Why We Have To Give Up On Endless Economic Growth

Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.

Ishaq Fahim for Noema Magazine

BY DOMINIC BOYER

MARCH 3, 2022
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist who teaches at Rice University, where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). He is a 2021-2022 Berggruen Institute fellow.

A new ecoliberal political consensus is struggling to be born — a consensus whose commitment to a truly sustainable modernity might well prove resilient to the authoritarian-nationalist and collectivist overtures gaining signal strength and ground troops around the world. But it has a long and difficult road ahead of it, and a paradox at its heart.

In 1984 Claus Leggewie and Brice Lalonde wrote about “ecoliberalism,” the idea that classic liberal values like individuality and industry can harmonize with serious ecological politics. The term describes a liberal-democratic trend dating back to the 1970s that has become more prominent in recent years as signs of climate catastrophe and ecologically influenced social destabilization have multiplied around the world.

It is sometimes mistaken for a neo-Keynesian economics, but Keynesianism had no great environmental mission to offer. Where Keynesianism and ecoliberalism do overlap is in their acceptance of growth-oriented capitalist industry as the economic core of liberal-democratic society.

Keynes saw market capitalism as a lesser evil than state-controlled industry, even if he dreamed of doing away with the types of capitalists who demand rents without adding value. Early ecoliberals helped shape the aspiration toward “sustainability,” which was (and is) predicated on the idea that advances in technology could eventually provide a secure industrial infrastructure for ecologically sustainable growth.

Today’s nascent ecoliberal consensus is exemplified by the recent passage of the European Climate Law, a binding framework for bringing Europe’s economy and society to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Though critics have said it made too many concessions to fossil fuel interests, there is good reason to think we will look back on the ECL as an important watershed in the global struggle against climate change. A legally binding pathway to decarbonizing roughly a sixth of the global economy is a historic achievement by any measure.

The ECL’s broader framework, the European Green Deal, originally aimed to “transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use.”

“Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.”

One could argue that the whole promise of ecoliberalism lives or dies on the term “decoupled.” Unfortunately, there is scant evidence thus far that decoupling economic growth from resource use is both possible and sustainable.

A major study published in 2021 that looked at both production- and consumption-based emissions from 2015 to 2018 in 116 mostly high-carbon national economies found that only 14 of them had been able to decouple GDP growth from both types of carbon emissions growth.

That might seem like progress, since a similar study published in 2012 found that zero countries had achieved decoupling. But the 2021 study also found that 22 countries that had managed to decouple between 2010 and 2015 had actually recoupled again after 2015. In other words, decoupling requires both pressure and vigilance. Worse yet, the study found, “Even countries that have achieved absolute decoupling are still adding emissions to the atmosphere thus showing the limits of ‘green growth’ and the growth paradigm.”

This is the ecoliberal dilemma in a nutshell. Legislation like the European Climate Law and the stalled Build Back Better plan in the U.S. show that sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster. The global supply of renewable energy will increase by about 35 gigawatts from 2021 to 2022.

That would be marvelous news, if not for the fact that the world’s power demand is projected to increase by 100 gigawatts during the same year. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects a 50% increase in world energy use by 2050, which renewables will only be able to partly cover, thus leaving the world in still worse emissions shape than it is today.

The EIA growth data is more convincing than its prediction that the energy mix will still be predominantly made up of fossil fuels in 2050. Still, it underscores a genuine problem. We are working harder and better at sustainability but finding ourselves falling still further behind.

Of the three core concerns of liberalism — liberty, private property and industry — the attachment to industry is strongest. Liberalism champions freedom and liberty relentlessly, but it has always quietly tolerated dispossessing and even enslaving some as the cost of enabling others. The private property commitment is more resolute, but certain variants of liberalism, notably Keynesianism, have displayed strong commitments to redistributive mechanisms in the name of public goods and national welfare. Industry, meanwhile, is liberalism’s one true love, a connection that dates back to the dawn of liberal political philosophy.

In his “Second Treatise,” John Locke, for example, describes labor as intrinsic to the establishment of property: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” But not even all hard work is created equal.

Much as Adam Smith would later echo in this theory of opulence, technology combined with labor (in other words, industry) was the decisive formula for creating value out of the natural resources God gifted humanity. Technology functioned, according to the philosophy of the time, as a sign of grace dividing the world into those with the rational wherewithal to make the most of divine gifts (European men mostly) and those who allowed their gifts to lie fallow and go to waste.

“There is an ancient symbiotic relationship between liberal political ideology and the industrial growth orientation.”

How this equation functioned as a pretext for global colonial occupations and dispossessions for several centuries is the subject for another essay. My point here is that there is an ancient symbiotic relationship between liberal political ideology and the industrial growth orientation that is usually glossed as the internal logic of capitalism. Buried in growth is the pursuit not just of profit, but also of grace, and above all the moral right to accumulate resources and exert dominion.

I believe this history sheds light on why ecoliberalism hasn’t yet proved itself capable of fully acknowledging, let alone remediating, the problems (ecological but not only ecological) created by its centuries-long legacy of relentlessly expanding industrialization. These problems are constantly discounted and marginalized in mainstream liberal politics. Back in the 1970s, when the unsustainability of the current global trajectory first came into clear focus, the few, like André Gorz, who were brave enough to talk about the obvious need for “degrowth” were laughed out of the political sphere.


Today, degrowth is poised to become a much more salient political movement, one that is gaining strength from new economic theories — like Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, for example, which seeks to rethink economic activity as finding a “safe and just space” for humanity between social minima and planetary maxima. Such theories are being put into experimental practice by city governments in places like Amsterdam and Barcelona.

Mainstream liberals, and many ecoliberals, continue to laugh them off. But the laughter is increasingly nervous, a recognition that degrowth is likely on the horizon one way or another: either through collapse of the current civilizational trajectory or through some of kind of managed transition to widespread industrial and economic downscaling. In a fundamental way, liberalism finds it difficult to imagine, let alone to embrace, such a future. Liberalism has historically always been about the quest for “more.” It has no idea what to do with “less” as a rallying cry.

