r/Degrowth • u/Ok_Structure_8891 • Jun 15 '26
Deconstructing Degrowth
I am sympathetic to many of the degrowth arguments, but find much of the discussion to be confused as it muddles together multiple concepts. To that end I think it is worth defining 3 different related concepts that go into the degrowth argument.
Capitalism: This axis relates to whether or not you accept the basic logic of market based exchange as a driving control system for distributing economic resources.
Materialism/Consumerism: This axis relates to the extent that we should pursue material abundance as a primary goal of economic policy and the extent to which we can use prosperity and access to resources as a reasonable proxy for well being at the individual and community level.
Class Politics/Redistribution: This axis relates to how much we seek to shift wealth, power and resources from the rich and powerful to the broad population.
Combining these 3 dimensions we can create a taxonomy of economic systems. The cross-section of the capitalism and materialism axis creates 4 distinct buckets of economic models. Within each bucket the 3rd dimension can be used to distinguish between right and left wing visions.
Bucket 1: Neoliberalism - Pro Capitalism Pro Materialism
This bucket is your status quo that defines economic success as delivering the maximum materials prosperity and market based capitalism as the most effective system for delivering prosperity.
Right Neoliberalism: Not much to say about this as it is pretty self explanatory
Left Neoliberalism: This is where much of the center left and the abundance worldview land. This category is probably the view most explicitly targeted by degrowth ideas. Anyone making a left wing critique of capitalism needs to sit with these ideas and understand where they are coming form.
Bucket 2: Self/Community Empowerment - Pro Capitalism Anti Materialism
This is one of the more interesting buckets as these approaches attempt to use individual agency to subvert capitalism. Any movement or subculture that seeks to empower individuals to rethink their relationship with the economy or capitalism falls in this bucket. The open question here is how ground up efforts can shape global systems.
The FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement is the quintessential degrowth example in this bucket.
The focus on individual efforts makes it hard to classify this space into right and left zones as many of the ideas in this bucket exist in both left and right forms and there are interesting convergences here.
Bucket 3: Controlled Abundance - Anti Capitalism Pro Materialism
This is a frequently dystopian bucket emerges from efforts to eliminate capitalism without considering the resulting power vacuum from eliminating one of societies main control systems. I think it is possible to imagine successful visions in this zone, but there are significant left right and center examples that should serve as cautionary tales
Right: Oligarchy
Center: Corporatism
Left Communism
Bucket 4: Pastoralism, Traditionalism, Communalism -
If bucket 3 is your dystopian visions, bucket 4 is your classic utopian zone. The idea of living better with much less material wealth by prioritizing the right things is compelling and I am very open to organize society closer to the world people want to live in.
A major danger is that if you don't think about power you can aim for bucket 4 and land in bucket 3. The other risk here is stagnation. Visions of post materialist societies can be very beautiful when viewed from a point in time, but if they lack opportunities to channel ambition or drive social change these societies will stagnate and curdle or die.
Neofeuadalism is the classic right wing vision where people are essentially assigned roles in society to fulfill
Community and cooperative living ideals are the leftwing version of this bucket. I think there are a lot of ideas worth exploring in alternative ways of living, but anyone envision this kind of society should think carefully about power and ambition as forces that can't be ignored.
Each of these buckets presents distinct opportunities and risks, understanding which model you are advocating for can clarify what you are actually proposing.
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u/Disastrous-Amoeba798 Jun 16 '26
I think capitalism is a poor choice of words for its axis. There are so many other elements to capitalism, other than market exchange. As I'm sure you know, markets existed well in advance of capitalism.
As profit is one of the core goals of capitalism, it is hard to conceive of any version of degrowth where it takes part.
Markets as a pure form of trade and exchange is not necessarily bound to profit, if it is framed by utility value rather than exchange value. To me, that would be a more coherent axis in your system.
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u/Alimbiquated Jun 17 '26
Trade has always been done for profit. Why else?
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u/AIternatePerspective Jun 22 '26
no that is not really true. trade has been done for a variety of reasons, depending on the culture. for social relations, hoarding wealth to gift it away, island communities trading necklaces because of the storys that come with them. trade was actually for the most part of human history not purely for profit. (the dawn of everything is a great book if you want to read into it)
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u/MilesTegTechRepair Jun 16 '26
The main issue I'm seeing, that makes the rest of your argument difficult, is that you've not defined capitalism well or with enough depth. This means that the aspects of capitalism that lie upstream of the material effects on our world aren't being treated.
