“The post-growth economy, with its appreciation of regionality, variety, non-alienation, and its ideas for land and monetary reform could be easily integrated into… opposition to the current system.”

For many members of the post-growth and degrowth communities, this statement might reaffirm that their guiding frameworks can transcend capitalism and its mounting crises. However, they will probably have second thoughts upon learning its source: Björn Höcke, an infamous politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) allegedly published these words under the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig” in the neo-Nazi magazine Volk in Bewegung (People in Motion) in 2012.

Dangerous convergences in an era of crisis

The AfD made unprecedented gains during recent state elections, the latest in a series of profoundly concerning victories for right-wing or outright fascistic political actors across Europe, North America, and many other parts of the world. As an anti-colonial anarchist whose activist scholarship centers Indigenous struggles against extractivism, I am alarmed by the rising global fascist tide, accelerating ecological and climate crises, and the potentially explosive intersections of these trends. Anti-fascist researchers and podcast hosts Sam Moore and Alex Roberts contemplate these possible intersections through their exploration of eco-fascism, which encompasses various past and present attempts to produce racist, nationalist, and other chauvinistic hierarchies in and through natural systems as responses to capitalist crises.

I am drawn to post growth and degrowth because they promise to imagine and cultivate inclusive, democratic, and sustainable post-capitalist futures, which, by definition, cannot accommodate fascist or eco-fascist ideologies, priorities, and initiatives. However, I have found relatively few explicit engagements with fascism in the post growth and degrowth spheres. At the same time, a scattered but growing body of evidence shows how far-right opportunists are more than willing to fill this gap through infiltration and co-optation, as exemplified by Ladig’s appeal.

As a 2023 Post Growth Fellow, I sought to address this gap by investigating what post growth, degrowth, and anti-fascism can learn from each other. In addition to reviewing whatever academic and public scholarship I could find at the crossroads of these topics, I administered a brief survey to staff and Fellows associated with the Post Growth Institute, as well as researchers and activists associated with the Research & Degrowth Network. After receiving 15 detailed responses, I conducted six open-ended follow-up interviews with survey respondents who indicated an interest in further dialogue.

Clarifying — and defending — the terms of the debate

Many of my respondents called out attempts to depoliticize post growth and degrowth in order to make it more palatable to mainstream policymakers, businesspeople, and civil society professionals. For example, one of them critiqued 9th Degrowth Conference keynote speaker Diana Ürge-Vorsatz’s call to reconsider using the term “degrowth” altogether due to its connotations of “austerity” and overall “negativity.” Engaging dominant political, economic, and social arenas is undoubtedly important to building a critical mass of support for post growth and degrowth, and the reframing of core ideas and proposals is a key part of this strategic navigation of the halls of power. Nevertheless, strategic navigation should not mean surrendering to the dictates of capitalism and its interlocking systems and structures of oppression, as far too many critical perspectives, grassroots mobilizations, and transformative alternatives previously have.

Keeping the dangers of depoliticization in mind, I understand post growth as a tapestry of approaches that generally seek to challenge and transcend growth as an economic, political, and social imperative. Degrowth, meanwhile, specifically aims to reduce the world’s total energy and resource usage to foster abundance and enable decolonization. While these definitions are certainly compatible with post-capitalist transition and maybe even anti-capitalist rupture, they can, at the same time, be absorbed by the very dominant institutions and belief systems they frequently condemn. I strongly believe that anti-fascism is crucial to preventing this absorption.

Fascism and anti-fascism cannot avoid engaging with politics, though fascists often cloak their intentions in the relatively apolitical language of pseudoscience, and liberal anti-fascists often reduce deep-seated fascistic social tendencies solely to charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, or Jair Bolsonaro. Fascism has been widely invoked, misunderstood, and misapplied over the past several years of right-wing resurgence, but political scientist Robert Paxton’s robust definition of the essential traits of this phenomenon with outwardly diverse manifestations is worth citing in full:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion [emphases added].

Anti-fascism, then, entails combined opposition to 1) the “internal cleansing” of racialized, gendered, and otherwise oppressed populations that fascists consider “weak” or “impure”; 2) “external expansion” through militarism and other direct and indirect forms of imperialism; and 3) the capitalist economy that “traditional elites” and their fascist foot soldiers seek to defend. At first glance, post growth and degrowth very much share these priorities with anti-fascism. On closer examination, though, anti-fascist theory and praxis pose tough but vital questions about identity, ideology, and strategy to depoliticized growth criticism.

