Topic · economy · ecology · justice

Degrowth

Leaving the logic of always-more without organising deprivation.

Central tension

Can a society learn to say “enough” without organising scarcity?

Degrowth is often understood too quickly. For some, it means going backwards, producing less, consuming less and accepting a general decline in living standards. For others, it would simply be the inevitable consequence of a finite world: material limits would eventually impose what politics refused to decide.

The position defended here is different.

Degrowth is neither the pursuit of recession nor a fall in GDP turned into an end in itself. It means the voluntary and democratic reduction of excessive material and energy pressures, together with a transformation of the institutions that currently make general expansion necessary.

In short

Reduce excess, secure what is necessary, rebuild institutions.

The form of degrowth defended here does not seek to make everything decline indiscriminately. It proposes reducing excessive material and energy pressures, guaranteeing what is necessary for a dignified life, developing human capacities that can grow without requiring ever more matter, and reconstructing institutions that have become dependent on expansion. It is acceptable only if it remains just, democratic and revisable in light of its results.

How “always more” became normal

Economic growth has fulfilled real historical functions. Industrialisation massively increased productive capacity, built infrastructure and improved food, transport, access to care, education and many material aspects of life. It would be false to reduce this entire history to an ideological mistake.

But what began as a way of loosening constraints gradually became a normal condition of operation. When production rises, it becomes easier to create jobs without reducing other people’s income, increase public revenue without immediately changing distribution, invest in anticipation of larger markets, finance social protections, service debts and postpone distributive conflicts.

Growth does not necessarily resolve contradictions. It often makes it possible to move them into the future.

The growth imperative is therefore not only an individual desire to possess more. It is institutional. Even a suddenly more sober population would still live inside systems of employment, credit, taxation, pensions, investment and territorial planning built around expansion.

Asking individuals merely to “consume less” cannot by itself deactivate that architecture.

The knot: reducing without impoverishing

Blind degrowth would be bad policy. Territories, social groups and sectors do not begin with the same degree of material security. Some still lack adequate housing, care, mobility, reliable energy, education, good food or simply time. Others possess material stocks, space, mobility, equipment and levels of consumption far beyond what is needed for a dignified life.

“Less for everyone” would turn ecology into austerity.

The fairer question is therefore: what should decrease, what should be protected, and what should instead increase?

A society of sufficiency may need more trains, renovated homes, nurses, schools, electrical networks, research or certain materials. It may also want more music, knowledge, health, security, free time, relationships, urban beauty or capacity to act.

It does not reject every local increase. It rejects the indefinite increase of total production as the default answer to almost every problem.

Degrowth is therefore not simply “less”. It seeks to replace undifferentiated growth with a political distinction between what deserves to grow, what can stabilise and what must genuinely decline.

Building sufficiency

The word “sufficient” can itself become dangerous if it means an authority deciding once and for all what everyone ought to settle for.

Sufficiency is neither a uniform ration nor a morality of frugality. It describes an organisation in which essential needs are secured, the ways of meeting them remain diverse, and material accumulation ceases to be the main measure of progress.

This requires distinguishing need, comfort, status, habit and waste. These categories are not simple and vary with place, technology, age and situation. A car can be a luxury in a dense urban centre and a condition of access to employment in an area without public transport. A poorly insulated house is not merely “energy consumption”: it may also be a lifetime’s savings and a territorial constraint.

Sufficiency does not abolish political conflict. It makes it visible.

Which capabilities do we want to guarantee to everyone? Which material uses are necessary to make them possible? Which costs are acceptable? Who bears the transition? Who decides?

An economy is a material world

A society is also an immense physical stock. Homes, roads, vehicles, machines, electrical networks, pipes, devices, schools, hospitals and digital infrastructure were all produced from matter and energy. Once built, they require maintenance, replacement, repair and sometimes demolition.

This changes the ecological question. Making each new object more efficient is not enough if the total number of objects, surfaces, vehicles or infrastructures grows fast enough to cancel the gains.

A policy of sufficiency therefore also seeks to slow material turnover: make things last longer, repair more, share where it makes sense, transform uses, limit premature replacement and distinguish indispensable infrastructure from stocks that are already excessive.

Reducing flows does not mean preventing under-equipped territories from building what they need. Justice requires distinguishing a missing material floor from additional accumulation where abundance already exists.

