I agree with what Jason Hickel wrote in a recent blog, that we need a mass political party that would implement a degrowth agenda, and that currently the degrowth movement does not have a political agenda or capability. I also agree with Anitra Nelson, Vincent Liegey and Terry Leahy when they wrote that degrowth is a movement. Degrowth is a movement as much as Civil Rights, Marriage Equality, or the Sunrise Movement were or aremovements whether or not they were organized as political parties.

When we proposed last year that all degrowthers should join forces in solidarity, the very first point of our proposal was to decouple recognition from status and merit because we believed, and I still do, that comradery and understanding should be based on egalitarian principles. This proposal has been received with lackluster understanding and support.

More recently, I have advocated for a synergy of bottom-up and top-down strategy. Bottom-up is close to the horizontal anarchist position, however it follows scales from local to regional and (inter)national, rather than political hierarchies. It means that strategy would start at the local. Conversely top-down means strategy begins at the largest scale, being operationalized by respective large-aim institutions.

Here, I would like to add specificity to the idea of building mass parties which builds on the recognition of the tremendous effort that has been done by degrowth activists and practitioners, many of whom work for free, while also having to make a living. These mass parties need both bottom-up engagement, and top-down policy design. Yes, we have to take power, but we cannot do it without mass engagement. We already know that degrowth is popular and its label is a strength not a weakness as many have remarked already.

The 28% support in the US for the label “degrowth” without a description attached is as meaningful as the concept of “free buses” from Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor-elect of New York. Both concepts need to be elaborated in order to make full sense. Degrowth is not more jargony than “free buses”. It just needs unpacking and after it is unpacked it is as good as “free buses” if not better.

The upcoming degrowth-friendly parties should consider the following:

Governance based on qualified sortition (random selection)

Roger Halam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain recently said to Novara Media that he is a strong advocate for sortition and he is confident that people selected at random will rise up to the task. Sortition, which is basically a formation of government through various forms of selection by lottery, has been discussed by many authors. Just to name a few: Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance editedby John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, The Trouble With Elections by Terry Bouricius, and George Monbiot in a Guardian article.

The qualification part would be something determined by the entire collective, from a minimum time spent in the organization or not working in executive capitalist jobs. People who meet these qualifications would be placed on sortition lists from which governance bodies would be selected at random, while observing desirable demographics.

Your Party UK has used sortition for the selection of their inaugural launch conference. Let us be super frank: representative democracy is a failure and elections are a circus. If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished. Getting degrowth done would require a separation of policy writing from policy selection. People who write policy should not be the same who vote on turning policy into law.

I cannot stress this enough: a Leninist-type party ran by a camarilla of degrowth cadres and experts defeats the purpose of the political revolution. The mass party must be of the people, by the people, and for the people with governance by sortition.

Running popular platforms hard on limitarian policies.

Free buses, rent freezes, and freehealthcare are policies that can win elections. However, all policy ideas, no matter how good or popular they are, can be co-opted by right-wing media and capitalist elites. Degrowth itself is painted with red scare and is associated with austerity by capitalists. A mass party should lead, loud and clear with the idea that having too much is a really bad idea that carves into the liberties and wellbeing of decent citizens and into the resilience of life on Earth. A mass party must lead with anti-capitalist policy proposals and the degrowth label. Moreover, since degrowth owns such a wide canvas of policy instruments, the ones that hit the right-wing ethos hardest are those from the limitarian space: limits on wealth and rationing.

Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction continue to be the most popular policies from the degrowth toolkit. They are not exclusionary but rather should be advanced together in the agenda of a mass party. The Job Guarantee may be the easiest to promote, even if it is at $15 hourly pay as suggested for the US by L. Randall Wray in Understanding Modern Money Theory (2025). In all cases, the mass party must include caps on wealth and forms of material rationing.

Running candidates in jurisdictions where centrists often rotate with right-wingers.

In Canada, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party won this year not because people love them, but because center-left and left voters who usually vote for the New Democratic Party (NDP) really hated the Conservatives. Similar story in the UK. However, the NDP is not too friendly to degrowth, since they are trying to sideline an ecosocialist degrowther anti-Zionist candidate from their current leadership race.