Re-politicizing growth criticism in three not-so-easy steps

Based on my surveys, interviews, and mini-literature review, I offer the following proposals for explicitly integrating anti-fascist analysis and practice into post-growth and degrowth, with the intention of stimulating further conversation around this essential topic:

1. To nip fascism in the bud, we have to do away with capitalist accumulation altogether

More moderate (as in institutionally oriented) post growth and degrowth proposals — such as progressive taxation, living wages, better business practices and models, and revived government expenditure on public goods — could alleviate the crushing mental, physical, and emotional burdens of capitalism for many, potentially making these beneficiaries more amenable to more systemic and structural change. Nevertheless, the prospects for passing these measures in increasingly dysfunctional capitalist democracies like the United States are murky at best. Modern capitalists have also mastered the art of evading taxation and legal accountability by shifting their operations and accumulated wealth around the globe.

As and when these proposals fall through, business as usual will resume, and capitalism’s inevitable contradictions — its unwillingness to suspend profit-making to ensure the holistic long-term wellbeing of the laboring classes and Earth as a whole — will continue to expand fascism’s base of mass support among the disenfranchised and disenchanted alongside the relatively privileged and powerful. In short, as long as growth criticism fails to confront the capitalist ruling class’s monopoly over private property for the purposes of exploitation, the fascist and eco-fascist threats will remain or even intensify. Many of my respondents identify as ecosocialists, and the ecosocialist call to meet human needs within the Earth’s planetary boundaries by seizing and redefining production processes could prevent growth criticism from becoming yet another progressive program that falters, contorts, and crumbles while moving through “proper institutional channels.”

2. Be aware that localized communities and economies can be sites of chauvinism, exclusion, and repression

Building post growth and degrowth alternatives at the grassroots level by localizing ecological, economic, and political decision-making power within oppressed communities — particularly in the Global South — seems to side-step the treacherous terrain of dominant political institutions. And, indeed, many such post-capitalist grassroots efforts are flourishing, from cooperatives in Indonesia to Community Energy Initiatives in Colombia. Nonetheless, the romanticization of local, self-reliant communities can inadvertently resonate with fascistic ideals of purity, parochialism, and tradition, as well as older regressive ideologies. For example, caste is a fixture of rural (and, for that matter, urban) life across India, and this entrenched feudal institution has frequently allowed Hindu fascism to gain a foothold in these communities while spurring caste-based atrocities in and of itself. Gau rakshaks — “cow protectors” who roam India’s countryside looking for members of minoritized populations to harass, assault, and even murder on suspicion of cow slaughter — perhaps most horrifically illustrate this unseemly side of the idealized Indian village. Outsiders might be understandably reluctant to critique communities framed by colonial regimes and mindsets as “backward,” but the imperative of sensitivity cannot inhibit engagement with local communities in all their complexity and contradiction, as illuminated by anti-fascism and anti-capitalism.

3. Decolonization is, by definition, political

If growth criticism is to relieve oppressed communities in the Global South and North of the pressures of atmospheric colonization and material extractivism, it will have to reckon with two incontrovertible facts: 1) just 100 companies were responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions as of 2017, and 2) the US military is the world’s single largest institutional polluter. Put plainly, the military-industrial complex and the transnational corporations whose interests it ultimately defends are fundamentally incompatible with any post-capitalist future generated by post-growth and degrowth. Having largely been mentioned in passing so far, demilitarization — together with the socialization of industry and the (re)establishment of multi-species communities of care — must be a cornerstone of growth criticism. This is all the more so the case because “fascism is colonialism turned inward,” as anti-colonial poet Aimé Césaire famously observed: American police forces use military equipment and tactics previously deployed during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to crack down on protesters of all kinds, while many former military service members are joining or forming right-wing militias such as the Three Percenters. Meanwhile, billionaires and their corporations, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks have pumped vast sums of money into right-wing hate groups that, for all their anti-authoritarian rhetoric, almost unequivocally defend ruling class interests.

Time to pick a side

Worldwide struggles against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and fascism are increasingly existential in character, and growth criticism cannot afford to avoid picking sides any longer than it already has through depoliticization. Anti-fascist theory and practice stand to deepen and extend post growth and degrowth’s critiques of capitalism, imperialism, and various forms of chauvinism, guarding against co-option in the process. Though this shift might alienate some, at least at first, it could win over many more in the medium- to long-term by speaking to the evermore precarious and genuinely life-threatening conditions of their existence under the increasingly crisis-ridden capitalist system. Anti-fascism demands an even broader (albeit well-coordinated) diversity of tactics to cultivate post-capitalist futures, especially as it pertains to ensuring the safety of multiple marginalized populations fighting for these futures.

If “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” fascism, climate crisis, and eco-fascism are among the most malignant tumors afflicting the global body politic. When confronting the dominant economic, political, and social actors who unapologetically spread this cancer, post growth and degrowth advocates everywhere would do well to adopt the famous rallying cry of the Spanish Civil War’s iconic anti-fascist fighters: “¡No pasarán!” (“They shall not pass!”).

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