Instead, at the moment, ecoliberalism (as well as the “green capitalism” that is its symbiotic companion) is betting the only hand it really knows how to play: technology. From massive investments in speculative technologies like nuclear fusion and deep geothermal, to the serial boondoggles of nuclear fission renaissance and carbon capture and humbler options like solar photovoltaic technology, everywhere ecoliberalism seeks the cure for several centuries of rampant industrialism in the emergence of new forms of industry.

It imagines that it can beat out the worst scenarios of environmental collapse by coming up with a technological solution that allows us to have it all: that is, a universal so-called “middle class standard” predicated on massive energy and resource use that can center a global ecoliberal dispensation. But the truth is that it hasn’t yet found an ensemble of technological solutions that are adequate to take on even one of the several hyperobject-level environmental dilemmas facing us (e.g. global warming, plastic and toxic pollution, species extinction) let alone all of them together. And the solutions that is has found so far are not keeping pace with the rising global demand for “middle class” lifestyles.

The problem is less the technologies themselves than the expectation that they must combine efficiently with a model of endless capital development. The more foresighted among contemporary ecoliberals — let’s say Elon Musk — combine a fabulous technological inventiveness with a clear thirst for the extraplanetary as the only way to keep the current ecological Ponzi scheme going more than another few decades. The truth is that if we stay on just this one planet, degrowth needs to be taken more seriously

“Liberalism has historically always been about the quest for ‘more.’ It has no idea what to do with ‘less’ as a rallying cry.”

Degrowth is not a new idea and urtexts like Gorz’s “Ecology as Politics”deserve reevaluation today. In it, Gorz argues that sustainability will never be attained in a capitalist economy because of a dynamic he calls the “poverty of affluence.” Like Marx, Gorz doesn’t doubt that capitalism is very effective at producing useful things through its constant innovation of technology.

What also remains constant, however, is that new technology emerges in a context of scarcity that preserves class inequality and hierarchy. According to Gorz, new technological achievements and luxuries enjoyed first only by the elite attract the desires of the masses toward them. As the masses gain access to old luxuries, new unattainable luxuries develop to replace them. This dynamic is intrinsically growth-oriented: “the mainspring of growth is this generalized forward flight, stimulated by a deliberately sustained system of inequalities.”

Even if capitalism can lift the floor of poverty as measured by consumption, it also raises the ceiling of luxury just as quickly. Technologies may themselves be helpful, but the dynamic of constant innovation and consumption is intrinsically unsustainable. Gorz imagines the world of degrowth as defined instead by universally available highly durable goods, beautiful public dwellings and transportation and a 20-hour work week focused on providing essential needs for all, with the remaining time left over for creative self-realization.

Contemporary degrowth thinking is not simply Gorzian — it is an experimental space for many ideas including ecofeminist and Indigenous interventions like the Red Deal. But it tends to be at least loosely anti-capitalist in its orientation and critical of the luxury consumption trends of the global North. Degrowthers, generally speaking, do not wish to deprive the global South of the opportunity for material development. They want to see the degrowth of Northern high energy consumption, creating the opportunity for a more equitable planetary modernity.

The core reasoning that the global economy needs to slow down — if only to buy ecoliberalism more time to solidify its consensus and improve its technology — is solid. And, in an ambitious way, degrowth synthesizes certain Keynesian and ecoliberal ideas into a worldview that seeks to remediate both social inequality and environmental destabilization at the same time.

Contemporary degrowth theorists tend to share a Pikettyian sensibility that the world does not lack sufficient capital development to address human misery; rather, the problem is resource hoarding by wealthy nations and classes, meaning that the world distributes its abundant existing capital poorly. Here’s how Jason Hickel puts it in “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World,” one of the more comprehensive and persuasive texts in the emerging degrowth canon:

“Capitalism is a giant energy-sucking machine. In order to reduce energy use, we need to slow it all down. Slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste, and slow down the mad pace of our lives. This is what we mean by ‘degrowth’. Again, degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation.”

Hickel joins ecoliberals in fierce opposition to obvious scandals like ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and the massive energy waste associated with speculative instruments like crypto. He also offers a rough list of intermediary objectives for making this new civilization, including: ending planned obsolescence, limiting advertising, shifting from ownership to usership, ending food waste, downscaling ecologically destructive industries (industrial beef for example), redistributing labor to avoid unemployment, and reskilling labor toward low carbon industries.

Still, Hickel openly acknowledges that “we don’t yet have all the answers. No one can give us a simple recipe for a post-capitalist economy; ultimately it has to be a collective project. All I’ve done here is offer a few possibilities that I hope will nourish the imagination. As for how to make it happen — that will require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history.”

The pivot away from degrowth governance and toward movement politics inevitably raises questions such as “degrowth by whom?” But I don’t think Hickel and others are trying to be evasive, so much as realistic that talking best practices of governance before a strong social movement emerges is a cart-horse reversal.

“There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a creative, experimental and joyful approach to remaking civilization.”

And where the movements are already vigorous enough to impact governance — for example, Barcelona — the early results of experiments in creating a “solidarity economy” are encouraging. Cooperatives like Som Energíaand Som Mobilitatare more than conventional service providers offering electricity and EV ride sharing, respectively. They are active agents of energy literacy and degrowth ethics who are helping their customers learn to use less power and to drive only when truly necessary. Som Mobilitat even found a way to make degrowth less about denial by sponsoring a lively energy efficiency race, in which the objective was to see who could travel the farthest on a set charge.

With all due respect to good governance, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing a creative, experimental and joyful approach to remaking civilization. Together with Cymene Howe and Daniel Aldana Cohen, I led a public event in Austin, Texas, a few years ago called “Low Carbon Leisure, Low Carbon Pleasure,” the point of which was to remind us high-carbon Northerners that much of what is truly enjoyable in life is either already low carbon or could find a low-carbon substitute with relative ease.

Low-carbon play, in other words, remains available to us even in a world defined by the high-carbon treadmill. Degrowth sounds like sacrifice, especially to ecoliberals. But what if the pursuit of less was framed as the pursuit of happiness by better means? Decoupling is much more likely to be achieved sustainably if citizens and governments are rowing in the same direction.