In Canada and the UK, there is no real alternative to the centrist status quo that has won elections. If a mass party that leads with degrowth policies ran candidates in jurisdictions like these, they stand real chances at winning local and general elections. Perhaps the Green Party UK and Your Party UK are poised to fill this gap. They should be infiltrated by degrowthers and swayed onto a committed path for degrowth.

We should not have to read more books such as More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz about the delusions of the energy transition, or books such as The Long Heat by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton about the perils of techno-optimism, to be finally convinced that owning the degrowth label and the toolkit of degrowth policy instruments requires courage and vision.

Joining or creating an international political alliance, such as DIEM25 or Progressive International.

We already have the International Degrowth Network (IDN) but it does not function like DIEM25 or Progressive International. It does not collect membership fees, it does not have paid staff, and it does not run political candidates. Upgrading the sociocratic aims of IDN towards a political organization could be the strategy to be considered. Alternatively, IDN members and degrowthers at large could join DIEM25, Progressive International or various ecosocialist parties and infuse these organizations with degrowth. In all cases, the degrowth label should be owned by those advocating for it, and must be qualified and unpacked as the occasion requires.

Leaders should not be tainted with perceptions of elitism and credentialism.

A sortition-based governance structure would weed out opportunists and status seekers. Socialist parties are not immune to corruption and special interests. Only sortition can mitigate these risks. Policy making cannot be, as a matter of principle, an affair run by the elite policy wonks. In the Bouricius sortition model, experts can still offer significant input in policy making, but they would not be elected into leadership positions.

Significant effort should be deployed to popularize ethics of sufficiency.

Before sortition is realized, when we accept the compromise with representative democracy based on elections, political leaders would have to recognize ethics of sufficiency that are shared by humans that have not been duped by consumerism and material status signaling. The imperial mode of living is something real, even if we choose to place responsibility on the design of capitalism instead on individual lifestyle choices. The imperial mode of living refers to a way of life in the Global North that relies heavily on the exploitation of resources and labor from the Global South, leading to ecological and social inequalities. It highlights how everyday consumption practices are intertwined with global power dynamics and the unsustainable nature of capitalism.

In this approach, degrowth can be presented as an ethic of liberation from the oppression of material status signaling, and expansion of social agency (more personal freedom in a social context). Work Time Reduction, for example, is a great public relations tool for degrowth but it must be framed in a dematerialized and decommodified economy. The same applies to UBI, UBS, and JG.

Nifty memes and bitesize ideas must complement storytelling and policy unpacking.

A mass party should not be afraid to embrace simple ideas that can capture the imagination of the people. Something along these lines: What if all products imported from the Global South had QR codes on them that would take you to a website where you could see the working conditions of those humans who made that thing, their names, their salaries, their living conditions, their health status, how much free time they have with their families? What if the same QR code showed you the wealth of the owners of those companies, their names, and their living conditions? Would you still buy that thing? Would you still want to keep this economic system? Moving the imagination of supporters for the mass party toward empathy and an egalitarian global ethic may be the key towards the much-needed delinking of the Global South from the Global North, as I understand them in their geographical sense.

Designing policy that aims at the fundamental causal structure of capitalism.

In the bottom-up vs top-down integrative approach, the bottom-up part is experiential and the top-down is structural. The mass parties must offer the experience of a new kind of politics and society, by actually showing up for local causes, listening to its members and citizens at large, and being influenced by them via crowd-sourcing policy proposal. I have suggested a tool for such purpose in the form of a crowd-sourced policy cloud.

Mass parties should be friendly and welcoming, not exclusionary and dogmatic. At the same time, they must aim at redesigning the structure of the economy by attacking and dismantling capitalist hierarchies, by decoupling power from property, and by halting the dispossession of private and common property by capital. Even if Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Job Guarantee, and Work Time Reduction were all implemented, they may remain confined within national borders. Decolonisation and delinking must also be at the center of strategy.

Where would these mass parties start

To conclude, where would these mass parties start? In which country? In Romania, my country of origin, where the far-right party leads in polls by close to 40% and where there is no party on the left, not even center-left? In Germany, France, Italy? In India or China? Once we deploy the heavy anchor of reality we are hit with terrifying apparent impossibilities. The answer is all of the above, with various caveats. Some countries have parties that may be swung further towards degrowth. Others need the invention of new parties from scratch, such as Romania and Canada. In all cases, a political strategy for a mass party must emerge from the mass of people that it is supposed to serve.

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