Abundance or Sufficiency?

Since the 1970s, environmental constraints, shifting social values, and the crisis of post-war productivism have profoundly challenged the Western left. Once grounded in beliefs in scientific progress, technological innovations, and rising material prosperity, left-wing movements have increasingly been forced to confront planetary limits, rising inequality, and growing public ambivalence toward technoscience. These tensions have crystallised in contemporary debates on the Green Transition, where competing visions of abundance (growth-oriented technological optimism) and sufficiency (degrowth, sobriété, post-productivism) shape political and social antagonisms.