Ultimately, I think collaboration with the degrowth movement is part of what solves the ecoliberal dilemma. It will help ecoliberalism to fall out of love with industrial expansion while reinforcing the values of liberty, equality and justice that liberalism has long championed. I’m not expecting ecoliberals to fall in love with degrowth, at least not right away. But perhaps they can develop a solid friendship based on their common cause to avoid the worst scenarios of environmental catastrophe.

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Britain: Is the working class back?

By Dan Evans

Published 10 April, 2025

First published at New Socialist.

As the welfare state wobbled in the late 1970s, the spectres of rapid deindustrialisation, automation and the parallel explosion of white-collar service work led Andre Gorz to do the unthinkable and question the historic role of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, the historic force that would bring a new socialist society into being. Shortly after Gorz published Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, in 1982, Reagan and Thatcher attacked — and then crushed — the most militant sections of the organised labour movement.

Following the destruction of the union movement and the open abandonment of the working class by their traditional political representatives, the working class disappeared from the political scene by (largely) ceasing to vote — in the 2024 General Election, fewer than 50% of working class adults voted, 1 leading to an enormous gulf or ‘void’ between the people on the one hand and ‘politics’ on the other. This void, as Peter Mair argues, is constituted by political parties becoming detached from wider society and their traditional bases. “The age,” he writes, “of party democracy has passed”.2

As the working class exited stage left, a new subject came to take their place. To the extent that ‘politics’ involves any actual engagement with ordinary people outside a technocratic elite, it has been the middle or intermediate classes, not the working classes, who have driven both establishment and insurgent politics since the nineties. Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 had little to do with working class power, but was substantially the result of Tony Blair having won over the lower middle class voters who previously had been the bedrock of Thatcherism.3 Corbynism (like Syriza and Podemos) was, at least in its activist core, the political movement of the younger new petty bourgeoisie.4

The last fifty or so years have arguably been the lowest point for working class struggle and class consciousness since the Industrial Revolution. Gorz’s heretical hypothesis had, until recently, seemed to have been vindicated: the forward march of labour, the inevitable rise of the proletariat, had ground to a halt. Yet class struggle ebbs and flows. As the late, great Mike Davis reminds us, capitalism’s cyclical crises periodically opens (although it can also close off) the possibilities for proletarian advance.5 Organised labour responded belatedly to the interlocking crises of contemporary capital, culminating, in 2022, in the biggest wave of strikes in Britain for 30 years. This period of sustained and coordinated industrial action was itself a significant achievement given the severity of Britain’s anti-union laws and given the traditionally craven and partisan attitudes of the British trade union bureaucracy. At the height of the strikes, Mick Lynch — the de facto leader of the labour movement — famously proclaimed: “the working class is back”.

Given the torrid time the left has had, aspects of the recent strike wave certainly felt invigorating in some ways. Although striking is difficult, it is good and healthy to get away from the sewer of social media, to escape the frustration at the blocked possibilities of electoral politics, and speak to people face to face; to feel and experience the sense of solidarity and comradeship that tends to resurface during strike action. Unionism and strikes can build class consciousness, build new subjectivities, and very often reveal the true nature of class society to those who were previously on the sidelines.

Above all, the strikes were a long overdue — and relieving — reminder that the organised working class retains significant structural power and leverage in society. It still retains the potential to shut down capital and hurt profits. Undoubtedly the recent strike wave was an important period in the class struggle, and will go down in the history of the labour movement in this country. But it is also crucial that we accurately understand the actual ‘balance of forces’ that exist in Britain at present. This is not being miserablist for the sake of it. Corbynism as a movement was defined by naivety. It did not grasp the scale of the challenge it faced or the powerful forces lined up against it. It didn’t even understand the glaringly obvious threat from its own right wing, let alone the power of the British state. Following Lynch’s speech, in the excitement of the early part of the strike waves, some of these tendencies resurfaced: the confusion of political slogans with reality; the desperate longing for a shortcut to power through a charismatic figurehead who will make everything better; a tendency to dramatically overstate the ‘radicalism’ of the present moment and the strength of the trade union movement, best evidenced by repeated calls for a general strike.

For all the positives surrounding the strikes, they were — and are — ultimately defensive struggles. Since the optimism of 2022, hopes that the political left might seize the initiative have ebbed away. In mid-September, after two years of struggle, both the RMT. and ASLEF. voted to accept a pay deal from the new Labour government. In the postal and higher education disputes, workers were forced back to work after accepting ‘deals’ which reduced workers’ terms and conditions. Although the potential capacity of working class power was on display, what was ultimately revealed was the strength and confidence of capital relative to labour in the current conjuncture. Across the board, partnership agreements were torn up. Employers didn’t, as union leaders had hoped, respond to pleas about being reasonable, or fold in the face of bad publicity. Royal Mail, for example, was content to absorb bad publicity (its CEO being humiliated by MPs) and to openly run down the public service in pursuit of its ultimate, long-standing goal — breaking a militant, highly-organised union. Belated threats regarding an all-out strike did not prevent the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces, which shut their doors for good at the end of September.

Given the vanguard role played by the CWU over the last 25 years — ‘the miners of the 90s’ — the Royal Mail dispute was a particularly important barometer for understanding the true position of the labour movement in Britain. The scale of Royal Mail’s union busting, and its very real threats to derecognise the CWU, harked back to a different period, and shocked even the most experienced unionists. None of this bodes well for the future of British trade unionism.

The crisis of proletarianisation

Now that the dust has seemingly settled, we can take stock of where we are as a movement. We should return to Lynch’s claim and the questions it raises. Who and what is the working class? Is it back? If it is back, what should we do? If it isn’t, then what next? Who is the revolutionary subject that will carry out societal change?

Much of the modern discourse around class is focused on class in itself; i.e. determining what a class is ‘objectively’, or mapping out what the different classes are and who belongs to which class. It tends to neglect the crucial idea of class consciousness (or class for itself). It is one thing to just describe the working class and their hypothetical potential size and power, but another entirely to think about the conditions and institutions which produce the thorny (and much-debated) process of transubstantiation from merely existing to acting as a collective, coherent and revolutionary body.

