How Degrowth Can Defeat Fascism

The strong case for citizen assemblies

In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as the “cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation. [...]The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”

In 2024, an independent candidate for the presidency of Romania suggested that the nation comes first, that all political parties would be abolished, and he would serve the will of the people towards the path of salvation, with the grace of God, of course, keeping peace with all neighbouring countries, of course, taking power away from the oligarchs, and boosting the prosperity of all citizens.

Robert Paxton wrote in Anatomy of Fascism (2004): “Fascism may be defined as 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.”

We are on the verge of Fascism 2.0, where tanks and guns are complemented by opaque social media platforms and tech gurus that are not held accountable for the consequences of their work. Money continues to flow into politics, oligarchs continue to keep politicians in their pockets, messianic leaders continue to rile up the masses.

Electoral democracy is also failing as a system. We simply cannot get governments elected, that are willing or capable to phase out insane levels of wealth and income inequality. Since fascism is a byproduct of a systemic imbalance, it is unlikely that the system will be able to regulate itself from within. I have come to believe that no matter how hard we try, we cannot save capitalism from itself.

The crisis will reach its climax, in the form of traditional wars and economic wars, or sustained massive unemployment. We are not there yet. The COVID-19 pandemic was just an early teaser of what’s in the books. However, the appetite for change is real across ideologies and cultures. Not just the left is upset with capitalism, but even the far-right can adopt politics of degrowth against capitalism. The battle is about how to replace the old system with a new system that is not born yet.

The establishment of permanent national citizen assemblies might be the most sensible approach to counter-balance the political deadlock.

These citizen assemblies should be tasked, at the bare minimum, with finding solutions to (1) phase out the doctrine of proportionality that links the regime of power with the regime of private property, for example replacing the one share = one vote system, with one person = one vote, in the ownership of corporations; (2) phase out the doctrine of dispossession which allows the conversion of property into capital, for example turning indigenous land into capital for fossil fuel companies or personal data into capital for Big Tech companies; and the (3) phase out unelected economic hierarchies, by allowing workers to elect managers and executives for limited terms, and allowing employees to participate directly in the governance of their company.

(I have previously introduced these doctrines here.)

1. These solutions would mean the phasing out of stock markets as the means to exchange ownership shares in corporations. Stock markets have added a level of complexity to the economy that has completely disconnected economic activity from its supposed purpose, that of economizing resources for the needs of humans.

2. They will also phase out all billionaires, and multi-millionaires with the introduction of wealth taxes, and maximum limits on wealth and personal income.

3. They will establish economic rights, that were first mentioned by President Roosevelt in 1944, and go further to the extent of making housing a human right and affordable for all humans.

4. They will establish concrete metrics for what a sustainable lifestyle means for all humans on Earth, within planetary boundaries, and with fairness equally distributed.

Judgments about what a decent lifestyle means for someone in the rich Global North should consider the circumstances of all people living in the poor regions of the Global South. Well-informed citizen assemblies may be the only deliberative forum in which such numbers can be determined. It is only fair and just, that decisions about reducing inequalities in emissions and inequalities in material consumption, are not made at government level, but in a bottom-up approach, where the people themselves decide the boundaries of fairness.

Questions to be answered by citizen assemblies: Should all humans have the same limit to air travel? Should all humans have the same limit to how much gasoline they can use? Should all humans have the same limit to how many renewable kilowatts of electricity they can use? Should all humans have access to free quality healthcare and education? Should all humans have a guaranteed livable minimum income? These are just a few of the many questions on the reformist roster.

Anything less than these fundamental reforms would fail to reform the system. Citizen assemblies remove the suspicions people have with the electoral system, and with corruptible politicians. Regular people are selected at random to participate in citizen assemblies. This method of selection answers directly concerns about fairness and genuine representation, since anyone could be selected.

Degrowth means the phasing in of economic democracy and the phasing in wellbeing economics. Degrowth is asking these important questions, and many more, that are fundamental to creating a new economy. There is simply no path forward without deciding democratically how fairness should be distributed between all citizens, and also between nations.

Fascism rises when fairness has stopped being the center of public discourse. When leaders are obsessed with talks about identity, meritocracy for the privileged, rewards for the famous and the powerful, they create a void in the soul that seeks to be filled with divisive emotions. Bringing back serious debates about fairness, with citizens assemblies created for this purpose, can restore the wounded soul, save us from fascism, and take us out of the climate crisis and social crisis.