Debating degrowth

Welcome to the *first* newsletter from the BREAK–DOWN!

Fresh from our expansion out of the digital realm and into the physical with our first print issue, Right Turn (available here!), we’re now pushing ever further with our 4d strategy for ecosocialist hegemony: by launching a substack.

The aim of this newsletter is to bring you the best new writing on capitalism and the climate crisis every fortnight. Expect original essays from our writers and contributors, analysis from the BREAK-DOWN’s editors, round-ups of the best new research and writing from elsewhere, and more.

With that in mind, our first offering brings you an interview with Jason Hickel, providing something of a retrospective on where the climate movement in the Global North stands now, and how far it has come in the five years since his landmark book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, was published. Much has changed in that time, of course, chief among them the ways in which we work and organise as a result of the pandemic. In the case of the climate, these years have been largely defined by stasis or, with depressing frequency, backsliding.

Our first issue was in many ways a stocktake of this backsliding, analysing how the minor advances that liberal climate politics achieved over the past decade or two have so easily been rolled over by a renewed onslaught from both the right and from the resilience of capital. As Adrienne Buller and Geoff Mann noted in the issue’s introduction, “things are bad, and they are for the moment getting worse, but the exhortation to suppress this truth in the interests of coddled ‘hope’ and forced optimism has been one of the least compelling aspects of (some parts) of the climate movement.” There is power in confronting the forces of reaction with clear eyes.

Yet there have also been green shoots. Among these has been the growing awareness, and even acceptance (however critical) of the idea of degrowth—and not just on the ecologically-minded left. From recent BBC special features on whether degrowth can “save the world” to mentions of degrowth in the IPCC’s Sixth Annual Report, and even in its increasingly frequent denunciation by right-wing press and celebrity economists, there’s no denying that the idea has penetrated the mainstream.

For that, alongside the hugely popular work of Kohei Saito, Jason Hickel can take