ABSTRACT
This chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) offers the alternative horizontal politics of the 21st century as a context for understanding political tendencies in the degrowth movement. Degrowth mobilises in horizontal, autonomous, sharing, commoning and caring ways – such as assemblies – against domineering forces for economic growth. Refusing power over and enabling power with centres on prefigurative practices of which there are thousands of examples around the world – from small community – and locally based mutual aid activities, say in the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘recuperations’ by workers in Argentinian and European spaces, to the self-organisation of massive territories, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the autonomous regions of the Rojava in northeastern Syria. The chapter examines uprisings and movements in terms of reclaiming spaces, including land, and reinventing relational, affective ways of being. Significantly, processes of self-organising mean engaging in direct democracy, eschewing demands and taking over state power to focus, instead, on realising objectives on the ground in relations between people and the earth.
