Ed. note: This piece is excerpted from Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth by Stan Cox, published by Seven Stories Press. For this piece, all the original footnote citations have been removed. All quotes are properly referenced in the original text.
Degrow or Destroy
In 1973, the ecological economist Herman Daly published his book Toward a Steady-State Economy, making the case for an upper limit on material-resource use and economic activity. The idea was accepted and elaborated upon by other heretical economists and environmentalists in the decades that followed. However, as we approached the tipping point toward irreversible ecological catastrophe, it became increasingly clear to a broader range of researchers and analysts that economic growth must not only be halted but also reversed.
A year before Daly’s book was published, the Austrian philosopher André Gorz coined the term décroissance, referring to the degrowth of material production. Interest in degrowth gradually increased over the decades that followed, but starting in the early 2010s, the degrowth movement began to spread widely. Degrowth is now the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, shelves full of books, and the open-source Degrowth Journal. The world of conventional science is being won over.
The degrowth scholar Giorgos Kallis, of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has defined degrowth as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, he listed nine principles that he foresaw underlying a degrowth society. Thus, as he and others envisioned such a society, land and labor are treated as being outside the economy. In this vision, the economy is nonexploitative and radically egalitarian. Infrastructure, resources, and goods and services related to health, education, water, and energy are treated as a commons. Production is localized. The economy is diverse, with cooperatives and nonprofits predominating and production for markets confined to a far smaller role than it had in precapitalist civilizations.” Resources are withdrawn from wasteful and superfluous material production, with some redirected as needed toward relational goods such as “friendship and love, healthy relationships, kinship, etc.” Governance occurs through direct democracy to the extent possible, with the beneficial side effect that “spending time and resources on [direct] democratic politics rather than productive investments will in turn slow down the economy.” Economic surplus is used for expenditures that are collective, egalitarian, and often recreational, with low energy and material input. Care work, more equally shared between genders, is prioritized; crucially, caring should reach beyond fellow humans to “other living beings and species.”
Degrowth stands in stark opposition to the “green growth” argument that physical and economic expansion is not subject to biophysical limits and can be rendered ecologically benign through technological means. And the degrowth vision is prevailing. A 2023 survey of 789 climate-policy researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth. Voluminous scholarly literature debunking green growth continues to apply despite its recent rebranding as “the abundance agenda.”
Because the degrowth vision is radical in the best sense of the word, the governments of today’s Global North are militantly opposed to it. It’s nowhere on their agendas, which means that it’s even more critical for those who want a livable future to advocate for the degrowth vision. The term degrowth has been criticized for what is interpreted as its negative vibe and lack of appeal in cultures that value the many positive connotations of the word growth. Addressing that criticism in his 2019 doctoral thesis, “The Political Economy of Degrowth,” Timothée Parrique explained that degrowth is intentionally provocative:
If sustainable development or green economy advertise a certain vision of prosperity, degrowth subvertises it; it hijacks the notion of growth. The word itself creates dissensus [the opposite of consensus]; it acts as a semantic weapon of mass disruption, as conceptual dynamite shaking the foundation of growthism and making space for discussion.
Having tracked down at least fifty-eight definitions of degrowth, Parrique grouped them into three types. The first group—“environmentalist”— describes “degrowth as decline.” This type puts “emphasis on that which should be reduced, e.g., production, material and energy consumption, economic activities, throughput, or anything else linked to environmental pressure.” An example of this type of definition is “the intentional limiting and downscaling of the economy to make it consistent with biophysical boundaries.” This is the definition of degrowth that its critics typically have in mind, and it’s not an easy idea to sell on its own. These days, it’s almost always discussed in conjunction with the other two faces of degrowth.
What Parrique calls the second, “revolutionary” type of definition, or “degrowth as emancipation,” stresses the societal ills, damages, and injustices that result from material overproduction and overconsumption and the relief that degrowth will provide.
The third type is “the utopian definition,” “degrowth as destination,” or as Parrique also puts it, “degrowth for or to something . . . In this aspirational understanding of the term, degrowth is associated to a variety of desirable values (e.g. well-being, frugality, justice, sustainability, conviviality, freedom, democracy) that are to be achieved via a decline, an emancipation, or both.” Among the “degrowth as destination” definitions on his list is this: “a democratically led, proportional and redistributive downscaling of production and consumption as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and wellbeing.”
The chief focus of this book is on his second aspect, degrowth as emancipation. That is, I examine the many ways we can free ourselves from the growth economy and its many harmful impacts by seeing true wealth as the collective pursuit of meaning, social justice, and beauty while living within ecological limits. I should, however, point out Parrique’s observation that “the difference between emancipation and destination is a thin one” because “the negation of something always comes with the affirmation of something else.” Accordingly, in the coming chapters, I’ll show how our emancipation from many of the harms currently inflicted by unrestrained growth will open up space for greater well-being in other, sometimes unexpected parts of our lives.
Leading degrowth advocates are explicit in urging that this vision of the future should not be built around hierarchic decision-making. The transformation must be a collective, lowercase d democratic effort, rooted in sociopolitical transformation rather than technological solutionism, with mutual aid a constant. Over time, degrowth has also become more explicitly anti-capitalist. Céline Keller, in the graphic nonfiction work Who Is Afraid of Degrowth?, writes, “Degrowth is a temporary phase to dismantle capitalism and reverse uneconomic growth, a transition at the end of which stands a well-being, postgrowth economy that is smaller and slower but fits within its biocapacity.” With less industrial production will come the need and desire for highly equitable distribution of economic and political power.
Degrowth is also anticolonial and antiracist; proponents stress that only the world’s economically dominant economies need to shrink their material production and that people in low-income, dominated countries really, really need for the dominant countries to degrow if the South is to have a livable future. Kallis puts it this way: “Economic growth is a colonial idea. It’s the way the West found to export its ideology and indirectly control the rest of the world. Degrowth wants an end to all that crap.”
Most of the research, discussion, and writing about degrowth so far has come out of academia and radical politics. Putting degrowth into practice in the North will require that it be adopted as the goal in a region or nation somewhere, and that can happen only after political pressure and biophysical realities converge to render the continued pursuit of growth impossible. At that point, it will be imperative to achieve degrowth through a rational, humane process. Although we cannot predict in any detail what day-to-day life in a society that functions under Kallis’s nine principles of degrowth will be like, we do know what life in, say, the present-day United States is like, and we all have our ideas about what is bad and getting worse as we follow the business as usual trajectory. That brings us back to the thought experiment at the center of this book: If the United States were to abandon that trajectory and take the concrete actions that are needed to achieve equitable ecological renewal, what elements of life in the present-day Global North would we necessarily, and gladly, leave behind?