By Sylvain Sainte-Marie
Has society gone mad with capitalism? That’s what the degrowth movement argues, stressing the current dominant system as destructive of social welfare for the world as a whole and reckless in face of the climate crisis.
In 1972, the Meadows report on the limits of growth demonstrated that the rate of economic growth at the time could not be sustained within the planetary boundaries. Subsequent models only confirmed this conclusion. The hypothetical decoupling of economic growth with human footprint on the environment is presented as a solution to this problem, but is widely debated and seems risky considering the survival of humankind on the Earth is at stake. Decoupling also falls short of solving the consequences of human activity on the planet other than greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, globalised capitalism has not proven beneficial for all in society, leaving in its path increasing inequalities and financial crisis. As Pierre Samuel wrote in his book in 1973, trying to raise awareness on the climate crisis:
“In fact, we live in an extremist society: extremist of production, growth, war, competition, specialisation. Because of its critical analysis of this society, the ecological movement is fundamentally moderate. But paradoxically, this tendency of moderation is viewed by some as revolutionary!”
In this article, we will look into how the degrowth movement is currently moving its focus toward strategizing the shift toward a degrowth society. Specifically, we will discuss how the movement tries to answer two of its major criticisms. First, no matter how desirable an utopia can be on paper, it is idealistic. Second, degrowth would be idea entertained by rich people who already have everything and criticise capitalism with no concern for the poorest in their own society and around the world. As such, degrowth would merely be another disconnected ideology for the highly-educated middle-class.
I. A brief introduction to degrowth thinking
Degrowth originates from a criticism of globalised capitalism as the endless pursuit of profit and technological innovation. In the vein of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in 1971, degrowth thinkers argue that decopelling, i.e. the complete decorrelation of economic growth and greenhouse gas emission, is either impossible or at least dangerously uncertain. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that the footprint of the human economy is not only composed of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, but many other components such as mineral extraction. As of 2025, humanity has crossed 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries, leading us one step closer to utterly unpredictable environmental changes. Degrowth adds a social critique to the environmental one. Namely, degrowth thinking insists on the importance of de-commodification of society which restores many aspects of human life from the trade economy. Stemming from Polanyi’s pioneering work in the 1940s, degrowth advocates for retiring “false commodities” from the trade economy to protect basic human rights. Finally, degrowth is also built on the criticism of unreflexive technological progress. Authors such as Ivan Illich analyse “growth […] as the result of a historically unique mindset that turns tools from means into ends.”
Degrowth tries to find solutions to the dead-end of capitalism. As Noémi Cadiou is a degrowth activist and co-editor of Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation (2022). During a talk organised by SPE’s sustainability hub in October she explained that degrowth is a transdisciplinary intellectual framework. It revolves around core principles: abundance (the Earth resources are not scarce but abundant, meaning no predatory behaviour is necessary), sufficiency (focus on the needs and not the means to live a fulfilling life), care (the social structures providing individuals’ physiological and emotional needs), democracy and self determination. Degrowth rejects as well as all form of domination, making feminism and decolonialism key components of its fight.
Focussing now on the economic side of degrowth, Bärnthaler synthesises the academia on the subject to define it as “an equitable downscaling of aggregate throughput, with a simultaneous securing of wellbeing.” There are three common aspects to all definitions of economic degrowth. Equitability emphasizes the deepening of democratic practices and the focus on social justice. The reduction of GDP while increasing wellbeing translates in the shrinking of specific economic sectors related to carbon-intensive industries and destructive of actual welfare. Consequently, degrowth is about redistribution within and among countries, considering everyone’s right to decent living conditions on the planet is possible by reducing the economic wealth of the richest and most developed countries. A strong argument in favor economic degrowth, brought forward by authors such as Timothée Parrique in Ralentir ou périr, 2022, argues that planetary boundaries will eventually lead to economic downscaling regardless of human choices, but it can either be done through a painful crisis out of capitalism where the most vulnerable will suffer, or via a concerted strategy.
