Presentation short abstract

Everyday degrowth refers to subtle daily practices and attitudes that reflect degrowth common senses. Drawing on Graeber’s everyday communism, it shows how these gestures, even in highly growth-oriented contexts, quietly challenge capitalist growth logics.

Presentation long abstract

Based on David Graeber’s distinction between “mythical” or ideal communism and “everyday” or empirical communism, we propose the concept of everyday degrowth to describe mundane, subtle, and often imperceptible practices, attitudes, or gestures that embody degrowth principles (that is, non-utilitarian activities that shrink the material scale of the economy while enhancing the collective quality of life).

Graeber reclaims the term communism to denote something beyond a political ideology: with “everyday communism,” he presents it as “a principle that exists and, to some extent, constitutes the necessary basis of any society or human relationship of any kind” (Graeber, 2010, p. 3), arguing that many routine interactions inherently operate according to this principle.

The framework of everyday degrowth helps identify shared meanings and habitual practices that arise in everyday life and that, alongside their communalist dimension, reflect core degrowth values such as autonomy, self-imposed limits, and care for all forms of life, even in unexpected or strongly growth-oriented contexts. Although their full political potential may not be realized within these environments, their very presence subtly disrupts the dominance of capitalist growth logics and challenges the ubiquity of growth common senses.