Degrowth from the Left

May 16, 2024

Demonstration in London, 2021. © Loredana Sangiuliano/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

Intra-Marxist debates are famously irascible, even when their stakes are low. Yet in recent years this intellectual tradition has been further fractured, at the same time as it has been focused and reanimated, by the gravity of the climate crisis. The character of a future egalitarian society, and the most viable way to get there, have been contested by two environmentalist camps: degrowthers and eco-modernists. The first argues that capitalism’s drive for perpetual expansion is the cause of planetary breakdown, and demands a slower, “steady-state” alternative based on less production and consumption. The second claims that this expansionism has created the technological preconditions for a sustainable society, which the working class must now bring to full fruition, rather than aiming for any aggregate contraction. It remains to be seen whether these positions can be reconciled. Yet in broad terms, it is clear that they are clashing expressions of the same phenomenon: the reemergence of a utopian sensibility on the left – one that is determined to identify history’s direction of travel following the premature announcement of its end.  

The degrowth school, which has long asserted that humanity’s material impact exceeds the planet’s biophysical capacity, has gained ground with several recent eco-socialist tracts. Kōhei Saitō’s Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), which sold half a million copies in Japan and has been translated into English as Slow Down (2024), describes an apparent shift in Marx’s late thought: away from a naïve faith in the infinite potential of technology towards a sober recognition of ecological limits. The contemporary environmental movement, writes Saitō, must heed this rejection of Prometheanism and abandon the notion of developing the “productive forces" (which, in the lexicon of historical materialism, means the machinery and infrastructure used in the production of goods). It should rather advocate a reduction of resource use in the Global North, establishing a new model of democratic planning to decide what’s needed and what isn’t.  

A similar vision is laid out by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter in The Future is Degrowth (2022), which describes economic growth as the “ideological, social, and biophysical materialization of capitalist accumulation.” The authors note that GDP, though a deficient metric in many respects, neatly expresses the foundational feature of the present system: a quest for constantly increasing surplus regardless of its fallout. This is not only the root of soaring carbon emissions; it is also a primary determinant of social alienation, political repression and hierarchies of race and gender, all of which could be ameliorated by a more modest societal metabolism. Three interlocking forms of class struggle are required to realize this downscaling operation: the creation of “nowtopias,” or spaces that resist the demands of capital, the pursuit of “non-reformist reforms” which hasten a revolutionary rupture with the current institutions, and “building counter-hegemony" against such sites of power. The possible contours of a post-growth world, should these forces succeed in bringing it about, are outlined in Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass’s Half Earth Socialism (2022), which imagines massive tracts of land being rewilded or reserved for green infrastructure, meat and dairy being phased out and energy use drastically diminished, with quotas ranging from 750 to 2,000 watts per person.    

For the ecomodernist Matthew Huber, none of this is practically feasible nor politically desirable. His 2022 book Climate Change as Class War presents degrowth as a middle-class fad which prioritizes consumption over production, and calls instead for a decarbonization campaign led by unionized workers in the electricity sector. The ultimate aim, he insists, should be the decommodification of energy and the switch to a modern ecological planning regime. In a searing critique of Saitō, co-written with Leigh Phillips, Huber describes the discourse of "biophysical limits" as a form of neo-Malthusianism, arguing that such constraints could in fact be overcome by a high-tech socialist society. Saitō, as Huber and Phillips read him, suggests that the current productive forces are corrupted by capital and cannot possibly be harnessed for green intervention in the climate. This leads him to advocate a “start from scratch” communism, in which capitalist technologies are simply junked rather than being developed and repurposed. All we get in their place is a list of unpromising micro-alternatives: community gardens, mutual aid networks, autonomous zones and so on.  

By the same reasoning, Huber rejects the post-industrial outlook of The Future is Degrowth and the mad-cap schemes of Half Earth Socialism – both of which, he claims, would undermine the material basis for eco-socialism. What’s needed to rescue our warming planet are “solutions like nuclear fission, green hydrogen, scaled geothermal and carbon removal.” Because capitalism cannot muster adequate investment in such fixes, it becomes necessary to mobilize the expanding proletariat – "an urbanized majority with no direct relation to the ecological conditions of existence" – to overturn it, preferably through a return to Leninist first principles. For Huber, the task should be to free the dynamic forces of production from the constraints of the class system (or “relations of production"). We should not throw the former out with the latter.  

