Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” said Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” The idea, he noted, applies mostly to the Global North, where production and consumption have come to exceed basic needs in ways that harm the environment. Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption.

If it sounds sort of Marxist that’s because it is.

Excited to make the very idea of “Don’t create endless piles of trash forever, we literally can’t afford to do this anymore” a partisan issue that gets the speaker labeled an evil Communist.

But the movement has its critics. Christopher Lingle and Emile Phaneuf III, economics researchers at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian nonprofit, argued in December that degrowth “will necessarily involve a reduction in human liberty and a diminution of human flourishing” (the italics are theirs).

big fucking sigh