As Richard Hoggart argued, in The Uses of Literacy,6 socialist intellectuals have a tendency towards hagiographic portrayals of the working class’s revolutionary tendencies. But romantic, sepia imagery of mining, manufacturing and the welfare state obscures a confrontation with reality: that the working class has been recomposed (or more accurately, decomposed). The era of ‘the job’ (in the sense of steady, secure ‘collectivised’ waged work) seems to be over. It makes more sense to think of the period between 1945-1979 as a historical anomaly, a blip that is not coming back. And as the world of work has changed, so the idealised proletariat of the bygone era is also not coming back, either in appearance or behaviour.

Not only has the working class shrunk in size, it is currently hopelessly divided and scattered by the modern labour process — by short-term, part-time contracts, bogus self-employment, and modern forms of piecework, now carried out by a growing lumpen strata. On top of this, working class communities, and the institutions which historically sustained working class culture and political class consciousness beyond work — sports clubs, libraries, community halls — have similarly been destroyed, very often (of course) by Labour-run councils. The way we work and live is becoming increasingly fragmented and isolated. As Anton Jaeger argues, we live and work more and more like Marx’s French peasants, as ‘potatoes in a sack of potatoes,’ whose relation to their mode of production isolates them from one another.

Changes to work, to communities, to how we live, matter because class consciousness — or coherent politics — does not simply emerge from being poor, however much we might want it to. It requires conscious, boring, long-term organisation, and to be scaffolded by institutions. If we understand proletarianisation purely as ‘lots of people are getting poorer’ or becoming deskilled and stripped of their autonomy, then optimistic accounts of how ‘the working class is growing’ as more and more professionals and white-collar workers slip into it make perfect sense. This understanding of proletarianisation stands behind the discourse of ‘the 99%’ or the wage-earner thesis: the idea that society is polarising into two camps, and that deskilled and degraded professionals and white-collar workers like junior doctors and early career academics can now be identified as part of the working class.

But if we understand the concept of proletarianisation as Mike Davis interprets it in Old Gods, New Enigmas, as the social process of transubstantiation by which workers developed a collective conscience (whereby workers are concentrated in greater masses in workplaces, where they ‘feel their strength more’, and where they get organised) then what is happening under neoliberalism — not just in the developed world, but to a large extent across the globe — is in fact a ‘crisis of proletarianisation’.7 Alejandro Portes and BR Roberts have similarly argued that the rise in the informal, grey economy and of bogus self-employment represents a global trend of ‘deproletarianisation’, as we move away from ‘collective’ workers concentrated in larger workplaces.

In previous epochs there were always sectors and groups which union organisers regarded as impossible to organise. Today, with work and social life fragmenting into isolated bubbles, much of the workforce occupies similar conditions. While workers are becoming poorer and deskilled, they are also becoming harder to organise, and the capacity for class consciousness and coherent action as a collective is declining. Even in our remaining huge workplaces — for example Amazon warehouses — the workforce is transient and vulnerable, and hence the noble efforts to organise these sectors have thus far come to nothing. Davis uses the metaphor of a ‘power grid’ to describe the modern working class, with the organised, class-conscious workers as the core which keeps the grid powered and which provides the main challenge to capital.8 Today, workers like the RMT and the CWU are the ever shrinking, flickering core — an ideal type of politically educated, motivated, experienced and disciplined worker which also has leverage in key industries (and this is precisely the reason they were targeted by the Government) — but the rest of the grid is dimly illuminated indeed. Despite public support for the strikes, union density continues to fall. Among the 27 million workers in the private sector, only 12% are unionised. Unions are now more popular among foremen and supervisors than workers. In most industries, and in former trade union heartlands, union density is falling.

Today, most working-class people are not in unions — many people don’t know what they are: the political culture and residual familial links to unions have largely disappeared. Even in the vanguard industries and unions, something akin to a blood transfusion is taking place, with older, militant workers leaving en masse, being replaced by younger workers on worse terms and conditions — meaning less security, and so less capacity to act — and with less awareness of their rights and the role of unions.

Modern class politics: Anger without organisation

Under conditions of fragmentation, class politics takes on incoherent forms. Most people possess an enduring class identity as well as class instinct — the ‘muscle memory’ and knowledge of what class you are in, an innate dislike of the bosses, and a feeling of unfairness. The majority of people still identify as the working class or ‘the people’, and understand that society is unfair and that social mobility is a lie. Moreover, Resistance is still widespread, but as Daniel Zamora notes, this now tends to be individualised rather than collective: walking off the job, quitting, sickness, etc. We have class struggle, but an atomised form, which allows the status quo to continue.

Without the direction and ‘discipline’ that was previously provided by mass parties and unions, and with the right frequently, however disingenuously, speaking the language of class better than the left, class politics no longer takes the forms we are used to. As Sherry Ortner argues, class is increasingly hidden in other issues, and popular anger is frequently being harnessed by right wing forces. This is clear in the rise in conspiracy theories and in the uptick in non-unionised, anti-state, anti-globalisation protests such as the Gilets Jaunes, the Canadian Trucker Protests, and the rise of farmer protests across Europe. Modern class politics is coalescing into an often chaotic but deeply- rooted (and justified) anti-statism and anti-liberalism among growing sectors of the population that feel ignored, silenced and angry.

The class structure under neoliberal, deindustrialised capitalism increasingly mirrors the complexity of the historical period during the messy initial transition to industrialisation: a mélange of rootless seasonal workers, artisans and hand-workers in cottage industries — semi-proletarians — before industrial factory workers emerged as the idealised vanguard. And just as the class structure has returned to the period immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution, so class struggle increasingly mirrors the dangerous unpredictability of early semi-proletarians. Influenced and moulded by peasant and artisan culture, this group was simultaneously deeply radical yet also unpredictable, spontaneous and violent, acting without the ‘discipline’ of the industrial unions, and often combining composite elements of radicalism and national chauvinism. Yet of course, whether one is a revolutionary agent has nothing to do with one’s individual politics, but is about one’s actions vis a vis the status quo.

