Prospects for Degrowth 2025
These are difficult times indeed, with terrible news on many fronts. What are the prospects for the degrowth1 alternative as we move through 2025? Dark times: the current context First, we need to understand what is going on around us: what is the evolving context with which degrowth has to contend, and to which it has to present a viable alternative? Collapsing planetary and ecological systems in the face of insignificant mitigation and excessive material flows Unrelentingly, more evidence accumulates about the dire state of the planetary and ecological systems on which humanity relies. For many years, we have known that the planet has entered the danger zone on multiple dimensions, and for longer that this was likely to happen. We are now seeing increased evidence for cumulative impacts and positive feedback effects impacting on likely earth system tipping points2, so that climate chaos in particular is getting steadily worse. Some examples: the diminishing of the ocean currents that give Europe relatively a mild climate (for latitude), more and more extreme, unprecedented weather events, the presence of pervasive pollutants such as nanoplastics in all our bodies and brains, and the collapse of insect populations. It is what the eminent Barry Commoner author of the four laws of ecology, more than five decades ago, called the ‘closing circle’.3 Despite this, and the efforts of many, including the UN, there is little or no sign of serious mitigation actions worldwide. That is particularly clear in the two areas where there are global agreements, climate and biodiversity: in neither case are commitments made by countries being adhered to4. The emergency brake5 needs to be applied but the drivers all have the accelerator pedal firmly pressed down to the floor. The internal and external limits of capitalist expansion Capitalist economies generate economic growth because the pursuit of profit and capital accumulation are integral to them. The economic and social systems of nearly all countries rely on continued economic growth for stability and to fund government expenditure. There could be alternative possible designs – we degrowthers certainly think so – but for now, the stagnation of most rich country economies has become a problem for them. The stagnation has multiple causes. Internally, the long-range trend for the rate of profit to decline6, itself the result of an inescapable contradiction of capitalist business, is countered by a variety of ‘fixes’, new markets, cheaper resources and labour, technological innovation, but those options have become ever less potent in forestalling the inevitable: even the booming US economy is dependent on the temporary boost from increased fossil fuel exploitation and export. Externally, the increasing scarcity of energy and mineral resources doesn’t mean they are about to run out but that extraction becomes ever more expensive, causing reduction of the both the energy and the money returned by investment across the board, which sends ripples through the system, amplifying the impact of the internal contradiction. The environment also offers increasing shocks from climate and ecological destruction which also have their impacts on the accumulation cycle. Capitalism’s growth motor is broken and while there will be temporary repairs, nobody knows how to fix it long term. ‘Deregulation’, the weakening of hard-won protections for people and planet, is again fashionable but while it might give a temporary boost, it won’t change the underlying realities. Instead it will make their impact greater. Bankruptcy of political leadership Faced with recurrent, multiple global crises in the economy, the political elites are revealed to be ideologically bankrupt. Without new ideas they are not able to confront the pancrisis and the population knows it. Renewed growthism – backtracking on environmental and social protection Faced with economic stagnation the elites are panicking. Wild eyed in the control room, they thrash around seeking to fix the unfixable, pushing all the buttons, pulling all the levers, to no avail, just making things worse. They try the old mantra “growth”, repeated endlessly, and given a priority above all else7. They roll back environmental and social protections8: pulling out of agreements on climate mitigation, desperately promoting a building boom9, directing expenditure to the military10, promoting non-solutions such as nuclear power, hydrogen11 and carbon capture and storage12, all in the name of GDP growth, for they know no other god. Geopolitical conflict and population displacement As primary resources get scarcer and more expensive to extract, so conflicts occur over them, often disguised as something else. As ecosystems and agriculture collapse more conflicts appear and intensify. As conflict and war increase, so populations get displaced, seeking better lives or just escaping intolerable and dangerous situations. Right populism, fascism and racist movements As the ruling elites lose their political capital, so the political right attempts to fill the void. They play on the declining incomes