Degrowth is an umbrella term for heterogeneous movements that aim for a fundamental societal transformation in the face of multiple social, ecological, and political crises. This includes changing production and consumption relations, dismantling global power asymmetries, and developing new visions for a good life for all within planetary boundaries. We believe that the state should play a decisive role in the democratic and sovereign implementation of such a program. However, from our perspective, both the affordability of such a radical transformation and the possible countermeasures associated with it remain underexposed. Given the existing power and capital relations, we recognize a structural conflict between dominant economic actors/sectors and political programs that could bring about a degrowth transformation.

We analyse how this situation ensures adherence to the growth regime and make the argument that even the announcement of a degrowth program would necessarily lead to countermeasures. We focus our analysis on the financial sector, which plays a decisive role in government financing and thereby can exert power over the public sector by worsening its financing conditions (e.g., through capital flight and/or downgrading of creditworthiness). Our analysis concentrates on Eurozone countries, because 1. we recognize the urgent need but also great potential for degrowth and 2. according to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) member countries are monetarily non-sovereign, which increases their dependence on private, profit-oriented financial actors.

We argue that necessary social, ecological, and industrial transformations are thus dependent on particular interests that indirectly finance them through government bond markets. In the prevailing paradigm, it is therefore not possible for the Eurozone countries to invest massively, expand basic social security, and simultaneously reduce economic growth – Green Growth appears as the only alternative. We aim to demonstrate this by examining the recent historical disciplining reactions of actors from the financial sector to progressive government projects.

We conclude by sketching two scenarios for the required financing of a state-led degrowth program within the Eurozone: 1. the institutional restructuring of the monetary system towards the possibility of direct state financing and 2. the financing of individual progressive measures within the existing system. MMT provides the theoretical framework for this and shows the enormous financial leeway of state financing. However, the success of both the first and second scenario depends crucially on knowing, anticipating, and decisively countering the possible backlash outlined above.

Material stocks (MS) should be given much more attention in the Degrowth community. A central demand of Degrowth is the absolute reduction of the economy's material throughput while increasing overall well-being. The focus on material throughput, however, seems inadequate since the economy that needs to be degrown does not pass as a throughput economy anymore.

As sociometabolic research shows, since at least World War II, the global economy transformed into a stockpiling economy – material outflows being far lower than inflows due to accumulation of materials in stocks like buildings, infrastructure, technology and other durable goods. Empirically, the requirements for the expansion, maintenance and operation of MS is a major driver and lock-in of material throughput, while no significant evidence for neither relative nor absolute decoupling of stock growth from GDP can be found.

From a welfare perspective, focusing on flow-measures like throughput also seems inadequte since it is stocks that suffice to provide service to people, not flows. MS conduct processes of need satisfaction: e.g. the mere availability of energy is not enough; in order to satisfy a need it must be transformed into an energy service like “heating the flat” – but this only happens if a functioning heating unit is activated. It follows, that MS are highly important both for throughput reduction and well-being and thus should be incorporated into the Degrowth call.

By doing so our work contributes to opening up the black box of flow-based imaginaries and seeks a radical social imagination in line with the biophysical structure of society. What would this imply? Currently, MS are distributed unevenly between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-economy. In 2015, roughly 79% of global MS were located in core countries and China, driving asymmetric flows of resources, whereas the rest of the world only possessed around 21% while harboring 62% of global population. In this light, Degrowth should imply an intensified need satisfaction per unit of existing stock by radically changing their use-patterns. But it should also initiate a global redistribution of MS while democratically redesigning the socio-natural arrangements they create. This would come down to democratic practices of creative destruction—i.e. democratically delineating, which buildings, infrastructures or manufactured capitals shall be reproduced by the social metabolism, who shall bear their full costs of reproduction and, finally, which MS shall be actively disassembled and transformed into secondary materials through processes like Urban Mining.