The ideas of ‘degrowth’ have gained an increasing following in environmental circles in recent years. According to degrowth advocates, society could be changed overnight if we wanted it to. ‘Growth’ of economic output could – and should – be halted in the interest of the planet, we are told.
Pushing these views is a wave of ‘ecological economists’ within academia. For example, anthropologist Jason Hickel rose to prominence in 2020 with his book ‘Less is More’. This became one of the most popular reads on degrowth, and spawned a 2024 BBC documentary of the same name.
Japanese author Kohei Saito also scored what many called ‘a surprise hit’ with his book Capital in the Anthropocene, selling over half a million copies. In this, Saito poses the idea of ‘degrowth communism’, meaning that we should “overcome the divide between Marxism and degrowth”.
Even Greta Thunburg, arguably one of the world’s most famous climate activists, has formed her political beliefs around degrowth. In her work The Climate Book, published in 2022, she strongly argues for such ideas.
It is no surprise that these ideas are now circulating widely. In this period of deepening economic and environmental crisis, it’s hard to maintain that capitalism is a rational system. Ever-greater numbers are looking for an alternative to the broken status quo.
Degrowth advocates try to reflect the discontent towards the current system. Amongst the many vague notions around ‘degrowth’, some even identify themselves as ‘anti-capitalist’ and come out with seemingly radical statements.
In fact, however, these ideas are not new. Nor are they truly radical. At root, the demands of degrowthers amount to regulating capitalism, and are therefore completely utopian.
What is degrowth?
There are a number of different definitions and views on what degrowth would look like. Broadly speaking, however, there are two camps into which degrowth advocates fall.
First up is the right-wing camp: those who believe that there are ecologically defined limits on human populations; and that, whilst technological and economic change may be necessary, the defining problem is with growth.
Malthusianism is an example of this, laying the blame for environmental destruction squarely on the shoulders of ordinary people and their lifestyles; on ‘consumerism’ and industrialisation.
It is here that we find the origins of degrowth. Degrowth was popularised in the 1970s by the Club of Rome – a group of researchers, establishment politicians, UN officials, and bourgeois economists – and their 1972 publication The Limits to Growth.
This study was considered groundbreaking, with models and simulations revealing that humanity was heading towards a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both populations and industrial capacity” by 2072, unless economic growth was severely curtailed ASAP.
Such a critique certainly finds an echo on the left. Nevertheless, most left-wing degrowthers nominally reject the outlook of Malthus, and dismiss the ruling class’ attempts to blame ordinary people for environmental problems.
Instead, left degrowth supporters commonly critique the capitalist system itself. For example, Hickel, Saito, and others say that we should move towards a “post-capitalist economy”: doing away with society’s “obsession with endless growth” and harmoniously balancing our economy with nature, all while reducing inequality and raising living standards.
They argue that instead of focusing on GDP growth, we should focus on GPI (genuine progress indicator) growth, which would take human health and wellbeing into account.
Academic Timothée Parrique, for example, defines degrowth as “a downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints, planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing”.
To achieve this, we are told that we must simply do away with ‘growthism’ as an ideology, along with all its associated problems: the privatisation of public services; cuts to social spending, wages, and labour protections; and soaring inequality. Once we dismantle this ‘growthism’ vision, we can implement all the reforms and changes we need.
In Less is More, Hickel puts forward a whole series of relevant reforms: introduce a global minimum wage; clamp down on tax evasion with laws to regulate cross-border trade and corporate accounting; cancel debts, freeing poor countries to invest in public healthcare, and so on.
Besides this, the author proposes a five-step plan of “pathways to a post-capitalist world”: ending planned obsolescence; cutting advertisement; shifting ownership to usership; ending food waste; and scaling down ecologically destructive industries.
In the years since, Hickel has reiterated these demands, alongside others, in various interviews, papers, and posts.
As Marxists, we are in favour of any genuine reforms that improve the conditions of the working class. That is not the issue. The issue is how these reforms are raised in a completely abstract and utopian manner, divorced from any fundamental change in social – i.e. property – relations. This is exactly the problem with degrowth as a ‘theory’.
Hickel admits as much by saying:
“This isn’t scary at all. This is not the command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment. On the contrary, it’s an economy that feels in key ways familiar, in the sense that it resembles the economy as we normally describe to ourselves.”
Why is it “familiar”? Because it’s still capitalism! Under the suggestions of the degrowthers, in other words, we would still live in a class society, with a ruling class exploiting the working class for profit. The fundamental logic of capitalism would be completely preserved.