One of the curious features of this debate is the mutual accusation of utopianism. Saitō labels his opponents "utopian socialists,” in the vein of Saint-Simon and Owen, who dream of communal abundance yet ignore its empirical conditions. For him, the unscientific core of ecomodernism lies in its unquestioning faith in science: its tendency to present technological progress as a good in itself, as if the road to socialism were lined with nuclear reactors and green hydrogen plants. The degrowth movement argues that such "breakthroughs" may, in fact, suffer from the same defects as system that produced them: heedless of human needs, oriented towards exchange. By extension, a just society may want to eradicate them rather than release their full potential. “Capitalist technological advancements may not be in the ultimate interest of the world’s producing classes,” writes Kai Heron in response to Huber. "Historically, they have often conflicted with greener forms of production,” including vernacular architecture and agroecological farming systems, which eco-socialism may well want to reinstate.   

Huber makes the opposite argument. Because degrowthers deny that capitalism’s productive forces could serve as the foundations for socialism, he contends, they cannot articulate a realistic vision of the latter. This leaves them prone to utopian conjecture – hence Vettese and Pendergrass’s plan for mass rewilding and mandatory veganism. On this interpretation, the "half-earth" proposition, that humans should simply vacate much of the planet and leave it to regenerate, reflects a deeper failure of degrowth thought: “an unscientific belief in a balance of nature, that there is a set way for nature to be, and that capitalism is upsetting this balance.” The insistence on the planet’s supposedly immutable limits implies a reification of the natural world. It betrays a false optimism about the prospects for the environment were humanity to abstain from "interference" and leave it to repair itself. Today, as fires spread and riverbanks burst, such interference may be needed more than ever.

People wade through floodwaters in Jakarta's central business district in 2013. © Ed Wray/Getty

 “Utopianism,” then, is used pejoratively on both sides. Degrowth denounces ecomodernism’s utopian view of technology; ecomodernism condemns degrowth’s utopian view of nature. But what if we were to pull back from this controversy and take a more positive view of the term? Utopias, as Fredric Jameson observes, tend to emerge at times of political suspension: when “no agency has appeared on the horizon that offers the slightest chance or hope of modifying the status quo, and yet in the mind – and perhaps for that very reason – all kinds of institutional variations and re-combinations seem thinkable." In such conditions, they express a disruptive desire to transcend the present, not by winning practical reforms, but by sundering society’s ideological fabric. This is especially pertinent to the present era. If neoliberalism tries to eliminate historical consciousness by proclaiming capitalism to be the end-point of human development, to which there can be no alternative, utopianism subverts this logic from within by describing a "non-place,” outside of history, whose radical otherness indicts the ruling system – and propels the imagination beyond it. To be a utopian, in this sense, is to refuse the foreclosure of the future.  

Jameson notes that "one of the most durable oppositions in utopian projection . . . was that between country and city”: a binary that recurs in speculative philosophy and fiction from Heidegger to LeGuin. "Perhaps its more contemporary form,” he continues, "involves a relationship to technology and a correspondingly diminishing nostalgia for nature; or, on the other hand, a passionate ecological commitment to the prehistory of the earth and an ever-feebler pride in the Promethean triumph over the non-human." Utopias tend to idealize either the social or the natural, prioritizing one of these elements and downgrading the other. Ecomodernists assume that the productive forces can be divested of their capitalist character and used for collective ends. Some degrowthers, conversely, accept the notion that nature’s preexisting "balance" can be restored after the cesura of capitalism. Both positions require a significant leap of faith. The first involves betting on the miraculous powers of technologies that do not currently exist. The second skirts over the material or technological infrastructure that must be harnessed to achieve a "steady state.” Each expresses a belief, which cannot be verified empirically, that one side of the country/city opposition offers salvation from the other. Their respective agents of change reflect this dichotomy: ecomodernists pin their hopes on the urban proletariat, particularly in the Global North, while degrowthers tend to foreground peasant and indigenous movements outside the imperial core.  

Yet the crucial point, for Jameson, is that utopias are not about mapping out a positive blueprint or creating a perfect political schema. "For all their potential luxuriance of detail,” writes Perry Anderson, they retain "a stubborn negativity, an emblem of what, despite everything, we cannot grasp or imagine.” This is partly thanks to the status of revolutionary transitions and the societies they create, both which necessarily mark a rupture in history, such that their precise content – the institutions they bring into being, the subjectivities they engender – cannot be foreseen. Rather than trying to predict the future, utopianism sets out to demolish the psychic obstacles to social transformation. Utopians, Jameson tells us, "have to concentrate not on visions of future happiness, but rather on treatments of that stubborn resistance we tend to oppose to it and to all the other proposals for positive change in this now worldwide society. Utopian thinking must first involve the radical therapy for dystopia.”  