Such is the scale of the proletarianisation crisis that Davis wrestles with the idea — raised by Hobsbawm and, of course, Gorz — of whether there is even a historical agent or force that still exists to support socialism in the modern period. If there is still something approaching the idealised proletariat, then it is in militant workers like the RMT and the CWU; but they are outposts, anomalies. ‘The working class’ of course remains, as a cultural category and identity — but is increasingly not the ‘idealised’ factory proletariat of sepia-toned nostalgia, and we also cannot guarantee whether its instincts will align with ‘left’ values.

What next? Organising during times of chaos

Broadly, there are two possible responses to these changes. The first is aiming for renewal: organising and rebuilding within this new society, using the tools and methods of the past in order to try and achieve what was achieved in previous decades — a mass trade union movement, strong communities with anchor institutions, a new mass left party with roots in these communities. Moulding the new, inchoate class structure into the ideal proletariat would require (at least) a decades-long programme of deep organising : new unions, new community institutions, new parties. I would imagine this is the vision of most socialists who are now thinking of a new left party. But is this realistic, or even desirable? The scale of the work needed may simply be too great, which may explain the emergence of a strain of nihilism and despair among some sections of the left, and, from others, the tendency to stick with the shortcut of the Labour Party, or to imagine that a new left party, without any of the limits of Labour, can easily be formed. I have a recurring, nagging feeling that we may be trying to force the new, changed society into forms of organising and praxis that were developed in and for a different period, and which were never successful anyway. The objective basis for these forms of politics may well be past. Perhaps we need to relieve ourselves of nostalgia for that kind of politics, as well as the perennial nostalgia for an older form of working class life of the kind that Hoggart critiques.

We must also reflect on whether we are in fact pining for a past that never was: one could certainly argue that, barring 1926 (the impact of which has itself been overstated), movements comprised of the ‘ideal’ proletarian subject were never as revolutionary or oppositional as is commonly claimed, and of course have often been unsuccessful and unpopular. David Edgerton and Ross McKibbin have repeatedly pointed out that the British socialist movement—or at least its parliamentary form—never commanded the broad electoral support of the majority of workers.

Indeed, as Craig Calhoun famously noted, throughout history, community-based social movements have existed alongside ‘pure’ class-based movements. These movements, which we would today call ‘populist’, were often far more radical in their demands and actions than the ‘ideal’ organised class-based movements. In Britain, the first wave of the Industrial Revolution—a period of proto-industrialisation—represented the most dangerous period for the British state: the Merthyr rising, the Chartists, Peterloo. This period of social insurrection was not led by ‘the proletariat’, but by a mixture of artisans, farmers, and semi-proletarians.

In fact, across the world, the majority of social change and protest has never in fact been led by the ‘proletariat’, but by cross-class movements in which ‘class’ alone has never been the sole locus. This was the case in national liberation movements, including the Cuban revolution; in race- and gender-focused civil rights movements across the West; and in recent years has also been the case for the Arab spring. Today, environmental movements and pro-Palestine movements have been far more willing to take on the state and imperialism than the union hierarchy, using innovative forms of direct action which replicate the disruption of strikes. Whilst sometimes incoherent, many of these movements have been more ‘oppositional’ vis a vis capital and the state than purely class-based movements. Indeed, the ‘discipline’ of the formal, organised, class-based movements has often acted as a dampener on action, tending towards a narrow ‘trade union consciousness’ and compromise through the incorporation of the unions and social democratic parties into the state, including into the imperialist state. This is not to claim that these movements or intermediate classes are innately more revolutionary or progressive, but rather to say that there is clearly no perfect revolutionary subject or method of organising: proletarian movements have failed, and so have non-proletarian ones.

The class structure has changed, and so has the ‘revolutionary subject’. But rather than despair, there is cause for optimism. The problem is not with ‘the people’: there is widespread hostility to the state, to politicians, and to war, and mass support for redistributive politics. Perhaps we should not try to go back, to use the rigid tools of the past for a changed, chaotic class structure; to try and cram the existing, chaotic class society into outdated political categories, frameworks and organising methods developed for a simpler class society. The task facing us now is to find the right tools with which to organise, and to discover how to embed ourselves in a milieu with which we are not familiar.

Dan Evans is a writer and academic based in South Wales. He is the author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (Repeater, 2023).

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  The IPPR’s report “Half of Us: Turnout Patterns At the 2024 Election” found that 52.8% of the working age population voted in 2024 (this is lower than the 59.9% “turnout” figures which account for the percentage of registered voters). The report also found that “the less wealthy” were significantly less likely to vote. Other work by the report’s authors, shows a widening turnout gap between the university and non-university educated, between top and bottom income terciles, and between homeowners and renters. Whilst none of this can precisely be treated as a proxy for “class”, the classed tendencies ought to be clear.

• 2

  Peter Mair. 2013. Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso, p.1

• 3

  For Blair’s success in winning over lower middle class voters see Robin Blackburn’s 1997 NLR essay “Reflections on Blair’s Velvet Revolution”.

• 4

  I argue this in more depth in my 2023 book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. London: Repeater, p.77, 279

• 5

  Mike Davis. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso, pp.25-33

• 6

  Richard Hoggart. [1957]. 1958. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. Harmondsworth: Pelican, p.14

• 7

  Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, pp.5-6

• 8

  Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, p.24

After Montreal A View From the Past

The Montreal Climate Change Conference is over. In a certain sense it is the completion of a cycle that began in Montreal over a decade ago. The Original Rio Conference on the Environment which led to the Kyoto Accord, and this Kyoto 2 conference was the brain child of Canadian Maurice Strong.

He was and is a significant mover and shaker in both Montreal and Ottawa, Strong was head of the Power Corporation, and he was the original conference chair for Rio. It was appropriate that it ended in Mr. Strongs home province from whence it began. Mr. Strong pushed the environmental issue for business purposes, his is the environmentalism of the Hydro business, which includes the promotion of clean energy from nuclear power. And as a former head of Power Corp he was well connected with the Liberal Party. One of the reasons that Kyoto has been pushed by the Liberals is Strong.