Similarly, Hickel is a supporter of ‘modern monetary theory’: a neo-Keynesian idea that seeks to utilise the state’s control over the money supply (via central banks) to direct the economy – all within the limits of capitalism, a system of production for profit.
It is obvious from these appeals that Hickel and co. consider the capitalist state to be an independent arbiter that one can convince to implement radical changes. But it is not. The state serves the interests of the ruling class, defending the capitalists’ private property and their pursuit of profits.
This is also evident from Hickel’s suggestion to “democratise key international institutions” like the IMF and World Bank. But these are imperialist institutions which need to be smashed, not ‘democratised’.
Socialism: Utopian and scientific
According to left degrowthers, then, we have structured our society upon an ideology of ‘growthism’. But this is an explanation that explains nothing.
Where did these ideas come from in the first place? And why did this ideology become the dominant one in society?
Instead of providing any real analysis of how capitalist society functions, a degrowth perspective paints everything as ‘accidental’, down to greed and morality. This is pure idealism.
Marxism, by contrast, is based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Our ideas are shaped by the world we live in. It is social conditions that create social consciousness.
It is not the case that the ruling class is simply guided by ‘growthism’, and therefore desires more and more growth. Rather, the capitalists themselves are subject to the dynamics and logic of their own system; to the objective laws of capitalism, which impose themselves upon society.
“As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.” (Marx, Capital. Vol 1)
Competition forces the capitalists, as a class, to constantly revolutionise production; to gain and maintain a greater share of the market; and to squeeze the working class ever harder – all in order to increase their profits.
If they don’t, then rivals will come and tap into their market share. This is what compels the capitalists to constantly reinvest their surplus into new means of production, leading to economic growth.
It is not ideas that drive them, then, but the laws and logic of capitalism itself.
But the degrowth advocates say, no, what we need to do is ‘dream up’ a better system, in order to convince policymakers, academics, and politicians to move our economy away from growth.
In his thesis The Political Economy of Degrowth, for example, Parrique suggests that degrowth is simply an invitation to imagine how society could provide for its needs without abiding to the mad logic of anarchic expansion.
Anticipating objections from Marxists, he comments:
“Some would stop me right here quoting Marx who ‘do[es] not write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.’ Put back into context, this statement was an attack against the utopian socialists of the mid-19th century (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon) who produced elaborate blueprints of ideal societies.
“But Karl Marx was wrong; there is value in political dreaming. What he underestimated is the power of utopias to educate desire, to fuel the social imaginary. Marx dismissed utopias without realising that these outlandish plans were the visible tip of a more diffuse revolutionary momentum.”
This is a complete misunderstanding of the Marxist approach. Marx and Engels were materialists. They did not neglect the power of ideas. They simply explained that ‘the ideal society’ that the Utopians of their time envisioned could not come into existence without the necessary material basis in terms of the development of the productive forces – i.e. of industry, science, and technology.
“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it, have been developed: and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.
“Therefore mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve, since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or at least are in the process of formation.” (Marx, Critique of Political Economy)
The Utopians were alive at a time when the productive forces were still growing and maturing. There was no superabundance. And the working class was only just taking shape.
In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friederich Engels explains how “the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond to crude theories”.
Unable to see the material basis for genuine socialism and communism, the Utopians attempted to evolve such a society out of the human brain.
Degrowth advocates still hold this Utopian philosophy. They start out by imagining the economy that they would like to see, and then think that it is enough to argue for this rational blueprint.
But just like all reformists, they only see the devastating symptoms of the capitalist system (inequality, climate catastrophe, poverty, exploitation, colonisation etc.), not the real disease: private ownership and production for profit. To them, as Engels put it “society presented nothing but wrongs, to remove these was the task of reason”. He continues:
“It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda…
“These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.” (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
It’s precisely this idealism that leads to all sorts of confusions. To give an example from Parrique himself:
“Before being installed on roofs, solar panels had to be installed in minds. And to be installed in minds, they had to be described in more precise terms than a general desire for ‘cleaner energy’. The production of utopias is nothing less but the process by which societies dream, and without them, there could be no revolutions.”
Here we see again how Utopians put everything back to front. Solar panels wouldn’t be installed on people’s roofs at any point in history. Yes, our inventions do come from the mind – but the mind is not separated from the material world.
