Black activists and Anti-capitalist organizations agree with our literature

These ideas have a long history in anti-colonial thought. Fanon (1963:314–315) critiqued Europe’s growthist model, lamenting that Europe had “shaken off all guidance and all reason” and was “running headlong into the abyss.” “Let us be clear”, he wrote: “what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification ... Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation.” Gandhi (1965:51–53) noted that the industrial growth of Europe and the US depended on plundering the South. He called for Southern countries to collectively refuse this arrangement, thus forcibly reducing the “surfeit” of rich countries. He rejected growthism and argued that production should be organized instead around human needs and sufficiency, enabling people to pursue the “art of living nobly” rather than “a complicated material life based on high speed”. Julius Nyerere (1960s) and Thomas Sankara (1980s) likewise championed a sufficiency-oriented approach to devel- opment, which they saw as key to national self-reliance and thus to throwing off neo-colonial power.

The critique of growth was in large part pioneered by thinkers in the global South, including Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the economists Radhakamal Mukurjee and J.C Kumarappa (Gerber & Raina, 2018). These perspectives have been developed further by figures such as Amin(1987),O ̈calan(2015),Shiva(2013),Shrivastava and Kothari (2012). Critiques of growth are represented in the envi- ronmental justice movement (Martinez-Alier, 2012), within movements such as the Zapatistas and in Rojava (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019), in the buen vivir movement (Acosta, 2020), in the food sovereignty movement (e.g., Campesina, 2018), and in the broader post-development literature (e.g., Escobar, 2015; Kothari et al., 2014; Kothari et al., 2019), all of which have their roots in the global South. Degrowth scholarship and activism is aligned with these movements, with demands directed spe- cifically at the North. It is the sharp edge of anti-colonial struggle within the metropole.

So what about the class politics of degrowth in the North? How do we reconcile degrowth with the reality of working-class poverty? Degrowth scholarship points out that energy and resource use in high-income nations is vastly in excess of what is required to end poverty and to deliver high levels of wellbeing for all, including universal public healthcare, education, transportation, computing, communication, housing, and healthy food (Millward-Hopkins, Steinberger, Rao, & Oswald, 2020). In other words, high-income nations could scale down aggregate throughput while at the same time improving people’s lives by organizing the economy around human needs rather than around capital accumulation—that is, by distributing income and wealth more fairly, while decommodifying and expanding public goods (Hickel, 2020b). These are core degrowth demands. After all, degrowth is part of the broader ecosocialist movement. What degrowth adds is the assertion that growth in high-income nations is not required in order to achieve a flourishing society. What is required is justice. Recognizing this is part of building class consciousness against the ideology of capital (Hickel, 2020c). But even more importantly, what is the point of a progressive politics in the North that is not aligned with the struggle for decoloni- zation in the South? Ecosocialism without anti-imperialism is not an ecosocialism worth having. And in the face of ecological breakdown, solidarity with the South requires degrowth in the North.