It was also appropriate that given the current situation of crisis in the UN, that Mr. Strong was absent from the conference since he has been linked to the UN Food for Oil scandal in Iraq.

Mr. Strong's many accomplishments as a member of the Canadian ruling class are too detailed to go into here now, but he represents the rising ruling class of Trudeau Liberals in Quebec who foreswore seperatism for integration in the corridors of power, and in so doing strengthened both the Quebec and Canadian State in the 20th Century.

But the Climate Conference in Montreal, led to nothing new, Kyoto 2 is business as usual. The US didn't asign on, no big deal, they are still developing their own asymetrical approach to climate change. Capitalism can adjust to increased production and sharing of green credits, of carbon sinks, of new adapatable technologies, of capitalist business offering alternative green energy like wind power, (the wind power associations of Canada say No Government hand outs Please, we are businessmen).

Has the revolutionary potential of the ecology movement come and gone, despite the stuffed bears, and dancing flowers in the mass protests in the streets of Montreal outside the confernce, the tear gas did not choke or gag these protestors. Theirs was the quiet concern of millions of us, about our future. They were well behaved as were the police and the State. It was all very serious. Very scientific, very political.

But what has changed since Rio, since Kyoto 1? Capitalism has adapted. Has it come to the self recognition that its continued existance threatens our very home world? I think not.

For capitalism is us, and we have yet to put the wrench in the wheels that drive the marketplace. And this goes beyond the liberal ideology that we need to consume less. The very fact is that the contradiction of advanced capitalism is that it now is holding back a technology and productive capacity to provide abundance for all, because it is chanelling production into profit.

And in doing so it has failed to recognize the use value of recycling, reusing, and reduction. Instead we are producing more and more throw away items. The revolutionary idea of ecology so prevelant in the 1970's is not the Green Party or green conciousness, never was, never will be. Join the Audboun Society if you want that.

Nope as Murray Bookchin has pointed out Radical Ecology is part and parcel of the Anarchist understanding of the crisis of advanced capitalism. His works on Social Ecology and the Limits of the City were breakthrough works that have yet to be matched by many modern writers, for their far flung critique.

Several other European Leftists such as Andre Gorz also noted the signifigance and importance of an ecological critique of political economy for the Left. His most poular essay online is; Social Ideology of the Motorcar

But one of the Leftists to predate both Gorz and Bookchin was Pierre Cardin, one of many psuedonyms for Cornelius Castoriadis one of founders of the French ultra-left groups Socialism or Barbarism, which in England was known as Solidarity. They have published numerous works during the sixties that were staples for Left Wing Anarchist reading.

Notes From the Underground

Mr. Castoriadis's life combined high intellectual seriousness with intense political infighting. When he arrived in France from Greece in 1945, at the age of 23, he had already translated the work of Max Weber into Greek. He was also a veteran of the Trotskyist movement, which both the fascists and the communists were seeking to "liquidate," to use their polite term for "exterminate."

In 1948 Mr. Castoriadis found work at what would later become known as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while also leading a small post-Trotskyist group called "Socialism or Barbarism," which published a journal by the same name. (Thus, Mr. Castoriadis was conducting statistical analyses of capitalism while preparing at night and on weekends to overthrow it.) "S. ou B.," as its comrades called it, never had more than a hundred members. It published a newspaper, Workers' Power, that circulated in some factories, but much of the group's energy was devoted to theoretical debates. As Mr. Castoriadis grew critical of Marxism itself, for example, he was opposed within the organization by a young philosophy professor named Jean-François Lyotard. (Ironically, Mr. Lyotard would later become prominent as a postmodernist who rejected Marx's "grand narrative" of history.)

The group's impact on radical students and activists around the world was disproportionate to its size. And its influence continued to grow even after S. ou B. dissolved in 1965. In the late 1970s, it became fashionable in some circles to claim to have once been a member. It was a development that amused Mr. Castoriadis. "If all these people had been with us at the time," he said, "we would have taken power in France sometime around 1957."

Emerging from the political underground, Mr. Castoriadis became a psychoanalyst, and also began teaching a seminar on philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He published numerous books reflecting an encyclopedic range of interests and an unblinking skepticism toward the "generalized conformism" of contemporary society. After decades of denouncing the Soviet Union as a monstrosity, he never became enthusiastic about the existing Western order. At a 1997 conference organized in Prague by President Václav Havel of the Czech Republic and the writer Elie Wiesel, Mr. Castoriadis described capitalism's "expectation of an unlimited expansion of material so-called well-being" as "obviously the most absurd of all Utopias ever formulated by the most sanguine Utopians." He also urged the adoption of a "new type of human life ... a frugal life, as the only means to avoid ecological catastrophe and a definitive zombification of human beings, endlessly masturbating in front of their television screens."

When he died at the end of that same year, Mr. Castoriadis left an apartment filled with manuscripts, including an enormous mass of lectures from his seminars on philosophical and psychoanalytic topics -- material indispensable to understanding his thinking on the question of human creativity. He left a widow, two daughters, and a network of comrades and admirers around the world.

Castoradis work included the following interview. It comes from a massive if somewhat controversial work online, THE RISING TIDE OF INSIGNIFICANCY

I originally had looked at copying some quotes from it as I felt that it was as relevant today, as when it was done back in 1993, perhaps moreso in light of the failure or success of the Montreal Conference, depending of course if you think anything actually occured there.

Instead I beleive it is time for us to reassess the NGO/Green/Animal Rights/ movements that claim to be anarchist, because they engage in Direct Action to meet their reformist ends. Castoradis makes many a cogent point especially about Green Politics, which looked far more radical then than now, in light of the Red Tory's that run Canada's Green Party.

