The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter (review)

Published last year by Verso, The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan is a capacious, well-rounded, but hard-swinging treatment of the debates that have come to define "degrowth." The book stands as an incredible feat of synthesis for the degrowth movement as a whole, though the authors begin modestly, noting that they wish to "describe" debates (vii) within degrowth and extend these to a wider audience. However, the book does far more than this, not least of which may be glossed in the author's keen sensitivity toward the heightened politicization of the question of transition in radical circles today. Of course, this more intense politicization of transition does accurately register the reality of the stakes in the contemporary situation, defined as it is by legitimate crisis. There is climate change, but today, there is also the increased visibility, on a broader scale finally, of the recognition that we humans are doing something drastically wrong with the economic system.

The Future Is Degrowth separates itself from both the green capitalism it partly grew out of (and up with), and internally from much of the twenty-first-century degrowth movement itself, by making an actual commitment to a world beyond capitalism. Where earlier strains of degrowth embraced green capitalism, often as part of an intentional politics that pragmatically accepted that such an alignment at least promised that things would get done, Schmelzer et al. write in the space of conscious awareness that the fate of any worthwhile environmentalism, in the current historical moment, must "specifically address" the capitalist economy (11), though not to the exclusion of other forms of critique. Indeed, we can frame the book's own radicalism in terms of the specificity of its address.

What may be an obvious point demands contextualization when today, in some circles, even the mere mention that other forms of critique might be valid in themselves draws suspicion. Some in the more radical traditions ask, how radical can critique that does not take direct aim at capitalism possibly be? Despite closing with a section entitled, "Degrowth: A visionary pathway to post-capitalism," and despite leveling, in the very last sentences of the entire text, the serious claim that "one thing is certain: we need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars," many on the left today will not be convinced that degrowth is sufficiently radical. Where's the proof? What has degrowth done? Harder line skeptics will continue to challenge degrowth as being more critical of capitalism in its neoliberal form as opposed to the whole structural core of it. Yet why should this be the bar for radicalism? With the journal's special issue on environmental radicalism in mind, I raise the question in the space of this review of whether Schmelzer et al. wish to state for degrowth a platform that is radical enough. If the proof of sufficient radicalism lies in an avowed and demonstrated attempt to move beyond capitalism, then yes, they do.

The title of Andrew Ahern's recent Los Angeles Review of Books commentary on Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism—"Red and Green Make . . . Degrowth"—indicates something at the heart of the question about a platform's radicalism. As is sometimes supposed, is a sufficiently radical critique a red (i.e., communist) one? And . . . commence debate. But what can be argued with the Schmelzer et al. book is that degrowth has passed to the redder side of the spectrum. Ahern rightly notes that our politics, globally, remain at a standstill: "The environmental movement deserves credit for getting us beyond denial, at least at the highest levels of public discourse. However, while 'system change...