II. The limits of the traditional theory of transition
How to move from a capitalist socio-economic structure to a degrowthian one? “Transition is a black box that lies between the present and our idealized visions of the future” according to the anthropologist Silja Samerski, and strategy to reach a new paradigm is still unclear. The first to really grapple with this problem was Erik Olin Wright in Envisioning Real Utopias from 2010. Wright’s work provides a theory of action, dividing strategies into three types of actions: ruptural (breaking the status quo), interstitial (creating alternatives in the cracks of capitalism), and symbiotic (using the State’s power and institutions to advance degrowth agenda).
Taking a closer look, we can give examples of each type of action. Ruptural type of action is closely related to revolutionary type of action. Post-materialist mass-social movements such as May 68 in France come to mind. Fuelled by anti-authoritarian and situationist ideas, May 68 was a mass movement coming from the street and using protests and blockade to impose their claim. More recently, that is also the type of action Andreas Malm, a Swedish scholar and activist, advocates for in How to blow up a pipeline, 2020. On the other hand, interstitial type of action is closer to the anarchist tradition, trying to develop alternative organisations outside of the dominant paradigm in order to have a functioning model to put in place on a higher scale whenever the dominant paradigm, capitalism in this case, loses stability. The Hangar Zéro is a telling local example. This place was built as a response to a real-estate project in the Eure neighbourhood, constructing mostly out of reused materials that the current system is unable to process, and using horizontal decision-making procedures. In that sense, Hangar Zéro tries to develop an alternative architectural and entrepreneurial model. Finally, the symbiotic strategy is connected to the social-democratic tradition, trying to use the tools of the State to incrementally change its functioning from within. The German traffic light coalition, which governed the country from December 2020 to November 2024 is an example of that strategy. The Grünen agreed to form a coalition with the SPD (socialists) and the FDP (liberals) even though there was a profound disagreement on fiscal policy with the FDP from the start. Then, the Grünen negotiated to take the seat of the economy ministry and pushed their transition agenda, especially advocating for the abolition of the German debt break in order to scale up the green transition. This very controversial topic in German politics eventually led to the collapse of the coalition. However, the foot-in-the-door strategy worked, because once the idea was thrown into the public debate, the suppression of the debt break was implemented by the CDU’s (conservatives) following government. It is currently used to finance defence spending, but this tool could be used by a Green government in the future.
According to Wright, the three strategies are necessary and complementary in order to achieve a degrowth transition. Nevertheless, according to him, “under foreseeable historical conditions such means would be incapable of actually creating a deeply egalitarian democratic form of social empowerment in developed capitalist societies.” He consequently puts a great emphasis on the role of interstitial and symbiotic modes of action.
Wright framework has proved very influential in the degrowth world and is the backbone of Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social-ecological transformation (2022), presented as a synthesis of degrowthian academics. However, in a recent article published in degrowth.info, Charles Stevenson advocates for a parting with Wright’s transition framework. According to him, “[Wright’s] modes of transformation offer an academic typology of anti-capitalist struggles after the fact, but they do not provide context-specific answers to the question of what is to be done.” Strategy is about building an actual plan on how to make a degrowthian coalition win hegemony. Wright falls short of expliciting how much of symbiotic and interstitial method is to be adopted in a specific context, “[his] model of eroding capitalism runs the risk of lulling us into believing that any and all strategies can be equally effective for transforming society.” Society is under the yoke of capitalism, a force that represses challenges to its control, and small scale nowtopias (experimental organisations thought as alternative to capitalism) are merely a drop in the ocean of the challenges ahead. In order to move forward, degrowth needs a strategy giving it the means to become hegemonic.
III. Ways ahead
As Stevenson concludes along with others, making degrowth dominant is a cultural battle. In order to understand what is still needed, Bärnthaler (2024) analyzed Degrowth & Strategy using Buch-Hansen (2018) prerequisites for a degrowth paradigm shift to occur. There are four: “(i) a deep crisis, (ii) an alternative political project, (iii) a comprehensive coalition of social forces, and (iv) broad-based consent.” The two latter prerequisites are the one currently missing.