Could ecomodernism and degrowth be read, against the grain, as different therapies for dystopia? That is, as discourses of radical negation, whose primary purpose is not to provide a forecast of the world to come, but to break the ideological bonds that entrap us in the present one? In his discussion of the country and the city, Jameson urges us to resist the temptation to unify these antithetical terms in a higher synthesis. For "what these utopian oppositions allow us to do,” he explains,  

is, by way of negation, to grasp the moment of truth of each term. Put the other way around, the value of each term is differential, it lies not in its own substantive content but as an ideological critique of its opposite number. The truth of the vision of nature lies in the way in which it discloses the complacency of the urban celebration; but the opposite is also true, and the vision of the city exposes everything nostalgic and impoverished in the embrace of nature. Another way of thinking about the matter is the reminder that each of these utopias is a fantasy, and has precisely the value of a fantasy – something not realized and indeed unrealizable in that partial form. 

In this moment of mutual dialectical negation, the truth of the city only becomes apparent in its indictment of the country and vice versa. Each utopia is a "fantasy" whose concrete proposals should not necessarily be taken at face value (as with Jameson’s famous demand to reinstate universal conscription). Their real value lies in their critical function – their ability to expose the myths that structure our reality.  

We might therefore say that signing up to policies such as mass rewilding and universal veganism is not necessary to recognize the basic strengths of degrowth as a utopian strain. In its critique of the "city" qua technology, it is nothing less than a repudiation of the belief in civilizational progress by which the left has often been constrained. Just as capitalism rests on a faith in endless expansion, socialism has, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, assumed that the development of the productive forces was working in its favor. Sooner or later they would come into conflict with class society, as the growth of industry created a collective urban subject capable of abolishing private ownership.  

This was a conviction that neoliberalism appeared to disprove, atomizing its potential gravediggers rather than consolidating them in an unstoppable fighting force. From the 1980s onward, capital’s offensive undermined the hope that, beneath the ephemera of everyday politics, structural processes were unfolding to the left’s advantage. Along with the acceleration of the climate crisis, which casts doubt not just on "progress" but on general prospects for survival, this shift has prompted degrowthers to reassess long-term trajectory of world history. What is our long-term aim, if not merely to drive it forward? If capitalism culminates not merely in its own collapse, but also in that of its planetary ecosystem, can socialism still be said to constitute a point further along the same temporal continuum? Or must we switch over to a radically different timeline – shrinking the present productive infrastructure to make way for alternatives? 

By the same token, we may not need to take literally the ecomodernist vision of nuclear fission or geoengineering. Perhaps what is really being worked out in these techno-utopian fantasies is the proper relation between the left and the natural environment. Slavoj Žižek has warned against the "deeply conservative" notion "that there is something like ‘nature,' which we humans, with our hubris, with our will to dominate, disturb.” "The first premise of a truly radical ecology,” he writes, "should be, ‘Nature doesn’t exist’ . . . What we need is ecology without nature, ecology that accepts this open, imbalanced, denaturalized, if you want, character of nature itself.” If there is a danger of deluding ourselves that an abstract and depoliticized "technology" is the answer to climate catastrophe, there is a parallel problem with assigning "nature" this role. As in various strands of New Materialist philosophy, the attempt to “decenter” the human subject in favor of the outside world risks disempowering it entirely: demanding that we defer to the extant reality rather than reshape it. Given the uneven effects of ecological crisis, it is easy to see why this abnegation of responsibility might be appealing to wealthier citizens of the Global North, who can demonstrate their "respect for nature" by foregoing political action. It is at this pacifying conception of ecology that ecomodernism takes aim.   

Jameson’s dialectical "double negation" thus seems to call for a left that embraces neither the forces of production nor the fetish of nature – both of which are ideological salves that render real emancipation unthinkable. The first creates a consoling sense of linear progress via the city, while the second reduces the scope for human agency via the country. In the clash between the utopian discourses of degrowth and ecomodernism, each side of this dichotomy is revealed to be radically contingent. Technology is not a deus ex machina that will revitalize the socialist tradition; it is a site of struggle in which "progress" is never assured, and in which the left must strive continually to create egalitarian infrastructure. Nor is nature an untouchable domain that humans must vacate; it is, increasingly, a realm of flux that demands careful oversight and management. Neither has a pregiven role in the project of liberation. Both are invariably shaped by political intervention.