Degrowth: the realistic alternative for Labour. 1 Mark H Burton 2 Every 1% added to global GDP over the last century has meant, on average, adding 0.5% to carbon dioxide emissions. As the size of the world economy has grown, so too has the pressure it places on our ecosystems. The consequences of that pressure are now becoming all too apparent. John McDonnell [1] The British Labour Party has been the site of a resurgence of radicalism in the context of the economic, social and political crisis post the 2007-8 Great Financial Crash. With the collapse of neoliberalism's authority (manifested in the Labour party leadership in the two stage shift to the left via Miliband to Corbyn), a space has opened for ideology, theory and policy that seeks to offer an alternative. This space has been rather dominated by a post-Keynesian orthodoxy, that seeks to manage capitalism better, and in the interests of the many – sometimes with an acknowledgement to the urgency of confronting the ecological and climate crisis that threatens to render any economic and social system unviable. However, there are other ideas emerging and here I will draw together some threads that suggest a potential opening to ideas associated with the growing degrowth movement, an alliance of scholars and activists that links social, economic and ecological justice through a critique of the dominant economic and social models of advanced capitalism. An alternative socialist tradition One way to introduce this thinking, in a way that speaks to the British Labour tradition, is to recall a distinction made by Raymond Williams between two versions of the socialist tradition. In the long evolution of the British Labour and socialist movement, there are many examples of those who struggled not just against labour exploitation and for a bigger slice of the cake produced by the workers, but who resisted the reduction of life to commodity relations. These ideas and struggles were present from the earliest stirrings of capitalism (the Diggers and related groups) through its maturation (for example, aspects of Chartism with its Land Plan and self-help mutual institutions, the Socialist League, associated with Morris's Marxist and aesthetic critique of industrial society, or the Clarion Club, with its cycle excursions linking socialism and the countryside and its range of alternative cultural institutions). It never was entirely eclipsed. Referring to this legacy, Williams shows that, 'In Britain, identifiably, there is a precarious but persistent rural-intellectual radicalism: genuinely and actively hostile to industrialism and capitalism; attached to country ways and feelings, the literature and the lore.' [2, p. 36] As he later reflected, Williams was here criticising the dominant tendency of the Labour Party then, for which socialism was no more than “a successful industrial capitalism without the capitalists”[3]. As Löwy and Sayre note, with a Gramscian emphasis consistent with the later Williams, he showed how pre-capitalist values, resisting both commodification and destruction of relations with nature, were effectively present in the modern emancipatory project [4, p. 79]. However, what Williams [5, pp. 212–213] called “productivism” dominated. This was the tendency to assume that the central problem of modern society was poverty, which would yield to production, and more production.[5, pp. 212–213] Today we can recognise that emphasis, sometimes directly, when the redevelopment of industrial production is proposed, but more generally through the endless repetition of the mantra of “economic growth”, albeit, for Labour, investment-led, inclusive, and even green growth. Faced as we are, with a world capitalist system that is banging up against the finite limits of the natural and physical world, and the continued reproduction of dispossession 1 An greatly edited version will appear in Renewal, 2019, issue 2. 2 Steady State Manchester email: mark.burton[AT]poptel.org