Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The degrowth movement exists to advance these difficult arguments – to take the large body of evidence as to why the current economic process is failing, and propose a range of alternatives which might avert the catastrophic failure of this system.
Unpicking the dominant, growth-based worldview will mean closely analysing the stories we have been told (and who those stories might serve), and bravely and courageously assessing whether all of this growth really does bring us ‘the good life’.
Saito’s book is refreshing because it helps end an old feud between socialists who trust that new technologies and the automation of work can deliver an expanding economy with greater leisure time and those who argue for a socialism without growth.
Incremental change can be tough to accept when you’re trying to prevent mass suffering and extinction, but as Herman Daly and Joshua Farley remind us, we must start “from where we are, even if the basic idea is not to remain there.”
If we are to be intentional about equitably meeting human needs and prospering within ecological boundaries, I believe we need to do the work of imagining that world first if we want to create it.
This article is an attempt to seriously engage with socialist ecomodernism in a way the interview failed to do with degrowth: on its own terms.
Perhaps, the larger purpose of degrowth scholarship (and conversations like these) is to act as Overton Windows – to help people imagine and actualize behaviors and networks that will help us adjust in a post-growth world.
The Degrowth & Strategy volume makes a case that, to bring about shared goals of eco-social transformation, we need to collaboratively bring together, honor, reflect critically on, and deliberate about a wide mix of approaches.
Degrowthers have, somewhat unjustly, been criticised for not having a strategy. This book is an attempt to fill that perceived gap.
While there are considerable political challenges involved in realizing the goals outlined here, we can improve the political feasibility of them by challenging the neoliberal narrative about the causes of the current crisis and its possible solutions.
We need not lose sight of the true meaning of a holiday, where we socially waste our time together to eat, drink, and be merry. So, I ask you, as this year comes to a close, to not forget to come in and know me better, man!
The idea is to try to bring degrowth’s abstract ideas to the ground and think more concretely about the metabolisms, policies, economics and politics that can make degrowth REAL.
