This book is to degrowth what the IPCC is to climate science: the best available literature review on the topic. Timothée Parrique If you haven’t read the book yet, get your copy here or in your local bookstore. And let us know in the comments how you liked it! The recent volume Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary seeks to do just that by bringing together ideas and concepts advanced by struggles around the world, such as Ubuntu (Southern Africa), Sumak Kawsay (Latin America), Swaraj (South Asia), and Democratic Confederalism (Kurdistan). Framed as an alternative to elite non-solutions such as smart cities, ecomodernism, and geoengineering, this invaluable book will guide the reader through the wealth of alternatives already on offer. And it situates degrowth within a much larger set of ‘alternatives to development’, many of which criticize capitalist growth from the perspective of the global South. 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. Kallis, G.: Degrowth. The Economy. Key Ideas, Agenda Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, ISBN 9781911116806, 2018.

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. and to the critiques from the political and intellectual left that Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan's book The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism gives scientific The book then moves on to the question of degrowth’s achievability, the feasibility of making degrowth a reality. Once again, the authors return to Olin Wright and his three transformation strategies: 1) “interstitial strategies” (existing alternative institutions such as cooperatives or community-based organisations) , 2) “symbiotic strategies” (forms of cooperation between different social forces and representatives of the political system) and 3) “ruptural strategies” (revolutionary confrontation). While the third route is rare in the degrowth debates, the interstitial and symbiotic strategies are often discussed and “regularly juxtaposed”. 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. The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to A World Beyond Capitalism” is an amazing new book enriching the degrowth discourse. Written by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter, it discusses why and how to break free from the capitalist economic system. Jana talked to Aaron, R&D member and co-author of the book, about theories of change, about feminist and decolonial origins and about what it is like writing a book during a worldwide pandemic.A most comprehensive analysis of the different trends converging in the degrowth movement, showing its capacity to both subvert the logic of capitalism and project visions of social justice. A book that powerfully challenges any reductive views of degrowth. Silvia Federici Who is to be the agent of this ecological transformation? Elites prefer to see capital and technology as the agents of history. On the left, there are those who argue that, because of their privileged position vis-a-vis capital, the Western working class are our only hope. And this working class, it is argued, can only get behind an ecological transition if we offer them more of what capitalism has provided us, not less. The critique of an economic system based on economic growth is not new. In 2022, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the seminal report The Limits to Growth. Published in 1972, a team of scientists led by Donella Meadows warned that the resource consumption of an ever-growing economy was unsustainable. In the decades since, various alternatives to a growth-based economy have been put forward including a steady-state economy, post-growth, doughnut economics, and degrowth. In 1992, Bush Sr. justified the US demand to not include timetables and targets for emissions reductions in the Rio Earth Summit documents by stating: “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” Today, the richest 1% of the global population is responsible for an increasingly large portion of environmental impacts. This is the owning class: billionaires who fly in private jets, sail in cruise ships, and invest in the worst polluting industries.

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.

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Nevertheless, this compelling historical account of degrowth's forerunners has a certain bias towards intellectual critiques of growth. While the authors correctly include Marxism, critical theory, ecofeminism, or postcolonialism into the heterodox intellectual field of growth critiques, 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)? 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: 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?

In The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism, the German sociologists Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen introduce the “imperial mode of living”—a concept that is incredibly useful to understand the social desire for and institutional momentum of growth. Bringing together the sociology of consumption and habit formation with post-development, feminist, and Marxist critique, Brand and Wissen show how capitalist hegemony “draws on the wishes and desires of the populace … becomes a part of individual identity, shapes it, and thereby becomes all the more effective.” Samuel: To what extent do you see this current landscape as an opportunity for degrowth advocacy, versus a major hurdle? 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? Degrowth radically questions the fossil-fuel powered way of life, and with that its central institutions and infrastructures. It makes visible how, through democratic and planned reduction of production and consumption in the global North, global ecological justice can be achieved and a pluriverse of interdependent ways of living can emerge. As a critique of neoclassical economics, it is of course inspired by heterodox approaches to economics—from ecological economics to Neo-Keynesianism. However, as we argue in our book The Future is Degrowth, degrowth is also fundamentally about social power and hierarchies . In celebration of Earth Day, we decided we would highlight five books that are key inspirations for degrowth, which are critical of power structures and offer viable alternatives.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?

Foster, 2000; Hornborg, 2012; Moore, 2015). Growth, then, has not only a social or ideological dimension. It is also a material process in the strongest sense of the word. It mobilizes more and more matter and energy in a non-circular way, thereby increasingly undermining its own foundations. 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? Because of all this, we dedicate a significant portion of the book to the decolonial, internationalist current. It can always be highlighted more and there is more to be done here, more alliances to be made.As the flaws in the currently prevailing paradigm of unfettered growth become ever more apparent, degrowth is increasingly regarded as a tangible alternative. Far from a radical notion confined to the realm of abstract debates, it may hold the key to a more just and sustainable world. An ambitious new book, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism (Verso, 2022), sets out to be a roadmap towards a future without growth. of capitalist accumulation. Among others, these strands include the ecological critique, cultural critique, critique of capitalism, feminist critique, or North–South critique. This chapter's most important contribution lies in its non-dogmatic approach: it includes literature that is not part of the degrowth canon yet, thus opening the possibility for enriching intellectual dialogues. But the authors also show how critiques of growth can also appear in right-wing and conservative discourses, highlighting how the critique of growth can also be appropriated by politically regressive forces. The climate breakdown, the growing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, the gap between the Global North and South, and the ongoing pandemic have proved that the mainstream growth-based economic model is not fit for purpose. But what is the alternative? Aaron: The Future Is Degrowth, like the other works you mention, seeks to introduce degrowth to new audiences. However, it begins from an explicitly leftist—that is, an anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-racist—position, and argues for degrowth from that perspective. This allowed us to engage with topics like the Green New Deal, ecomodernism, and social movement strategy. It also allowed us to be in conversation with degrowth itself, seeking to push it on some debates that we felt were necessary, such as the problems of far-right environmentalism, imperialism, and capitalist hegemony. To do so, we turned to the indispensable work of Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright. Published just after the 2008 financial crisis, Envisioning Real Utopias is one of the most accessible books out there on what we can do today to break out of capitalism, with useful, and concrete examples of the actually existing alternatives already out there. The book is structured similarly to ours: it first offers a critique of capitalism, then describes socialism as a utopian alternative, and finally describes the strategies available to us to make it happen. Thus, Wright shows that post-capitalist alternatives are not just desirable, it is also achievable. And he provides a framework for thinking through strategies of radical change, on which we rely in the second half of our book. There, we we discuss policies that democratise the economy, "now-topias" that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth.