Series — Social Ecology Today: Dialogues

Is Moving Away from Growth Enough?

“Grow or die”: that is the law governing every enterprise in a market society.¹

— Murray Bookchin, 1989

Introduction — From Roots to Dialogues

The first five texts in this series laid the foundations of social ecology: a libertarian tradition that views freedom as a matter of institutions rather than the absence of rules; a critique of capitalism that refuses to reduce domination to mere economic exploitation; an anthropology that demonstrates that hierarchy is by no means a natural inevitability; and a focus on subjectivities that shows that domination is embedded even in our most intimate desires. These four pillars—the libertarian tradition, social critique, anthropological possibility, and subjective depth—bring the *Racines* cycle to a close and open the *Dialogues* cycle: the focus is no longer on tracing the genealogy of social ecology, but on confronting it with other currents with which it shares a diagnosis, while distinguishing itself from them regarding what should be done about it.

The first of these dialogues almost imposes itself. The previous text concluded with the idea that a genuine ecological transformation requires a break with the ideology of limitlessness—the belief that accumulation and expansion constitute the natural horizon of any successful existence. Degrowth makes this break its central focus: it directly challenges what our societies still take for granted as an insurmountable truth—the necessity of producing ever more. Hence the question that structures this text: Is moving away from growth enough to move away from domination?

The Critique of Growth

The term “degrowth” emerged at the turn of the 2000s from a deliberately provocative choice—Paul Ariès refers to the notion of a “mot-obus” (grenade word). Serge Latouche, one of its leading theorists, makes no secret of it: it is less a precise economic program than a rallying cry intended to shatter the implicit consensus that makes growth the undisputed horizon of progress². Behind the provocation, a body of theoretical work has emerged to give substance to the movement’s central intuition: infinite growth in material production cannot be sustained in a finite world. What sets degrowth apart is that it does not stop at this physical observation: it challenges the mindset that has made growth an end in itself—to the point, as Latouche shows in a later essay, of structurally occupying the place of the sacred in societies that nevertheless believe themselves to have moved beyond religion³. This sacrosanct growth is not open to debate: questioning it is seen less as an economic disagreement than as blasphemy. This is why Latouche also speaks of “decolonizing the imagination”—it is not enough to produce less; we must also rid ourselves of the idea that development, as shaped by the modern West, constitutes a universal horizon.

Social ecology had articulated this critique long before the term “degrowth” entered public discourse. As early as 1989, Bookchin was already dismantling the mechanism: growth is not an excess that simply needs to be corrected; it is the direct manifestation of a market law. In an economy where every company risks being taken over by a competitor at any moment, growth is not a choice but a condition for survival⁴—and demanding a limit on growth without addressing this competitive dynamic is tantamount to asking a living organism to stop breathing. This is what led Bookchin, following the publication of the Meadows Report by the Club of Rome in 1972, to state that calling on a market economy to limit its growth made as little sense as calling on a warlike society to limit its wars without addressing what makes it warlike⁵: a quantitative diagnosis, on its own, says nothing about the structures that produce the expansion it laments.

It is this methodological point that the most rigorous forms of degrowth, in the tradition of Giorgos Kallis or Leopold Kohr, also strive not to lose sight of. Kallis insists: it is less a matter of portraying growth as an absolute evil than of recognizing ecological limits as a structuring factor of the economy, and of questioning what makes growth necessary rather than merely desirable⁶. Kohr, for his part, as early as the 1950s, had identified gigantism—of states, corporations, and bureaucracies—as the true source of social imbalances, long before growth became a subject of public policy⁷. His thesis remains foundational, but social ecology aligns with it without adopting its implicit hierarchy: the quantity produced poses just as much of a problem as the scale at which human activity is organized—the two are mutually dependent; they are not mutually exclusive.

Convergences with Social Ecology

In this regard, social ecology and degrowth converge on a striking number of points. As early as the mid-20th century, Bookchin described how the market economy, by extending into all spheres of existence, was transforming society itself into a vast shopping mall where personality, love, and beliefs, too, had to grow or die⁸. This depersonalization through consumption is precisely what degrowth denounces under the slogan “fewer goods, more connections.” Indeed, as early as the 1960s, he had anticipated the distinction that degrowth would later adopt between real needs—food, shelter, and self-fulfillment—and false needs, manufactured by advertising and the mimetic desire for possession. Corresponding to this contrast, both in his work and in that of degrowth thinkers, is a shared celebration of durable goods, designed to be repaired and passed down (right of use or custody) rather than thrown away and replaced—a principle he shared with William Morris, whom we have already encountered in this series.

This parallel culminates in the very notion of a desirable society. Bookchin spoke of a “post-scarcity” society—not a society of unlimited consumption, but one freed from the anxiety of lack, where everyone could have access to what they need without being trapped in a perpetual race toward accumulation. He himself clarified that his “beyond scarcity” meant neither profusion, nor abundance, nor senseless consumption⁹—an idea that echoes, almost word for word, what Latouche would call decades later “frugal abundance.” There remains the question of technology, on which this convergence calls for greater caution: Bookchin saw in it, in his time, a liberating potential provided it were freed from the logic of profit—a conviction that must now be reexamined with the hindsight afforded by fifty years of digitization and artificial intelligence. We have since named this renewed imperative communotechny—an ongoing deliberation on the ends, scale, and power relations established by any technology—a topic explored in depth in a previously published article on the ESC Workshop (🛠️ Communotechny —Towards a social ecology of techniques).