One point I believe he is incorrect on, but that has been a common misinterpretation, is that Marx and Engels were anti-environmental pro productionist apologists. This I believe has been significantly challenged of late by John Bellamy Foster in the pages of Monthly Review and has been the focus of one of his recent books. While Castoradis denounced the expansive production of capitalism, I believe that Bookchin hit on the head when he announced the politics of post scarcity anarchism. But that is another debate for another time, as Homes said to Watson about the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

So here is some food for thought, and as usual I look forward to a spirited debate and your comments. Footnotes are at the end. Because of its length I have posted off site here:

THE REVOLUTIONARY FORCE OF ECOLOGY.doc
Interview With Cornelius Castoradis (Pierre Cardin)

Questioning Our Limits to Leave Scarcity Behind

Giorgos Kallis
MARCH 2020
GREEN EUROPEAN JOURNAL

Whereas mainstream economics is about expansion and productivity, environmentalism has often taken it upon itself to remind people of the limits and the consequences of exceeding them. Too many emissions will see climate catastrophe. Too much resource extraction will see society break down. But is this way of thinking counterproductive? Does appealing to external limits deny society the chance to set its own path? We spoke to the political ecology thinker Giorgos Kallis about his new book, Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, to discuss problems with the standard discourse on limits and where to look for alternatives.

Green European Journal: Nowadays some of the talk about limits – to growth, to demography, of the planet – is based on Malthus and the Neo-Malthusians of the 1960 and 1970s. In Limits you explain that Malthus’s original message is quite different from the usual story about limits and overpopulation. (1) Can you explain?

Giorgos Kallis: We have come to think of Malthus as someone who worried about overpopulation and limits to growth. But if you read his An Essay on the Principle of Population carefully, Malthus makes clear that he does not believe there are limits to resources, not even to food production. (2) He is not worried about overpopulation, a term he never uses – he is worried about producing enough food to keep the population growing.

The secret to understanding Malthus is to remember that he was both a priest and an economist, the first professor of political economy. Malthus was a student of the theologian William Paley at Cambridge. For those priests, the greatness of a nation was measured by its numbers. Population growth was good, not bad. Malthus does not predict overpopulation and famines in the future. In his essay, he argues against redistribution, positing that if we take care of the poor they will become lazy and not work hard enough to produce food and support themselves. Keep them hungry so that they are industrious, and so the population keeps growing.

Malthus’s influence on subsequent economists and economics is much stronger than we often realise. He turned the Christian mantra to go forth and multiply into an economic principle. Population growth in his model was the greatest possible good for humanity, its God-given mission. Malthus translated this expansionary logic into a foundational assumption of economics. In economics, the religious dimension disappears but the assumption that our duty as humans is to expand, multiply, and colonise the earth’s surface (and beyond) remains.

Does the emphasis that economics puts on scarcity and growth come from Malthus?

Not only, but yes, Malthus played an important role. He was one of the first to hide the moral assumption of a duty to expand without limits behind seemingly mathematical language. His crude model was one of arithmetic, linear growth in food production clashing with geometric, exponential growth in population. But population grows exponentially only if you assume that for some reason people cannot limit how many children they want to have. Throughout history, humans have adapted their reproductive strategies to their environments. The moral and political assumption that humans must expand their numbers is hidden behind mathematics, giving it an aura of science. Unlimited wants and therefore scarcity are made to appear as facts of nature. What is a very particular morality appears as the natural state of things: we need to produce in ever-greater quantities because we do not have enough.


As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In modern economics, maximisation is no longer about population but consumption and an abstract notion of utility. If for Malthus we had to produce as much food as possible to allow the maximum possible growth of population, for modern economists, production has to increase to be able to enjoy as much as possible in a limited amount of time. Economists, like Lionel Robbins in his famous essay in which he defined economics as the science that studies scarcity, like to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe. (3) Robbins writes that Crusoe on his island had everything he needed – he could hunt, fish, grow food, and enjoy life. But if he hunted he wouldn’t be able to read, and if he read he wouldn’t be able to fish. So his time was limited and everything he did had an opportunity cost of not doing something else. Scarcity followed Crusoe in Paradise.

What I try to show in Limits is how this is a myth. It is a moral myth necessary for capitalism’s constant expansion, not some universal state of nature. As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In mainstream thought, maximising and expanding is always good. Where can we turn for alternatives?

There are many possible ways to arrange our affairs, other than thinking that we live in world of scarcity and that we have to expand. Many pre-capitalist societies had a logic of limitation where they trusted their environments and lived in a steady state, satisfied with what they had. I’m not saying we can turn a world of 9 billion people into a hunter-gatherer civilisation trusting its environment. Rather, I’m saying that human societies have been organised differently and that this is a reason for hope that capitalist civilisation can be followed by a different arrangement not predicated on limitless expansion.


The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

But the first step is to recognise where we’re at and why. Part of the problem today is that even environmentalists frame the present state of affairs as one where we are producing and consuming too much, overshooting planetary boundaries, or that our ecological footprint is too big. Framing things this way feeds into the idea that our needs are naturally without limits and that we clash with an external world that limits us. We have to build a story instead that starts from the basic truth that humans know how to limit ourselves and that a meaningful and truly free life is a life that knows its limits.

Our popular myths today are about expansion – think of the self-made entrepreneur or the Hollywood blockbuster where the hero always beats death in a happy ending. We lack meaningful, popular stories of freedom within limits. We need novelists and artists who tell different stories with different forms and cultural heroes that show different ways of being, celebrating those who refuse the mad pursuit of more and who organise for the protection of their communities and for wellbeing within limits.

Should this emphasise personal restriction?

Where we environmentalists are wrong is that we think that by appealing to a future disaster, we will prompt people to limit themselves. But facing death, people choose to live and not to think about tomorrow. If they know that they will die soon, they will live even more madly (or worse, become depressed and retreat). A different story should dismantle the idea that liberation means living without limits. The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

The environmentalist discourse of “sacrifice”, that we can’t live like Donald Trump because then the planet will be ruined, leaves intact the idea that living like a billionaire is nice to begin with. Many of us do not want to live like Trump, Elon Musk, or The Wolf of Wall Street (even if occasionally we laugh with them and their megalomania). As Spanish philosopher Jorge Riechmann put it in the title of a book, some people who do not want to colonise Mars; some people want to live a good life down here on Earth with their friends and loved ones. (4) Can we have stories about these people? Can we have stories that remind us that behind the scenes the lives of Trump or Musk are miserable? Maybe not miserable, but banal, boring, empty of meaning, and hysteric in their meaningless pursuit of power for power’s sake.