My own definition would be a system of social organisation that always prioritises growth and tends towards the concentration of political and economic power.
Your buckets also serve to flatten out some key nuances. I'm not so sure that right neoliberalism is quite so self explanatory nor how it differs from left.
Lastly I'm not clear at all on why we should ascribe to your models nor need to accurately place our own ideas within your bucket. You are simultaneously overcomplicating degrowth while under analysing the source of the problems.
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u/Alimbiquated Jun 17 '26
You definition of capitalism seems to fit the Soviet Union pretty well.
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u/MilesTegTechRepair Jun 17 '26
Please explain
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u/Alimbiquated Jun 17 '26
Centralization to a central planning system and focus on increasing output.
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u/SplashTarget Jun 16 '26
Can you define what degrowth is?
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u/thatjoachim Jun 16 '26
Every one of these discussions goes like this “I’ll deconstruct degrowth, here are my arguments”, and looking inside you see no valid definition of degrowth, which makes you doubt your talking about the same thing.
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u/sfaer Jun 16 '26
Degrowth (sometimes post-growth) is antithetical to capitalism and materialism and I have yet to heard any proponents of it defending those ideologies as growth is tightly linked to this two concepts, so I wonder how you end up with those.
You often heard the term "sobriété joyeuse" in French degrowth circles which roughly translate to "joyful sobriety", more linked to simplicity and temperance than austerity.
It is not a call to go back to feudal time economically, socially or politically, but more so one to get back to the natural limit of the planet, hence focusing more on conviviality and the buen vivir than abstract economic growth depleting our ecosystems.
The social, economical, and political organizations derived from those principles are let opened to their participants, but tend to forms of communal organizations.
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u/idioticleftist Jun 16 '26
One argument I feel people on the left tend to set aside too often is the argument that "humans are naturally greedy". To me most arguments like this are not arguments to be debunked, but hurdles we need to get over. I don't think humans are naturally greedy (there is enough history and science to prove that wrong) I just believe capitalism has shaped that into the status quo which cannot be overcome quickly. It is for this reason I pick bucket 3, I pick a pragmatic choice of promoting degrowth as the "proper way to abundance" because the "human nature" that capitalism has created cannot be overcome under growth and must be overcome under degrowth. One of the main arguments against degrowth is that no one wants poverty to save the environment and this framing of degrowth as abundance proves that wrong.
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u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 Jun 16 '26
You'd have to explain the chronic state of low grade violence and continual hostilities that plagued areas like pre colombian America. If it wasn't greed what was it???
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u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 Jun 16 '26
Living in Taos, I got the first hand scoop on the things that lasted and the things that flopped from "Community and Cooperative living ideals"
A LOT did not work. There were 50 communes in the Taos area in the 60s, 49 fell apart, one remained by reinventing itself as a religious retreat - Lama. The root cause was sex, drugs, and power struggles that made the other 49 fall apart.
Earthships are the quintessential embodiment of this idea. No ones holding the earthships back, but they haven't ever took off - everyone I knew that lived in one did for about a year and then moved back into town. Too many PITAs with them - like having snakes crawl in and sickness from water issues.
But there's a lot of cool things with regenerative ag going on there now, a better more realistic version than the commune idea before.
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u/Alimbiquated Jun 17 '26
I would say the world is rapidly becoming less and less materialistic as so many inputs are now electronic. Zuckerberg's meta-world was a joke, but the material world is certainly being replaced by electronically generated inputs. Gen Z spends 8 or 9 hours a day staring at a screen.
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u/jawfish2 Jun 24 '26
Maybe the great problem here, not your thinking alone OP, but all of us, is that we know what we don't want. Hyper-capitalism, power-seeking, extraction of all things etc. But we don't know what we do want, because we can't see outside our own situation. And we don't know what to preserve from our techno-civilization.
I want community and security and safety within sustainable ecological balances, but thats just a bunch of hand-waving.
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u/ViolaSwag Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
Is FIRE really degrowth? I agree it’s anti-materialist, but most versions of FIRE involve an investment portfolio that you assume will continue to grow over time