The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism

Product Information

scientific evidence against the dominant green growth narrative that promotes the “decoupling” of economic growth from ecological impact. Respecting planetary boundaries without overcoming capitalism's need for endless growth is impossible, they argue. On the other hand, the authors challenge what they call “progressive productivism” by showing that even leftist programs for social justice and 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? 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?

should also engage with movements such as the moral economies of early-19th-century popular revolts, utopian socialist communities, labor Magnificent. The Future is Degrowth is arguably one of the most complete works on the concept of degrowth. This book is essential reading for both actors within civil society movements and policymakers, as it manages to be extremely ambitious in its goals while remaining realistic. Green European Journal From a personal research interest on the topic of degrowth and strategy, I really liked the chapter on “Making degrowth real”. While interstitial and symbiotic approaches are usually delved into in the discussion, you also include ruptural strategies of civil disobedience, that are often dismissed by other authors. Why did you choose to emphasise them? Schmelzer, M., Vetter, A., and Vansintjan, A.: The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, London, New York, Verso, 320 pp., ISBN 9781839765841, EUR 23.95, 2022. Kallis, G.: Degrowth. The Economy. Key Ideas, Agenda Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, ISBN 9781911116806, 2018.

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)? 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. The joint consideration of these critiques is essential both to ensure an effective response to multiple crises but also, as the authors warn, to avoid (extreme) right-wing appropriation of degrowth and its ideas. For while the political right mostly supports a growth-oriented policy, there is also a reactionary critique of growth on parts of the ethnonationalist right. This faction argues that, as the availability of resources falls, overall consumption must fall but their people must have continued access. Clearly, this line must be rejected by those supporting degrowth as it is conceived in this book. The degrowth alternative

It’s here that the pluriverse comes in. Like degrowth, the pluriverse is a concept whose aim is to counter a universalizing, monolithic economic system. If the goal is to build “a world where many worlds fit”—as the Zapatistas put it—then it is paramount that we draw on the experiences of movements around the world that offer different visions of the future. 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?

Success!

If you are looking for a clear, comprehensive, scholarly but practical overview, then I'd recommend The Future is Degrowth. Mark Burton 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. All in all, The Future of Degrowth presents a compelling introduction into a heterodox scholarship, forcefully showing how all questions of social, economic, and democratic organization must be radically materialized (see chap. 2). The authors convincingly postulate, “What distinguishes degrowth most clearly from other socio-ecological proposals is the politicization of social metabolism and its ramifications for policy design” (p. 8). This sentence must be highlighted, for it is far from being self-evident. As several historians have shown, modern political ideas have grown out of specific socio-ecological and geopolitical constellations (for example, Chakrabarty, 2009; Mitchell, 2013; Charbonnier, 2021). The supposedly endless availability of fossil fuels, combined with colonial appropriation of land, resources and labor, created an illusion of the economy as a separated, more or less dematerialized sphere of production and exchange.

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. Degrowth—largely because of the word’s connotations—is often thought of as a negative, reactive concept. And so, critics of degrowth often claim that degrowth would doom the poor, and especially the Global South, to immiseration. But neither claims could be further from the truth. First, global justice is a central tenet of degrowth. The phrase “sustainable degrowth” was first coined during the heyday of the alter-globalization movements as a counter-term to the jargon of “sustainable development” and “green growth”—phrases which were employed by development gurus to justify immiserating and disastrous structural adjustment programs in the Global South. And the degrowth movement has allied itself with vibrant and hopeful movements and strains of thought rooted in social movements in the Global South. For decades, these movements have built and proposed alternative, counter-hegemonic paradigms and models that resisted the hegemony of growth and development.

ABOUT US

The differences between these proposals are not only semantic. Though they may overlap, they represent different visions of how radical the change should be, the role of politics and the conflict between bottom-up and top-down approaches, and the kind of measures they imply. Where they agree is in their essential criticism of an economy based solely on economic growth. Such a model is seen as both doomed to fail given the planet’s limits, as well as underpinning an unjust social and geographical distribution of wealth. As the subtitle says, this book is indeed a guide. But it is much more than that: it is a solid analysis of the faults of a growth-based economy, an overview of the different approaches opposing this model, and how they converge (or not) in their goals. Written at a timely moment, this book is both for those just coming across the idea of degrowth, as well as those already familiar with the term. 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.

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.Degrowth is utopian, as should be clear by now. And utopias are, as Ernst Bloch puts it, “the education of desire.” Without the ability to imagine a better world, we won’t have the desire, nor the courage, to enact it. But utopian thought is often dismissed as impractical. Without a strategy to challenge the well-organized interests of capital, utopia remains just a daydream. While our book does not provide a blueprint for change, we do offer some ways to think about strategy and the mutually reinforcing roles that different kinds of strategy can play in the ecological transition. It is within this class that we find an idea of the good life that is closely bound up with an imperialist economy—one that must necessarily always extend beyond itself, using an outside to appropriate resources and dump wastes. And as the demands for SUVs, suburban living, fast fashion, and meat grow around the world, these practices and the ideal of an “American way of life” behind them are sending the rest of the world over a precipice. Barca, S. and Leonardi, E.: Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology, Globalizations, 15, 487–503, 2018.