of some sections of the population, blaming minorities, women and migrants. It’s the old fascist playbook, sometimes, as before, hand in hand with sections of big business, but now with a weakened labour movement and fragmented left, they have less organised opposition than before. These movements deny the ecosystem realities facing humanity, act to increase the already enormous inequalities in wealth, and under the typically legitimist exterior there is a violent, militarist undercurrent. As a result of this right wing pressure, centrist parties have themselves significantly shifted their rhetoric and policies rightwards. In the past weeks and months, this rightward shift, and its consequent reactions, have gathered pace alarmingly – the fascists are already in some of the control rooms. Entry points for the degrowth alternative Given that conjuncture (or something like it – there are other ways of characterising it1), what might be the entry points, the nodes for resistance, prefiguration and organisation for the degrowth movement? In considering this we have to recognise that there is no longer a reasonably unified, collective, protagonist or ‘counter-hegemonic subject’, no single ‘midwife of history’. That is to say, where once there were strong movements of the organised working class, often linked with movements for liberation from imperialism, they have, if not disappeared, then weakened. Moreover, the multiple set of issues to be confronted means that the opposition to the dominant order consists of diverse groupings who might make common cause on some issues but not on others, particularly in the absence of a unifying ideology: class struggle is not enough2. For that reason, the pointers that follow cover distinct sectors and struggles. As Chertkovskaya has argued3, degrowth activism will involve different (often overlapping) modes of struggle in different places and times: Resisting, Taming, Halting, Escaping / Building alternatives and Dismantling and Smashing. Moreover, the degrowth movement is small so if it is to turn the growing popular rejection of the status quo into an ultimately planned degrowth of capitalism and its excessive material flows, it has to, selectively and critically, ally with other more or less friendly groupings while working at the edge where groupings and organisations come into contact4. Disenchantment of sections of the left and centre-left Sections of the left and centre left are recognising that the productivist, mitigated capitalist model both fails to deliver the anticipated benefits to the population, while threatening the environmental substrate that society and economy rely on. The are more likely to be sceptical of technological fixes for the ecological crisis than the productivist mainstream. Increasingly they are disenchanted with the rightward turn of most social democratic and supposedly socialist parties. Is there a chance of rediscovering the left’s alternative project5, one that resists the commodification of everything and focuses instead on fairness, kindness, beauty, sufficiency and respect for nature? It is unlikely that the ruling factions of most centre-left parties will change direction but there is considerable resistance and frustration among their activists: in the UK, some Labour Party council groups have defected en bloc to independent or green groupings. It is probably now a realistic prospect that sections of these movements could be ‘peeled off’ and organise around the alternative counter-hegemonic banner of degrowth, or degrowth socialism. We have to be ready for those moments, as well as work to make them happen and welcome people newly embracing degrowth. The current Spanish government6 illustrates that an effective left can, under the right circumstances, exert corrective pressure on the centre left, lessening the tendency to drift rightwards. Green7 and ecosocialist groupings need to be pushed to more explicitly reject growthism and campaign for the alternative. Historically, to a greater or lesser extent, the left and centre-left have been closely connected with organised labour, the trade unions. Some trade union campaigning is aligned with degrowth aims8 but some is not, particularly where jobs in the ‘dirty’ economic sectors (cars, aviation, weapons, fossil fuels in particular) are concerned. This means the alliances have to be navigated critically and compromises made carefully. Popular resistance to mega-projects, fossil fuel expansion and other extractivism, data centres, green space erosion This is an obvious area for degrowth activists to both align with and to do some ideological reframing of these struggles as part of the wider degrowth project. Experience suggests that this is fertile ground as campaigners’ political consciousness inevitably develops through lived struggle on these issues. Moreover, these areas of resistance cut across the North/South – Rich/Poor divide but all are occasioned by capitalist expansion. Interest in demonstration projects and degrowth-friendly alternatives These are the ‘concrete utopias’ discussed elsewhere9. They tend to be small-scale but a) suggest possible