The capitalist emphasis on working hard as the key to success comfortably ignores an ugly reality: that the workforce faces worsening conditions and increasing precarity, while extractivism has brought the planet to the verge of ecological collapse. From the teachings of André Gorz to Gen Z’s quest for work-life balance, liberating time is at the centre of endeavours to achieve a better life – not just to consume freely as individuals, but to come together as a community.

Dirk Holemans: For older progressives, André Gorz has been a major source of inspiration, but even more interesting is what he could offer to new generations.

Céline Marty: Gorz deserves to be rediscovered because he’s someone who, even back in the 1970s, was linking critiques of work culture to environmental issues, a perspective which is sorely missing from contemporary discussions. Fifty years later, we still have to think about work and environmentalism in tandem; otherwise we risk reducing environmentalism either to spheres of individual influence or to infrastructure changes that ultimately take place beyond the confines of our work and professional lives.

Gorz’s efforts to unite labour and environmental and social movements still constitute a relevant political action today, but his way of understanding degrowth is also making a comeback in public debates. When I first read his texts on political ecology, I found them to be a radical, clear, and frank critique of capitalism. His is a unique form of ecology that won’t settle for sustainable development or small gestures. This makes it much more radical, and also much clearer in the strategies and solutions it proposes.

When I read Métamorphoses du travail (“Metamorphosis of Work”), I found a text that was wholly relevant to our society. Its critique of the ideology of work is still pertinent today. In France, Sarkozy’s mantra of “work more to earn more” firmly entrenched this mindset. It was this ideology of work that was debated in the 1980s, and which led to discussions about reducing working hours. Today, all of Gorz’s criticisms of the ideology of work are still valid, and his view of the service industry – the fact that we are trying at all costs to create jobs, even ones like dog walkers, sushi delivery drivers, and so on – is completely applicable to modern society.

We could also say that today, there is too much emphasis on purchasing power. It plays a central role, while other challenges are talked about less. But how much money you need to live depends on the cost of housing, food, utilities, etc.

Ultimately, we can approach this demand for purchasing power by exploring how wealth is redistributed. It’s actually very interesting. In European public discourse, we have all these debates around [French economist Gabriel] Zucman that highlight the enormous increase in the wealth of the ultra-rich. This naturally points to the issue of redistribution, and thus to social and fiscal justice. But there is also a more qualitative issue: defending public services and showing that the strength of the French system compared to the American system is that, despite lower salaries, much of the cost of living in France is socialised. We don’t pay for school, and we pay next to nothing for university. Moreover, we don’t pay the full cost of public transport, health insurance, or a significant part of our social welfare.

So, ultimately, one qualitative response to this demand for purchasing power is to defend public services. It’s also an opportunity to say that these are not just economic or material demands, but demands for a better life.

So, this is not just an issue of wages. It goes hand in hand with things like taxation and investing in the future, particularly environmental investments.

Another idea that is very important in Gorz’s work is grassroots autonomy. This distances him from the belief in centralised government that has dominated much of the Left. But are social justice and the green transition possible without the state?

I propose a reinterpretation of Gorz’s entire philosophy by examining the concept of alienation – and his response to it – through the concept of self-management. He notes that life is self-managed on an ecological level and then relates this to the self-management of one’s own time, for which he advocates reducing working hours and implementing a universal basic income.

Regarding the role of the state, particularly in implementing social justice, one of its primary responsibilities is to collect taxes, and that may actually be its most needed role: to do so in a fairer way than we currently do. That’s the current focus of public discourse as well, with Macron having given many fiscal gifts to the country’s richest people. The question is also how we redistribute wealth and how we can, at different geographic levels, be financially autonomous enough to manage our own local projects. This is also a debate about how to handle taxes on a local level.

Without this autonomy, people are forced to beg the state for funding for their local initiatives. Gorz criticised the fact that mayors are forced to go begging to the government in Paris for money to finance their projects. So, we clearly need the state to relinquish some of its power. In a way, this was what Gorz said to the socialists in response to [socialist president François] Mitterrand’s 1980 slogan, “We are going to change life itself”. In his weekly Le Nouvel Observateur Gorz replied: “We don’t want you to change our lives for us.”

But society is divided among different generations. For instance, Generation Z are very focused on finding a balance between their personal and professional lives. Can we understand this as a contemporary interpretation of Gorz’s philosophy?

Some sociologists who study work culture say that young people want the same things as other generations and that, for them, work still matters. Personally, I think that we can explain generational differences through different life experiences.

We have historically told people that social mobility depends on rising through the executive ranks, which itself requires a university degree. But today we see that the conditions for working people and students have declined. This means young people are realising that, even after completing a master’s degree or two, they can’t find a job that interests them and also offers good working conditions. I also think that if you’re 25 today, you’ve watched your parents’ working conditions get worse and worse. This undermines the idea that if you play the capitalist game right, getting the right degrees and experience, everything will work out. In fact, you might see it as a bit misleading, because even 50-year-old senior professionals are now working under poor conditions.

When we quit, criticise, or are reluctant to commit to a job, or when we change jobs all the time, this is in fact the result of a great loss of faith in contemporary capitalism.

So, has capitalism changed form?

In shareholder capitalism, workers, including senior managers, can be quickly dismissed, but under the more paternalistic capitalist model, people were looked after more closely until the end. This fact has profoundly changed how people relate to work. I still believe, for example, that the children of the France Télécom employees who committed suicide have a different relationship with work than their parents did. When you see that work can kill your loved ones, when you see how much working conditions can cause people to suffer, it creates a different relationship with work. Moreover, I think that witnessing their parents being mistreated at work ultimately leads children to become quite rebellious, because it creates a critical distance. Seeing that living by the rules of capitalism doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere can be very disheartening.

And so, I believe that when we quit, criticise, or are reluctant to commit to a job, or when we change jobs all the time, this is in fact the result of a great loss of faith in contemporary capitalism. It also signals a rupture in the idea that you need to have a career and that you can count on your job in the long term. I think that, in fact, we are well aware that we are disposable, and that there is no contract of trust in either the private or public sector. Restructurings and staff cuts lead to a situation of critical distance.

This isn’t a strictly generational phenomenon either – it plays out according to social class and employability. When you are sure of your own employability and have a good experience in your first job, you can allow yourself to imagine that there might be something else better out there. But when your primary concern is just finding stable employment instead of precarious work, you obviously do not have the same ambitions.

One of Gorz’s key ideas is the distinction between free time and “liberated time”. The latter of these can be used autonomously, free of the demands of capitalism.

In France, where we have this idea of collective “liberated time”, we maintain a tradition of volunteering. Statistics show that around a quarter of the population is involved in some kind of volunteering or community work, and this culture of community involvement can start at a very young age, through sporting or cultural activities. I would say that this kind of involvement even increases during one’s university years, and it’s only really when you enter working life that you start to feel that work takes up all your time. It becomes difficult to find time to do other things, and to be confident enough in one’s job to be able to say, “I’m leaving early, I’ve got other stuff to do.”

It’s also important to have collective institutions that allow us to spend this free time outside of capitalist logic. Because, of course, we know full well – especially with the online economy – that the goal is to occupy our free time and our “available brain time” and make us consume more through online advertising. On this point, I think it is interesting to look back at what happened in the 1980s, when there were discussions on reducing working hours, of a cultural society, and of “changing life”. During that time, many cultural policies were put in place to build things like libraries, swimming pools, sports grounds, theatres, and so on.

Talking about reducing working hours also meant proposing shared infrastructure and places where we could spend that time. The Popular Front did this in the 1930s by developing sports and holiday infrastructure. Subsequently, these policies were undermined by budget cuts to culture, sports, and associations, weakening the structures that enabled people to spend their free time collectively and reflectively.

Culture and sports also enable us to exist outside of our productive capitalist role. When you participate in a sport, theatre, or dance group, you exist outside your job; if we weaken all these structures outside the job market and the economy, our free time will be dedicated to consumption and consumption alone. That’s why I think it is extremely important to go against the grain and defend a culture of leisure through public services.

The environmental crisis is a crisis of overproduction, of too much work, of too much extraction, of wasteful production on many different levels.

What do you think is the most central and necessary element for the ecological transition?

For me, criticising the ideology of work is a deliberate strategy to convince people that the only way forward is to take degrowth seriously. Working less to live better, doing things better with less. It’s therefore vitally important to remind people that degrowth is the horizon we’re working towards. The environmental crisis is a crisis of overproduction, of too much work, of too much extraction, of wasteful production on many different levels.

The environmental crisis is also caused by the lifestyles of the wealthiest. They are the ones who must be urged to consume less, and this means it is also a question of social justice. I believe that the ideal of working less is appealing to everyone whose working conditions cause them suffering on a daily basis.

If we can put forward serious environmental projects that assert that the environmentally friendly way forward is working less, then that’s a very attractive idea. I think this idea of “work austerity” is one of the most appealing proposals that can be made as part of the ecological transition. It feels good when you take a break from work or work less, and that’s something we need to stand by.

For decades, GDP – and efforts to maximise it – has sat at the heart of global economic orthodoxy. But as its shortcomings become increasingly clear amid planetary collapse and rising inequality, the need for an alternative is felt acutely. Can Europe take the lead in normalising a better, more sustainable wellbeing indicator?

The European Union’s first aim is to “promote peace, its values and the well-being of its citizens”. Yet the primary metric it uses for measuring progress captures none of these goals; quite the opposite, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is hindering sustainable and inclusive wellbeing.

For over 80 years, GDP has been the dominant indicator for guiding policy. Europe is no exception; indeed, one reason GDP was adopted as the primary standard for comparing the size of national economies at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 was to measure the cost of rebuilding Europe following World War II.

Today, economists, politicians, and the media still treat GDP as a proxy not just for economic “output”, but for wider societal progress: the higher the GDP of a country, the better its standard of living must be. Yet the metric was never intended to measure what most people value, such as health, community, environment, equality, and quality of life. GDP simply quantifies the monetary value of marketed goods and services produced within a country’s borders. What the metric omits – the wellbeing of people and planet – is far more consequential than what it counts.

This blind spot matters, because what gets measured shapes what gets managed. If GDP is the lens through which progress is judged, governments will prioritise economic output above all else, even when that output ignores – and potentially even undermines – the very foundations of wellbeing.

Take the illustrative example of an oil spill, which wastes non-renewable resources and causes immense damage to the surrounding ecosystems. Since ecosystems have no current market value, their decimation is not recorded by economic accounts. Conversely, wages for human labour used to clean a spill have a market value. The result of an oil spill is therefore recorded as a net positive for the economy. This is the consequence of GDP’s methodology: it homogenises all exchange of money as positive, regardless of social and environmental impacts.

As the ecological crisis deepens, a metric of “progress” based solely on economic output is clearly not suitable.

Why GDP sticks

Most people can intuitively recognise the contradiction between endless economic growth – with the ever-increasing resource use and pollution it leads to – and the limited natural resources available in the closed ecosystem that is our planet. In 1973, American economist Kenneth Boulding famously said that “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” One year earlier, the Club of Rome had published its influential report “The Limits to Growth”.

Nevertheless, most national and EU economic policies are still geared towards growing GDP. There are several reasons why, despite widespread criticism, GDP persists as the dominant metric for economic progress.

First, GDP is extremely well established, both for ease of measurement and comparability. Details for how to collect GDP were published in 1953 by the System of National Accounts (SNA), the international standard set of recommendations for compiling measures of economic activity that ensures all countries use the same yardstick. Furthermore, data on GDP is available for all countries and is published quarterly, with records going back to 1960 for most nations. Through GDP, countries can track their progress over time and see how well they measure up to other nations. Having a metric reduced to a monetary value makes it easier for politicians, the media, and the wider public to understand. This is hard to replicate for more complex accounts of wellbeing.

Second, GDP serves the powerful. Some vested interests are able to produce short-term financial gain from the current economic system, even though this has often led to rising inequality and environmental degradation. Take the energy sector as an example. Renewable technologies are cheaper to deploy, and only require maintenance to continue producing energy thenceforth. But unlike the fossil industry, where money is exchanged for extracting, refining, selling, and burning fuels, renewables do not contribute immensely to national GDP statistics.

Public affairs firms’ lobbying of politicians on behalf of fossil fuel interests has led to impressive results: in 2023, fossil fuel subsidies in the EU reached 111 billion euros. These subsidies ensure that companies in the sector continue to make large profits, which in turn feed lobbying efforts. As long as fossil fuels generate extraordinary amounts of money and wield considerable political influence, it is hard to overcome the vested interests of those who benefit from a GDP-centric economic model.

Finally, opposition to GDP appears fragmented. For almost as long as GDP has existed, a variety of actors – including think tanks, national bodies, NGOs, academics, researchers, and more – have been criticising its limitations and putting forward alternatives. Still, advancing a replacement and showing it to be not only superior to GDP but also better than hundreds of available alternatives is a lot trickier.

Building consensus

In a recent study, we offered a route to overcoming GDP’s entrenchment. By mapping over 200 alternative wellbeing indicators, we found that these alternatives do not compete against each other or argue for wildly different criteria. Instead, there is strong agreement on the fundamental elements that should be included in any replacement to GDP.

Although these indicators differ in their time, country, culture, terminology, and methodological origins, underlying similarities keep reappearing. Finding the “sweet spot” between complexity and feasibility is essential in order for an alternative to GDP to be successful. Include too many components, and you create an indicator that is expensive to measure (potentially alienating developing countries with smaller statistical bodies) and difficult to understand for policymakers and the public. Over the course of our research, we identified 19 components that capture the fundamental similarities among the many available indicators. These include life satisfaction, health, life expectancy, housing, infrastructure, inequality, financial security, water and air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, crime, per capita GDP, and more.

While measuring productivity can be useful for tracking a country’s development over time, GDP should be contextualised with other metrics rather than being pursued as an end in itself.

The impact of such a shift would be enormous. Policymakers would be encouraged to view policy in terms of the benefits it brings to society at large, and not solely based on its impact on economic output. For instance, the new measure would clearly identify an oil spill as a negative event, boosting GDP but damaging other components such as life satisfaction, health, infrastructure, and water quality.

Of course, a framework would need to be developed to appropriately measure each of these components. For example, a measurement of the “health” component could include criteria such as quality-adjusted life years, number of doctors per 100,000 people, child mortality, prevalence of mental illnesses, and hospital accessibility and average waiting times. Experts in every field would be tasked with developing meaningful criteria for each component of wellbeing, while politicians would carry out the task of communicating with the public and helping people interpret the new metrics.

Competitiveness redefined

Moving beyond GDP will require more than a strong alternative, and building consensus on such an indicator is a prerequisite for gaining political traction. A key step in this direction is to coordinate and strengthen existing institutional initiatives.

