(PRE)FIGURING FASCISM #4: War Machines and Growth Engines: Militarism, State Formation, and the Limits of Degrowth Politics

Thursday, 18 June, 2026 – 17:00 to 19:00

This talk argues that the degrowth movement has two blind spots at its theoretical core. The first concerns militarism. The vast apparatus of modern warfare — the logistics, the accounting systems, the nationalism needed to make people willing to fight — was not a byproduct of capitalist growth but one of the forces that produced it. The second blind spot concerns the solution(s) degrowth proposes. The dominant strand of degrowth scholarship looks to progressive state institutions and cultural transformation as the vehicle for a degrowth transition. But the modern state is constituted by organised violence — it is, at its core, a war machine — and a politics that fails to name and confront this fact will end up reproducing what it opposes, whether at the national scale or the municipal one. In other words, this talk will argue that a genuine degrowth transition requires demilitarisation as a precondition.

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Andro Rilović is a lecturer and PhD researcher at UvA. Both his teaching and research are rooted in degrowth scholarship, and he primarily investigates how militarism shapes political and economic institutions in ways that create and reinforce a constant imperative for economic growth.

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(Pre)Figuring Fascism is a series of talks drawing attention to the continuities between liberal governance and fascism, hoping to stimulate an understanding of fascism as it relates to colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism – rather than viewing it as a kind of shock to an otherwise well-working liberal system. Because we know: So long as the conditions for fascism’s emergence are not overcome, we are always living in proto-fascist times.