INTERVIEW with Jason Hickel: "Degrowth is a gateway into socialist thought for the 21st century"

Jason Hickel on the last five years of debating degrowth.

This conversation between JASON HICKEL, professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and ANDREW AHERN, a New England-based ecosocialist writer and activist, marked the 5-year anniversary of Jason’s book, Less is More. It ranges widely over debate in ecosocialist thought and strategy, as well as the current terrain of class and environmental struggle. It took place over Zoom in late May 2025, with follow up questions via email in early April.

ANDREW AHERN: It has been five years since your book, Less is More, was published. In that time we have seen degrowth enter into mainstream debates around the climate and ecological crisis, thanks in large part to the book. Looking back over these past five years, what is your impression of how degrowth ideas have been received – both the good and the bad? Did you expect Less is More to spark such an international debate?

JASON HICKEL: Well, it’s been a wild ride. And very interesting to watch. Over the past several years degrowth has become very well-established in environmental science. There has been an astonishing increase in scientific research that uses and improves upon degrowth frameworks, so the empirical case is now stronger than ever, and the evidence base has expanded a lot since I wrote the book. Degrowth also has substantial uptake among climate activists, and on the socialist left – by which I mean, the concept is part of their analytical framework even if the word is not deployed in public-facing communications. But it’s not just Less is More, many people have contributed to bringing degrowth ideas to mainstream attention, and there have been several books published on this topic in the past several years.

But degrowth is an anti-capitalist position, firmly rooted in ecosocialist analysis. The core of ecosocialism is that we should democratize control over production so that we can organize it around ensuring human well-being and ecological stability. Degrowth has inspired the ire of those who consciously align with capitalism because they recognize that it represents socialist ideas breaking through into the mainstream. So they single it out for attack. In some cases this has led to real fireworks. And I think the diagnosis is correct. For people who are broadly part of the climate movement, the case for degrowth is extremely compelling. And once you start thinking, okay, how can we actually reduce wasteful and destructive production, and organize the economy instead around ensuring human well-being for all, you are in the terrain of socialist ideas and policy. Degrowth is a gateway into socialist thought for the 21st century.

This is an important point. A lot of people get caught up thinking, oh, we are being attacked because the word sounds negative, we need a better framing, etc. No, it is being attacked because it calls for overcoming capitalist control over the means of production.

AA: With that said, there has been much ink spilled, countless panels and numerous debates on the promise and shortcomings of degrowth. What have been the most fruitful elements of the degrowth debate thus far? Are there points you wish we could move past in order to focus on more pressing problems?

JH: I feel like 99% of the heat can be resolved by correcting three common misunderstandings.

First, degrowth is targeted at rich economies, and specifically their ruling classes, which are overwhelmingly responsible for driving the ecological crisis. It is not targeted at developing countries, it is not an anti-development position. Second, degrowth is not about reducing all forms of production; it is specifically about reducing destructive and unnecessary forms of production. Third, the objective of degrowth is to improve human well-being and accelerate social progress by redirecting production toward socially and ecologically beneficial activities. All of these points can be grasped with a cursory reading of the literature, but too many of the most outspoken critics of degrowth don’t actually read – they just react based on vibes. This is not helpful.

But some points of debate have been really generative. People on the socialist left pointed out that degrowth, in its earlier formulations, had several shortcomings. It did not sufficiently center working class movements as agents of transformation. It did not advance convincing policies for how degrowth could be achieved while also improving well-being for all. And it did not sufficiently theorize how to overcome unequal exchange and imperialist dynamics in the world economy. But these issues are now increasingly dealt with, and major advances have been achieved, even if there is more work to do.

AA: In my opinion, one of the better critiques of degrowth revolves around its inability to build power, including identifying what kinds of political actors will be able to take the mantle of degrowth and enact it. Have you seen the uptake of degrowth ideas into power building organizations and institutions? What are the most promising signs of degrowth actually influencing actors who can implement its vision?

JH: There is a lot to say about this. First, degrowth is often referred to as a “movement” but I think this is incorrect. Degrowth is an analytical frame that has convinced a lot of people, and has a lot of traction particularly among academics, students and activists, but it is not a movement as such and does not have the capacity to achieve power and implement policies. We may try to convince existing incumbents to implement the policies we call for (credit guidance to scale down destructive industries, plus public investment in universal services and a job guarantee to redirect production and ensure good lives for all), but we have capitalist governments and they obviously won’t do these things. So, what exactly is the theory of transformation here?

The only way to achieve these things is through a movement for democratic socialism. That should be the movement. Degrowth should be understood as an element within a socialist transformation, as a corrective to certain productivist strains of socialist thought that are inadequate for our current moment. The problem with left-productivism is that it ignores imperialism and ignores ecology. It assumes that high-income nations can and should continue to increase their aggregate production indefinitely. But this is incorrect. First, we know that the high levels of production and consumption in high-income economies rely on a massive net-appropriation from the global South. This is fundamentally incompatible with socialism and must be abolished. Second, we know that if high-income countries are to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization they need to scale down aggregate energy use, and this will require reducing unnecessary forms of production. That’s an empirical fact.

