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.
The crises provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed for all what many have long known: the foundations of the wealth and well-being of the world rest upon the sphere of social reproduction and the labor of care. This work is performed primarily by women and, more generally, by people whose work and lives are under-valued and marginalized by sexist, racist, classist, homophobic and ableis...
If progressives want to fight the movement against so-called ‘gender ideology’, they need to break with neoliberalism The number of newly elected Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who oppose women’s reproductive rights, gender equality, sexuality education, same sex marriage and the Council of Europe Convention on Violence Against Women (Istanbul Convention) stands at around 30 per...
How the conflation with neoliberalism and austerity unfairly reduces the idea of degrowth to absurdity – and where the degrowth movement can turn for answers to the crisis. The degrowth movement has been developed in response to neoliberal reality, neoliberalism's comically reductive view of human nature, its ecological blindness and the rise in social inequality it has brought about. Austerit...
