We, organizers and participants at the Degrowth Vienna 2020 conference demand equity and justice. We stand in solidarity with the people in the United States challenging white supremacist culture and with related global struggles. As activists, academics, artists, and practitioners we aim together to put an end to systemic oppression and structural racism; as again has been recently revealed by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor or Ahmad Auber. The conference expresses its global solidarity with all victims of police violence and systemic racism, and supports the antifascist movements facing criminalization. Racism and coercion are political issues that cannot be tackled on a moral basis only. This murder is the result of an oppressive and exploitative system where racism and coercion are key in maintaining domination and the exploitation of women, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and historically marginalized trans-/queer/non-binary people, people with disabilities, the working-class, and natures. Ending systemic racism is a liberatory means towards human emancipation. This requires the rejection of a policing system based on the devalorization of human beings as well as the destruction of nature, for the sake of capital accumulation through a white supremacist culture by political and economic elites. Overcoming systemic racism includes the rejection of the prison-industrial complex, reinforcing capitalist exploitation by criminalizing lives. It additionally calls for a transformation of the organisation of executive functions, away from oppression, and instead centred on the protection of human rights. We recognise that degrowth as a movement is still white dominated and euro-centered, and thus susceptible to the same structural discrimination that plagues our systems. We commit to work consciously as a community to address and improve in regards to racism internally. As a movement we fight for a world where every human and non-human being — of any colour, any gender, any sex and/or sexual orientation, any ableness, no matter of their geographic and social origins, beliefs or opinions — is entitled to dignity and to a meaningful and decent life. Thus, the degrowth movement fully embraces the claims of the protestors throughout the United States and beyond and expresses its support. With the awareness that our paths are still detached, we aim to advance our convergence and struggle forth in unity.
Self-limitation is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits. Political ecology ‘has made strong arguments against natural limits’ and is in friction with ‘degrowth’s .. urgency of less’, writes Paul Robbins. Indeed, political ecologists developed the field as a response to 1970s neo-Malthusianism. Nancy Peluso, Lyla Mehta or Betsy Hartmann have exposed ...
The debates around post-growth transitions to just socio-ecological futures - while undoubtedly variegated - all emphasize that such a transition will involve a fundamental change in the way we organize economic relations and processes. At a first glance, this implies both a nominal and a structural, change with corresponding shifts in production, labor and consumption patterns. Whereas nominal...
By Jasmin Wiefek and Bernd Sommer “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”: This famous dictum by Theodor W. Adorno1 highlights the difficulty of finding a way to individually pursue a good life in a world that is characterised by inequality, exploitation and various forms of domination. However, this question has so far mainly been dealt with [...]