Degrowth research shows that we can improve social outcomes with substantially less energy use, less material use, and less aggregate output. These are powerful insights and should be integrated into socialist paradigms. But also, this is just what would naturally happen during a democratic socialist transformation. When workers and communities have control over production, the first thing they will do is reduce production of damaging and unnecessary things, because why would we voluntarily destroy ecology for no good reason, and exploit our sisters and brothers in the global South, and waste our labour time? In most cases people would reject such an approach. And this has been demonstrated in several empirical studies of democratic decision-making. So it seems to me that degrowth will be a consequence of socialist transition. It’s the socialist transition we need to focus on achieving. The strategic benefit of this approach is that it clarifies the battle lines. When socialism is the objective, we are in the terrain of class struggle, which is where we should be.

AA: Since Less is More was published, how have you seen the degrowth movement, but also yourself, change, whether with regard to the politics, philosophy, or strategy that you and the larger degrowth movement held?

JH: In Less is More I argued that the climate movement will not be able to achieve the necessary transformations on its own. It will need to create alliances with labour unions and other working-class formations. I argued that this requires real organizing, and advancing policies that can directly address working-class concerns about employment, wages, housing, healthcare etc, so that people can see their interests represented. This sort of alliance is necessary because, while climate protestors can succeed in blocking roads and bridges and drawing attention to their cause, labour unions have much more political leverage, including the power of the strike.

But since then I have come to recognize that what is actually needed is something like a mass-based political party that can advance a wholistic alternative vision, achieve state power, and implement transformative policies. I don’t mean a bourgeois party like the ones we are familiar with. I mean a party that has active and organic connections to communities and workers, which can build political consciousness, and which can integrate disparate movements and struggles into a single political machine.

I say this for several reasons. First, we have all been on protests – climate protests, Black Lives Matter protests, anti-genocide protests – and at the end of the march it’s not clear what to do next … there is no way to mobilize all that passion and anger into an effective political force. The energy dissipates. To the extent that this is our only tool, the ruling classes benefit tremendously. The smartest governments just ignore the protestors until they are exhausted and bored, until the media story has passed, and then carry on with business as usual. We need some way to plug people into an organized political machine.

Second, right now our efforts are fragmented into a hundred disparate movements. The anti-genocide movement, the feminist movement, the climate movement, the labour movement, etc. They have their separate demands and they rarely work together. We need ways of uniting these movements and multiplying our power. This is what a mass-based party can achieve. And if you ask me this is the only approach that can realistically win the transformation we need.

AA: Within just the last two years alone we have seen studies that show how impactful the climate crisis will be on the prospects for future economic growth. If we add to that mass species extinction, a shortened water supply and other compounding ecological issues, then the impacts are greater still. Yet, these studies have been largely ignored by mainstream politicians, political parties, and economic institutions. What do you make of the tension between the science, telling us how dire the situation is and will be, and what current political institutions and movements are moving forward with? How can we reconcile empirically and materially grounded insights from ecological science with the need to build political power in order to live well within planetary boundaries?

JH: Yes, and the problem is worse now than it has ever been. There was a brief period, several years ago, when climate science was really breaking into the public consciousness. There was a collective sense of alarm and concern, to the point where governments were forced to declare “climate emergencies” and so on. But then something happened, this discourse ended up collapsing … perhaps it was a change in the social media algorithms, or a shift in media coverage, or maybe people just began to realize that our governments had no intention of actually making any changes, and a kind of hopelessness set in. But the reality is that our governments cannot make the necessary changes because they are capitalist. That is the blockage.

Let me spell this out. Under capitalism, production is controlled by capital—the major financial firms, large corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. For them, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve ecological goals, but to maximize and accumulate profit—that is the overriding objective. So we get massive production of things like fossil fuels, SUVs, industrial beef, fast fashion and weapons, because these are highly profitable to capital, but we get chronic underproduction of things like renewable energy, public transit and affordable housing, because these things are less profitable to capital or not profitable at all.

This poses a very severe problem for the energy transition. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are 3-4x more profitable. So capital keeps investing in fossil fuels even as our world burns around us. The only way to deal with this problem is to impose a credit guidance framework that can actively reduce investments in fossil fuels and shift investment toward renewables instead. But this is fundamentally against the interests of capitalism. So too with necessary objectives like public transit, building insulation, ecosystem restoration, regenerative agriculture, etc. These are not profitable so capital just doesn’t do it. It will require public finance and public works, which in turn requires reducing capital’s command over our productive capacities.