degrowth futures, b) make a real difference for those they reach, c) represent possible nodes for survival/restoration in the face of collapse or system-change. Degrowth activists can (and do) help make the connections here, both ideologically and practically. Anti-fascist resistance and solidarity movements The rightward turn of politics, the rise of fascist parties and voting, and the alliance of sectors of capital with the fascist right all lead to an opposite reaction from social movements old and new. In some countries massive anti-fascist demonstrations have taken place. Consumer boycotts are gathering against some of the far right oligarchic interests. Degrowth activists will also be involved in such campaigning, and will be there in solidarity and support, while promoting the degrowth alternative as the radical (at root) solution to the fascist turn. Degrowth as counter-hegemony What do we know about the role of ‘big ideas’ in galvanising systemic societal change? Perry Anderson summarises his understanding and its implication thus, …ideas count in the balance of political action and the outcome of historical change. In all three of the great cases of modern ideological impact, the pattern was the same. Enlightenment, Marxism, Neoliberalism: in each case a system of ideas was developed, to a high degree of sophistication, in conditions of initial isolation from, and tension with, the surrounding political environment—with little or no hope of immediate influence. It was only when a major objective crisis, for which it was in no way responsible, broke out, that subjective intellectual resources, gradually accumulating in the margins of becalmed conditions, suddenly acquired overwhelming force as mobilizing ideologies with a direct grip on the course of events. Such was the pattern in the 1790s, the 1910s, the 1980s. The more radical and intransigent the body of ideas, the more sweeping its effect, once unleashed in turbulent conditions. … Resistance and dissent are far from dead, but they continue to lack systematic, uncompromising articulation. None will come, experience suggests, from feeble adjustment or euphemistic accommodation to the existing order of things. What is needed instead, and will not arrive overnight, is an entirely different spirit—an unflinching and where necessary caustic analysis of the world as it is, without concession to the arrogant claims of the Right, the conformist myths of the Centre, or the bien-pensant pieties of too much of what passes for the Left. Ideas incapable of shocking the world are incapable of shaking it.10 He could be describing degrowth. We want degrowth to become the ‘good sense’ of the future, a vision and an action plan that brings together diverse constituencies: it is well placed to do that with its simultaneous and cross-cutting concern for ecological safety, and social and economic justice. For that promise to be realised though, degrowth has to be readily and honestly communicable to those who are unfamiliar with its theoretical and empirical basis, and to those who may have doubts, often fed by misinformation. The neoliberal project11 and the Green New Deal12 both had the advantage of an easy to summarise set of ideas that were actionable. To be honest, degrowth lacks that13, although there are very good book-length treatments14. We need a well developed communication strategy: in the UK we do have an example degrowth manifesto15, with a suite of policy ideas, and that can be adapted to other contexts. We need to go beyond that with what is sometimes called the “elevator16 pitch” – the essential persuasive essence that can be conveyed in a couple of minutes, opening the door for deeper explanation, exploration and experimentation. This is not to dilute the message with a bland “almost degrowth” label, but to emphasise the need to communicate and persuade effectively. Optimism of the will but pessimism of the intellect17: the reality of collapse There will be difficult times ahead. Livelihoods will collapse, violence will increase, people will be displaced and hurt in many ways. We must be prepared for the severe effects both of ecosystem, economic and social collapse and for the widespread violence and gangsterism that will be increasingly prevalent from both state and non-state actors. We do not expect to win but we cannot afford to lose. Our approach will be collective not individual, caring, sharing and resisting, while always showing the way along the alternative degrowth pathway that we will be constructing as we go. Or at the very least, helping prepare for a ‘better collapse’18. I am grateful to Mladen Domazet, Richard Shirres and Carolyn Kagan for helpful comments on an earlier version. Notes 1 Contact: [email protected] 2 See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950https://www.commondreams.org/news/tipping-points-soonerhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-xAnd on the prescience of the Limits to Growth simulation: https://espas.secure.europarl.europa.eu/orbis/system/files/generated/document/en/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.13084 3 Commoner, B. (1971). The closing circle: Nature, man, and technology . Knopf. “We must close the circle. We must learn how to restore to nature the wealth that we borrow from it.” Marx had much earlier called this the Metabolic Rift, see Saito, K. (2017) Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, Monthly Review Press. 