In Europe, several ongoing research projects are exploring ways to move beyond GDP. For example, Horizon Europe (the EU’s research and innovation programme) funds initiatives such as Sustainability Performance, Evidence and Scenarios (SPES), ToBe, Models, Assessments, Policies for Sustainability (MAPS), Wellbeing, Inclusion, Sustainability & the Economy (WISE), and the MERGE project (which also supported our research on semantic similarity amongst alternatives to GDP).  

At the international level, there are two major developments. The UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond-GDP was called by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres in 2025, and its recommendations are expected to be released this year. While the impact of this initiative is hard to predict, there is no doubt that the UN’s taking an interest in the issue adds a degree of legitimacy to the beyond-GDP movement.

In March 2025, the latest System of National Accounts was published, updating (for the first time since 2008) the data relevant to the changing needs of economic policymaking. The newest edition includes, for the first time, chapters dedicated to collecting data on wellbeing and sustainability. There is no guarantee that this will lead to a shift in political focus, and countries take time to adapt their statistical bodies to the guidelines of the SNA (and that is if their national statistical agencies are well-funded enough to do so). Nevertheless, it represents further evidence of the shift towards including considerations outside of “traditional” economic accounting.

Europe needs to take the lead in this endeavour. At a time when it is struggling to define its identity in global politics, championing wellbeing, sustainability, and inclusion offers the EU an opportunity to be a world leader. International competitiveness has been front and centre of European debates, but if competitiveness is to be defined in the same old narrow terms of growing GDP and the policies that support it (cutting environmental and labour regulation, increasing natural resource use, reducing social expenditure), then we will suffer on the altar of misunderstood “progress”. If, however, we shift our definition of competitiveness to focus on maximising sustainable and inclusive wellbeing, we can set an example for the world on what it means to live by the values that matter to us.

The author of this article is part of the MERGE project, funded by the European Union (number 101132524).

What is the relationship between culture and the economy? And how can arts and culture help reorient collective goals and expectations towards more sustainable futures? Reflecting on the latest print edition of the Green European Journal, Patrycja Kaszynska (University of the Arts London) suggests that through imagination, arts and culture support the emergence of new social possibilities – new imaginaries. 

Recent discussions on the value of art and culture and political economy published in the Green European Journal suggest the need for sustained and systematic engagement with the question of how art and culture influence the direction, purpose, and social organisation of economic life and, crucially, how they shape what our future economies might become. This raises a set of prior questions: how can this happen? Through what mechanisms do art and culture orient collective expectations and possibilities for action?

These questions are cogent at a moment when growth – understood as socially extractive and environmentally damaging expansion – can no longer be assumed as a norm.

Animal spirits, expectations, and norms    

Recent debates suggest that the value of art and culture to the economy lies not simply in their contribution to economic output, but in their capacity to shape how economies develop. For instance, Mariana Mazzucato argues that cultural practices influence the direction and patterns of participation and support through which economic life is organised. The key question is therefore not whether art and culture affect the size of the economy, but how they configure its shape.

One straightforward answer is that art and culture drive change through inspiring. At a basic level, cultural experience operates affectively: through aesthetic and expressive registers, it influences moods, dispositions, confidence to act. This is perhaps in line with acting on Keynes’s “animal spirits” – a term the economist introduced to capture the emotional, instinctive, and psychological forces that drive economic behaviour including investment, consumption, and risk-taking. Yet this affective account is limited. If art and culture merely stir impulses, their economic relevance risks appearing shallow as a knee-jerk reaction.

Affects matter, but should not be understood in isolation from beliefs. In this sense, art and culture play a role in shaping expectations. Narratives, images, and symbolic forms provide frameworks through which people interpret economic change, coordinate behaviour, and commit to long-term projects despite incomplete knowledge. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller argues in his Narrative Economics, widely circulating stories – about technological change, financial crises, or speculative booms – spread through societies in ways analogous to epidemics. These narratives influence how people behave; moreover, these shared stories do not simply reflect economic realities – they actively constitute them by rendering certain futures imaginable.

The key question is not whether art and culture affect the size of the economy, but how they configure its shape.

In this context, sociologist Jens Beckert claims that economic actions depend on what he terms “fictional expectations”: collectively shared narratives that make future-oriented commitments possible despite the absence of reliable knowledge.

This all happens in the context where, as economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has emphasised, culture shapes what can happen by influencing both the identification of our ends and the recognition of plausible and acceptable instruments to achieve those ends in the broadest possible sense. Economic action, especially where futures are uncertain, depends not only on incentives but on shared understandings of what is plausible, desirable, and worth pursuing.

Seen from this perspective, art and culture help orient collective action and decision-making: they shape how societies identify their goals and recognise what counts as acceptable means of achieving them. They shape the horizons within which economic choices are made.

While this characterisation is voiced here by economists, it would likely resonate with artists, creatives, and people working in the arts and humanities. This raises a somewhat uncomfortable question whether similar claims, when advanced in cultural or creative contexts, would enjoy the same credibility or be dismissed as “a plethora of anecdotes that do not add up to evidence”.   

Setting this aside, what matters here is whether these claims are true, valid, and warranted independently of their disciplinary provenance. Notably, economists do not have a way to demonstrate that they are true in causal terms, and the so-called “theory of change” for how these processes unfold is still pending in their accounts.

Making the virtual real    

It is a big claim that art and culture matter because they shape expectations, norms, and actions. Recent critical social theory offers a way of thinking about this claimed transformation that avoids both abstract speculation and narrow instrumentalism. Rather than imagining change as a leap from vision to implementation, these approaches focus on immanent alternatives: ways of organising social life that are not yet dominant, nor even actual, but signalled or imagined and, in this way, exerting influence on the present while pointing towards different futures.

Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher uses the term “effective virtualities” to describe scenarios that are not yet realised but nonetheless shape perception and, possibly, future actions. He argues that what currently is the case – “the real” – forecloses alternatives by making existing arrangements appear inevitable and immutable: something neatly summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s TINA quip: “there is no alternative”. For Fisher, the virtual is not unreal but a field of latent possibilities. Art and culture matter because they can reactivate suppressed possibilities, making alternative futures experientially present and thereby loosening the grip of the TINA disaffection. But how?

Sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias” is helpful here. He focuses less on cultural perception and more on institutional experimentation such as participatory budgeting, worker cooperatives, and universal basic income and, as it were, fills in a missing link between what art and culture make visible and what is actionable. For Wright, social transformation proceeds through practices and arrangements that embody alternative values, even while remaining workable within existing systems. There is no big rupture, no total revolution, nor a sudden ideological rift. These initiatives matter not because they offer blueprints for a final state, but because they shift expectations about what is feasible. By demonstrating that different ways of organising economic and social life can function in practice, they create openings for change and the impetus to make the virtual real.

What unites these perspectives is an understanding of transformation as neither purely symbolic nor purely structural. Change occurs when shared practices are reconfigured – when the background understandings that organise everyday action are made visible, contested, and gradually revised.

On this view and as Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus argue in Disclosing New Worlds, transformation unfolds in concrete sites where meanings, norms, and material arrangements are gradually realigned. Narratives, images, and symbolic forms, when part of collective experimentation, play a critical role here as triggers through which new forms of coordination take hold. In this sense, art and culture contribute to transformation not by prescribing outcomes, but by catalysing world disclosures.

From imagination to imaginaries

What the preceding discussion highlights is the role of art and culture in sustaining imagination – not as free-floating fantasy or some art-for-art’s-sake projection, but as a socially grounded capacity. This brings us to the concept of imaginaries.

As defined by philosopher Charles Taylor, an imaginary is a shared horizon of meanings and assumptions through which a group understands how the world is and how it could or should be. Taylor distinguishes imaginaries from imagination in three key ways. First, an imaginary is collective, not an individual mental faculty. Second, it is practical – it shapes everyday action and coordination rather than offering escapism, solipsism and so on. Third, it is normative – it carries implicit ideas about what is right and legitimate and not merely reflecting some individual predilections.

The Apollo programme, the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, offers an illustration of how such imaginaries take shape in relation to art and culture. Long before rockets were engineered or missions authorised, art and culture had already rendered lunar travel imaginable and meaningful. Literary works by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, along with popular visual culture such as Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune, Segundo de Chomón’s Excursion dans la lune, Walter R. Booth’s The Airship Destroyer or The Aerial Submarine, not to mention Chesley Bonestell’s magazine art, widely used by NASA, familiarised audiences with the idea of leaving Earth and encountering space as a realm of exploration rather than pure fantasy.

These cultural forms did not predict the Moon landing in any technical sense; rather, they normalised the aspiration itself, embedding it within narratives of technological progress, collective endeavour, and human curiosity. By the time the Apollo missions were politically proposed, space travel was already publicly legible as a worthwhile undertaking. Art and culture thus played a generative role in assembling an imaginary that made massive public investment, political mobilisation, and collective identification with the project possible.

That was over half a century ago. What we are seeing now is that the value of art and culture is itself framed through an imaginary that, in contrast, puts a cap on the open-endedness and curiosity-driven nature of cultural engagement. As cultural policy and economy researcher Justin O’Connor notes, the notion of “creative industries” is deeply implicated in shaping our contemporary imaginary of what art and culture can do.

The creative industries framework does more than identify a sector or justify particular policy interventions; it actively organises how the value of art and culture is perceived, experienced, and pursued. By aligning cultural activity with innovation, competitiveness, and economic growth, this imaginary shapes which forms of cultural labour are recognised as legitimate, what kinds of public support appear reasonable, and which futures for art and culture seem plausible or desirable. In doing so, it narrows the horizon of cultural policy and practice, marginalising alternative imaginaries in which art and culture function less as engines of growth and more as an infrastructure supporting meaning-making, exploration and experimentation, reflection, and critique.

The foreclosure of alternatives is getting worse, not better, with the onset of AI. As O’Connor notes, “If the cultural sector agreed to self-identify as ‘industry’ as a condition of state funding, it is now being asked by the UK government to give up its collective IP to the AI tech bros in order to boost productivity – for the greater national good. In the face of this, the cultural sector stands mute, as years of industrial and impact metrics have hollowed out its sense of value.”

Seen in this light, imaginaries – good and bad – form the basic analytical concept of world-disclosure mechanisms. They are the background structures through which imagination is oriented, agency is enabled, and practical horizons are reshaped through the transformation of social practices.

Given the striking success of the imaginaries associated with space exploration and the creative industries, the pressing question is why similarly compelling imaginaries have proven harder to establish around democratic renewal or post-growth futures. If imaginaries, to take hold, depend on specific material and institutional conditions as much as ideas and meanings, then this question is not just for artists but also for politicians, policymakers, and funders who shape the conditions under which art and culture are produced and circulated.

Seen in this light, imaginaries – good and bad – form the basic analytical concept of world-disclosure mechanisms.

Reorienting economic life    

For a long time, the central challenge for those seeking to improve how the value of art and culture is understood – and, by extension, the quality of cultural policymaking in contexts shaped by evidence-based decision-making and public management – was framed as a problem of measurement. Many within the cultural sector itself embraced the false hope that better tools, better data, and more evidence of the right kind would finally allow art and culture to prove their worth in the competition for public resources. One upshot of this was, as Eleonora Belfiore argued, that art and culture were valued primarily in terms of their effectiveness in delivering other, non-cultural policy agendas. Unsurprisingly, this rarely worked in culture’s favour: building a car factory, providing a gardening allotment, or organising a football tournament would typically appear more effective in delivering regional development, health, or a sense of belonging when compared to the open-ended and diffused effects of cultural engagement.      

This instrumentalist approach has backfired because it reflects a misunderstanding of how art and culture create value. It only helped entrench the unhelpful opposition between intrinsic and instrumental value, with parts of the cultural sector reactively rejecting the idea that art and culture might have social, economic, or environmental effects at all. In doing so, it arguably undercut the possibility explored in this article: that dreaming feeds into disclosing new worlds, and that imagination can support the emergence of new social imaginaries.

While measurement remains important – and there is now strong work demonstrating how GDP systematically misrepresents not just cultural value but what matters to social welfare as such – the primary challenge today is one of articulation. Moving beyond GDP is necessary but insufficient; we must also move towards beyond-growth language. The urgent task is to cogently show how art and culture can be effective in triggering beyond-growth imaginaries. This is not to prescribe a single pathway – whether degrowth, post-growth, or green growth –  but to insist that alternative imaginaries are required if unsustainable growth is no longer to serve as the default organising principle of collective life.

There are at least three reasons why this matters. First, from a pragmatic perspective, continued growth may no longer be viable for regions such as Europe. The structural drivers that historically underpinned growth are weakening, while climate breakdown and extreme inequality mean that even when growth occurs, it fails to deliver broad-based prosperity. Second, there is the question of whether we should want the traditional model of growth. Recent geopolitical developments have starkly revealed how certain growth imaginaries remain entangled with histories of colonialisation and domination, might-is-right scenarios, and modern-day piracy. These realities underscore the ethical and political limits of existing models and point to the need for alternative visions of how to live together. Third, we are beginning to have a clearer, cross-disciplinary understanding of where the distinctive value of art and culture lies and how it operates in practice through world disclosure and by giving rise to new social imaginaries.

The significance of art and culture, then, lies in their capacity to imagine alternatives, orient collective expectations, and indicate possibilities for action, helping to shape the direction and purpose of economic life precisely when growth as usual can no longer be assumed as its organising norm.

Economic growth was long seen as the surest route to poverty eradication. That wisdom has since been dispelled. In its place, an emphasis on securing society-wide equality and wellbeing has emerged, but policymakers have yet to catch up.

This month, members of the European Parliament, high-level EU policymakers, trade unions, civil society leaders, academic experts, and activists came together in Brussels for a follow-up event to the 2023 landmark Beyond Growth Conference. On the agenda: how to integrate post-growth policies into the EU’s poverty reduction strategies – from the upcoming EU Anti-Poverty Strategy and Intergenerational Fairness Strategy, to the new Action Plan to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights, and the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework.   

At the very least, the event demonstrated that a one-time fringe opinion – that economic growth is not a magic wand for eradicating poverty – is now moving firmly up the agenda.  

The European Environment Agency has been calling for “growth without economic growth”, recognising that the obsessive quest for increasing economic output has been damaging for the environment and human health. A UN-backed Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth is being developed to encourage a human rights-based model of social investment that reduces dependency on growth. The new challenge facing the EU is therefore whether its socio-economic governance can reinvent itself, and bring about improved wellbeing without increasing the GDP.    

Social exclusion is relational 

There is much work to be done. Most people have been led to believe that economic growth equals human progress, and GDP growth is still very much perceived as a precondition for combating poverty. This assumption, however, is simply wrong: since the 1990s, progress in the eradication of poverty has largely stalled, even as global GDP has nearly tripled. Yet traditional poverty eradication strategies continue to rely on growth as the foundation for job creation, fiscal resources, and social spending.  