And then of course there is the fact that high-income countries need to scale down certain forms of production. Many of these sectors are highly profitable. Capital will not just do this voluntarily! In sum, our governments are not dealing with the ecological crisis because they are capitalist. So, it is capitalism that needs to be overcome. The sooner we realize this fact and confront it, the better.

AA: One thing I increasingly think about is what type of organizing institutions will be able to cohere the many different factions of the Left so we can organize and win the future we want. We have environmentalists who don’t have the political power to enact the change they want; the trade union movement is mostly not focused on transitioning from fossil fuels; and mainstream political parties might have good rhetoric on the climate crisis but govern in contradictory ways. What do you see as the most promising ways to cohere a left politics?

JH: There are a few things to say here. First, the unions are not focused on transition because they are afraid of layoffs. When they hear that environmentalists want to scale down not only fossil fuels but also other forms of production, it only adds fuel to their fears. Their instinct has typically been to line up with capital and call for more growth, to ensure jobs and livelihoods. But this is a totally inadequate approach. There is a much better way to achieve these objectives, namely, with a public job guarantee. The job guarantee permanently abolishes involuntary unemployment, so that we can have an open conversation about scaling down fossil fuels and other sectors without anyone worrying about getting hurt. It is key to a just transition.

The job guarantee also enables us to set wages and conditions (say, living wages and workplace democracy) across the whole economy, because private employers will have to match the standards of the job guarantee programme in order to avoid losing staff. Such a programme would also empower anyone to train and participate in the most important collective projects of our time, doing meaningful and socially necessary work. This is how we shift labour away from servicing capital accumulation and toward achieving social and ecological objectives. Most importantly, this proposal is massively popular. It can form the basis of a winning political platform.

So the unions need to change tactics. I say this not as a critic from the outside but as a lifelong union member. How did we let the political horizons of the labour movement shrink down to sector-specific battles over wages and conditions, while leaving the general structure of this unequal and ecologically destructive economy intact? Without any concern for the well-being of workers in other sectors, or non-workers, or the unemployed? This is not good enough. The political horizon of the labour movement should be to achieve democratic control over production and finance so that it can be organized around well-being and ecology. That’s it.

So, policies like the job guarantee need to be front and center. This is how you build a broad consensus across environmentalists and unions. And from this perspective you can see that most of the existing Green parties are not at all on the right track. They talk about environment but usually have nothing to say about social policy. Let me be clear: this can never connect with working-class communities that are struggling to make ends meet. It comes across as sneering and out of touch. Environmentalists need to foreground policies that address the bread-and-butter concerns of the working classes. The Green parties should dissolve themselves and reconstruct around ecosocialist policy and discourse and aim to build a working-class base.

All of this amounts to a totally different approach. It centres people not as guilty individuals but as agents of transformative change. We are the people, we are the ones who produce the collective wealth of the nation. Right now we do not have control over what we produce, we are disempowered, hostage to capital, and unable to resolve the social and ecological emergencies that face us. We live in a miserable shadow of the society we could have. Our historic task at this juncture is to regain democratic control over our own productive capacities so that we can build a better civilization.

AA: The current situation is dire. Donald Trump is president in the US; there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza; the Labour government in the UK is deeply unpopular and so on. What is giving you hope, inspiration, and the belief that a better world is possible? Who can we look to for leadership, the ability to organize, and start building the better world?

JH: I think what’s instructive about the current moment is that liberalism is collapsing. It has no coherent response to the social and ecological crises that we face. This is creating an ideological vacuum that is being filled by the far right. But of course the far right offer a fake politics, it is a cynical attempt to bring a certain faction of the working class on board with a project that is ultimately about further entrenching the class interests of the elite. This is an opportunity for socialist politics to step into the void, to mobilize the deep currents of anti-establishment sentiment that are so prominent right now, and offer real solutions to the crises we face.

Of course, the ruling classes of the imperial core have invested a tremendous amount of effort in demonizing the word socialism. They do this precisely because they know how successful socialism can be; they know it can pose an attractive alternative capable of achieving mass support. So we have to operate in this reality. While socialism may be an effective public-facing rallying cry in many European countries, in places like the US it sounds far too unfamiliar and scary. That’s fine. It’s not the word that matters. What matters is the policies.

AA: What should people expect from you in the future? Do you have any projects you are working on now that you are excited about?

JH: Well we have a big ERC-funded project with some 40 researchers engaged in advancing empirical work on ecosocialism, degrowth, unequal exchange, delinking, and political transformation. A lot of exciting publications will be coming out of this group so keep an eye out for this. As for my own work, people can find my latest research at jasonhickel.org/research, and I write more informally at jasonhickel.substack.com. We also launched a new website called the Global Inequality Project (globalinequality.org) which is dedicated to research and data on capitalism, imperialism, and ecology. As for the next book, there is something exciting in the pipeline so stay tuned! ●