The Point of Political Bifurcation

However real these convergences may be, a decisive disagreement separates social ecology from degrowth—a disagreement that Bookchin had identified even before the term became established in public debate. Deeply committed to conceptual rigor, he was wary of both insufficiently defined ideas and overly rigid dogmas, and foresaw the risk that this slogan, separated from its critical context, might backfire on its own intentions and become co-opted by any political project—including the most authoritarian ones. Degrowth that is not accompanied by a challenge to structures of domination could very well result in increasingly restrictive state measures—punitive taxation, rationing, top-down regulations—without even touching upon any of the hierarchies that caused the crisis. In a society that remains organized by and for the sake of accumulation, “degrowth” would then mean nothing other than what the word already signifies in ordinary economic language: a recession, borne unequally by those with the least power to protect themselves from it. Some degrowth movements believe they can avoid this risk by pairing a shift away from growth with a universal basic income; but a cash allowance merely redistributes purchasing power within the market, without addressing the question of who decides what is produced—and, when it remains modest, it ends up, as André Gorz already noted, being nothing more than a “subsidy to employers” rather than an instrument of emancipation¹⁰. This discussion will be explored in greater depth in the section devoted to ecosocialism.

This is why social ecology has always resisted two symmetrical temptations, each as fruitless as the other. The first consists of basing transformation on the “voluntary simplicity” of individuals, placing on the consumer a responsibility whose causes are in reality structural: demand, as Bookchin pointed out, rarely emerges spontaneously—it is shaped by corporations whose very business is to do so¹¹. Calling for voluntary simplicity makes sense, he wrote, only “when the means of living are truly simple and accessible to all”¹²; living “simply” is a luxury for those who can afford artisanal products or recycled goods at high prices—a standard largely out of reach for the majority of the population. The second temptation, a reversal of the first, consists of entrusting the limitation of growth to technocratic mechanisms and constraints imposed from above, without ever asking who decides, and on what grounds.

Between these two dead ends, social ecology articulates a different demand: reducing production and consumption is undeniably necessary and vital, but it makes sense only if the question itself shifts—from “how much to produce” to “who decides what is produced, how, and to meet which needs.” A society can perfectly well “produce less” while remaining hierarchical—by imposing its trade-offs from above, by placing the burden on the most vulnerable, and by keeping intact the power structures that made growth necessary. Degrowth, without institutional transformation, remains a policy of quantity; what it lacks is a qualitative policy of decision-making and dignity.

Ecological Democracy and a Post-Growth Society

The previous text in this series has already established that individual and collective freedom cannot exist without institutions: direct democracy, organized into confederated communal assemblies, constituted social ecology’s political response to state centralization. Social ecology proposes to extend this same framework to an area that degrowth most often leaves as a mere aspiration: economic decision-making itself. This is what Bookchin called the “municipalization of the economy”—decisions regarding production and distribution would no longer be left to the market, the state, or even well-intentioned experts, but to communal assemblies, deliberating collectively on what should be produced, on what scale, and to meet what real needs¹³. Such a decision would not be based on an abstract standard identical everywhere, but on the concrete possibilities of each territory: some municipalities would have to increase certain forms of production, others to reduce them sharply—overall coherence would depend not on uniformity, but on cooperation and interdependence, directly mediated by confederal deliberation among municipalities.

Understood in this way, moving away from growth ceases to be an external constraint—imposed by the market when it collapses, or by the state when it imposes rationing—and becomes the very subject of democratic deliberation. This shift transforms a necessity endured into a collectively embraced choice—a way of inhabiting the world—and strips degrowth of its inherent ambiguity as both an emancipatory project and a euphemism for austerity. Moving away from growth, in this sense, is therefore not enough: it raises an even more decisive question, one that social ecology has consistently posed since its inception—who has the power to decide the material conditions of our shared existence? A measure is valid only if it is decided democratically by those it affects, rather than imposed from above or left solely to individual virtue.

Transition → VII — Social Ecology and Ecofeminisms

But a critique of growth and productivism alone is not enough to grasp all the forms of domination that permeate our societies. For state-based and industrial modernity has also been built upon another deep-seated hierarchy: patriarchal domination and the devaluation of reproductive labor—or subsistence activities—and care work. This is precisely what ecofeminisms have set out to highlight.

Notes:

1 Murray Bookchin, “Death of a Small Planet. It’s Growth that’s Killing Us,” The Progressive, August 1989, pp. 19–23.

2 Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth, trans. David Macey, Polity Press, 2009 [2007].

3 Serge Latouche, Comment réenchanter le monde. La décroissance et le sacré, Rivages Poche, 2019. — No English translation available.

4 Murray Bookchin, op. cit. (1989).

5 Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future, Black Rose Books, 1989, pp. 135–137.

6 Giorgos Kallis, In Defense of Degrowth: Opinions and Minifestos, Uneven Earth Press, 2018.

7 Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.

8 Murray Bookchin, op. cit. (1989).

9 Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Wildwood House, 1974 [1971], pp. 62–69.

10 André Gorz, “Pour un revenu inconditionnel suffisant,” Transversales/science-culture, no. 3, 2002; cited in David Cayla, “Le revenu universel, instrument de l’imaginaire néolibéral,” in Gwendal Châton and Martine Long (eds.), Le revenu universel, une utopie pour le XXIe siècle ?, Berger-Levrault, 2022. — No English translation available.

11 Murray Bookchin, op. cit. (1989).

12 Murray Bookchin, “The Power to Create, the Power to Destroy,” in Toward an Ecological Society, Black Rose Books, 1980.

13 Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?”, in Michael Zimmerman (ed.), Environmental Philosophy, Prentice Hall, 1993.