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Abstract
Degrowth has become a forceful conceptual framework and a political mobilizer for imagining and enacting alternative ways of articulating society, the economy, and nature. While it is most straightforwardly understood as material downscaling, degrowth denotes a far more encompassing transformation: a break with the ideology of growth, the repoliticization of the economy, and a reorientation of economic relations along different principles. This essay reviews the trajectory of degrowth thinking and activism and delineates the points of tension therein. In doing so, it focuses on the (im)possibility of sustainable socialist growth, the broader processes of capital accumulation beyond their outcome, the question of work and emancipation, and the scale and agency of degrowth politics.
Notes
1 One outcome of this engagement has been the bringing of a critical political-economy perspective into degrowth thinking, as evidenced by the recent edited volume Political Economies of Degrowth (Chertkovskaya, Paulsson, and Barca Citation2019). Another very welcome outcome has been the forging of an ongoing critical dialogue between feminist and degrowth scholarship and activism. Feminists have been taking issue with both the omission of ecofeminist work within the intellectual heritage claimed by degrowthers and also the blindspots in degrowthers’ conception of the broader sphere of social reproduction (Gregoratti and Raphael Citation2019).
2 That labor-saving technological change has also created severe suffering is, accordingly, a problem rooted in private control of that technology and in capital’s appropriation of wealth and profits; it is not a technological problem per se (Huber Citation2019b).
3 See Vansintjan (Citation2016) for a possible ground for conversation.
4 In doing so, accelerationists are also dismissing a long tradition of Marxist-feminist thinking that politicizes not the quantity of this work but rather its organization, performance, and distribution.
5 Jason Hickel’s Twitter thread provides a good summary. Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel), “Just to be clear: the economic contraction that’s happening now is *not* degrowth,” Twitter, 29 April Citation2020, 4:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1255589713915908096.