To invent solar panels, scientists first had to have a certain understanding of physics; society needed to have industries and factories in place to make them, with workers and engineers possessing certain skills and training; and a whole transport network had to be in place to supply these products to houses needing clean energy.
The fact that there is a ‘general desire for cleaner energy’ to begin with is precisely because of the capitalist system that has led the whole of humanity into this climate catastrophe. In short, it’s material conditions that have given rise to this idea.
Revolutions are not first created subjectively in the mind, but are a reflection of the objective fact that a particular socio-economic system has reached its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces any further.
This materialist understanding of historical and social development underlines why socialism isn’t just a nice idea or an ‘alternative’ to capitalism, but is an essential, objectively necessary solution to the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system.
It is exactly for this purpose that Marx wrote three volumes of Capital: in order to provide us with a scientific understanding of the capitalist system and its dynamics.
Building upon the works of his ‘classical’ predecessors, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx analysed the motion of the capitalist mode of production. The conclusion he demonstrated is that anarchic growth and destructive crises of overproduction are inherent to the laws and logic of capitalism, based on production for profit.
The real barriers to harmonious economic development, Marx explained, are private property and the nation state. Unless we break ourselves free of these shackles, any attempt to solve the problems that we see under capitalism is futile.
Capitalist accumulation
Marx analysed economic growth under capitalism scientifically, in contrast to the vague manner in which degrowthers discuss this question.
Under capitalism, Marx showed, growth arises from ‘capital accumulation’. Capital, he explained, is value that seeks to generate surplus value. The capitalists, in other words, invest money in means of production and labour-power, in order to make a profit.
In their pursuit of ever-greater profits, due to the pressures of competition, the capitalists are forced to reinvest their surplus value – created by the working class – into new means of production, including factories, machinery, technology, infrastructure, and raw materials.
This leads to expansion and development of the productive forces, leading to greater output. The economic pie grows; and with it, the mass of profits increases as well.
Whilst the capitalists accumulate more and more wealth, the workers only accumulate misery and toil. The inequality and antagonism between the two classes increases.
This dynamic of capital accumulation also explains why capitalism is an inherently crisis-ridden system, responsible for creating poverty amidst plenty.
Every capitalist is making the same ‘rational’ decision to squeeze the working class for higher profits, leading to a situation that is extremely irrational for the system as a whole. The market becomes saturated by commodities that cannot be sold, giving rise to periodic crises of overproduction.
In such crises, Marx and Engels outline:
“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto)
“Over and over again,” Jason Hickel asserts in Less is More, “it becomes clear that scarcity is created, intentionally, for the sake of growth.” But this is false. The real problem is profit.
“The limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies but by the number of purses able to buy and to pay,” Engels explained, responding to Malthus and his reactionary ideas. “Bourgeois society does not and cannot wish to produce any more. The moneyless bellies, the labour which cannot be utilised for profit and therefore cannot buy, are left to the mortality figures.”
In short, it is the laws of capitalism that are responsible for the want, wastefulness, destruction that we see all around us – not the abstract idea of ‘growth’.
Class struggle
Due to the deepening global crisis and rising class struggle, in more recent commentaries, Hickel seems to acknowledge the limits of attempting to convince the capitalists and their political representatives of his ‘degrowth’ perspective and agenda.
In a 2023 contribution to the Monthly Review, for example, the academic acknowledges that the capitalist system will never overthrow itself to become greener and more egalitarian. And furthermore, he correctly states, it is the organised working class that must be the primary agent in bringing about radical change.
“This is not a time for mild reformism, tweaking around the edges of a failing system,” the author writes. “This is a time for revolutionary change.”
More recently, meanwhile, Hickel has become an outspoken critic of imperialism and “social democracy” (i.e. reformism).
The only way forward for society, the environmental author states in a social media post from earlier this year, “is to abandon capital accumulation and transition to a post-capitalist economy where production is democratically organised around human well-being and ecology (in other words, socialism)”.
Social democracy is not a viable alternative to capitalism. It is a tempting prospect, but ultimately suffers from violent contradictions that cannot be sustained.
Social democracy tries to establish a compromise between (a) capitalism, and (b) socialist demands for fair wages,…
— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) February 16, 2025
“When we sweep away the illusions and false solutions,” he concludes, quoting Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, “it always comes down to the one choice that humanity faces: socialism or barbarism.”
At the same time, however, in his writings and interviews, Hickel quotes various Utopian and liberal thinkers, ranging from the anarchist Kropotkin to the bourgeois economist Keynes. And he continues to push reformist economic policies, such as regulating commercial credit and private investment, rather than arguing unequivocally for socialist planning.
