There is a growing body of thought -- serious, well-argued, ecologically grounded -- that says the answer to the crisis of our time is less. Less production. Less consumption. Less growth. Strict, declining caps on extracted resources. A society organized around sufficiency: just enough for everyone, no more for anyone.
We recognize the crisis, are sympathetic to the impulses to address it in this way, but we refuse its conclusion -- not because we want more stuff, but because we want more life, and life does not submit to target rings.
I. What They Get Right
The degrowth critique of capitalism is, in its essentials, correct. An economy organized around the maximization of profit produces mountains of things nobody needs, degrades the ecosphere that sustains us, generates grotesque inequality, and then spends billions on advertising to convince people that the resulting misery is actually desire. The SUVs the size of tanks. The fast fashion that ends up in landfills in Ghana. The planned obsolescence that turns a washing machine into a five-year subscription to replacement. The housing market that treats shelter as a speculative instrument. The food system that ships strawberries six thousand miles while the farm next door goes bankrupt. All of this is real, it is destructive, and it needs to end.
Living experiments like the Public Common Partnership model -- as practiced, for instance, by the Ward's Corner Community Benefit Society in North London -- distribute ownership of land, buildings, and small businesses across community organizations whose objective is the flourishing of the neighborhood, not profit. Workers participate in governance. Surplus is directed by a democratic body that includes not just the workers but anyone with a stake in what the enterprise produces. This is economic democracy in practice, and it deserves serious attention.
The broader vision is appealing in many of its features: worker cooperatives, universal basic income and services, a radical reduction in paid working hours, a revaluation of care work, the end of commercial advertising, the replacement of private automobiles with transit networks and walkable cities, the restoration of green space where parking lots now bake in the summer sun. Any honest person, reading this list, would find much to want.
Stan Cox, one of the movement's most thoughtful voices, makes the case cleanly: cut resource use, focus on sufficiency and justice, and a range of secondary harms -- noise, light pollution, pedestrian deaths, the psychological damage of consumer culture -- naturally fall away. He is right. He is describing a world that would, in many ways, be more humane than the one we have.
So what is the problem?
II. The Sound of the Limit
The problem is in the word sufficiency. Listen to it. Hear what it says. It says: enough. It says: here is the boundary of what you need. It says: beyond this line is excess, and excess is harm, and you will be held within these rings -- the red ring of minimum needs, the blue ring of maximum well-being, the green ring of decent, equitable, just living. Stay inside the green. The committee will define its borders.
We are told that most people are decent and do not crave enormous houses and many possessions. This is probably true. Surveys confirm it. But notice what the sentence does: it takes the statistical norm and makes it the moral norm. Most people don't want too much, therefore wanting too much is the problem, therefore the solution is a system that prevents too much. The logic is airtight, humane, ecologically responsible, and -- for a certain kind of person -- suffocating.
Which person? Not the billionaire. The billionaire is easy to diagnose. Five houses, a yacht, a private jet, a space program -- this is extraction and domination dressed up as desire. Abolish the billionaire class as class and we will not shed a tear. That is not the person we are worried about.
We are worried about the person who does not fit inside the green ring. The painter who heats a studio all winter to work on a canvas no one commissioned. The woodworker who fills a garage with lumber for projects that have no market and no deadline. The gardener whose garden exceeds any rational need -- not because she is a consumer, but because she loves to grow things, and the growing is the point. The musician practicing badly through an open window on a summer evening. The writer with a room full of books that will never be read, or read once and never opened again, and each one necessary. The person with three guitars who cannot really play any of them, and who is not finished buying guitars.
These people are not the problem the planet needs to solve. They are the proof that human beings are not optimizable. And any system -- capitalist, socialist, communist, degrowth -- that cannot make room for them has not understood what it is building for.
III. Everyone Is an Artist
Joseph Beuys said it in the 1970s and was mocked for it: everyone is an artist. People heard him saying everyone can paint like Rembrandt. He was saying something more radical: that the shaping of one's own life is the primary creative act, and that a society organized to suppress that capacity in most people -- so that a few can exercise it professionally -- is a society organized against its own deepest resource.
Paulo Freire said something structurally identical: everyone is a knower. The adult learner who walks into a classroom is not an empty vessel. She arrives with a lifetime of knowledge -- experiential, practical, relational -- that the educational system has refused to recognize. The Freirean classroom does not give her knowledge. It creates the conditions in which she discovers that she already has it, and that it counts.
We make the same claim about a people's abundance. Not: we will give people enough. But: people already possess the creative, self-organizing capacity to build lives of meaning and richness. What they lack is not ability or desire. What they lack is access to the material substrate -- the energy, the shelter, the tools, the time, the infrastructure -- on which that capacity can operate.
There is a sentence that haunts every political tradition: "Everyone is a producer." Read in the 19th or 21st century, it is a claim about labor. You contribute, therefore you belong. It can be measured, managed, optimized. It leads, eventually, to the committee that evaluates your output and determines your allocation.
