Shrinking Giants, Part 2: On inequality

This is the second article in an 8-part series based on an essay by Ronan Murphy. The global economy runs on a simple logic. States must grow or be outcompeted, and those that fall behind lose their security. In a system where power still flows, ultimately, from the barrel of a gun, Ronan explores what this means for anyone hoping to build something different.

Part 1 (with a list of articles in the series) can be found here.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters” – Antonio Gramsci.

Under conditions of growing inequality, attempts to impose ecological limits can morph into explosive social conflict. We have already seen warning signs. France’s gilets jaunes erupted when a fuel tax was perceived as unfairly burdening the rural poor. People will not support sustainability policies that they feel trample on their livelihoods or entrench privilege. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen describe this resistance as a defence of the “imperial mode of living”, the observation that consumption patterns in the Global North are structurally dependent on cheap labour and resources from the Global South, and that this dependency is so deeply embedded in everyday life that people defend it unconsciously, even when it is destroying the conditions of their own future.¹ The backlash is not irrational; it is a predictable consequence of asking people to give up material comforts that the entire structure of modern life has taught them to treat as normal.

More ominously, these grievances create fertile ground for reactionary movements, precisely the forces that would derail a sustainable transition. Today we see the emergence of eco-fascists and hard-right nationalists who twist environmental narratives to serve xenophobic or authoritarian agendas.

These tendencies come from distinct but converging directions. Derrick Jensen, co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, approaches from the radical environmentalist left but has drawn sharp criticism for using essentialist conceptions of the “natural” to peddle transphobic talking points about who should be involved, and more dangerously “in” with, an ecological transition. Separately, far-right figures like Keith Woods describe disaffected and alienated former leftists as their primary targets for recruitment, coat-tailing onto legitimate ecological grievances while redirecting blame toward immigrants and minority groups.

These groups offer scapegoats instead of solutions, and in a transitional period, these elements could gain traction by exploiting fear and frustration. Similarly, ultra-nationalists promise to put their nation’s survival first, often at the expense of global cooperation, and could rally even further support beyond their existing success if people feel threatened by scarcity or decline.

If progressive governments attempt bold climate and redistribution policies, powerful industry lobbies can be expected to respond, whether through lobbying, capital strikes, or funding misinformation on a scale far beyond their practice for the last 50 years (see: Dark Money by Jane Mayer).

Social justice, therefore, is a core security requirement for sustainability. As the United Nations’ poverty rapporteur warned, we risk a kind of “climate apartheid” where the wealthy buy their way out of crisis while the rest suffer – a scenario that would all but guarantee social breakdown and authoritarian backlash.

Recent research confirms that high economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of democratic erosion and backsliding. Feelings of being “left behind” make populations susceptible to anti-democratic strongmen who promise order or revival.

This suggests something important about the sequencing of transition itself. Systems undergoing fundamental change are fragile. They are susceptible to shocks, backlash, and cascading institutional failure. The resilience literature, particularly the work of Carl Folke and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, distinguishes between systems that can absorb disturbance while maintaining function and those that are brittle and prone to collapse.² Brian Walker and David Salt make a similar point, arguing that managing for resilience requires maintaining the diversity and redundancy of institutional and ecological functions, especially during periods of transformation.³

Applied to the political economy of transition, this means that before any post-growth society can build the virtuous feedback loops of cooperative economics, community energy, and regenerative agriculture, it must first stabilise its institutional foundations. It must invest in shock absorbers. For example, wage support for workers leaving carbon-intensive industries, core funding for community anchor institutions facing insolvency, or emergency adaptation funding for the most vulnerable housing stock.

These investments may not produce immediate positive-sum outcomes, and they may not be mutually reinforcing in the way that a mature regenerative economy would be, but they preserve agency, buy time, and hold space for more ambitious structural change. They prevent the permanent exit of key civic actors from the transition landscape.

The transition management literature, particularly the work of Jan Rotmans and Derk Loorbach at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, describes this as the pre-development phase of systemic change, the period where experimentation is possible precisely because existing institutions are buffered against collapse.⁴ If we skip this phase, the transition will likely be captured by those with the resources to weather the storm, which is to say, the very actors whose interests are served by the status quo.

To avoid this fate, post-growth transitions must aggressively prioritise equality and inclusion at every step. This means policies like wealth redistribution, guaranteed basic services, and just transitions for workers, ensuring that the burdens of changing the economy fall on those most able to bear them (and most responsible) while the benefits of a greener society, clean air, community life, economic security, are broadly shared.

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1. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2021). The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. London: Verso.

2. Folke, C. (2006). ‘Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses’. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), pp. 253-267. See also Folke, C. et al. (2010). ‘Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability’. Ecology and Society, 15(4).

3. Walker, B. and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press.

4. Rotmans, J. and Loorbach, D. (2009). ‘Complexity and transition management’. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 13(2), pp. 184-196. See also Loorbach, D. (2010). ‘Transition Management for Sustainable Development: A Prescriptive, Complexity-Based Governance Framework’. Governance, 23(1), pp. 161-183.