bit of a tension between the different streams of degrowth, where some focus on bottom-up solutions and others stress a top-down, state-led strategy. In the book, we argue explicitly that these strategies are not competing, but rather symbiotic. We draw from Erik Olin Wright and suggest that there are three kinds of strategy that would enable the formation of a counter-hegemony. First, there are nowtopias, which are utopian experiments in the present. Think cooperatives or the Zapatistas. These are useful, not because they will by themselves or eventually replace the capitalist system, but because they “educate the desire” for alternatives, as philosopher Barbara Muraca says. Second, there are non-reformist reforms, which are policies that expand the horizons of what is possible. We emphasize policies like reducing working hours and universal basic services. Third, there are explicitly counter-hegemonic struggles or as Erik Olin Wright calls them, “ruptural strategies,” which include labor movements, blockades, and forms of “dual power” that organize political blocks against and beyond corporations and the state.  These strategies are self-reinforcing; for example, ruptural strategies put pressure on the state to implement needed reforms, while nowtopias provide resources to social movements and are in turn defended by them in times of state repression.

Samuel: It seems that in the case of a more centralized degrowth, there’s a risk of being co-opted and put toward authoritarian ends; how can that be prevented?

Matthias: This worry that degrowth will only happen as a top-down and elite driven process has recently also been raised by Geoff Mann in the LRB. While its important to be wary of all elite efforts to advance social cuts under the guise of eco-austerity, I don’t see why elites would promote degrowth, a radically egalitarian agenda which proposes to end luxury and overconsumption, level incomes, and challenges the primacy of accumulation. Elites should worry about degrowth because it would mean the end of extreme wealth. In fact, this fear is not new and predates the emergence of degrowth (critics of “sustainable development” also argued it would lead to dictatorship).

Fundamentally, degrowth has a utopian agenda. It radicalises debates about the future of sustainability, economics and systemic change. Beyond the techno-optimistic illusions of green growth and other false solutions, it offers a framework in which we can begin tackling the right kinds of question.

Samuel: In the case of decentralized degrowth, it seems that there could be cases of degrowth localities being outcompeted or exploited by growthists; how can that be prevented? These are obviously big questions that themselves could take a book to answer, but speaking in general terms, how can we begin to confront them?

Matthias: Definitely, these are key questions that we need to discuss. That’s also a reason why, as we argue in the book, only focusing on the local level is not enough. The experience of cooperatives and projects of the solidarity economy in Europe, which where particularly strong since the 1980s, were largely, over time, being crushed by competition. They either adapted to market constraints by compromising on their social, democratic or ecological objectives, or they went bankrupt. Therefore, next to local alternatives, postgrowth nowtopias and cooperatively organized companies degrowth must restructure society as such and create new rules that incentivise social and ecological behavior.

In addition to the development of the commons and the solidarity economy, reference is repeatedly made to concepts of economic democracy and the kinds of democratic investment and management originally developed in the trade union environment. Economic democracy aims to contain and dismantle the high concentration of economic power in a few corporations and their connections to the state. It should enable all people to participate in economic activities and decisions as they do in other political decisions. This involves both economic regulations of all kinds (such as democratic deliberation on the question of which unsustainable economic activities should be phased out and how) and the support and expansion of the solidarity economy and commons. In addition, economic democracy is about the reappropriation of private enterprises into collective forms of ownership, abolishing decision-making hierarchies in the workplace, and encouraging collective self-determination in society more broadly. This could be advanced by limiting the ownership of the means of production to a certain maximum size. The larger companies get, they would be placed under more and more democratic control, and beyond a certain size they would be transferred to common ownership.

Andrea: That is exactly what capitalism does for 500 years, the function of capitalism feeds on exploitation of unpaid subsistence work (see works of Rosa Luxemburg etc.). That is why we have to build commons federations and intelligent interfaces with capitalist and bureaucratic systems. I think the patterns of commoning (see Helfrich/Bollier 2020) can help a lot here. 

Samuel: If you see degrowth as a means of unifying disparate movements, or providing a unified set of goals and pathways, how can that work begin?  

Matthias: We’ve actually worked along these lines, starting from Germany, and connecting various social movements and alternative economic currents through a discussion of degrowth. This resulted int eh book “Degrowth in Movement(s)”. We understand degrowth as an emerging social movement that overlaps with proposals for systemic change such as alter-globalisation and climate justice, the commons, refugee struggles, Buen Vivir, food sovereignty, non-profit cooperatives, the care revolution, free software, basic income, or Transition Towns, a mosaic of initiatives for social-ecological transformation. Degrowth is one strategic vantage point for movements that explicitly aim at a society and economy beyond growth, industrialism and capitalism – not because it is or should be a key term for all movements in the mosaic, but because degrowth symbolises the most radical rejection of the eco-modernist mainstream of growth-centredness, extractivism, and industrialism.

We use the notion of a “mosaic” to highlights the vision of building a plural world, rooted in multiple struggles and with many different strategies – composed of different forms of economies, living worlds, and cultures, pollinating, interacting, and collaborating with each other. To differentiate it from the one-way future of capitalism and economic growth, the various alternatives to economic growth have recently been termed the “pluriverse” by a group of scholar-activists from various continents. We should combine different strategies to build this pluriverse - and hopefully degrowth can play a role in this.

The Future Is Degrowth

A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism

Verso 2022

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3989-the-future-is-degrowth

Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian, social theorist and climate activist. He has published The Hegemony of Growth and edited Degrowth in Movement(s).

Andrea Vetter is a transformation researcher, activist and journalist, using degrowth, commons and critical eco-feminism as tools.

Aaron Vansintjan holds a PhD in urban geography from Birkbeck College, University of London, during which he studied green gentrification in Montreal and Hanoi. He is a co-editor of Uneven Earth, a website on environmental politics.

Samuel Miller McDonald is a writer and geography PhD student at University of Oxford. He is currently working on a book entitled Progress: Five Myths that Shaped Our Past and Put Our Future at Risk.