If we have to choose between "everyone is a producer" and "everyone is an artist," we choose the latter. Not because art is more important than work -- a false distinction that both capitalism and its critics rely on -- but because the claim about art is a claim about being. You are alive, therefore you create. Good taste or talent or not -- who is to say? Not the committee. Not the protocol. Not the target ring.
IV. The Isms Have Run Out
The book <em>Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future</em> by Kai Heron, Kier Milburn, and Bertie Russell is a serious work of political economy. Its account of Public Common Partnerships -- enterprises where surplus is governed by a common association that includes workers, users, and community members -- is one of the most promising institutional models in the current literature. It deserves to be read, debated, and tested.
But the book, and the broader movement it belongs to, frames its vision as communism -- small-c, carefully qualified, but communism nonetheless. Stan Cox approvingly calls the goal "degrowth communism," following Kohei Saito's influential formulation. This is an honest label. It is also, in the American context, a suicide note.
Not because Americans are too stupid to understand what degrowth communism means. But because the word "communism" -- in any form, with any qualifier -- activates a century of historical experience that includes gulags, famines, secret police, one-party states, and the systematic suppression of exactly the individual creative freedom that the degrowth movement claims to value. The theorists know this. They distinguish carefully between their vision and actually existing communisms. But the distinction is not available in a word. The word arrives with its history, and its history includes the committee that decides what you need.
This is not just an American problem. Any organizing project defeats itself the moment it adopts a vocabulary the people it most needs to reach experience as a threat to their autonomy. This is not ignorance or false consciousness. It is a reasonable response to a political tradition whose practice -- whatever its theory -- has consistently involved someone else deciding what is sufficient for you.
A people's abundance must articulate something that is not subservient to the isms of the 19th and 20th centuries. Not capitalism, whose abundance is accumulation and whose freedom is the freedom to exploit. Not socialism, in its historical forms, whose justice too often came with a bureaucracy of permission. Not communism, whose most beautiful sentences about human flourishing were written by people whose successors built surveillance states. And not degrowth, whose ecological wisdom is genuine but whose political imagination -- caps, limits, rationing, sufficiency -- recapitulates the logic of scarcity in the language of justice.
V. What We Actually Believe
Abundance is real. It is not a metaphor, not a Silicon Valley marketing slogan, and not a capitalist hallucination. The sun hits the earth at ten thousand times the rate of human energy consumption. Solar costs have fallen eighty percent in fifteen years. Iron-air batteries store power in rust. 3D-printed homes are standing in Texas. The cost of computation, genomic sequencing, and water purification is collapsing on the same exponential curves. The material conditions for universal human flourishing are arriving -- not in some distant future, but now, in this generation, with technologies that have addresses and price tags.
The obstacle to abundance is not physics. It is politics. The structures that keep people poor amid plenty -- utility monopolies, landlord economies, intellectual property regimes, the financialization of housing and health care, the lobbying apparatus that converts private interest into public paralysis -- these are not laws of nature. They are political arrangements, maintained by identifiable interests, and they can be changed.
The answer is not distribution. It is ownership. Giving people access to abundance -- a daily ration, a subscription, a welfare check -- is better than deprivation but it is not freedom. Freedom is owning the infrastructure: the solar panels on your roof, the microgrid on your block, the cooperative that governs your energy, your food system, your housing. The people who depend on the infrastructure should govern it. Not as users. As owners.
A family governs its household. A neighborhood governs its microgrid. A cooperative governs its enterprise. A nation builds a dam. The principle is the same at every magnitude: the people who bear the consequences make the decisions. This is not smallness. Mondragón is eighty thousand worker-owners. The Hoover Dam was a public works project that electrified a region. Participatory democracy builds gardens and dams.
And then you trust people with what they build.
You do not tell them how much is sufficient. You do not draw a green ring around decent, equitable, just living and ask them to stay inside it. You do not decide that the leaf blower is wasteful but the poetry press is essential, or that three guitars is a permissible number of guitars. You govern the commons -- the shared infrastructure, the collective resources, the ecological systems that belong to everyone -- and you liberate the person. The life lived on that infrastructure is not the committee's business.
VI. The Reef, Not the Ring
The degrowth movement offers a graphic: concentric rings. A red interior for the minimum floor of needs. A blue ring for the maximum ceiling of well-being. A green band between them -- the target zone, the space of sufficiency, the area of approved human life. It is ecologically responsible and humanly claustrophobic. It is a zoning map for the soul.
The reef, by contrast, is not planned. No organism submits a proposal. No committee evaluates whether this particular polyp's growth pattern is justified, or whether that fish has exceeded its allocation of reef space. The reef works because the conditions for flourishing are present: clean water, circulating nutrients, structural integrity, the accumulated labor of millions of organisms, most of them long dead, none of them famous. And then life does what life does. It proliferates in forms no one predicted -- most of them strange, many of them redundant, some of them spectacularly beautiful, all of them alive.