At the heart of this paradox is the assumption that poverty is primarily a question of insufficient income. Income is, of course, essential – but the dominant model remains incomplete because it overlooks the structural and relational drivers of social exclusion. Income-threshold definitions of poverty – still used by global institutions and embedded in indicators such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 1 – offer only a partial view. They capture the minimum resources needed to meet basic needs but fail to account for the evolving social expectations of increasingly affluent societies.  

Income is, of course, essential – but the dominant model remains incomplete because it overlooks the structural and relational drivers of social exclusion

As sociologist Peter Townsend argued decades ago, poverty is inseparable from people’s ability to participate in the living standards considered “normal” within their society. Social exclusion is a relational concept, linked to how one is ranked in comparison to others, and not just the result of deprivation in absolute terms. The EU’s AROPE indicator reflects this by incorporating a measure of relative income (one is “monetarily poor” if their income is below 60 per cent of the median), and it goes even further by capturing multidimensional poverty. Yet it too falls short of addressing the deeper structural and relational forces that perpetuate exclusion. 

Race to the bottom 

Boosting income is therefore not enough, especially since it has been less and less equally distributed in recent years. Far from focusing on GDP growth, policymakers should instead consider the climate crisis it has brought upon us, the inequalities it creates, and the poverty it exacerbates.    

Far from focusing on GDP growth, policymakers should instead consider the climate crisis it has brought upon us, the inequalities it creates, and the poverty it exacerbates.

Firstly, and despite decades of attempts, there is no empirical evidence that high-income countries have achieved the degree of absolute, permanent, economy-wide decoupling of economic growth from environmental impacts needed for growth to be compatible with planetary boundaries. It is time to “bid farewell to green growth”. And, as I outlined in my most recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, while the increased metabolism of the economy (closely correlated with GDP increase) gravely destabilises the biosphere, its impacts are most heavily felt by those living in low-income countries. Far from eradicating poverty, persistent GDP expansion is becoming a driver of future climate-induced poverty. 

Secondly, growth produces a burnout economy and worsens inequalities. In France, although median living standards have increased over recent decades, the income of the poorest deciles has either stagnated or improved only minimally: the living standard of the poorest 10 per cent of households has barely changed in real terms over the past two decades. At the same time, the share of income held by the top 10 per cent has increased considerably. The widening income gap exacerbates relative poverty, social exclusion, and feelings of abandonment.   

With the growing globalisation of the economy and the multiplication of free trade agreements, economists such as Bob Jessop note that the state has changed its strategy to achieve GDP growth. The Keynesian paradigm in which growth comes from rising consumption supported by a strong welfare state has been replaced by the Schumpeterian idea that innovation is the key recipe for growth – an idea recently crowned with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.  

Governments have thus sought to use any means to attract wealthy individuals and large corporations to maximise investment, R&D and growth. Inter-jurisdictional competition has become a reality in the current policy environment to spur foreign investment. States now rush to lower taxation rates and deregulate the economy. While stable and full-time employment contracts were the norm up until the 1980s, they are increasingly replaced by more “flexible” – i.e. less protective – forms of contract. In a 2023 report to the UN, I showed that fewer long-term employment contracts, lower wages, and reduced protections are leading to the emergence of what the British economist Guy Standing has coined the “precariat”. 

In low- and middle-income economies, export-led development has also resulted in higher inequalities. Large companies have benefitted from a structural advantage to enter globalised markets: they are the ones who gain the most from free trade and export-led extractive activities. A minority of export-oriented firms grow by consuming the natural capital of low- and middle-income countries, while small-scale farmers who are unable to enter global supply chains are left behind.  

Thirdly, GDP growth has sometimes also been achieved through the extension of the market logic to goods and services which were before not monetised, by privatising the commons or public services, leading to the growing “commodification” of life. As Karl Polanyi underlined in The Great Transformation, capitalism seeks to extend the realm of the market as much as possible. What was previously allocated on the basis of reciprocity or redistribution is now granted on the basis of the sole ability to pay. For instance, people could once ask their neighbour to fix their car; now they hire someone to do it. Those who can’t afford such payments are pushed further into economic insecurity.   

An urgent shift 

For all these reasons and many more, in July 2024 I presented a report to the UN on Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth. In it, I warned that economic growth cannot be pursued at all costs, even in the name of reducing poverty.   

In my report, I argued that an urgent shift in the fight against poverty is needed. Traditional approaches to poverty eradication have had their day. The question now is not how to keep growth alive, but how to end poverty without holding people and the planet hostage to it. 

Rather than pursuing endless GDP growth, governments and institutions should turn instead toward focusing on what really matters: social wellbeing within planetary boundaries. In presenting the report to the UN, I committed to developing a Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth – a comprehensive toolbox of policy measures, built together with UN agencies, governments, civil society organisations, academics, trade unions and others, to guide our economies away from profit maximisation and towards fulfilling human rights.  

Rather than pursuing endless GDP growth, governments and institutions should turn instead toward focusing on what really matters: social wellbeing within planetary boundaries.

At the heart of the Roadmap – which will be presented to the UN in 2026 – are policies that deliver universal basic services. Food and housing are currently mostly allocated to individuals based on their ability to pay, but should be taken out of the realm of the market and allocated on the basis of need, consistent with their status as human rights. Free healthcare and education for all are existing examples of decommodified goods and services, and expanding this approach is a cornerstone of the Roadmap.  

Complementary measures such as a basic income for all or a job guarantee – whereby the government guarantees a job to anyone willing and able to work – can further ensure that everyone has a stable foundation from which to meet their needs. Reduced working time could encourage people to adopt less energy-intensive lifestyles, while also helping to distribute domestic work more evenly. Implementing reforms to increase the progressivity of fiscal systems, including wealth and inheritance taxes, coupled with decisive action to tackle tax evasion, are just some of the paths proposed in the Roadmap to finance this shift. 

However, providing free access to basic services would not, on its own, overcome social exclusion; only reducing inequalities can. Tackling inequality is essential to eliminating poverty beyond growth. When disparities are reduced, social expectations become more realistic for those with the least, easing the social pressures that exacerbate poverty and the sense of social exclusion.  

Lower inequality can also curb harmful consumption trends. High-end luxury habits, such as the use of SUVs in cities or the building of large mansions, create status pressures in the general population. Citizens tend to mimic these unsustainable consumption patterns, in what is often referred to as the Veblen effect. Policies to curb consumerism and harmful advertising could help shift societies towards sustainable forms of wellbeing. By limiting extremely costly and unsustainable status consumption – what has been termed “conspicuous” consumption – societies can practically advance towards tackling poverty within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries. 

A new era 

These are the bold yet achievable measures that must shape the next generation of anti-poverty efforts – including, in Europe, the new Action Plan to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights, the Quality Jobs Roadmap, the EU Intergenerational Fairness Strategy, and the first-ever EU Anti-Poverty Strategy.  This is especially important in an environment in which competing priorities – notably defence, security, and competitiveness – along with a green backlash, risk overshadowing social objectives and crowding out fiscal space for social investment, already hindered by the recent reform of EU fiscal rules.  

By embracing the policies set out in the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, the EU can lead a new global era of poverty eradication – one that transcends growth dependence and puts human rights and planetary stability at its core. 

Hyped as a driver of economic growth, culture has been systematically devalued and marginalised in public policy over the past few decades. This has led to increased precarity now compounded by predatory AI systems. If GDP is not a good metric to measure the value of arts and culture, how should we rethink their role in our societies?

For the last 35 years, arts and culture, in the form of the “creative industries”, have been primarily valued as a driver of economic growth. This connection was more than a marriage of convenience, whereby the sector simply used metrics of gross value added (GVA), employment, or innovation spillovers as advocacy tools for government funding. Rather, it was a powerful economic imaginary. The idea of cultural industries emerged in the 1980s. This was a time of deindustrialisation, when many old industrial cities believed that lost jobs could be replaced by the kinds of cultural activities quite literally occupying the newly vacant factories and warehouses. The cultural industries were viewed as part of a new post-Fordist economy, in which standardised goods gave way to niche customisation, an expanded service sector, and the growing importance of knowledge “intangibles” in production.

Goods with a high “aesthetic” content and services that provided “experiences” proliferated, driven by individualised lifestyles. Production of high-touch, customised goods and services required the embodied aesthetic know-how and “out of the box” innovation traditionally associated with artists. Cultural industries thus went from being a pre-industrial artisanal hangover to post-Fordist bleeding edge almost overnight. This was the flip side to the belief that the new consumption economy, uncoupled from utilitarian need and driven by infinite – because insatiable – desire, would generate new demand for high-profit consumer goods, stimulate investment, and counter the signs of economic slowdown that had been around since the mid-1970s.

It was this structural connection to post-Fordist growth, rather than clever advocacy metrics, which gave the creative industries a forward-oriented, even utopian, aspect in the later 1990s. They were closely linked to the new agglomeration economies of cities, now released from their nation-state containers to swim in global flows – an urban “renaissance” generating a sense of metropolitan autonomy coupled to the progressive politics of an educated, professional class.

But before the turn of the millennium, the links to European-style social market economies had given way to the creative entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley. This shift was exemplified by the profoundly a-social market definition of creative industries given by the UK government in 1998, as “those activities that originate from individual creativity, skill, and talent, with the potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. This seemed to hand the keys of the future over to the “creative class”. For, as Richard Florida suggested, “if workers control the means of production today that is because it is inside their heads; they are the means of production.”

A failed vision

As it turned out, “creatives” remained factors in a production process controlled by those who owned the IP for the hardware and software systems within which cultural production was rapidly subsumed and the hedge fund capital that financed them – a tendency only accelerated by predatory AI systems. If the 1990s promised flat hierarchies, networked production, and grassroots innovation, by 2025 six out of the 10 largest corporations on the planet were involved in the production and/or distribution of culture – the ecosystems of which they increasingly dominate.

The upshot of this creative utopian vision was the marginalisation of culture in public policy. Government expenditure on culture in OECD countries sits at pre-2008 levels, despite growth in total government spending. Indeed, though culture was now an industry, the strategic levers applied to it were pure innovation neoliberalism – promotion of entrepreneurship, skills, and networking, public sector outsourcing, management by economic performance metrics – rather than the kind of state-led industrial strategies seen in China and South Korea.

Whether culture should be an industry or not, the capacity of neoliberal states to actually engage in industrial development was extremely limited. As the platforms and monopolies suck the life out of the cultural ecosystem, the sector has suffered a serious erosion of conditions. Cultural workers were never full professionals – their career paths were not clear, their associations (if there were any) rarely controlled entry and work conditions. But if the professional class is in decline more generally, then the creatives are in freefall. Employment in the creative industries is concentrated in metropolitan cities, and in particular parts of those cities.

The social context in which 1980s cultural industries emerged – cheap rent and public housing, free education, welfare payments, a social infrastructure of civic institutions and associations – has also disappeared. As the economic argument for culture stumbled and sources of income dried up, the advocacy game moved on to proving economic worth via social impact – health and wellbeing, social cohesion, tourism, and other “spillovers” – expressed as complex fractions of GDP using convoluted metrical calculations worthy of a 16th-century astrologer. More recently, culture is to be seen as the soft power complement to Europe’s rearmament drive. And so on.

In any event, the Faustian bargain between culture and economic growth has now been sprung. If the cultural sector agreed to self-identify as “industry” as a condition of state funding, it is now being asked by the UK government to give up its collective IP to the AI tech bros in order to boost productivity – for the greater national good. In the face of this, the cultural sector stands mute, as years of industrial and impact metrics have hollowed out its sense of value. But what exactly is the role of arts and culture in the modern polity?

The Faustian bargain between culture and economic growth has now been sprung.

Culture as foundational

In my book Culture Is Not an Industry, I try to argue that art and culture should be seen as part of the social foundations, alongside health, education, social services, and basic infrastructure. I used Nancy Fraser’s notion of “Cannibal Capitalism”, wherein capitalism relies on “non-economic” systems of regulation, political legitimacy, ecological sustainability, and social reproduction (child-raising, education, nurture, etc.) – systems that, nonetheless, it systemically undermines in its search for ever-expanded profits. Like the ouroboros, it eats its own tail. I argue that culture is also part of social reproduction (and is similarly being devoured), in which case, to place culture under industry and economic development is a fundamental category mistake. It should stand with the other social foundations and not be forced to serve economic development.

But this immediately hits a problem. Many who would broadly agree with this emphasis on the social foundations would struggle to include culture within it. If foundational liveability is a matter of ensuring the supply of universal basic services for most citizens, most of the time, how does culture fit in? Isn’t the proliferation of fabricated cultural desires and their ancillaries in fashion, travel, Instagram and TikTok, online shopping – the whole lifestyle-entertainment complex – deeply implicated in the sorts of useless, wasteful consumption that has brought us to the current systemic crisis? More generously, is not art and culture a matter of discretionary spending rather than need, something pleasurable that comes after, once the basics have been met? After all, art is not food, water, or housing.

Certainly, it is easy to dismiss popular culture as hedonistic and destructive, though there is often a scent of an older, patronising view of “mass culture” here that we should be wary of. Perhaps it is more useful to view culture as a capability rather than a need (or a luxury). Amartya Sen emphasises the capabilities that allow citizens to live “the lives they have reason to value”. This certainly does require material resources – as Hegel said, “secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself.” But foundational cultural provision, like education, with which it is closely aligned, equips citizens with the ability to fully engage in culture, to participate in the shared “rules of the game”, in which our active individual parole works in relation to a common langue. It involves a capacity to evaluate and judge our shared values and traditions, as articulated through art and culture, which is crucial to democratic life. Citizenship is then less a right or status than an activity of decision and choice where we are defined as much by shared meanings as shared needs.

Infrastructure, ecosystem, civil society

The cultural foundations can be seen as an infrastructure, a material apparatus or assemblage of cultural and educational institutions, spaces of preservation, learning, production and consumption, and the provision of cultural funding and support that allow individuals to acquire the capability to “fully participate in the cultural life of the community”, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights has it. This requires public funding and local democratic participation. This is not about funding “market failure” – funding things that, unfortunately, cannot be made to pay on the market. Rather it is about an explicit public, democratic commitment to providing the foundations by which everyone can participate in culture as far as they want to.

But a lot of cultural activity takes place outside or on the periphery of direct state funding, in the realm of civil society. These are ecosystems of small-scale businesses and embedded markets, community economies and non-commodity exchanges of the commons, art and cultural fields that are located on the edges of the fully transactional commercial sectors. These local cultural ecosystems make our towns and cities worth living in. Though not directly publicly funded, they produce public goods that we all share and enjoy: the book and record stores, the small performing venues, the side-alley galleries and pop-up cinemas, vibrant cafes and bars, local craft and fashion spaces, festivals and street markets. These ecosystems are facing a crisis, their public goods rapidly being privatised as the air is sucked out of the system by predatory platforms, big finance, hospitality chains, and real estate.