Leaving dependence on growth

The hardest part begins after the critique. An economy built around growth does not become post-growth because a government declares that GDP should stop increasing. If employment, pensions, investment, public revenue or debt depend on regular expansion, removing that expansion without rebuilding the corresponding mechanisms may produce unemployment, insecurity, distributive conflict and political crisis.

The functions previously performed by growth must therefore be replaced one by one.

If productivity makes it possible to produce the same amount with less labour, the answer need not always be to create more production in order to preserve the same volume of working hours. Another possibility is to share work and the time released.

If public services become fragile when tax bases slow, the problem concerns taxation, income distribution, wealth, priority spending and financing — not only the quantity produced.

If firms rely on rising demand to invest, it becomes necessary to distinguish investment that expands market capacity from investment that maintains, repairs, transforms or decarbonises existing capacities.

A post-growth economy is not today’s economy put on pause. It is a different architecture.

Justice is not an addition

Distribution runs through the whole question of degrowth. A policy that sharply raises energy prices without providing mobility alternatives does not cost the same to an affluent urban household as to a rural worker dependent on a car. A uniform restriction does not weigh equally on someone with several homes and someone struggling to heat their main residence.

Material reduction is politically defensible only if costs are distributed according to capabilities, responsibilities, real dependencies and possibilities of adaptation.

This means protecting what is necessary before restricting what is excessive, while also recognising that the most privileged groups often have greater capacity to displace, hide or externalise their consumption.

Justice does not come after ecology. It determines the very form a legitimate transition can take.

Technology: neither automatic salvation nor enemy

Degrowth does not imply rejecting technology. Some technologies can reduce consumption, improve care, facilitate collective mobility, extend equipment life, improve energy production or make systems more economical.

But efficiency alone never answers the question of total quantity. A car that is twice as efficient does not necessarily reduce overall consumption if the fleet, vehicle mass or distance travelled rise enough.

The Noosophical question is therefore not “technology or sufficiency?” but: which technology, for what function, within what limits, decided by whom, and with what material and social effects?

A useful technology is a means. It becomes disintegrative when every encountered limit is treated merely as another obstacle to push back without questioning the purpose of expansion.

Freedom and democracy

A transition can pursue just objectives and still become illegitimate. Reducing production, changing transport systems, closing a heavily polluting activity or transforming a territory affects jobs, habits, assets, professional identities, communities and local histories — not only tonnes of material.

Treating every objection as ignorance or selfishness would destroy the democratic dimension of the project. But granting every existing interest an absolute veto would make any transformation impossible.

The tension must remain open: act rapidly enough to prevent collective harm while preserving contestation, correction, protection for those genuinely exposed to costs, and an intelligible distribution of responsibilities.

The degrowth defended here is therefore necessarily democratic, or it ceases to be the degrowth defended here.

What degrowth still has to prove

An integrative thought does not protect itself from objections. It looks for those that could genuinely force it to change.

Degrowth must therefore accept several uncomfortable possibilities:

If some economies can durably maintain high levels of well-being while sufficiently reducing material and climate pressures despite GDP growth, the claim that growth is necessarily incompatible with limits must be weakened.
If post-growth institutions durably produce unemployment, insecurity, authoritarianism or degraded public services without being able to correct these effects, they must be abandoned or deeply transformed.
If policies presented as “sober” merely shift their impacts to other territories, their success is fictitious.
If a population durably refuses certain constraints after genuinely informed and fair deliberation, the political problem cannot be solved simply by declaring that population alienated.

Values such as justice, autonomy or protection of the necessary are not scientific hypotheses to falsify. The means chosen to realise them, however, must remain testable.

A civilisation that knows how to stop

The deepest question may not be whether the economy grows by 1%, 2% or 0% next year.

It is whether a civilisation can distinguish more from better.

An integrative society should be able to increase a capacity when it is missing, maintain an infrastructure when it is sufficient, reduce a flow when its cost becomes excessive, and stop an expansion when it no longer serves the purpose that justified it.

Stopping is neither renouncing progress nor glorifying poverty. It is recovering the political capacity to choose a limit.

Degrowth then becomes less an obsession with “less” than a critique of “always more”.

Condensation question: How can everyone be guaranteed enough material means to live with dignity, while developing the human capacities we consider valuable and reducing physical pressures that cannot grow indefinitely — without turning transition into austerity, domination or a simple displacement of costs?

This question has no single answer. But it is already more precise than the choice between infinite growth and collapse imposed from outside.