Degrowth

Abstract

Degrowth has become a forceful conceptual framework and a political mobilizer for imagining and enacting alternative ways of articulating society, the economy, and nature. While it is most straightforwardly understood as material downscaling, degrowth denotes a far more encompassing transformation: a break with the ideology of growth, the repoliticization of the economy, and a reorientation of economic relations along different principles. This essay reviews the trajectory of degrowth thinking and activism and delineates the points of tension therein. In doing so, it focuses on the (im)possibility of sustainable socialist growth, the broader processes of capital accumulation beyond their outcome, the question of work and emancipation, and the scale and agency of degrowth politics.