Perhaps it is more useful to view culture as a capability rather than a need (or a luxury).

The question, then, is not just about levels of state funding for cultural infrastructure but how national and local governments can find new ways of protecting the ecosystem of local embedded markets and variegated spaces of the commons. How to produce public goods that help sustain this non-state sector, to support local ecosystems that are disappearing into the maw of the capitalist ouroboros.

This is not just a local problem, however, for the predatory algorithms of platforms reach deep into the eyes and ears, into the excitable frontal lobe receptors, of everyone’s lived experience. The AI juggernaut, driven fast and furious over the political, legal, and digital sovereignty of so many nation states – and towns and cities – is currently set to fundamentally restructure our cultural and communications system with next to no democratic debate. A Gutenbergian revolution driven by a bunch of alt-right sociopaths in Northern California.

This will require strong, concerted pushback at many different scales. It will be a tough battle, but it cannot be fought without a strong sense of the social and political purpose served by arts and culture. Ultimately, it is a foundation of free citizenship, of individual and collective development in common, one based on an affective, aesthetic (related to the senses), imaginative, and embodied symbolic space of collective communication and meaning making. Images and sounds, movements and rhythms, and forms of poetic language speak to us about our place in the world. They allow a form of collective meaning-making, a distinct mode of symbolic knowledge not available to abstract-rational discourse, providing an indispensable, if sometimes opaque, contribution to our shared social life. The transformative ideals we place on culture relate to the creative freedom we experience through the capacity to enjoy, engage, participate, make, experience, critique, and celebrate art and culture.

As Dylan Riley recently wrote, civil society is not some singular agent but a site of Gramscian struggle for hegemony. It is a struggle that the broad left-of-centre, and even the small “c” conservative right, are currently losing. As Kaiser Y. Kuo wrote, “We’re left here in America, and perhaps in the West more broadly, with free speech devoid of shared meaning, innovation without a shared purpose, and pluralism without a civic scaffold sturdy enough to hold it.” The fight for a cultural infrastructure is not just about finance but about politics, about confronting “the systematic destruction of the cognitive and social infrastructure that makes cooperation possible in the first place”.

Growth?

Is there then no relationship between culture and the growth agenda? In direct terms, it’s pretty minimal; the economic “footprint” of the cultural sector is dwarfed by that of social services, health and education, housing, and infrastructure. In some cases, restricting the role of AI in culture and social media might actually reduce GDP (along with the emissions from data centres).

Indeed, for many, culture’s primary relation should be to sustainability, even degrowth. This ranges from measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the production-consumption cycle of art and culture to using them to inculcate ideas of climate emergency and sustainable living. But, apart from AI, culture’s carbon footprint is not that large compared to, say, construction or transport, and it is hard to see how initiatives in this area can compete with the mass production of renewables or replacing cement, all of which require massive state direction. So too, the cultural sector’s ability to change minds is of different order to that required to build the political coalition for a serious green transition. Which, of course, is not to say these sustainability goals should not be undertaken by the cultural sector.

Jason Hickel, a well-known proselytist for degrowth, writes that “those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the 16th century had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world.” This made people adopt a dualist philosophy “leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis”. On the one hand, this looks to an epochal, if not civilisational, cultural change that goes beyond anything cultural policy could handle. On the other, it reduces modernity to a particular worldview, ignoring powerful counter-currents in European thought that have long challenged this dualist, extractivist and growth-oriented worldview.

From our perspective here, culture’s long opposition to “economy” (however hypocritical and self-serving this has often been) and its articulation of very different ways of seeing the world represent a crucial resource in any project of fundamental social transformation. Indeed, we might say that rather than being a means of climate-sustainable awareness-raising, the very act of investing in cultural infrastructures and ecosystems as foundational to sustainable liveability would itself be a sign that we were overcoming the dualist-capitalist worldview.

More recently, there’s been a new “left productivism”, a call for a new industrial growth strategy in which the modernist promise of abundance can be fulfilled. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestseller Abundance is centrist “new deal” but barely “green”. But Matt Huber, Keir Milburn and others present a heroic growth agenda embedded within socialist and ecological ideals.

Few involved in this new growth agenda mention culture, a strong exception being Mariana Mazzucato. Already in her account of the “mission economy”, the heroic purpose of transformation is to be equally shared by the guy sweeping the floor at NASA all the way up to the scientists and astronauts at the pointy end of the moonshot. In her latest pamphlet, on the public value of arts and culture, she has an epigraph from Saint-Exupéry: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood… Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” The forms of “arts and culture” in play here are very wide, ranging from the shared culture of communities, to cultural festivals such as Notting Hill Carnival, and to the BBC with its economic and technological spillovers. This “culture” is to be used, somehow, to shape people around an ambitious economic mission, though it is not really clear what this mission is, other than a green and just transition. Signing up culture for such an open, unspecified mission is not necessarily something that will generate buy-in. But in any case, with such a big and amorphous lever as “culture”, it is unlikely to be very effective, even if it does give some colour and glamour.

Conservation and emancipation

Benign as this mission might be, using culture as an ideological-emotional tool to shape a new economy is also to re-instrumentalise it. Of course, moments of momentous renewal and transformation can call into being the great designers, architects, sculptors, and artists associated with other such moments – the Bauhaus and New Deal that Mazzucato evokes (and we might add Haussmann’s Paris, early 1920s St Petersburg, the Festival of Britain, or, to be honest, the early days of Italian fascism).

But rather than viewing culture as a means to shape an economic mission, these are surely signs that the vision has already gone beyond economics, to value acts of creation and imagination as an essential element of the mission’s end goal. Faced with these heroic calls, evoking Raymond Massey in The Shape of Things to Come, or even Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, I am always tempted to remember Baudelaire’s spleen, or Dostoevsky’s underground man, or the darker moments of Joy Division. Art as freedom is also sometimes critique and refusal. Negative dialectics.

Art as freedom is also sometimes critique and refusal. Negative dialectics.

In all this, we should not forget those other traditions that were also wary of untrammelled growth and unexamined progress: the small “c” conservatism of writers such as Edmund Burke or T.S. Eliot, those who look to tradition, sanctioned hierarchies, long-standing institutions and rituals of religion, civic life, and family. Burke’s idea of society as a “contract… not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, was aimed at the French Revolution, but it can also apply to contemporary notions of culture as well as “sustainable development”. This conservatism has been a victim of accelerated capitalist growth, of the neoliberal ouroboros. It faces the profound uprooting of traditions, the shattering of the established foundations of family and community life, and waves of ontological insecurity that have unmoored us from any shared vectors of meaning, fragmented by a hyper-individualistic media sphere.

We on the Left might bring a tradition of cultural critique and artistic autonomy, a questioning of authority and holding it to account, a confidence in our ability to rule ourselves, individually and collectively, thus leaving behind our “self-incurred tutelage”, as Kant had it. This is the radical enlightenment bargain that our tradition of art and culture forms a part of. This may now rightly be subject to post-colonial reckonings – and those of women, ethnic minorities, queer people – and all those who fell afoul of that conflicted endeavour for enlightenment.

But we are faced with a radical onslaught from the tech bros and their alt-right allies, in which every aspect of human experience is lined up for control and commodification, just as any sense of justice is to be swept away as irrelevant to techno-progress. Then some form of radical enlightenment, one that knows also how to conserve and sustain – culturally, not just environmentally – might be the order of the day. We are only just waking up to the fact that art and culture are not luxuries but rather were neoliberalism’s first privatisation, the reduction of a fundamental realm of human experience to that of a rational-individual consumption economy. Perhaps culture could help show the way out?

By exposing the link between the growth imperative and today’s socio-ecological crises, post-growth thinking has made its way out of activist circles and into political institutions. But what makes the current system so difficult to challenge is its positive association with freedom in people’s minds. Moreover, denialist and reactionary movements have spared no effort to hijack freedom. To gain cultural and political hegemony to transform society, post-growth needs its own compelling vision and narrative of freedom.

In May 2023, the largest, most cross-cutting, and best attended post-growth conference ever organised took place in the European Parliament. It was undoubtedly a great success and a major milestone for theoretical and practical reflection on how to build, within the planetary boundaries, prosperity and wellbeing in Europe beyond economic growth.¹ Yet there was no discussion on a concept that has been central to the cultural and political battles of this decade: freedom.

Denialist and reactionary currents have spared no effort to make freedom their own. They present themselves as the true champions of liberty against “woke” and progressive movements. In an Orwellian inversion of the aggressor-victim, insider-marginalised dynamic,² freedom has almost become their exclusive patrimony. Through a revived neolanguage, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are resurrecting themselves as Martin Luther King,³ while X, the disinformation network, is championing freedom of expression. As in 1984, it seems that once again, “Freedom is slavery”.

Ecology – no matter which current – is in the crosshairs of this conflict. According to the reactionary narrative, we have been living under the threat of a “climate dictatorship” practising a “green fanaticism” for years, as apparently evident in the European Green Deal and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The international hate movement responds to this alleged fanaticism with assertions that freedom must be secured: freedom to drill, freedom to continue with fossil fuels, freedom to slander environmentalists – in other words, one-way freedom, without restrictions of any kind, ecological or otherwise. It is a harsh awakening: after a decade of cultural hegemony,⁴ ecology and climate protection no longer sell so well. On the contrary, they are presented as enemies of freedom.

While this denialist reaction is taking place, the climate crisis has not abated – quite the opposite.⁵ On a planet with finite resources, our current economic system and way of life, based on infinite growth and unbridled consumption, is at a dead end. Thanks to the best available science, we know that we are at a critical moment, both socially and ecologically, and urgently need to look beyond growth to achieve a future of sustainable and just wellbeing.

But being scientifically right is not enough to establish the dominance of an idea. What’s needed is to win people’s hearts and the collective imagination. Freedom is one of the most cherished values for European citizens.⁶ As such, and given the onslaught of the extreme right, the post-growth currents need to fully enter the conceptual and practical battle over freedom. This is a necessary condition for contesting cultural and political hegemony.

To do so, we need to ask ourselves some basic questions. How is freedom, a polysemantic term, understood by the majority today? What is the relationship between modern freedom and the perpetual growth system? And what kind of freedom would post-growth have to put forward?

Being scientifically right does not alone make an idea dominant.

Freedom and consumerism: a minimalist vision

Freedom is not anthropologically immutable. Aristotle’s Ancient Greeks experienced freedom differently from how Adam Smith’s industrial Europeans do. Donald Trump’s version of freedom stands in stark contrast to that described by Subcomandante Marcos. From an act in accordance with virtue and reason to the absence of oppression or an outlet on social networks, the concept of freedom has changed throughout geography and history.

As historian Sophia Rosenfeld rightly points out, the current meaning of “freedom”, especially in the American tradition, centres on the capacity to choose. In a world dominated by the capitalist market, homo economicus spends his time choosing – or dreaming of choosing, if he does not have sufficient purchasing power – his clothes, his mobile phone, or the destination of his next holiday.

In this context, freedom of choice is often conflated with the individual freedom to consume. This means that everything can be an object of consumption, even the freedoms inherited from the Enlightenment: democratic, religious, educational, and sexual. Liberal democracy – or at least the use made of it – has a certain marketing tendency to turn active citizenship into a passive clientele where selling a politician or an idea is little different from selling a match on Tinder or a dishwasher.

This is the ideological victory of Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism. The more choice the consumer has in their life, transformed into a permanent marketplace, the more freedom they enjoy, and vice versa. Speaking at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump called the Green New Deal a scam and rallied against electric cars before stating: “We’re going to let people buy the car they want to buy.”⁷ Outside of any regulatory framework, individual freedom to choose and consume anything, as the hallmark of an electorate resentful of its socio-economic degradation and at the same time a prize for multinationals, takes precedence over the general interest or the climate.

The rise to power in the US of techno-libertarians like Elon Musk adds a further twist. Individual freedom and the elimination of state restrictions (if not the elimination of public institutions altogether) is the alpha and omega of the crusade to get rid of all social and ecological barriers. Beyond the dubious effectiveness of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), its creation is above all a warning: the state and its regulations – starting with environmental rules and solidarity mechanisms – are superfluous.⁸ This has a clear consequence: the winners of Muskian freedom – the oligarchy and Silicon Valley – do so at the expense of the most vulnerable groups and the planet.

Paradoxically, this individualistic entrepreneurial libertarianism fits very well with an authoritarian and centralised conception of power, as well as with illiberal democracy. In this framework, as Rosenfeld notes, “Freedom, reduced to freedom of choice, makes it possible to maintain a semblance of democratic ethics, while the political system has, for the most part, become authoritarian.”⁹ In other words, liberalism for the few, authoritarianism for the many.

The Faustian bargain between freedom and growth

Obviously, this minimalist understanding of freedom as merely the capacity of consumers to choose takes little to no account of the negative socio-ecological externalities that result from it. In its most recent and extreme version, this version of freedom is accompanied by attacks on, and fake news around, ecological and climate policies.¹⁰ But make no mistake: it is not by chance that we have arrived at this reduced conception of freedom. Its roots are deep. In order to understand our present, including from a post-growth point of view, it is essential to look at the evolution of ideas around freedom from a material and historical perspective. The direction that ideological, philosophical, or economic currents take depends on the material, energetic, and technological conditions of each era. They also express a relationship with the socio-ecological environment in which they evolve.

As French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier notes, the alliance between freedom and growth was born in the 17th century within what he calls the “geo-ecological structures of politics” and took off with the Industrial Revolution.13 Thanks to the massive exploitation of a new energy source, coal (and later oil and gas), and the intense exploitation of the lands and raw materials of the new colonies in America and Africa, Western Europe raised and expanded its welfare states, its enlightened development, and its modern democracies. This system of “extensive growth” inaugurated a new ecological regime, which, in addition to birthing new systems of politics and production, created consequences that are still visible today.

In the eyes of this regime, abundance is no longer just a myth of antiquity; rather, it now lies within reach of humans. With the end of the era of scarcity and physical limitation, resources no longer seem finite, and our desires no longer appear to have any limits. This horn of plenty opens the door to a new concept of freedom, conceived as individual and collective autonomy emancipated from all material dependence. In these circumstances, satisfying abundance, and thus freedom, becomes a socio-economic and political priority. Structurally, through the partnership between state and market, between democracy and free trade, this means ensuring the expansion and permanent availability of new sources of energy, raw and critical materials, water or land at local and global levels. Without growth, there is no abundance. And without abundance, there is no freedom. It is the Faustian bargain of modern freedom.