You argue that environmentalists are stuck in a discourse of external limits. You come from the degrowth movement, how can its insights help us see matters differently?

There are two narratives in the degrowth movement. One is the idea of continental political ecologists such as Ivan Illich, André Gorz or Cornelius Castoriadis that we need self-limitation and that we should collectively set our limits. Another comes from the Anglo-Saxon debate on limits to growth – the idea that limits are set by the planet and food, resources, and energy are running out. Most degrowth scholars, such as Serge Latouche or myself until recently, treat these two notions of limits as one and the same. In my new book, I try to set them apart into an autonomous understanding of limits – i.e. it is we who shape our desires and our limits – and a heteronomous one that attributes limits to the external forces of nature.


For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in.

Heteronomy is anti-political and anti-democratic, Castoriadis argued. If your laws and limits are given by an external force, God or Mother Nature, then there is little that you as a collective can to do other than obey these forces, and their messengers or representatives. Now, the fact that we as a society determine our limits does not mean that there are no limits. You cannot jump from a skyscraper and land intact. But ultimately the decision whether to jump or not out of the skyscraper is yours, no matter how catastrophic the result may be. As long as we frame this choice as “Damn, the law of gravity limits me and I can’t jump off the skyscraper!”, we will be searching for ways to jump. The point is to stop and ask, “Why jump?”

Climate change and disasters are coming, but is it useful frame climate change as a problem of external limits, scarcity, or a limited atmosphere that cannot absorb any more of our emissions? As long as the language is that of terrible metaphors such as “sink” or carbon “budgets”, then the natural reaction is to think how can we exceed these limits, how can we engineer the climate so that it can take more of us and our desires. This is the logic that dates back to Malthus: producing more to confront a world of limits.

For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in. Of course, we should not stop talking about planetary thresholds, which like stepping off a skyscraper will bring catastrophic consequences. But the emphasis should be on the economic system and the forces that push us over the edge.


People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Autonomy is central to many 20th-century political ecology thinkers. What possibilities does the concept of autonomy offer the green movement?

The concept of autonomy puts green politics in a much broader and more encompassing perspective than discourse around disasters, peak oil, and the rest. People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. Autonomy is about the capacity of people to manage their lives collectively and their place in a world where globalisation is taking everything away. It claims a real democracy. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Ecology means true freedom, as André Gorz first claimed. It is commonplace to caricature Greens as enemies of freedom, those who want to take your car and your steak away, telling you how and how not to live. This myth rests on an idea of freedom as freedom to do as you please, which means freedom for the strong. Real freedom can be exercised only within limits. Think of a piano player who needs a limited keyboard to create beautiful music or the painter who needs a canvas. Limits liberate because they reduce the debilitating weight of limitless choice. Limiting oneself leaves space for others to live too. Ecology is first and foremost about limits, about autonomy, about freedom.

Alternative movements and political projects are often limited to cities or at best regions. What does autonomy mean in practice for movements engaging with the state and running for office?

I guess you have the political experience of Barcelona en Comú in mind. The rise of a citizens’ movement in power in Barcelona in 2015 was in many ways an interesting experience, even if it lost a bit of its steam and promise along the way. It became wrapped up in the Catalan question as well as becoming exhausted, as all political projects eventually are, by the passing of time and everyday bureaucratic battles. The original impulse, however, coming from civil society and from the grassroots movements that networked in the indignant squares, pointed to a possible articulation between alternative ways of living and alternative economic practices such as commons, and organising for seizing political office and power through elections.


Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives.

In our recent work on degrowth and the state, Giacomo D’Alisa and I claim that we should move beyond a division which sees people and civil society on one pole, and authorities and the state on the other. This perspective is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the state as the amalgam of political society and civil society. Political society is the space of political institutions and legal control with its police force and legal mechanisms of coercion, whereas civil society is the sphere of the commons with institutions such as the family, unions, associations, church, and sports clubs. Political society exerts force to rule but it cannot go far without the consent of civil society. The acts of political society have to make “sense” to people, so culture and re-articulation of existing common sense(s) in the sphere of civil society is crucial in any political transformation.

Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives. As Silvia Federici has put it, the point is not to demand that the state provides our meals or teaches our children, but to self-organise communally to educate and feed ourselves and our children, asking the state to pay and support our initiatives. There is no alternative to the state in this sense, we will always need a higher level of social organising and redistribution of resources. But the form of the state would have to change dramatically in a socio-ecological transition towards the commons.

Barcelona en Comu did not emerge as a political movement out of thin air. It was built, thought, and practised by people active and sweating every day in alternative economic initiatives, from movements against house foreclosures and for a debt jubilee to consumer or housing co-ops. The political party was born in the grassroots, as activists realised that transforming society requires engaging with the state and its institutions, however difficult that may turn out to be. There are parallels with the Occupy movement and organising for Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the U.S.

So individual change comes first?

No. Nothing comes first, not the egg nor the chicken. I believe in co-evolution, butterflies changing with flowers. Unless we have different people, living and desiring to live differently, we will not have political change to support different ways of living. Who would organise to see such change through? But unless we have political change to alter social and material infrastructures and to support different ways of living, it is very hard for people to change and live differently. Changes need to co-evolve. So no, I am not proposing individual action as an alternative to political or structural change. But I also do not think that individual change, or changes in ways of living, consuming, and desiring is secondary, and that changing the “mode of production” will see everything else to fall into place. We need individual change, but not just for the sake of reducing resource consumption (however important that may be, it is insufficient alone), but because political change is not possible without individual change. This is why my book focuses on the ethic of collective self-limitation as a foundational stone for a new political project. I do not mean that a different culture or ethics alone will change capitalism, far from it. But reversely, unless we start decolonising our imaginary from the ethic of limitless expansion, we may find one day that we escaped capitalism but that everything has stayed the same.
FOOTNOTES

1. Giorgos Kallis (2019). Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

2. Thomas Malthus (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Goodwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson in St Paul’s Church-yard.

3. Lionel Robbins (1932, 1935, 2nd ed.). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, London: Macmillan.

4. Jorge Riechmann (2004). Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata.