A spectre is haunting analyses of the far right: stagnation. From accounts of interwar fascism to explanations of the current rise in authoritarian tendencies and fascization, economic contraction and blocked growth are recurring causal factors, suggesting that the far right is ultimately a symptom of denied growth. This talk considers what such explanations presuppose, and argues that they are based on the unquestioned premise: that growth is the baseline, and that reduction — of income, of status or industrial power — is an accident: A lack to be resented or revolted against. Dismantling the growth paradigm is essential for understanding the issues at stake in debates about the ecologically necessary reduction of material and energy throughput. Drawing on the fields of political economy and political ecology, this talk presents a framework for a theory of growth organized across three dimensions. Ideologically, growth is perceived as an almost unquestionable marker of progress and legitimacy; in the social dimension, institutions, wages, welfare states, and political stability are inherently linked to expansion; and at the material level, the physical increase in energy and resource consumption is fundamental to modern societies. Currently, two different concepts are referred to as ‘reduction’, ‘restraint’, or ‘less’: the autoreduction of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats — whereby systems demolish their own foundations as a display of power, or where austerity, deindustrialization, and ecological collapse are rebranded as inevitable; and the deliberate reduction that degrowth proposes, which is democratically negotiated, redistributive, and oriented towards well-being.

When considered in the context of the three dimensions of growth, these responses operate at entirely different levels: The far right’s politics of loss chiefly operates on the ideological and social levels, mobilizing the promise of growth as grievance even when material growth is failing. In contrast, degrowth insists that reduction can only be achieved through deliberate intervention at the material level, coupled with a transformation of the social institutions dependent on expansion. The current post-sustainable situation is producing a discursive convergence between these approaches: ‘less’ becomes available to the far right as a narrative about civilizational decline, while the left’s own vocabulary of progress and sustainability is worn down by the pressure of antifascist economics and ecological collapse. But what is needed to make social-ecological transformation appear as self-determined rather than self-destructive and what implications does this have for ecologically informed analyses of fascism’s relationship to stagnation and growth?

Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian, transformation researcher and social theorist. He is Professor of Social-Ecological Transformation Research at the University of Flensburg and Director of the Norbert Elias Centre for Transformation Design & Research. His main research interests include the political economy of capitalism, social and environmental history, climate catastrophe, as well as social movements and alternative economics. He is the author of the award-winning The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Growth Paradigm (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and is co-editor of Degrowth in Movement(s): Exploring Pathways for Transformation and is co-author of The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso, 2022).

In English
Organized by

ICI Berlin

AutoReduction
Lecture Series 2026-27

‘Shock and awe’ is typically a state of reduced capacity to act, move, or resist. Under very special conditions it can be experienced as vitalizing, but in the current conjuncture, it is most readily associated with military or terrorist strategies directed at foreign enemies or, more startingly, turned inward in the hands of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats. The effect of dumbfounding paralysis is even more potent with actions that appear themselves self-destructive: when subjects wilfully demolish what used to secure their prestige and power; when rising authoritarian regimes are supported in anticipatory obedience; or when climate change seems to be deliberately accelerated through arms and technology races. How can one not feel utterly disoriented, when it seems as if the world is so clearly oriented towards its own destruction?

To be sure, the stupefying paradox of self-destruction, which can be pushed toward an (onto)logical impossibility that collapses activity and passivity, subject and object, can be quickly dissolved by moving to smaller scales and stressing that those who destroy are not the same as those who are being destroyed, at least not in the short term. Yet, rather than restoring the apparent self-evidence of a rationality based on competitive self-assertion, it seems equally important to challenge it and show the manifold ways in which such rationality and its aggressivity can become self-destructive. Can one make productive the paradox of such a critique, which does not take an external position and instead proceeds from within, seeking to make the paradigm of self-assertion implode into more benign forms of autoreduction such as self-restraint and self-questioning? To what extent might stupefaction in the face of frenetic destruction also have to do with the possibility of recognizing in it a self-destructiveness that is turned outward and, in its denunciation, a conservative trope of patronizing normalization?

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