Thus, in modern Western industrialised societies, economic growth is logically regarded and defended, consciously or unconsciously, as an essential tool and condition for freedom and a basic underpinning of democracy.¹¹ At the same time, the market capitalism that accompanies this system – supported and reinforced by the state – is often seen as an example of genuine freedom. As a corollary, any obstacle to growth can be seen as an obstacle to freedom. Any project that clashes head-on with, or at least criticises, the growth dogma is intrinsically in collision with the dominant model of freedom.

Decoupling freedom and growth

In this context, the challenge of post-growth vis-à-vis modern freedom is enormous. By openly calling for a more or less radical construction of a prosperous society beyond growth, without growth, or with negative growth, post-growth and degrowth currents are hardly compatible with consumerist and growth-oriented freedom. Proposing to ban or restrict polluting cars and energy sources or wasteful behaviour runs counter not only to freedom without eco-social regulation but also to the mere promise of infinite material abundance. Even mentioning that ecological limits exist can be understood as a restriction of freedom conceived through the prism of non-restriction.

But no matter how directly it confronts the growth-abundance-freedom triad, post-growth cannot abandon the struggle for freedom.

This is firstly because freedom is much more than the ability to choose and consume without restraint in an ever-expanding world. Freedom, and the debate about its meaning, existed before growth became a socio-economic dogma. It is perfectly possible to think and disseminate another concept of freedom beyond non-restriction. For example, in line with thinkers such as Philip Pettit or Jürgen Habermas, freedom can be understood as non-domination, security, and protection against arbitrary power, as well as emancipation from subordination.¹²

In this framework, public policies for environmental and social justice, as well as the rule of law, are cornerstones for eradicating the domination of certain people or groups over others.¹³ Reducing this “over-power” and “power-over” is a sine qua non condition for expanding the freedom of the “power-to-do” of the majority of the population and, at the same time, guaranteeing the rights of minorities and future generations. To this end, in the face of the techno-libertarian and reactionary offensive, reconnecting the very idea of the state and the public as the guarantor of a freedom that protects against the powerful and the law of the jungle is a priority.¹⁴ However, in light of the historical role of the state in the mercantile and productivist spiral and the ecological crisis, we need to rethink its function beyond generating welfare based on consumption and growth.¹⁵

Post-growth freedom is frugality in a material sense and abundance in other senses: solidarity, quality, sustainability.

Second, we should not throw all modern liberty out with the bathwater of growth. As much as many individual freedoms were born in the heat of the material expansion of the 17th and 18th centuries, and with all the contradictions that this entails, the freedoms inherited from the Enlightenment – and even modern democracy itself – are also a legacy of the struggle against absolutism, intolerance, injustice, and authoritarian and arbitrary power. Self-determination and autonomy, whether for political, religious or sexual orientation or personal and intimate self-development, are individual and common goods to be zealously defended – and all the more so in the face of attacks on democracy and civil, political, social, and cultural rights.

At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the paradox surrounding the freedoms of recent centuries. In the Faustian pact described above, freedom has been thought of as emancipation from any material dependence. At the same time, however, it has been constructed on the basis of infinite material growth on a finite planet. In the 21st century, we know that the Promethean dream of emancipation is not possible for the majority of the population. The fruit of this combination of freedom and growth can only be enjoyed by a privileged few. They enjoy a good life in their ultra-securitised neighbourhoods and countries or otherwise dream of migrating to Mars, while the rest struggle to survive, the Earth being their only reference point and horizon.

To avoid falling into these eco-fascist scenarios, it is essential to decouple freedom from growth. The post-growth project of human selfdetermination is more akin to a “frugal freedom”, one that can be enjoyed with the smallest socio-environmental impact and material footprint.¹⁶ In the same way that the degrowth movement made it fashionable to “live well with less”, we could use the slogan “be free with less”. At the same time, although it may seem initially counter-intuitive, this low-impact freedom need not entirely forgo abundance. Just as a post-growth society does not mean that everything has to decrease, freedom beyond growth does not mean that there cannot be an abundance of pleasures and non-productive activities.

In this ecological framework, to be free is not to work and earn more in order to accumulate more material goods but to work less so that one can have more time to take better care of one’s family, the environment, and democracy. To be free is not to engage (often without real choice) in paid activities simply to raise one’s social status without taking into account the collateral effects but to work in a profession that gives increased meaning to life and brings more ecological and social value to society. To be free is to be able to make ends meet without contributing to the end of the world. The goal, in other words, is more security and more sustainability. Enjoying freedom responsibly, ecologically, justly, and democratically today allows us, and those outside our geographical and temporal borders, to enjoy more freedom tomorrow.

This is frugality in a material sense but abundance in other senses: solidarity, quality, sustainability, democracy, wellbeing, safety, security, protection, and social bonds. It is, in other words, a profound and positive re-signification of what freedom and a good life mean. That can help to gain ground in the fight against the monopolisation of freedom by negationist and reactionary currents, to recover control of the narrative, and to position post-growth as a transversal alternative for the majority, desirable and credible.

At a historical moment of generalised self-absorption, and in contrast to imaginaries of withdrawal that can arise in the environmental and green movement, this is also an offensive strategy to win hegemony in the field of the values of European society. There is one goal: to make freedom and sustainability beyond growth two sides of the same coin.

1. In mainstream economics, GDP growth is understood as a measure of welfare and the ultimate goal of modern economies. To go deeper into this issue, see e.g. Jean Gadrey, Florent Marcellesi & Borja Barragué (2012). Adiós al crecimiento. Vivir bien en un mundo solidario y sostenible. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo. ︎
2. Incels are victims of women, whites of Blacks, heterosexuals of LGBTQIA+ people, and so on. ︎
3. Both have compared themselves to Martin Luther King: Trump while ordering the deportation of migrants from the US on 20 January 2025 and Le Pen after being convicted of embezzling public funds on 6 April 2025. ︎
4. From the Paris Agreement to Pope Francis’ Laudato sí encyclical, the European Green Deal, and the pre-pandemic youth climate mobilisations. ︎
5. Some reports foresee temperature rise scenarios of 4 degrees Celsius in Western European countries such as France. ︎
6. Mainly freedom of expression but also freedom of movement or religion. See: European Parliament (2025). Winter Survey 2025. European Parliament. Available at <https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3492>. ︎
7. Donald J. Trump (2025). “Special Address by President Donald J. Trump at the World Economic Forum.” World Economic Forum. 23 January 2025. Available at: <https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-address-donald-trump-president-united-states/> ︎
8. As illustrated by the removal of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s funding for renewables, the dismantling of the federal education department, and the end of international development aid via USAID. ︎
9. Marion Dupont (2025). “Historian Sophia Rosenfeld: ‘The rhetoric of freedom-as-choice is appealing not just to a lot of voters but also to the tech oligarchs’.” Le Monde. 4 February 2025. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2025/02/04/sophia-rosenfeld-historienne-notreconception-moderne-de-la-liberte-est-calquee-sur-le-modele-consumeriste_6530519_3232.html. ︎
10. This is a hallmark of the new reactionary Right, the direct result of which is, among other things, the attack on environmental policies in the European Parliament. ︎
11. At the same time, it is perfectly possible to have a growth-abundance bargain without freedom. See, for example, the Chinese model.
    ︎
12. For Pettit, “An agent dominates another, if and only if he has some power over that other, and in particular, an arbitrarily founded power of interference.” Philip Pettit (1996). “Freedom as Antipower”. Ethics, 106(3), pp. 576–604. ︎
13. Be it between the rich and the poor, employers and employees, creditors and debtors, men and women, parents and children, heterosexuals and LGBTQIA+ people, bureaucrats and citizens, majority and minority groups, coloniser and colonised countries, etc. ︎
14. “State” here can be broadly understood as the government of a region, a country, or a group of countries like the EU. ︎
15. See, for example, Florent Marcellesi (2013). “¿Más allá del Estado?”. Ecología Política, 45, pp. 7-12. Available at <https://www.ecologiapolitica.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/45.pdf>. ︎
16. It is the ecological application of John Stuart Mill’s “do no harm” principle, which is present in an attenuated form in the “do not significant harm” of European legislation. ︎

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, security emerged as the most pressing issue in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all formerly part of the Soviet Union. But while military preparedness is an essential component of national defence, focusing predominantly on hard power risks weakening social cohesion and exacerbating the inequalities brought about by decades of neoliberal economic governance.

Thirty years ago, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania re-emerged onto the world stage after decades of Soviet control. Their regained independence ignited hopes of democracy, prosperity, and secure membership of the broader European family. Today, these hopes have materialised in significant ways: the Baltic states boast membership of the European Union and NATO, modernised industries, and, in some cases, striking digital innovation. Yet a more complicated reality bubbles beneath the surface: decades of neoliberal reforms – rapid privatisation, deregulation, and budget austerity – have yielded high inequality, large-scale emigration, and mistrust in political institutions.

With Russia showing a willingness to redraw borders and engage in hybrid warfare, the Baltic states have understandably prioritised defence. They invest heavily in armies, border controls, and readiness exercises. But if segments of the population feel excluded or left behind, can tanks and fighter jets alone guarantee security?

Some policy experts argue that true resilience requires a different preparedness that balances national defence with social cohesion and collective wellbeing. This broader vision, often described as “comprehensive security”, calls for robust welfare systems, engaged citizenship, and an economy that serves the many, not just the few.

The neoliberal legacy

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Baltic states became ground zero for experiments in shock therapy: the swift dismantling of state monopolies and the dramatic liberalisation of trade. Overnight, industries once propped up by Soviet planning faced international competition. Foreign investors arrived, ready to acquire newly privatised assets at bargain prices. Meanwhile, a local elite, often well connected to political circles, emerged with controlling stakes in key sectors.

To outsiders, the transformation may have looked dazzling: gleaming new office towers in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, with Western brands beckoning from busy commercial streets. Estonia famously embraced digital governance, earning a reputation for e-solutions in everything from filing taxes to voting online. But these success stories often overshadow deeper fractures. In small towns, factories shut down, leaving workers unemployed and communities struggling for a new sense of purpose. Older adults on modest pensions watched living costs surge, while young professionals weighed the prospects of leaving for higher wages in Western Europe.

This abrupt transition was frequently hailed as the necessary cost of “catching up” with the West. Yet for many families, it felt like being cast adrift in a world of uncertain job prospects and thin social safety nets. The logic of the time was simple, if stark: by slashing regulations and encouraging free markets, the Baltics would attract foreign capital and integrate smoothly into the global economy.

Over the next two decades, inequality in the region deepened. By 2010, Latvia’s Gini coefficient – a metric of income inequality where zero represents perfect equality and 100 extreme inequality – soared to 35.2, the highest in the EU, where the average lies just under 30. Lithuania’s score of 32.9 revealed a similarly daunting wealth gap. At the same time, an alarming 38 per cent of Latvians and 33 per cent of Lithuanians found themselves at risk of poverty or social exclusion, far above the EU average of 23 per cent. While some entrepreneurial individuals thrived, especially in tech or finance, others struggled to keep pace. Income disparities became more visible: newly built apartment blocks or suburban homes next to remnants of older Soviet housing complexes needing renovation. Healthcare and education, once largely state-provided, were not always able to cope with shifting funding models, leaving some rural residents with fewer services.

At the same time, the exodus of youth and skilled workers (often referred to as a “brain drain”) accelerated. Take the story of Kristina, a nurse from rural Lithuania who saw her hospital’s budget cut year after year. Faced with lacklustre wages and dwindling medical supplies, she eventually joined a wave of emigrants heading to Ireland. Such individual choices, multiplied across the region, led to demographic decline and a sense of loss for those who stayed behind. Schools closed in certain villages, and local businesses struggled to find reliable staff.

Another prominent casualty of this rising inequality was public trust. Initially, independence brought euphoria. Multiple political parties, open elections, and alignment with Western institutions signalled a new dawn. But as corruption scandals surfaced and inequalities persisted, cynicism set in. Voter turnout dropped, while populist parties emerged with fiery rhetoric about the ruling elites. Voter participation, once extremely high in places like Latvia (89.9 per cent in 1993), plummeted to 54.6 per cent in recent elections, while Lithuania slipped from 58.2 per cent in 2000 to 47.8 per cent in 2020. This downward trend reveals a deepening civic disengagement and paves the way for the ascendance of populist parties, such as Estonia’s EKRE, which secured 17.8 per cent of the vote in 2019, and Latvia’s KPV LV, surging from obscurity to win 14.25 per cent of ballots cast in 2018. This “democratic fatigue” reflected a more profound disappointment: the freedoms gained in 1991 were fundamental but so were the realities of precarious employment, stagnant wages, and minimal support for those left on the margins.

Undermining cohesion

For many people, “security” conjures images of border guards, alliances, or missile defence systems. In the Baltic states, with Russia next door, such images are hardly abstract. Yet security also depends on social cohesion – the intangible bonds that make people willing to cooperate, trust institutions, and work for the common good. If large swaths of the population feel excluded or unheard, social cohesion becomes fragile. This fragility can manifest as diminished civic engagement or vulnerability to disinformation campaigns that exploit existing grievances.

High inequality magnifies these issues. When the gap between winners and losers grows, people question whether the system truly works for them. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, these suspicions can run deep: are politicians funnelling resources into defence deals that benefit a narrow slice of the economy while leaving social programmes starved of funds? Does a strong military shield the elite while doing little to improve people’s everyday lives? These questions can corrode the unity necessary to respond effectively to external threats.

When the gap between winners and losers grows, people question whether the system truly works for them.

Citizen disenchantment with politics has a profound impact on national security. If you believe your government is either corrupt or incompetent, you are less likely to support its initiatives, whether these consist of tax increases to fund the military or efforts to counteract foreign propaganda. Public trust is crucial in emergencies: it determines whether people comply with civil defence guidelines or volunteer during crises. A population harbouring deep scepticism toward leaders may hesitate to mobilise collectively, creating a vulnerability that adversaries could exploit.

Latvia’s minority Russian-speaking community, for instance, has sometimes felt marginalised by language policies that prioritise Latvian in schools and state institutions. While the overarching intentions behind these policies are complex and stemming from a desire to solidify national identity, this can leave some citizens feeling disaffected. That disaffection can, in turn, be amplified by foreign media narratives eager to stoke discontent, ultimately further eroding the sense of a unified national whole.

Emigration, another consequence of inequality and lack of opportunities, further undermines social cohesion. Families become scattered across borders; grandparents grow distant from grandchildren; villages lose their vibrancy as local shops shutter. This slow-drip erosion of human capital undercuts a country’s resilience. After all, who will become the next generation of doctors, teachers, or civil defence volunteers if a significant share of that talent pool leaves for London, Oslo, or Dublin?

