The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism

Published last year by Verso, The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan is a capacious, well-rounded, but hard-swinging treatment of the debates that have come to define “degrowth.” The book stands as an incredible feat of synthesis for the degrowth movement as a whole, though the authors begin modestly, noting that they wish to “describe” debates (vii) within degrowth and extend these to a wider audience. However, the book does far more than this, not least of which may be glossed in the author's keen sensitivity toward the heightened politicization of the question of transition in radical circles today. Of course, this more intense politicization of transition does accurately register the reality of the stakes in the contemporary situation, defined as it is by legitimate crisis. There is climate change, but today, there is also the increased visibility, on a broader scale finally, of the recognition that we humans are doing something drastically wrong with the economic system.The Future Is Degrowth separates itself from both the green capitalism it partly grew out of (and up with), and internally from much of the twenty-first-century degrowth movement itself, by making an actual commitment to a world beyond capitalism. Where earlier strains of degrowth embraced green capitalism, often as part of an intentional politics that pragmatically accepted that such an alignment at least promised that things would get done, Schmelzer et al. write in the space of conscious awareness that the fate of any worthwhile environmentalism, in the current historical moment, must “specifically address” the capitalist economy (11), though not to the exclusion of other forms of critique. Indeed, we can frame the book's own radicalism in terms of the specificity of its address.What may be an obvious point demands contextualization when today, in some circles, even the mere mention that other forms of critique might be valid in themselves draws suspicion. Some in the more radical traditions ask, how radical can critique that does not take direct aim at capitalism possibly be? Despite closing with a section entitled, “Degrowth: A visionary pathway to post-capitalism,” and despite leveling, in the very last sentences of the entire text, the serious claim that “one thing is certain: we need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars,” many on the left today will not be convinced that degrowth is sufficiently radical. Where's the proof? What has degrowth done? Harder line skeptics will continue to challenge degrowth as being more critical of capitalism in its neoliberal form as opposed to the whole structural core of it. Yet why should this be the bar for radicalism? With the journal's special issue on environmental radicalism in mind, I raise the question in the space of this review of whether Schmelzer et al. wish to state for degrowth a platform that is radical enough. If the proof of sufficient radicalism lies in an avowed and demonstrated attempt to move beyond capitalism, then yes, they do.The title of Andrew Ahern's recent Los Angeles Review of Books commentary on Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism—“Red and Green Make . . . Degrowth”—indicates something at the heart of the question about a platform's radicalism. As is sometimes supposed, is a sufficiently radical critique a red (i.e., communist) one? And . . . commence debate. But what can be argued with the Schmelzer et al. book is that degrowth has passed to the redder side of the spectrum. Ahern rightly notes that our politics, globally, remain at a standstill: “The environmental movement deserves credit for getting us beyond denial, at least at the highest levels of public discourse. However, while ‘system change, not climate change’ has become a common slogan for climate activists, there is an elephant in the room that the movement has been reluctant to blame: capitalism.”1 Yet a primary reason The Future Is Degrowth stands as such a refreshing contribution to degrowth debates is that it picks a side: The book implicitly suggests that degrowth today is avowedly anticapitalist. But its anticapitalism is no simple or facile rejection, a priori. The authors demonstrate an awareness of the immanent historical horizon that has been capitalism, and that any degrowth movement necessarily will emerge from. The book thus breaks a deadlock in the greener degrowth literature by avowing that anticapitalism must ultimately prevail in any postcapitalist politics. But is the shift we see in Schmelzer et al. from green to red radical enough?If one is green capitalist aligned, surely the book is too radical. If you are red-aligned, the answer might still be no. For Climate Leninists such as Jodi Dean and Kai Heron, degrowth inadequately calls attention to or theorizes transition itself. For them, transition “is communism in the making,” butFor them, degrowth “evades the problem”; it does not answer “how do we get from here, from a world on fire, to there communism . . . what is our strategy, what are our immediate tactics?”2It's true, the book does sometimes wobble, at least in its rhetoric, between advocating for a more generic “growth critique”—one in line with degrowth's own historical roots in tamer forms of environmentalism and green capitalism (which the authors do unequivocally break from)—and a sharper critique of capitalism itself. The book's political rhetoric does, on occasion, seem only to take aim at “fossil capitalism” (8) or appears to be quite content to advocate for “green economic development” to push its agenda (9). Yet, I would argue, The Future Is Degrowth ought to pass the bar of being radical enough even for the Climate Leninist, because of the way it categorically offers a totalizing critique of capitalism at the level of the system's actual dynamics. The authors’ finest achievement, in my personal view, lies in showing just how capitalism's biophysical core structure and its mode of social metabolism actually work to produce too much material throughout the system to be eco-socially sustained on the planet. An extended, structural analysis of capitalism's productive dynamics (see pages 48–70) proves the authors’ degrowth politics more than any sloganeering or nominal identification with a political alignment ever could. For the clarity of the analysis, moreover, one could certainly assign the book to students of environmentalism, and capitalism more broadly, as a primer for that tremendously difficult problem: How does capitalism work?What can immediately be surmised about the authors’ own radicalism, were one to be curious about it, is that it comes out in the argumentative power, acumen, and boldness with which the book demonstrates why any radical ought to move beyond capitalism. Drawing on a more flexible definition of transition, the book ought to be commended for the fact that it very self-consciously undertakes a politicization of the social metabolism and backs it up with actual analysis. First, the fact that it deftly explains how capitalism functions as a form of social metabolism that first generates unsustainable growth provides a sturdy rationale as to why one might choose to be red in the first place. Second, the book spends a lengthy chapter—Chapter 6, “Making Degrowth Real”—discussing how degrowth ought to be achieved via praxis. The authors borrow from Erik Olin Wright's work on real utopias3 (the interstitial, the symbiotic, and the ruptural strategies of political activism) to theorize what practically may work in the transition, in and after capitalism. The authors spend pages discussing the ideas and the concrete histories—submitting these to the test of whether they've helped achieve a move beyond capitalism—of small-scale cooperative, interstitial nowtopias, urban gardens and agriculture, alternative schooling, regional currencies; of more symbiotic alignments with current capitalist institutions, in finance and taxation policy, in energy and the green new deals; and of counterhegemonic strategies as is visible in the anti-systemic extractivism and anti-transnational corporation movements.Put simply, the authors’ principle political call here is not for entirely new forms of economic life and development (though this be the mark for some radicals), but for concrete experimentation with forms that can (and some that will) emerge successfully from capitalism into a world that must leave capitalism behind. As opposed to the Climate Leninist charge, they do strategize and present tactics for transition. Their call may not be for a red communism, but it's clearly no extension of green capitalism either. The book makes a sincere appeal for a “democratic” transition, so the question of whether The Future Is Degrowth wants a future that is radical enough will have to be answered in dialogue with other progressive social movements.