WeeklyWorker

03.09.2026
Degrowthers want to slam on the brakes and go into reverse gear

Abundance for all

How can climate catastrophe be stopped? Capitalism, almost by definition, depends on endless accumulation and the production of more and more stuff. But, at CU 2026, Ted Reese argued that degrowth is not the answer

Degrowth has been put forward by sections of the left as the necessary solution to preventing the worst outcomes of the environmental and climate crises. Kohei Saito goes further by promoting ‘degrowth communism’. It is easy and tempting to mock and misrepresent what ‘degrowthers’ really stand for. So in my talk at Communist University 2026, I attempted to give an even-handed account of what degrowth and degrowth communism are; and what their proponents get right and what they get wrong.

The term ‘degrowth’ and what it stands for has been popularised by Jason Hickel, following his book, Less is more: how degrowth will save the world, published in 2021. The degrowth movement aims, of course, to significantly reduce the volume of material and energy we use to produce our economy, at the same time redistributing and rebalancing wealth in order to minimise inequality, thereby transforming our socio-economic system into an eco-friendly one that reverses the ongoing destruction of the environment. Degrowth is not simply about absolute negative growth, though: the fundamental target is to wind down and end our dependence on fossil fuels, deforestation and unsustainable farming, to be replaced by abundant renewable energy, biodegradable plastics, afforestation and regenerative farming. Marxists therefore have plenty in common with the aims of degrowthers.

In online debates on the subject, I have seen some communists make some pretty disingenuous or misguided claims. Chief among them is the charge of degrowth favouring primitive or ‘pre-industrial’ forms of production or being pro-austerity or Malthusian (pro-depopulation). That it lays itself open to that kind of conflation and confusion - and you could easily imagine it being coopted by ‘ecofascists’ - is in itself a pretty unavoidable problem with the ‘branding’ of the concept and one reason I do not think communists should use the term in their agitation.

Nevertheless, it is rather over the top to claim, as some perhaps ‘socially conservative communists’ have, that the degrowth movement’s promotion of free access to contraception, for example, is promoting Malthusianism and depopulation. While I concede that it is ‘risky’ and incorrect to at least imply that population growth is the problem that needs to be curbed, exaggerating and throwing around false accusations only makes the debate more toxic and unproductive. Such accusations would only be warranted if degrowthers were promoting measures like sterilisation. Promoting free access to contraception is something quite different, giving women independence, choice and bodily autonomy - which communism would work towards giving everyone.

Support for degrowth makes a lot of sense instinctively. If we produce half as much stuff, we will have half as much impact or thereabouts on the environment. And look at all the crap and that we produce that we could easily do without, without harming human living standards. In fact, we could raise living standards just by significantly reducing pollution levels that cause so much human disease, and spending far less time and energy transporting junk to landfills.

Studies back up the thinking. A paper by Joel Milward-Hopkins et al, ‘Providing decent living with minimum energy’,1 found that general mid-20th century living standards - when things like employment, housing and childcare were far more accessible - were achieved at a fraction of today’s per capita energy and material use; and that with modern efficiency gains that standard could be achieved for everyone today with even less. The study by Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, ‘How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?’,2 found that decent living standards for all - nutritious food, good modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, sanitation, household appliances, computer/internet, transport, recreational goods and services - would require 30% of current global resource and energy use.

Degrowthers though are, by and large, idealists and social democrats. They often locate the problem with the ‘greed’ and excessive consumption of the super-rich; or the ‘political obsession’ with economic growth of the ‘neoliberal elite’. Through state regulation they think industrial policy can be redirected, the consumption of the rich curbed and the wealth gap between rich and poor ‘rebalanced’.

This is where their case falls down, since capitalism, or private commodity production, can only be temporarily reformed. That is because capital by definition must tend to accumulate. As more commodities are made in less time through expanded production and innovation, commodities obviously lose value and so tend to produce less profit per commodity and a falling rate of profit on capital investment. An underproduction of profit arises, whereby there is not enough to cover the costs of wages, capitalist consumption, maintenance and reinvestment.

The necessary counteraction to offset this problem under capitalism is to produce a greater amount of absolute profit, by innovating and expanding production. Because the source of profit, furthermore, is human labour and labour time, the difficulty of extracting fossil fuel and metals from the earth is far more profitable than producing biodegradable plastics and renewable fuels from non-extractive sources.