When combined with the region’s low birth rates, the resulting demographic fragility is more than a minor headache – it is a fundamental challenge to national sustainability.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and fullscale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have underscored the point that aggression can take many forms: cyberattacks, targeted propaganda, and the strategic stirring of ethnic and social tensions. By incessantly broadcasting images of empty Baltic villages and ageing populations, the Russian media regularly portrays the Baltic countries as economic failures to undermine their pro-Western orientation. For example, in Latgale, Latvia’s poorest region that is largely rural, historically underdeveloped, and populated mostly by ethnic Russians, Kremlin propaganda has focused on unemployment, low incomes, and feelings of being neglected by the central government. Moscow has managed to amplify distrust between communities, with ethnic Latvians growing wary of Latgale’s Russian minority, while some ethnic Russians feel increasingly alienated and sympathetic to the Kremlin’s line.

A similar story happened in 2023 in Estonia’s northeastern industrial region, Ida-Virumaa, where one third of voters backed candidates espousing a pro-Kremlin view of the war during parliamentary elections. In this case, the government’s attempts to win over these economically disaffected communities fell flat, as some in the region believed that returning to Russia’s embrace would bring them a sort of prosperity they had been denied.

These examples illustrate that if a populace is already divided by economic inequality or linguistic rifts, it becomes easier for hostile forces to exploit. Therefore, mending social fault lines is just as critical as pouring resources into cybersecurity and intelligence.

Budget dilemmas

The Baltic states have every reason to be vigilant given their geography and history. Joining NATO in 2004 was a watershed moment, anchoring them within a collective defence framework. In the context of Russia’s unpredictability, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have each increased defence budgets, aiming to reach 5 per cent of GDP or higher in the next few years. NATO Enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups stationed in the region add an extra layer of protection.

Since joining the transatlantic military alliance, modernising armies and training local forces for rapid mobilisation have become policy centrepieces in Baltic countries. Estonia has pioneered cyber defence – a natural extension of its digital society. Lithuania reinstated conscription in 2015, while Latvia has studied the best ways to expand its reserve forces. On paper, these measures enhance readiness and deter aggression.

Mending social fault lines is just as critical as pouring resources into cybersecurity and intelligence.

But do they also risk crowding out vital investment in social programmes that might reinforce the very cohesion these states need in a crisis?

Balancing defence and social spending is a classic policy challenge worldwide, yet it feels especially acute in small countries facing big security concerns. If budgets are finite, each euro spent on tanks or drones is one less spent on improving healthcare, closing educational gaps, or funding social housing. Critics argue that prioritising military hardware might yield short-term strategic advantages, but it will deepen social woes in the long run.

For example, a high-tech missile system might deter external enemies, but it would do nothing to help a rural mother struggling with rising costs or an unemployed miner from a shuttered Soviet-era plant. Over time, mounting social grievances could sap government legitimacy, reducing overall resilience. It is a classic paradox: a society that is militarily prepared yet socially fragile could be vulnerable to internal instability or external manipulation.

Aware of these tensions, some Baltic policymakers and civil society groups are advocating for a comprehensive security model. This approach weaves national defence, social welfare, and civic engagement under one unifying framework. The idea is to build robust societies that are harder to destabilise, whether via overt invasion or subtler hybrid threats. Treating social welfare as a matter of defence means expanding affordable healthcare, pensions, and social programmes to curb emigration and strengthen national loyalty. It also demonstrates that the government values citizens not merely as potential soldiers but as the backbone of national life.

Civic education and volunteering can also boost resilience. Estonia’s Defence League and Latvia’s Zemessardze (National Guard) serve as reserve forces and as focal points of community involvement. When people learn survival skills, medical first aid, or even digital literacy, they become empowered participants in defence rather than passive spectators.

Comprehensive defence also entails bridging ethnic and linguistic gaps. Policies that foster cultural inclusion – providing language support without stigmatising minority tongues, for instance – can fortify national unity. A society that respects diversity is less prone to internal fragmentation.

Finally, environmental and economic resilience need to be put centre stage in discussions on security. As climate change intensifies, the Baltic region may face ecological disruptions (flooding, temperature shifts, resource pressures) that strain public services. Investing in sustainable infrastructure and diversifying local economies can reduce dependency on external resources, bolstering resilience against natural and geopolitical threats.

The benefits of comprehensive thinking extend beyond the Baltic states. Within the European Union, conversations about “strategic autonomy” and collective defence have gained traction, especially since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the EU debates how best to ensure stability on its eastern flank, Baltic experiences show that resilience is multi-layered. It involves social investment, bridging identity gaps, and providing a sense of common purpose alongside any military build-up.

Resilience is multi-layered: it involves social investment, bridging identity gaps, and providing a sense of common purpose alongside any military build-up.

Redefining resilience

In many ways, the Baltic states stand at a crossroads. For decades, they have been lauded as post-Soviet success stories – digitally savvy, economically nimble, and firmly anchored in Western alliances – yet the next chapter of their story demands more than business-as-usual. The choice is whether to double down on the conventional path that prizes GDP growth and military strength alone or to embrace a more audacious model of national resilience that fuses defence readiness with social equity, environmental sustainability, and civic trust. The logic of comprehensive security already points in this direction, insisting that welfare, cohesion, and ecological foresight be integrated into the national defence equation. Building on that foundation, the Baltic states could push further and redefine what national success means in the 21st century.

An alternative economic paradigm is emerging on the European horizon, one that measures progress beyond the narrow gauge of GDP. Once a fringe idea, this post-GDP perspective has gained traction as economists and policymakers recognise that traditional growth metrics overlook social wellbeing and long-term stability. There is a growing acknowledgement across the EU that a country’s true strength is inseparable from the health of its society and environment. This aligns with broader European debates – from discussions of “strategic autonomy” in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to calls for new welfare-focused indicators – all suggesting that sovereignty and security in modern Europe must rest on more than just tanks, treaties, and GDP figures. By investing as much in their people and planet as in their armed forces, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania can position themselves as pioneers of this post-GDP development model. Some nations have already begun experimenting with wellbeing indices and sustainability metrics as complements or alternatives to GDP. If the Baltic states join and lead this trend, they could blaze a trail for integrating holistic prosperity into the European security toolkit.

Seizing this role would mean transforming the Baltic narrative from successful integration into Western structures to innovative leadership in reimagining those structures. Their experience with rapid reforms and digital innovation has shown that small states can be agile vanguards of change. That same agility could be applied to forging a new security paradigm that rejects growth-at-all-costs economics and instead balances military vigilance with social justice and sustainable development. In practice, this would make the Baltic states a living laboratory for how a society can be made truly resilient; a region where robust defence and economic vitality do not come at the expense of equality or the environment but are rather mutually reinforcing.

Such a model would represent a profound shift in mindset – from viewing security and prosperity as sometimes competing priorities to understanding that a nation’s strength is most secure when guns and butter are woven into a single, durable shield. By daring to chart this course, the Baltic states can move beyond being post-Soviet success stories and emerge as European leaders pioneering a 21st-century model of sovereignty and security built on inclusive, sustainable, and trust-based resilience.

With its roots in the countercultures of the 1960s, the Green movement is, at its core, a quest for freedom. However, from its inception, it has harboured a tension between its call for individual liberation and the understanding that true freedom involves respecting limits. With this tension now caught in the crosshairs of the right-wing counter-revolution, the Greens must prepare their vision of freedom for today’s fundamental political battles. 

Try stopping a stranger on the street and asking what they think of the Green movement. At worst, they’ll grumble about the bans and restrictions Greens want to impose in the name of ecological protection. At best, they’ll agree it’s important to protect nature and the planet we inhabit. But it’s unlikely they’ll describe it as a struggle for liberation. And yet, at its core, the Green movement is precisely that: a claim for freedom, both individual and collective.  

When it emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Green creed fused environmental consciousness (which predates it by centuries) with a broader critique of modern life. It extended and reimagined the spirit of the countercultural movements of the 1960s, which themselves were demands for freedom.  

In the 1960s, the post-war generation – the children of peace and of a new Europe – wanted their values, their voices, their choices, and their ways of life to be taken seriously. Their claims for freedom took many forms. In the Netherlands, the Provo movement baited violent reactions from the authorities through nonviolent protest. The hippie movement born on American college campuses, quickly crossed the Atlantic and played its part in the events of May 1968 in France. Feminism, too, was a movement for freedom – the freedom to reject tradition and social convention. Civil disobedience, rooted in the legacy of American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, was back in the spotlight. Sexual norms, patriarchy, the state, the military, technology, religion, and conservative values – every form of authority was up for question.  

It’s within this rich mosaic of countercultures that the Green movement found its historical, political, and anthropological roots. At its heart, it expressed a desire for a different kind of happiness, a different way of relating to others. In Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 classic Ecotopia, freedom is the cornerstone of the fictional green society that emerges on the west coast of the US after it breaks away from the rest of the country. The narrator, journalist William Weston, is taken aback by what he witnesses – not because it’s shocking in itself, but because it clashes with everything he’s been taught to believe about freedom, society, civilisation, and nature.  

The Green movement’s version of freedom is rooted in a philosophical and ethical return to nature. Since “culture” brought us to the gates of hell when it culminated in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, “nature” can offer an alternative system of values – or at least, so thought Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and the other philosophers of the Frankfurt School who deeply influenced the first Green movements in post-war Germany and inspired the postmodern critics of materialist consumption.  

The Green movement’s version of freedom is rooted in a philosophical and ethical return to nature.

Reconnection with nature and refusing to reduce it to a resource for human exploitation and control is central to the Green vision. But awareness of the destructive impacts of modern technologies, as per Rachel Carson’s seminal book Silent Spring (1962), does not stop at the conservative approach to nature developed by early Greens like Herbert Gruhl, a Christian Democrat who was one of the original contributors to the foundations of the German Green party. Indeed, the Greens’ vision of nature also offers a new dimension to the emancipation narrative that powered the left and liberal movements in the industrial age: reclaiming freedom from the artificial needs created by corporate greed, refusing an alienating productivist system, liberating body and mind from the grip of corporate and state power, and deepening democracy at local, global, and European level.  

In this vein, opposition to nuclear energy, for instance, reflects resistance not only to the alienating consensus of techno-science but also to centralised state power. Nuclear projects are often imposed without local consent. The fight against them is, fundamentally, a fight for democracy, community, and collective self-determination. What may have started as a “not-in-my-backyard” instinct quickly evolved into a “not-in-anyone’s-backyard” demand.  

Turning into a political movement, the anti-nuclear struggle transformed isolated resistance into a collective cause that rallied people far beyond Plogoff and Fessenheim (France) or Wyhl (Germany). At its core, the Green movement unites people who believe life offers something more than what’s in textbooks or dictated by the state. There’s something deeply democratic – and even anarchist – in that recognition.  

The price of freedom  

From its inception, however, the Green movement has harboured a tension between competing ideas of freedom: on one side, the call for individual liberation; on the other, the acknowledgement that true freedom requires us to respect the boundaries set by nature, and by life itself. Without these limits, individual freedom becomes meaningless.  

For a time, this tension remained abstract, beneath the surface. It only really emerged when Greens began to engage in formal politics, because politics requires drawing lines between what’s allowed and what’s not, what’s beneficial to the many and what’s harmful, what’s acceptable and what’s desirable. As Greens reached the highest level of governance, entering governments as early as 1985,¹ they attempted to reshape society. But as they did so, they had to reconcile their support for individual liberty and free enterprise with their commitment to ecological and social limits. 

This is seen, for instance, in the tension over which forms of energy to prioritise or abandon. A shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels towards renewables imposes constraints on markets, households, workers, and infrastructures. Likewise, reforming a food system that harms consumers and devours the planet implies limitations on individual desires, on farmers’ practices, and – unless balanced by other policies – on livelihoods, particularly those of less affluent citizens. Green policies do not always fully address the risk of socioeconomic inequality.  

Greens decided to participate in governments, they were quickly labelled as the party of restrictions – the ones who oppose new infrastructure and threaten your job; the ones who want to take away your car, your steak, your vacation, your pleasures. Their embrace of ecological limits clashed with the dominant model of freedom defined by material consumption. As French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier summarised: abundance is freedom. ²

 But the Greens partly failed to make their case that we had to change our ways and relinquish some of our freedoms – the freedom to pollute, to exploit, to dominate, to destroy – precisely to preserve the conditions of freedom. 

Indeed, even when other parties adopt green policies – on agriculture, pollution, emissions, or taxation – it is the Greens who get the blame for limiting what modern life is about. In fact, as they became absorbed into institutional politics, the Greens sometimes began to lose the social power required to effect true change. Their technical expertise in energy, food, or transport has made them skilled policy designers but poor politicians. In becoming institutionalised, they lost what once made them bold and forward-looking.  

They became experts at law-making and cleverly crafted policies, assuming that laws would change society. But while laws can shape behaviour, they do not change hearts or minds, at least not before the next generation. They assumed that raising awareness, disseminating scientific knowledge, and pressuring decision-makers would compel the change. And even when in charge, they found themselves trapped between the radicality of the necessary changes they advocated and the inevitability of compromises, which are the very currency of politics.  

Entrenched in electoral competition and the legislative process, Greens often lost sight of the deeper work needed to transform society: public education, civic engagement, and grassroots learning. Respect for nature, for limits, for each other, isn’t just about language. It’s learned in schools, at work, in politics, and in everyday public life.  

This tension is further mirrored within Green parties themselves, whose strong emphasis on autonomy and internal democracy often clashes with the need for efficiency, party discipline, and clear leadership. Increasingly, critics say, Green parties have come to resemble NGOs: an advocacy movement without a base, whose constituency is made of activists, experts, and concerned citizens, but which fails to enlarge its audience to engage with the public.  

Even worse, they allowed the “freedom” component of their DNA to be diluted, if not contested, by the heirs of the counterculture of the 1960s. Suddenly, prohibiting the use of private jets, recommending a vegetarian day in schools, or phasing out the use of certain pesticides were denounced as unbearable encroachments on personal and entrepreneurial freedoms. The new conservatives are claiming their freedom to not change.  

Consequently, the Greens’ own roots in individual liberation have come under fire as part of the backlash against so-called “woke” politics (which is, in fact, the mere continuation of the fight for equality and recognition essential to social justice). Again, Greens are partly responsible for being caught in the crossfire, because they failed to produce an appealing framework of emancipation connecting the dots between feminism, decolonial struggles, environmentalism, and social justice. 

Greens often lost sight of the deeper work needed to transform society.

From servants to masters  

The good news for the Green movement is that its critique of the dominant model of freedom is more relevant than ever today, and the social and ecological freedoms it stands up for have the potential to resonate deeply with the struggles and injustices many people face.  