4 https//www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-95-of-countries-miss-un-deadline-to-submit-2035-climate-pledges/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/24/countries-biodiversity-pledges-rome-cop16-aoe 5 https//gettingreal.org.uk/2024/05/02/the-emergency-brake/ 6 https//thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/ 7 E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/22/rachel-reeves-says-growth-matters-more-than-net-zero-heathrow-third-runway-decision 8 https://environmentjournal.online/climate-change/climate-rollback-policy-wakeup/ 9 https://steadystatemanchester.net/2024/07/18/build-build-build-for-growth-growth-growth/ 10 https://www.euronews.com/2024/04/22/military-spending-in-western-and-central-europe-higher-than-end-of-cold-war-data-showshttps://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/ramping-up-military-spending-a-shameful-betrayal-of-workers-say-peace-campaigners 11 https://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/hydrogen-report-web-final_0.pdf 12 https://www.campaigncc.org/sites/data/files/sites/data/files/Docs/letter_to_sos_-_blue_hydrogen_and_ccus.pdf 13 For example, for Europe in global context: https://agarzon.substack.com/p/and-now-what-europehttps://www.15-15-15.org/webzine/2025/03/29/abandon-all-hope-dire-times-for-europe/ 14 https://greendealmanchester.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/sustainability-utopian-and-scientific1.pdf 15 Chertkovskaya, E. (2022). A strategic canvas for degrowth: In dialogue with Erik Olin Wright. In N. Barlow, L. Regen, N. Cadiou, E. Chertkovskaya, M. Hollweg, C. Plank, M. Schulken, & V. Wolf (Eds.), Degrowth & strategy how to bring about social-ecological transformation (pp. 56–71). Mayfly. https://mayflybooks.org 16 https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/working-edgehttps://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/10-edge-effect/ 17 Williams, R. (1982). Socialism and Ecology. SERA. See https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/2020/08/31/part-one-ecology-and-socialism-a-lecture-by-raymond-williams-podcast/ for audio and text links. Burton, M. (2019). Degrowth: The realistic alternative for Labour. Renewal, 27(2), 88–95. https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-27-2019/degrowth-the-realistic-alternative-for-labour/ (for full submitted version: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333263007_Degrowth_the_realistic_alternative_for_Labour ) 18 The Centre-Left PSOE is the majority partner in a coalition with the left and green alliance Sumar. This has provided better worker and environmental protections that in much of Europe, although the contradictions are still very apparent: Spain has experienced higher GDP growth than most of Europe although Sumar components IU and Equo have explored degrowth https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-06-08/one-of-spains-governing-parties-adopts-degrowth/. 19 Green political formations are largely left in orientation and often share many of the assumptions of the degrowth movement. There are exceptions, the German and Mexican Green Parties cannot be considered at all friendly at present. 20 Public sector, Fire and Rescue services, and transport unions in the UK, for example. 21 https://www.degrowthstrategy.org/ 22 Anderson, P. (2025). Idées-forces. New Left Review, (151). 19-34. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii151/articles/perry-anderson-idees-forces 23 https://www.tni.org/en/article/a-short-history-of-neoliberalism 24 https://greennewdealgroup.org/ 25 https://steadystatemanchester.net/2021/01/04/the-post-growth-challenge/ 26 Hickel, J. (2022). Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. Penguin Books. Liegey, V., & Nelson, A. (2020). Exploring degrowth: A critical guide. Pluto Press. Schmelzer, M., Vetter, A., & Vansintjan, A. (2022). The future is degrowth: A guide to a world beyond capitalism. Verso. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthias-Schmelzer/publication/362762776_The_Future_Is_Degrowth_A_Guide_to_a_World_beyond_Capitalism/links/62fe2a06eb7b135a0e430bf5/The-Future-Is-Degrowth-A-Guide-to-a-World-beyond-Capitalism.pdf 27 https://gettingreal.or.uk The Swiss degrowth coalition are working on something similar. 28 An elevator being a lift in European English, rather than a piece of farm equipment, the term evokes having a hurried conversation with someone in a lift. 29 The expression is from A Gramsci but I have reversed the order of the two parts. 30 Riechmann, J. (2013). Fracasar mejor: Fragmentos, interrogantes, notas, protopoemas y reflexiones. Olifante. Teaser image credit: Degrowth snail. Por Pearson Scott Foresman – Esta imagen ha sido extraída del archivo, Dominiu públicu, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3204332