The environmental crisis then is the capitalist crisis - a crisis of profitability, driven inherently by the dual character of the commodity, since, the faster use values are produced, the more their exchange value tends to wither away. The capitalist class is then compelled by the unchangeable logic of the system to plunder and commodify nature at an ever-faster rate. And it is compelled to crush any reformist project that slows down the rate of commodity production or the flow of profit and value into private accumulation. If it does not do so, capital cannot attract and secure enough investment to prevent bankruptcy. Any spending on the public is money that is being taken away from private capital accumulation. Any spending on renewables is money that is not being spent on fossil fuel production. Investment in renewables is only profitable when the initial build requires a sufficient amount of labour, after which much less labour and labour-intensive work is required only for maintenance - whereas fossil fuel disappears into thin air, renewing the demand for labour and capital investment. Abundant renewable energy would be so cheap as to provide no profit margin without massive (and unsustainable) taxpayer subsidies (since taxpayers only have so much money). Making the degrowth vision sustainably possible therefore requires ending capitalism - all private production - for good. That requires not social democracy, but a powerful working class state that can prevent capitalists from retaking power.

Marxism

Does the concept of ‘degrowth communism’ fare any better then? It is certainly an advance on ‘degrowth’ merely by explicitly endorsing communism.

Although Hickel is quite open about blaming capitalism per se, he is less explicit about naming the solution. In a recent article in The Guardian published with Yanis Varoufakis, the two squarely called out “the need to overcome the capitalist law of value”, but recommended reformist measures that, while deserving of critical support, would nevertheless not achieve that stated requirement.3

The first measure: financially “penalise destructive private investments” - money that can be given over to public investment. As I have implied, private productive investment is highly likely to be extractive by nature, so this would likely only apply to companies with particularly visible pollutive practices. The fact remains that companies cut back on recycling and environmental cleanups because their profits are not high enough to cover the costs.

Secondly, they call for “a new public investment bank that, in association with the central banks, converts available liquidity into the types of investment consistent with common, sustainable prosperity” - an obvious hindrance to capital accumulation, not to mention that existing central banks serve and unite a nation’s network of private, capitalist banks.

Thirdly, they propose “the extensive use of deliberative democracy to decide sectoral, regional and national goals (eg, regarding the growth or even winding down of different outputs)”; and “a Great Corporate Reform Act for the purpose of democratising corporations, favouring and promoting the formation of companies run along the lines of one employee, one share, one vote”. Sounds nice, but a private company run by workers is still a private company, and is then still subject to the law of value that Hickel and Varoufakis recognise is destroying the environment. Such companies that decide to make less tat and crap are not going to accumulate profit and capital sufficiently to stay in business either; and since the fall in the rate of profit must be countered by centralising capital into fewer hands - per law of value - any democratic gains would not be sustained.

At least Saito explicitly names communism as the solution then. Saito, very usefully furthermore, has followed John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett in showing that it is wrong to claim, as some left environmentalists do, that Marx and Engels ignored the issue of the environment (which may be, the thinking often goes, why the Soviet Union and Maoist China did the same). Saito won the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2018 for his analysis of Marx’s notebooks on agriculture and the exhaustion of the soil.

Saito says that Marx increasingly attempted to analyse how the logic of capital generates various disharmonies in the metabolic interaction between humans and nature. Marx analysed this point with reference to Justus von Liebig’s critique of ‘robbery agriculture’, which takes as much nutrition as possible from the soil without returning any. A grave chasm arises between the logic of capital’s value production and that of nature’s metabolism: ‘metabolic rifts’ in human interaction with the environment. Marx wrote in Capital (volume 3) that the capitalist mode of production produces conditions that “provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil, [resulting in] a squandering of the vitality of the soil”. Marx also became more interested, says Saito, in how “pre-capitalist society had a unique way of communal regulations of land” and “imposed various rules on production and consumption, which realised a more steady state of sustainable production”. This made Marx “a “degrowth ecological communist”, he claims.4

To be precise, we should be clear that this metabolic rift again manifests as a result of the contradictory nature of the commodity. The rate of profit falls, private companies go bankrupt and the winners of capitalist competition buy up the bankrupt capital on the cheap, centralising capital into fewer hands; meanwhile mergers and acquisitions in general achieve economies of scale, cheapening production and making investment more affordable. This centralisation of capital is reflected geographically, concentrated in the richest cities. Workers are forced to follow to find work, food is increasingly shipped away from farmland to the cities, and the nutrients from the soil are never returned. Instead they are flushed with pollutive treatments into waterways via sewers. Farms then need synthetic fertilisers that take up yet more resources to produce, while disrupting and acidifying soil biology.