One of the great underexplored issues of the 21st century is the push to extend finance and money even further into people’s lives and time. In the late 20th century, we saw a drive to get more and more people, particularly women, into the workplace. The two-income family became the norm, essential to a secure, stable life. And – despite valiant resistance, especially in France – working life was extended with the rise in pension age.  

This, combined with the pressure – most intense on the young – to make yourself a product, to curate an online presence for both your professional and personal life, and to have a second job or side hustle, has further encroached on “free” time. So too has new technology: many workers are expected to answer their work phones or check their emails at any time of the day or night. A motif for our age is the Amazon warehouse worker, scrambling to the point of destroying their health to keep up with the robot packing parcels beside them. 

Collectively, humans are increasingly experiencing life as servants to “the economy”, working longer and running harder just to stand still. But are we here to serve “the economy”, or should it be serving us? Greens – as they talk about the necessarily post-growth world (for you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet) – are the only major political current to seriously address this question.  

Other political families still expect individuals to locate their identity, status, and place in society through their position in the productive value chain. In this vision, it is difficult to find a place for those who are not engaged in conventional paid work – artists, carers, contemplatives, and those with disabilities, whom the discriminatory job market fails to accommodate. Greens have a different approach. They want to rebalance society, to free people’s time to be their own, not directed by a boss (whether human or algorithmic). No one lies on their deathbed and groans, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”  

Unsurprisingly, Greens have been at the forefront of the growing campaign for a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay – maybe eventually a three-day week, as explored by the New Economics Foundation.³ More radically, many Greens have championed the universal basic income (UBI), an unconditional payment that allows people to meet their essential needs, to decide for themselves how to spend their time, energy, and talents, acknowledging that they, rather than multinational companies or the state, are best placed to judge that. That is real freedom.  

Freedom from corporate reach in our daily life is a second focus of the Green politics of today.⁴ It is an indispensable freedom to rethink our broken food system, dominated at each stage – from seeds to fertilisers and pesticides, harvest machinery, commodity trading, and manufacturing – by corporate greed. The ultra-processed food-like substances that are increasingly penetrating markets around the world are destroying local food systems and sweeping aside food sovereignty, as powerfully charted by the Canadian academic Jennifer Clapp.⁵

 Whether it is standing up against neonicotinoid pesticides or genetically modified food, championing small farmers and growers, or speaking up for immigrant, often undocumented agricultural workers labouring in awful conditions, Greens are defending the freedom of healthy local food webs against the heavy financial weight of oligopolist multinational companies. They are fighting a similar battle against the enormously destructive fast fashion system, which has demolished local fabric and clothing production around the world, and against many other forms of manufacturing that have swept aside local artisans.  

Ultimately, it is a battle for the freedom to have a diverse, flourishing local economy rather than being trapped in the globalised economic system.  

In the streets and the institutions  

Green thinking has always regarded neoliberal globalisation as a heavy restriction on freedom, as demonstrated by, among others, the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”. What was notable about those anti-globalisation protests was not just their size and force, but also their creativity and playfulness. As one protagonist, the late David Graeber, later recalled, there was a large “‘carnival bloc’, replete with clowns, stilt walkers, jugglers, fire-breathers, unicyclists, Radical Cheerleaders, costumed kick lines.”⁶ Responding to similarly playful protests in 2004, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair commented that he was not going to be affected by some “travelling anarchist circus”. Understanding the power of creative protest, of facing up to repression not just with force but mockery, has always been central to Green thinking, and it is particularly essential in the age of authoritarian bullies like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.  

The broader freedom to protest has also remained at the core of Green ideology since its origins. Non-violent direct action, whether against fracking in England, coal mining in Germany, or deforestation in Poland, and taking to the streets en masse is a crucial part of a democratic society. Speaking up for LGBTQIA+ rallies in Hungary, women’s rights in Poland, or environmental protection in Serbia, Greens are a reliable voice for the right to express dissent against illiberal governments.  

Beyond the streets, Green voices also stand up in parliaments and campaigns for the freedom to demand, to imagine, to work for real change. The majority politics of the early 21st century, in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama’s now laughable “end of history” thesis, of the “nudge theory” promoted by now discredited behavioural economics and social psychology, explicitly accepted the current system could not or should not be changed, but only adjusted a little. This was the politics that ultimately produced Brexit and the rise of the far right in many countries. Opposing both the neoliberal consensus and nationalistic rhetoric, Greens demand the vision, the right to change what is clearly a failing system.  

Decisions cannot be imposed on it by either a far-away capital city or a multinational energy giant. 

Rights for nature and peoples  

In Green thinking, freedom is not just for human animals, but for the more-than-human world too. Drawing on indigenous thinking from around the world, Greens have been at the forefront of the rights for nature movement, driven often at the local level by attempts to establish the legal right of a river or a forest to exist and flourish. On a broader scale, Greens have led efforts to legislate against ecocide and to protect the freedom of ecosystems to flourish. This is not just the right thing to do, but an imperative for human survival: as the Stockholm Resilience Centre identifies, we have exceeded six of the nine planetary boundaries.⁷ There is no freedom on a dead planet.  

That effort is intimately related to the essential freedom of our bodies to live uncontaminated by the microplastics and nano-plastics now found in human breast milk and testicles, by the PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and pesticides in our bodies. These tiny particles restrict the lives of everyone from low-birthweight babies to Alzheimer’s patients. It is not individual action that creates this chronic pollution, but a handful of multinational companies.  

Finally, there is the most obvious way in which the Green movement has always been a champion of freedom, demanding the right to self-determination for the people of Tibet, West Papua, Corsica, and many other places. Moreover, Greens are too often the only ones standing up for human rights and the rule of law – some of the most basic freedoms of all – and against torture, false imprisonment, or corporate land grabbing. Too often, violations of such basic rights have been thought of as a problem that only exists in distant lands; today, however, they are closer to home, if not at home.  

Self-determination is not just a right of oppressed nations. It is also the freedom to form communities and to govern and choose for ourselves (what is often described as “localism”). The idea that decisions should be made by those who are directly affected by those decisions, and that power should only be referred upwards when absolutely necessary, is foundational to Green thinking.  

When it comes to the climate emergency, for example, the world has to decide that it cannot live with runaway heating and set a total greenhouse gas emissions limit. But for a town or village to meet its share of the change, it should be able to decide for itself whether it wants a wind turbine on this or that hill, or solar panels on every house. These decisions cannot be imposed on it by either a far-away capital city or a multinational energy giant. 

Green liberation  

The political battle Greens currently face is to reclaim their idea of freedom and reinsert it into the broader historical momentum of human emancipation. They need to reframe their message as one of hope, not constraint. In spite of climate and biodiversity urgencies, they have to focus again on politics with a capital “P”: not party politics and elections, but the encompassing vision that gives meaning to both the individual and the collective.  

Green liberation is a message of freedom. It offers to change everything so that we can stay who we are. After centuries of learning to be “free from” constraints and building our sense of individuality, we need now to be free together. Indeed, the freedom to be yourself is about becoming aware of a triple reflexivity: oneself, the world, and the planet. Because if infinite material growth is indeed impossible within the physical limits of this planet, there is infinite growth potential in each and every one of us.  

We thrive in the links we create and maintain with each other. And this is what Greens can offer to contemporary politics: a vision of humanity that is not reduced to relationships of domination or production; an anthropology that is not reduced to sociological determinism and victimisation; a representation of the world that makes sense of this individual life that none of us ever asked to live, the fruit of a desire that was not our own. In the depths of each of us, stifled by the anguish of living or fulfilled in our projects, there is the aspiration to belong to something greater than ourselves. Deep down, we are beings of connections.  

Green liberation is the answer to these dire times of brutality, aggression, anxiety, and fear.

Even the self-centred claim to freedom that powers the right-wing populist insurrection is not completely estranged from this feeling. There is, if you read between the lines, the longing for community and the mobilisation against the dissolution of bonds of every kind. 

The Greens offer hope. They bring the prospect of a care-ful society, a world where links are nurtured and communities thrive in democracy and solidarity. Often now, such thriving only appears in moments of extremis. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, where the US state – that extreme example of neoliberalism – was so useless and uncaring that more than 1300 people lost their lives, there was “an extraordinary flourishing of mutual aid, solidarity, and communal cooperation, something we might call ‘disaster anarchism’”. At its heart was activist Leenie Halbert, who was quoted as saying: “I just wanted to bring love back to my neighborhood.” The challenge is to produce such community action before the point of disaster.  

Green liberation is the answer to these dire times of brutality, aggression, anxiety, and fear. It aims to build from the grassroots up and to deliver the Green vision at the national and transnational levels. This is a vision of hope, of human possibility. It is our job now to find a route out of the impasse that neoliberal politics has driven itself into. That does not mean going backwards, but breaking down the walls, physical and mental, built up around us. 

1. In the German state of Hesse, where Joschka Fischer became minister for energy, and in Wallonia, the French speaking region of Belgium. The first European Green party to enter national government was the Finnish Greens in 1995, quickly followed by Greens in Italy, France, and Germany. ︎
2. Pierre Charbonnier (2021). Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas. Cambridge: Polity Press. ︎
3. Anna Coote, Andrew Simms & Jane Franklin (2010). 21 Hours: Why a Shorter Working Week Can Help Us All to Flourish in the 21st Century. New Economics Foundation. Available at: https://neweconomics.org/2010/02/21-hours. ︎
4. The Canadian series Continuum (Simon Barry, 2012-2015, Showcase) perfectly illustrates a world entirely dominated by giant multinational
   corporations that have outgrown and absorbed states. ︎
5. Jennifer Clapp (2025). Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters.
   Cambridge: The MIT Press. ︎
6. David Graeber (2007). “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture”. Available at: https://davidgraeber.org./ ︎
7. Stockholm Resilience Centre (2024). “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”. Stockholm Resilience Centre. 12 October 2024. Available at: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/publications/publications/2024-10-12-earth-beyond-six-of-nine-planetary-boundaries.html. ︎

By promoting self-sufficiency and localised farming, neo-peasant communities aim to offer an alternative vision to the capitalistic and productivist logic driving global agro-industrial expansion. Yet, despite recognising the similarities between the dynamics causing ecological collapse and those that marginalise women, these initiatives often reproduce the same male-dominated power systems. Even in progressive movements dedicated to degrowth, sexism can slowly creep in.

For a long time, European environmental and climate movements have been aware of the importance of considering social inequalities in their demands. Intellectuals, trade unionists, and political representatives have insisted on making ecology a social issue, attentive to the mechanisms of class hierarchy reproduction and the role of the techno-capitalist organisation in destroying ecosystems. However, while these approaches rightly highlight the central role of labour organisation in transition processes, they pay less attention to the risk of reproducing sexist power relations within radical ecological practices and projects.

This issue can be observed in the “back to nature” movement in Europe. Social scientists in various European countries have studied this phenomenon since the 1960s. Driven by environmentalist, anti-militarist, and libertarian anarchist movements, the protagonists of these initiatives are often young adults from urban backgrounds. They settle in rural areas to develop agricultural or livestock projects, sometimes aiming at food autonomy, but also with the goal of preserving peasant farming in the face of agro-industrial expansion. Today, amid climatic, political, and economic concerns, these struggles are also driven by survivalist motivations.

I have conducted participant observation fieldwork among self-managed agricultural collectives in France, Italy, and Spain. These communities of young adults, aged between 20 and 40, have chosen to develop a “peasant” lifestyle based on self-sufficiency and degrowth, where respecting ecosystems is as important as re-establishing a relationship with agricultural and artisanal labour, freed from the productivist logics and power dynamics characteristic of industrial wage labour.

The organic farming they practice is, in most cases, small-scale and based on polyactivity, self-consumption, and sometimes sales at local markets. Depending on the crops available on their land upon settlement, those involved in these projects engage in organic market gardening, goat or sheep farming for cheese production, and making bread, oil, jams, cider, or wine. They build and renovate old hamlets, carry out their own mechanical repairs, and cut wood for heating.

Beyond their drive to “do it themselves” regarding essential goods and services, these individuals are also proactive in organising cultural, festive, and activist events in the areas where they settle. Relationships with the local community can sometimes be tense depending on the region. Neo-peasants generally maintain a “low profile” to integrate into local social networks and demonstrate the benefits of their lifestyle and work without engaging in overt proselytism.

The ecofeminist proposition

These self-sufficiency and collective living projects, which seek to embody “here and now” an alternative to industrial capitalism, are influenced by post-productivist libertarian ideas as articulated by philosophers André Gorz and Ivan Illich, and geographer Élisée Reclus. However, they are also part of the social experiments promoted by ecofeminism. This intellectual movement, which emerged in the 1960s, has seen a resurgence over the past decade, especially in France. It is based on the observation that the mechanisms of domination oppressing women are similar to those that exploit and destroy nature.

Ecofeminism has sometimes relied on spiritual and conservative assumptions, romanticising the supposedly intuitive connection between women and natural balance, and falling into essentialist and traditionalist narratives.

Ecofeminism has sometimes relied on spiritual and conservative assumptions, romanticising the supposedly intuitive connection between women and natural balance.

By contrast, other strands of ecofeminism advocate for gender equality while seeking to elevate reproductive (domestic) labour to the same level as productive (paid) work. Highlighting the empowerment derived from self-sufficiency practices, these perspectives assign women a central role in constructing alternative ways of living. In this view, “peasant women” resemble a rehabilitated archetype of the “witch” – a knowledgeable, independent, and powerful figure capable of ensuring her own survival and that of her family or community, without relying on an employer or the state.

However, these are not the primary paths chosen by most communities I have encountered. With the ambition of task-sharing and horizontal labour organisation, domestic chores are, in theory, to be shared among all residents, who take turns cooking, cleaning, washing up, welcoming guests, or caring for animals. Yet this arrangement often fails to prevent the gendered division of labour and the social hierarchies that accompany it.

The “hard life” and ecological ableism

To understand how neo-peasant lifestyles sustain sexist power relations, it is crucial to acknowledge the normative importance of work investment in these collective spaces – despite the absence of individual wages, as incomes are pooled or supplemented by various social benefits. Proactivity, availability, and flexibility in response to the demands of agricultural labour – much like in traditional farming – permeate all aspects of daily life. Working with “the living” and being as close to “nature” as possible entails submitting to the rhythms, cycles, and relentless demands of plants and animals. Agricultural labour is thus omnipresent even if it is neither industrial nor productivist, and it serves as a powerful legitimising force within these spaces.

This “work ethic” is partly due to the nature of farming but is amplified by the glorification of a “hard life”, a virilist normalisation of rural existence. This is also driven by the residents’ desire to integrate into predominantly male agricultural social networks, where physical endurance, self-sacrifice, and risk-taking are highly valued. Too much caution, taking medical leaves easily due to pain or injury, or refusing to work without proper protection can be dismissed as “bourgeois intellectual” affectations – and call into question one’s legitimacy to identify as a “true”, “hardy” peasant.