In order to build a comprehensive coalition of social forces, degrowth movements need to move beyond the restricted definition of democracy as consensus making and accept compromise, to reach a broader audience. Regarding democracy, degrowth movements insist on abolishing all forms of domination and fostering empowerment. This leads to democratic decision making only based on consensus. However, “it impedes strategic agency to build cross-class and cross-milieu alliances [and] tends to build eco-social communities, not an eco-social society.” Degrowth movements need to reach compromises and accept to give up on certain claims in order to broaden their social base. Because “critical problem-solving necessarily takes place in political contexts that are structurally unjust and communicatively distorted”, compromising involves “identify[ing] the next best transition steps with the greatest transformative potential in the relevant context.” Moving forward, degrowthian strategy needs to develop a critically efficient grid of analysis of the acceptable compromise, for the sake of coalition building.
Second is obtaining broad-based consent. The degrowth movement is mostly composed of highly-educated middle-classes, who tend to overestimate the importance given to the environmental crisis in the broader public. If the environment is a widely shared priority, it falls behind others such as jobs, affordable housing or health care. Moving beyond the limited dichotomy of action within and without the state, grassroots can “construct a counter-hegemony that reorders common-senses”, which “fate depends on its ability to occupy the political sphere and use the collective force of the state to spread the new common senses.” Hence the question is which common-sense is shared by a critical mass of people, so that it can effectively occupy the political sphere. In order to acquire broad-based consent, a degrowthian agenda should start with what is already common sense to bring its ideas, and not the other way around. Starting from material needs, a degrowth agenda can build on universal access to basic services. Bärnthaler insists that “structures are always strategically selective, privileging some forces, strategies, actors, and interests over others, a hegemonic project here and now will also need to resonate with some capital fractions to be selected and retained”. Accepting some of this overlap will be necessary to bring truly revolutionary changes to the system. This agenda remains to be built.
Looking ahead, degrowth movements need not consider all action as equally efficient to take down capitalism. Nowtopias are the incubators of structural changes, but compromise making and appeal to more consensual topics, such as material needs, are necessary to build a strong enough coalition. Degrowth strategy needs focussing on finding the right balance between a deeply revolutionary agenda and the need of making actual change as soon as possible. Eventually, if degrowth truly sees itself as a realistic paradigm, it needs to be willing to rule and coerce. The movement has long shied away from embracing this idea, but no society can exist without some form of domination, therefore degrowth needs to claim its rules to be the best in order to escape its political marginalisation.
Bibliography
Azihari*, Par Ferghane. “Les contresens de Kohei Saito, philosophe marxiste décroissant.” Le Point.fr 202411, no. 202411 (2024). https://nouveau.europresse.com/Link/politique2T_1/news%C2%B720241120%C2%B7POR%C2%B727044697lpw.
Bärnthaler, Richard. “Problematising Degrowth Strategising: On the Role of Compromise, Material Interests, and Coercion.” Ecological Economics 223 (September 2024): 108255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108255.
“Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition.” Spectre Journal, n.d. Accessed November 5, 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/climate-leninism-and-revolutionary-transition/.
Degrowth. “Let’s Move on from Erik Olin Wright’s Modes of Transformation.” Accessed November 3, 2025. https://degrowth.info/en/blog/let-s-move-on-from-erik-olin-wright-s-modes-of-transformation.
False Commodities: Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century – Michigan Journal of Economics. January 17, 2024. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/01/17/false-commodities-karl-polanyi-in-the-21st-century/.
“Planetary Boundaries.” Text. September 19, 2012. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html.
Samerski, Silja. “Tools for Degrowth? Ivan Illich’s Critique of Technology Revisited.” Journal of Cleaner Production 197 (October 2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.039.
Samuel Pierre. Écologie: détente ou cycle infernal. 10-18. Union générale d’éditions, 1973.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 