Saito, author of Marx in the Anthropocene, wants to “overcome the divide between Marxism and degrowth”, saying we need “a vision where mass production, mass consumption and mass waste can be avoided”. He adds: “My vision is not Soviet-style - I am not arguing for the state ownership of everything or state-planned economy.”

Like Hickel and Varoufakis, his emphasis is instead on ‘starting small’ by championing school strikes, workers co-ops, as well as localised production and consumption. Again, in actual fact, this smacks of reformism, not communism (of any actual ‘type’). His call for a “popular front in defence of the planet” is, moreover, quite useless. Effectively that is what we already have, with the working class subordinated to the leadership of social democrats and liberals who are not confronting the essence of what is no less than an existential ‘problem’. The popular front did not prevent the rise of fascism in the 20th century because it refused to break with capitalism. Its contemporary proponents are repeating the same - to put it generously - catastrophic ‘error’.

Own goal

Degrowth, unfortunately, is what we are going to get, at least in the way that many people may associate with the term. The Korean canary is already singing: South Korea’s stock exchange crashed by 40% in July for the first time since 2008 - a likely sign that another major global economic contraction is upon us. That means production will fall markedly through bankruptcies, while the survivors scale back production to raise prices. The capitalist state will enforce yet more austerity: deeper cuts to public spending, jobs and wages; even higher consumption and income taxes to subsidise capital; and so on. The dwindling remainder of profitable capital will be centralised into yet fewer hands, taking inequality to levels that will make the present obscene divide look like the good old days.

As I said at the start, the ease with which degrowth can be conflated or confused with austerity or depopulation makes using it as a means of attracting mass appeal to either environmentalism or communism an unnecessary own goal - especially when we can put sustainable, eco-friendly abundance for all at the forefront of our politics.

The problem with degrowth is its overemphasis on growth and consumption: ie, on the quantitative side of the equation. If the quality of production were different, if production were based more or less entirely on clean, renewable, recyclable and biodegradable energies and materials, quantity would be a much lesser problem, even if we continued to, say, make cars at the expense of public transport (which is much more efficient - able to carry far more people over much greater distances in much shorter periods of time); but the former, of course, generates much more profit for capital than the latter. As long as we were using such materials at a rate at which nature could replenish them and itself, the environmental issue would be ‘solved’, or manageable. By using such renewables and materials, the rate at which nature could replenish would in fact speed up, since the lack of pollution and the biodegradables would aid the process. (And, of course, we can grow plants with vertical agriculture - something that has again proven too productive for capitalism to make good use of - we are not simply limited to the land.)

Communism enables this ability inherently. Capitalism already inherently plans production at the level of the individual enterprise, but does so on the basis of profitability - what and how and how much is produced depends on what will make a sufficient amount of profit. Communism does not introduce planning, but takes it to a higher level - a joined-up, holistic, economy-wide level - by producing on the basis of need - without the interruptions of financial crises, falling profitability, competition, and commercial secrecy; and, crucially, on a break-even basis. We can therefore adapt our production and production levels according to what the environment is capable of providing.

We must doubtlessly do better than the Soviet Union - which did not have today’s technology and was forced into a destructive and wasteful arm’s race by imperialism, although it did achieve some impressive environmental feats, such as afforestation drives. But Saito’s scepticism of state ownership and planning is myopic. China is already proving this: its state ownership of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy (energy, steel, banking, etc) is a major factor in its ability to affordably mass-produce solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. That is because state ownership decommodifies and deprivatises the relations of production. Proceeds are reinvested socially, rather than ending up with shareholders who only reinvest when profitability is high enough, sustaining supply and therefore keeping prices relatively low.

In the Communist manifesto, Marx explicitly calls for the progressive increase in state ownership of the economy.5 The reaction to the Soviet Union should not be to denounce state ownership and planning, but to recognise that there was not enough of either to withstand the forces and distortions of capital (ie, globally). Once everything is owned by the state, nothing is owned by the state - since the state is the expression of the rule of one class over another. In a total monopoly no exchange of ownership is necessary and therefore class no longer exists.