The ‘real’ agricultural work is the work that is seen and sold.

The low mechanisation of agricultural work, tied to a stated commitment to decarbonisation, as well as the physical inaccessibility of these locations, further demand significant bodily investment – lifting heavy loads daily (construction materials, grain sacks, hay bales, firewood), digging, and cutting trees. In this context, individuals with physical strength and stamina are particularly valued. Phrases like “he moves mountains,” “he’s a powerhouse,” “a stakhanovist”, or “a real workhorse” serve as indicators of one’s social utility, indispensability to the group, and in some cases, a survivalist readiness for societal collapse.

This valuation of physical endurance also results in less investment in domestic tasks. These activities, perceived as requiring less skill, technical expertise, or planning, are often delegated to transient visitors. Despite theoretical efforts to equate them with productive activities, domestic tasks are also less valued within local social networks. The “real” agricultural work is the work that is seen and sold – people are praised for the quality of their cheese, freshly rebuilt walls, or cleared plots, but never for eating a balanced diet, washing up regularly, or keeping a dormitory clean.

“What do you do with your days?”

This situation marginalises women. Firstly, since most farming tools and agricultural resources are designed for male bodies, women must exert extra effort to prove they can meet the physical demands of this lifestyle. They often see their tasks as challenges they must pass to avoid being relegated to less physical (and thus less valued) work. As one woman told me:

Every time, I end up in the kitchen during the haymaking. Then the guys come back and put their feet up at the table. (…) They say, “Yes, but it’s normal, everyone has their role, it balances out, we value your work.” Except I’d like to take part in the haymaking. (…) That’s all people talk about, we sing songs, it’s an event. Not like cooking, that’s all year round. (…) But the 25-kg bales are too heavy for me, I can’t get them on my back [and climb the slope], I just fall backwards. We could make 15-kg bales instead – it would mean more trips, but they’d be lighter. But some people resist the idea.

Secondly, social dynamics often lead women to take on more domestic responsibilities despite a general commitment to equal task-sharing. This is particularly evident when they decide to have children. Pregnancy and motherhood are experienced as marginalising periods during which women step back from physical labour. To avoid appearing idle, they compensate by over-investing in domestic work.

After my childbirth, I was completely exhausted, and I couldn’t bring myself to say, “No, stop, I don’t want to do anything anymore, I need to rest.” (…) It’s a pressure I’ve felt for years, where I try to maintain my level of productivity while breastfeeding and taking care of my children. (…) And the worst part is that this work is not recognised (…). One day, we were having a discussion in a meeting (…) and Javier responded aggressively, “You’re tired? But what do you do with your days?” (…) I know that’s what people say about me, but I thought about it, I wash the laundry for the house, I clean, I welcome the people who stop by, I do my rounds in the kitchen… And in fact, it’s a lot, but it’s not visible.

Similar dynamics occur when women seek external employment, often due to family responsibilities (caring for elderly parents or children). As they spend less time on-site, they remain less informed about daily developments and improve their manual skills less, leading them to withdraw from collective decision-making on work priorities, investments, or production directions. Furthermore, their off-site jobs tend to be undervalued in neo-peasant discourse, reinforcing the perception that they need to “compensate” for their absence upon returning home. This, in turn, results in a more spontaneous assumption of invisible labour, reinforcing the idea that for women, “back to the land” is often closer to being “back to the house”.

For women, ‘back to the land’ is often closer to being ‘back to the house’.

This marginalisation is exacerbated by their minority status within these collectives. The few women that live in these spaces are almost always present as part of a couple. And if their relationships end, these women are usually the ones who leave, being less integrated into both the collective and the surrounding village social life.

Radical ecology for all

The climate emergency necessitates a reduction in consumption and a shift towards localised production models that minimise outsourcing and reliance on global supply chains. This means more labour – and that labour must be organised with an awareness of systemic power structures. “Doing it yourself” and reflecting on the implications of subsistence practices is an important political act.

However, existing neo-peasant initiatives reveal the broader challenges and limitations of post-productivist and communalist lifestyles. While these reflections emerge from the lived experiences of the people I met, they also resonate with broader political perspectives. Anarchist writer and philosopher Murray Bookchin’s communalism, for instance, insists that socio-ecological practices must not only aim to overcome capitalism but also challenge all forms of domination and oppression. This means moving beyond isolated practices of self-sufficiency to build genuinely emancipatory communities rooted in collective self-management and social justice. Achieving true equality in the face of climate change requires not only holding on to universality in our political projects or lifestyles – so they do not become privileged – but also establishing democratic mechanisms within them that amplify the voices of systematically marginalised groups such as women, disabled individuals, racialised people, or those from lower social classes.

We must aim not to discourage small-scale radical ecological initiatives but to emphasise that each social and ecological experiment we create – as essential as it is – unfolds within a constant, ever-evolving dialectic, shaped by the power dynamics of the moment and requiring continuous re-examination. These nuances, tentative experiences, debates, and ever-redefined hopes form the beating heart of a utopia that has never faded.

​​​The case for progressive policies such as working time reduction and universal basic income is often narrowly built on their potential for increased productivity. Yet maximising output is not what people and the planet need. How do we shift the narrative? ​​ 

The four-day working week as standard with no less of pay (and without longer hours each day) is an idea that is both gaining popularity​​ and being implemented​​ around Europe and beyond. Trials are discovering (unsurprisingly) that ​the four-day week​​​ delivers greater health and wellbeing of employees, better ability to meet care responsibilities, enjoy a social life and participate in community activities, and higher ​employee retention rates​​​. ​These findings were confirmed by the world’s largest four-day working week trial to date, held in the UK in 2022.​​​​​​​ 

​​​T​​​he pausing of the long-term redistribution of time away from the slogging, endless labour of the 19​th​​​ century towards John Maynard Keynes’ vision of a 15-hour working week (or a​​ 21-hour week​, put forward more than a decade ago by the New Economics Foundation​) was a measure of the failure of late 20​th-century ​​​politics and economics: it delivered profits for the few at massive cost to people and planet. ​​Indeed the end of the ​20th-century ​“Great Equalisation” of wealth ​​​​​​​​in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan​​ was also accompanied by a massive increase in the amount of household time spent in paid work​. This was largely due to​​​​​ the drawing of ​many​​​ women into paid employment​. Today, ​​​the two-income family is ​​essential for basic quality of life in many parts of the world​​.​​​ 

​​​​Not what I meant​​​​​ 

​​​While the benefits of working time reduction are obvious, ​​​there’s one element ​​that should make us think carefully about exactly what we are aiming for. As an article for the World Economic Forum trumpets, the four-day week actually increases productivity (my italics). The article adds: “Work smarter not harder has been the mantra of management consultants for decades.” ​​​ 

I’ve long argued that this is a trade-off we politicians have to be offering in a post-growth world: less stuff in your life, but more life.

That starts to look slightly less idyllic, ​as it associates working time reduction to ​the model of hyper-efficient, mind-always-on-the-job ​​Stakhanovi​sm​​​​, as opposed​ ​​​​to a more companionable, relaxed, chat-at-the-water-cooler environment of friendships and social support. Indeed the 4-Day Week Global campaign​, which has organised pilot programmes across the world,​ has trademarked ​the ​“100:80:100”​ principle (100 per cent pay, 80 per cent of the time, 100 per cent productivity)​. They say: “It is crucial that the output is maintained to successfully implement a 4​-​​​day week​​”​.​​​¹

We have not escaped from the cultural pro​b​​​lem ​​identified ​by environmental anthropologist Marie-Monique Franssen: ​​​​​ “​W​​​e glorify those who are ultra-productive and ultra-active”. And as she notes, ​this ​​​is making us ill, as well as helping to trash the planet.  

​​From ​a ​​​​​post-growth ​perspective​​​,​​​ we can respond to this productivist version of the four-day week in the words of​​​​​ T.S. Elliot’s​ ​​​J. Alfred Prufrock​:​​​ “​T​​​hat is not what I meant at all”. One of the ​degrowth ​movement’s luminaries, Jason Hickel, explains ​​in Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World​​ that “as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of increasing production is not primarily to meet specific human needs, or to improve social outcomes. Rather, the purpose is to extract and accumulate an ever-rising quantity of profit. That is the overriding objective… every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point​.​”​​ And since the carbon​ ​​​intensity (and other environmental damage) of growth can be reduced, but the two factors not decoupled, as Tim Jackson demonstrated in Prosperity Without Growth, increased productivity is more than the planet can bear. Or​,​ to go back to Hickel: “​​​‘​green growth’ is not a thing”​.​​​​     ​​ 

​​​Time for UBI​​​​ 

​​But​​​ does that mean post-growth and the four-day, or three-day, working week ​can’t ​​​go together? Clearly not. The 40-hour week is past its use-by date, ​as is​​​ evident in the UK​, where​ ​​long working hours (and commuting times) ​are ​linked to poor public health and wellbeing.   

​​R​​​educing working hours is ​​a public goal, one that is eminently politically “saleable”. No one lies on their deathbed and groans: “I wish I had spent more time in the office.” Indeed, I’ve long argued that this is a trade-off we politicians have to be offering in a post-growth world: less stuff in your life, but more life. Couldn’t we say that rather than chasing growth in G​​D​​P​​, we chase reduction in working hours​?​​​ ​A​​​ reduction of​,​ say​,​ 15 minutes each year in ​the ​standard working week would mean ​gaining an extra hour per week ​every four years ​​to do what you like ​​– or to do politics, to “work” with others on reshaping your community and society to fit within the physical limits of this fragile planet while looking after human needs​.​​​ (Yes, you might call it ​doughnut economics​​​​.​​​)​​ 

Perhaps we need to come at this from the other end, looking at where the power lies, who decides what paid work looks like, and who takes part in it​ and​​​ for how long​.​​​ We have ageing populations in the Global North (and increasingly in the Global South), heading towards ​– ​or already ​seeing – ​declining numbers of people of “working age”, however ​much ​that is extended​. T​​​he UK is just an extreme outlier of governments seeking to get more people working, for longer. There is no choice but to “get a job” for nearly everyone – no matter how ill or burdened with caring responsibilities.  

What if there was a choice? What if there was a ​​​universal basic income (​UBI), a payment, guaranteed as a right once you are accepted as a member of society, that is enough to meet basic needs? No one could then tell you “get a job, any job”, with the threat of penury if you refuse to comply.  

W​​​​​​​​​hen asked about the drawbacks of a UBI society, ​I answer ​​that ​​​you’d get a lot of bad poetry written​.

​​That does not mean – to take a classic kneejerk rightwing response – lots of people will choose to sit on the sofa. ​​This was not the result of the grand​mother​​​ of UBI trials, in Manitoba​, Canada,​ in the 1970s, where employment levels were maintained even though more young ​people ​​​stayed in education for longer.​​ ​More recently​​​, Finland’s ​UBI trial has added further evidence to the fact​​ ​​​​​​​​​that those now excluded from the labour market by poverty and ill health, when ​-​​​give​n​​​ ​​a chance to spend cash, energy​,​ and time getting “work-ready”, are more likely to be in employment​​ or work longer hours. ​​​ 

​​Bad poets, free citizens​​​​​ 

​​Again, you might ask how this fits with post-growth. ​​​ 

Well​,​ th​e benefits of UBI are currently being measured ​​​​​in the world of the five-day week, ​a world ​in which ​basic income ​​​trials are time-limited (their major flaw in understanding all the potential benefits), and in which “a ​full-time​​​ job” is valorised. That’s not to say there is any doubt that paid work has ​positive effects ​​​beyond the financial. But it doesn’t have to be ​a lot​ of paid work. A fascinating and important study ​found that​​​ the minimum “dosage” of work needed for maximum health and wellbeing benefits was eight hours​ per week​.​​²

​​W​​​​​​​​​hen asked about the drawbacks of a UBI society, ​I answer ​​that ​​​you’d get a lot of bad poetry written​. This points to a​​​​​nother issue​ ​​​that would need to be addressed ​– ​even in a society with UBI and a three-day working week as standard​.​​​ ​​​It is the deeply ingrained notion that t​im​e ​​​has to be productively used, even when no payment is involved. Learn a language, develop a side​ ​​​hustle (when I talk to ​​people today about a three-day week they often raise this issue – having several ​jobs ​​​is so essential to their survival today ​that ​it is hard to imagine a life without them), read an improving book​.​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​I​n a world in which competing to get ahead is taken as a necessary every-waking-moment endeavour​, many children are raised in this frame from their earliest days​. ​​The individual is a product that has to be constantly improved, ultimately for the purpose of paid (maybe better-paid) work. 

This is very much an artefact of the 21​st-​​​century​ ​​​post-industrial work ethic, as James A​.​ Chamberlain has dubbed it. Yet even back in 1930, Keynes thought that one of the problems of the 15-hour week would be that people would not know what to do with all of that “spare” time. Is that any wonder though, when​,​ as Kathi Weeks ​notes ​​​in The Problem with Work Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, “successful” family raising of children, schooling, medical treatment, welfare systems, ​and ​criminal justice systems are all judged by whether their products are “work​-​​​ready”​?​​​ Paid work “is not only the primary mechanism by which income is distributed, it is also the basic means by which status is allocated​,” and “o​​​​​ften the most important, if not sole, source of sociality for millions”.  

Yet this has not been the reality of human life for the vast bulk of human history. Hunter-gatherer societies, ​​it seems, often worked ​​an average of three hours a day​;​​​ medieval European peasants enjoyed four or five months holiday a year, which more than made up for six-day weeks (with days no longer than now). It was capitalism​,​​​ combined with the Protestant work ethic, that robbed the working woman and man of ​their​​​ time, energy​,​ and other sources of identity. 

So if we’re thinking about time and post-growth together, ​​freeing our bodies from the demands of the bosses​,​ and our minds​​ from the run-away work ethic, are essential companions. That means stopping competing with each other, being, living, thriving. 

1. My first boss, the lovely late Barry Clarke at the Cootamundra Herald newspaper in Australia 35 years ago, used to insist that everyone downed tools for a communal morning tea break, and that they didn’t talk work in that time. It helped make the workplace a community for a disparate mixture of office, printroom and journalistic staff. If it still survived today, would it make the 100:80:100 cut?  ︎
2.  ​W​​​hen we are talking post-growth, we are of course talking about the Global North, where nations are collectively consuming ​​between five (the US) ​and​​​ three ​times ​(UK and Europe) ​their share of the ​planet’s resources every year. ​​In the Global South, ​outcomes of UBI such as increased productivity (as shown by a large study in Kenya) can postively contribute to meeting society’s needs​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.  ︎