This shows what a confused hotchpotch of ideas ‘degrowth’ theory ultimately is.
We must state clearly and unequivocally: capitalism is killing the planet. We need a revolution. The world working class must rise up to take ownership and seize control of the means of production, and plan the economy along socialist lines.
As Marxists, we have not arbitrarily ‘chosen’ the working class as the force destined to overthrow capitalism. Rather, this flows from a scientific understanding of the central role that the working class plays in production, which provides workers with an enormous potential power and collective consciousness.
Degrowth idealists, by contrast, tend to blur over class lines, pitting different groups of workers against one another. Other Malthusian-inspired trends in the environmental movement similarly confuse matters by blaming abstract ideas of ‘consumerism’.
The so-called ‘eco-Marxist’ Saito, for example, states that: “We Japanese [in the Global North] are complicit in environmental catastrophes in the Global South. Our rich lifestyles would be impossible without the exploitation of the Global South.”
But the Japanese – like any nation or people – are not one class. It is the ruling class that enjoys the fruits of imperialism. While the capitalists pollute the planet and line their pockets, the Japanese working class is highly exploited, subject to notoriously harsh and horrendous working conditions.
Workers across ‘the North’ have more in common with workers in ‘the South’ than with the bosses in their own countries. Workers collectively share the same fundamental class interests; and they form mass organisations such as trade unions and political parties in order to fight for these.
Armed with a clear revolutionary programme, it is the organised working class that has the power to overthrow the capitalist system and bring about revolutionary change.
Socialist planning
Today, it is increasingly clear that the capitalists and their chaotic system cannot save the environment. Indeed, it is they who are the real arsonists, responsible for the inferno that is ravaging the planet.
We have the technological solutions necessary to bring our economy in harmony with nature. But to implement these, we need planning. This raises the fundamental class question, however: you cannot plan what you do not control, and you cannot control what you do not own.
Only when the working class seizes control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, such as the big banks and major monopolies, can we plan the economy in the interest of the majority of society, instead of for the profits of the few.
This is the material foundation for a society of superabundance, in which the productive forces at our disposal are rationally and democratically utilised, in harmony with our surroundings.
Marxists, therefore, are not against ‘growth’ in itself. Indeed, growth under socialism would mean an enormous development of the productive forces, to such a degree that we could massively raise the living standards of everyone across the world – all while decreasing working hours through automation, in order to free up people’s time for the pursuit of education, science, and art.
Thanks to the capitalists, we will inherit an utter mess in terms of environmental disaster and devastation. One of the first tasks of a workers’ government, therefore, would be to invest in infrastructure to build up resilience against droughts, wildfires, floods, and other extreme weather conditions across the world.
By expropriating the properties of the super-rich, and embarking on a mass programme of home building, decent housing could be provided for anyone living in an uninhabitable environment.
Without the barrier of the nation state, and reactionary politicians whipping up racism and xenophobia, this wouldn’t be considered a ‘migrant crisis’, but an international plan to ensure safe and humane living conditions for everyone.
There is already enough food produced globally to feed the world. And by sharing modern science, technology, and techniques, plentiful supplies of clean water and energy could easily be provided to all too.
Dutch expertise in water management and agribusiness, for example, allows the tiny patch of land that is the Netherlands to export vital crops and other farm produce across the globe. Yet, due to private ownership, the capitalists hoard this technology for themselves. Their motivation is not to produce food to feed people, but to increase efficiency for the sake of competing on the world market and making mega-profits.
Similarly, on the basis of an international socialist plan, energy generation based on solar, wind, and water could be placed where it makes the most geographical sense, and then exported in abundance across the world.
And by removing profit from the equation, on the basis of workers’ control and management, huge amounts of waste could be removed across entire industries. Alongside the latest recycling technologies and methods, this would allow for production to leap ahead whilst also reducing the extraction of natural resources.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The possibilities are endless. We cannot provide an exact, detailed blueprint of what socialism would look like. But the sky-high potential is clear, if we can lay the necessary economic foundations.
Only by carrying through a socialist revolution and establishing a socialist planned economy can we ensure that humanity’s development no longer stands in opposition to nature, but that the laws and forces of nature instead are utilised to bring about progress for the whole of society and our surroundings.
“With every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws [of nature]…In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities.
“But the more this progresses, the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.”