As Engels writes, “To carry out this control [over our interaction with nature] requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.”6 It is the relations of production which are of paramount importance.

In the near term, we probably cannot reduce our use of fossil fuels and mined metals as quickly as we would wish without seriously downgrading living standards - although, of course, we will be inheriting a collapsing society anyway - while we are building up the capacity of the renewables and biodegradables that can replace the current productive system. Having said that, China, again, has proven that renewable production can be ramped up very quickly - albeit in a way that is warped to whatever degree by its own private sector and its dependence on trade with the capitalist world order.

In the longer term, because communism can make production easier - ie, without relying on the difficulty of extraction to produce demand for labour time - we can enable the transition we really need by radically upscaling the research and development of additive production. That is, instead of extracting finite materials from the Earth, we can grow them effectively infinitely (as opposed to the unimaginative degrowther argument that ‘infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet’). Additive production often involves self-replicating material: ie, with relatively little human labour. And, instead of using subtractive production (metal milling, or carving furniture out of trees, for example), we can layer materials (as with 3D printing) into all sorts of shapes and sizes, radically reducing unused material/waste.

The obvious example is biodegradable products made from hemp (a plant that is self-seeding and requires relatively little water), around 50,000 of which already exist (albeit on a relatively small scale), including battery supercapacitors.7 More imaginatively, a ‘mycelium revolution’ is already underway, whereby fungi can be coaxed, again, into all sorts of shapes and structures, including, apparently, computers;8 purer metals and diamonds than those found in the ground can be grown in labs (China’s use of synthetic diamond for its general industrial production has been vital to its global rise in the past decade or so); and food claimed to be chemically identical to ‘conventional’ food, including meat, can be grown via ‘cellular agriculture’ or ‘precision fermentation’ (something that could supplement regenerative farming and which could be especially important, even if the quality is not of the standard it may well reach in the future, when food systems have diminished as a result of the collapse of capitalism and its environment).9

Humanity

Meanwhile, Nasa is apparently developing powerful biofuels from the bacteria in human waste.10 Nuclear fusion is arguably additive in comparison to subtractive fission. Alternatively, instead of making batteries, solar panels and wind turbines from mined metals that produce hazardous industrial waste as a byproduct, they could be made, of course, from fibrous plants and lab-grown materials. The list goes on. I may be accused of extreme technological optimism, but do your own research. Many of these options are already in production at a small scale; they will just never be profitable to invest in at a much larger scale, because, of course, they would become too cheap to generate profitability.

None of this is to say that communism alone is the complete panacea. We would still obviously need developed human intelligence to take the decision to wind down fossil fuel production and deforestation at the required pace and transition to additive production. The point is that communism enables this option sustainably and at the required scale.

The arguments for degrowth are worth taking seriously. We would indeed need to restrict many forms of production and prioritise the absolute necessities in the early phases of communist development, in order to reduce atmospheric carbon emissions as quickly as possible and put resources where they are most needed, for environmental restoration and absolute human need.

‘Abundance for all’ is then the long-term vision and some form of ‘degrowth’ and outright prohibition of unnecessary production is required, while we move to recyclable and renewable production. Eventually though our productive capacities are likely to become so high that enforcing prohibitions will become effectively impossible - meaning that making sure that clean and recyclable material is readily available to all is what is vitally important.

  1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307512.↩︎

  2. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493.↩︎

  3. www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/capitalist-model-climate-growth-capitalism-species-humanity.↩︎

  4. ‘A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis’ The Guardian February 28 2023.↩︎

  5. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state [our emphasis]: ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm).↩︎

  6. ‘The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man’ (written in 1876 as part of Dialectics of nature: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour).↩︎

  7. www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/hemp-carbon-makes-supercapacitors-superfast.↩︎

  8. www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/the-mycelium-revolution-is-upon-us; and engineering.osu.edu/news/2025/11/powered-mushrooms-living-computers-are-rise.↩︎

  9. www.rethinkx.com/faq-and-mythbusting/tag/food-agriculture.↩︎

  10. biomassmagazine.com/articles/process-converts-human-waste-into-rocket-fuel-11253.↩︎