No cap on how large any individual coral can grow. No ring defining the sufficient life. The system is healthy when the relationships are intact and the substrate is shared. Individual organisms flourish according to their own natures -- extravagantly, in forms no planner would have designed.
That is the model. Not the managed allocation of sufficient resources within approved boundaries. An ecology of abundance, collectively sustained, individually lived. The infrastructure is the commons. The life is yours.
VII. What It Sounds Like
What does it actually sound like, what does it specifically look like, how does it feel?
It sounds like a classroom where a woman reads her own sentence aloud for the first time and the room goes quiet -- not because the sentence is literature, but because it is hers, and she made it, and the making of it changed something in the room.
It looks like a neighborhood where the solar panels on the roof power a workshop in the garage where someone is building furniture that no one asked for and no market requires, and the electricity is free because the community owns the microgrid, and no one has to justify the wood shop to anyone.
It feels like the absence of the question "is this productive?" -- replaced by the question "is this alive?"
It sounds like exquisite music in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, or a gut-wrenching performance in The Sphere in Las Vegas, or that music practiced badly night after night. It looks like a garden that has exceeded any rational need. It feels like time -- not managed time, not optimized time, not time carefully allocated between paid labor and care work, but open time, time that belongs to the person living it, time that no one has a right to audit.
It sounds, on a larger scale, like a community that decided to build a theater nobody asked for -- not because the committee approved it, but because enough people wanted it and the resources were there and no one had to beg for permission. It looks like a public works project that an entire region decided to fund because the ambition was shared. It feels like collective power exercised without collective control over the individual life.
What is it? It is the thing that every managed utopia -- left or right, growth or degrowth -- is afraid of. A person with enough material security to be genuinely free, and no one standing over them telling them what freedom is for.
VIII. The Difficult Conversation
All of us owe the degrowth movement a direct response to their hardest question. They will say: but the planet has limits. Resources are finite. The ecosphere is collapsing. You cannot answer ecological catastrophe with more abundance -- that is the logic that caused the catastrophe in the first place.
They are right that the planet has biophysical limits. They are wrong that abundance violates them. Here is why.
The catastrophe was not caused by abundance. It was caused by a specific kind of production -- extractive, fossil-fueled, profit-driven, designed for obsolescence, indifferent to consequences. An economy that burns coal to manufacture plastic toys that break in a week and end up in the ocean is not abundant. It is wasteful in the deepest sense: it wastes the materials, the energy, the labor, and the living systems of the planet in the service of someone's quarterly earnings report.
Replace the energy source -- solar, wind, geothermal, storage -- and the carbon problem transforms. Replace the production logic -- cooperatively owned, designed for durability, governed by the people who use the products -- and the waste problem transforms. Replace the ownership structure -- community-held infrastructure, democratic governance of the commons -- and the distribution problem transforms. You do not need to cap human aspiration to save the ecosphere. You need to change the system that converts aspiration into extraction.
The degrowth movement knows this. Their best thinkers say it explicitly: the problem is capitalism, not consumption per se. But then they reach for caps, limits, and rationing as the solution -- as if the only way to stop a destructive system is to restrict the human beings caught inside it, rather than to replace the system itself.
We say this now: replace the system. Build the alternative. Solar on the roof. A battery in the garage. A cooperative that owns the microgrid. A community that governs its own food, its own water, its own shelter, its own education. And then let people live. Not inside a ring. On a reef.
There will be genuine ecological constraints that require collective management. Water in arid regions. Fisheries. Old-growth forests. Mineral extraction. These are commons that demand governance -- caps, quotas, shared rules. We need not be anarchists. Democratic governance of shared resources is essential. But governing the commons is not the same as governing the person. You can set a sustainable harvest limit on a fishery without telling a painter how many canvases she is allowed to stretch. You can manage a watershed without managing a life.
The distinction between governing the commons and governing the person is the line a people's abundance will not cross. The infrastructure is collective. The life is individual. The committee sets the rules for the shared resource. It does not set the rules for the open afternoon.
IX. An Invitation, Not a Manifesto
The question underneath all of this is anthropological -- though it includes energy policy, institutional design, and political economy. What kind of creature is the human being, and what does it need to flourish?
"Enough," "just enough and no more," is not the answer. A perfect plan for a perfect life is not the answer. "The answer" is not the answer -- it is part of the problem. But if we must pick a single principle to guide us through the muck and mess of human avarice, greed, and excess, it is an old word, easily enunciated and dauntingly, elusively realized: freedom -- material, political, creative -- to become whatever it is you are becoming, in a world where the conditions for that becoming are collectively sustained and individually lived. Fortunately, we need not be compelled to pick one. "Mutual aid" -- Kropotkin's, the ancient African, the Covid-era -- is two words woven together we wouldn't want to dispense with.
Such a principled world of freedom and mutual aid is better built not inside a ring but on a reef.