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Degrowth Opinions and Minifestos

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Degrowth Opinions and Minifestos In defense of degrowth Opinions and Minifestos Giorgos Kallis Edited by Aaron Vansintjan This book is published as an Open Commons and made available free of cost. Editing and formatting took six months of work. Help us recover some of the costs for this work by donating at: indefenseofdegrowth.com. You can also support us by writing a review on Goodreads. The material in this book is under a Creative Commons Attribution- Praise for In defense of degrowth NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0). “I’m thrilled that Giorgos Kallis, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on degrowth, Under this license, you are free to: is making this essay collection available for free. Whatever your level of familiarity Share—copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format with the subject, the book’s mix of engaging commentary, bold analysis, and creative Adapt—remix, transform, and build upon the material policy tools is certain to deepen your thinking.” Under the following terms: —Naomi Klein, author of This changes everything and The shock doctrine Attribution—You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but “In defense of degrowth … shows why its author, and the Barcelona group not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. to which he belongs, have become the indisputable world leaders in the vital NonCommercial—You may not use the material for commercial purposes. project of crafting novel economic imaginaries and feasible frameworks for an age where, literally, everything has to change.” —Arturo Escobar, author of Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World and Feel-thinking with the Earth. To my mother, Maria. I am writing for and with her. Contents Preface 10 Part I: The degrowth alternative 1. For a radical environmentalism 16 2. The degrowth alternative 25 3. The Left should embrace degrowth 33 4. Let’s be less productive Part II: Against eco-modernism 5. Political Ecology gone wrong 54 6. Why eco-modernism is wrong 58 7. Tweeting with the enemy 65 Part III: Rethinking the economic 8. The battle for Harvard, or, how economics became economics 72 9. For a Political Ecological Economics 76 10. The Wolf of Wall Street and the spirit of capitalism 85 Part IV: (De)growth, capitalism, and (eco)socialism 11. Is there a growth imperative in capitalism? 90 12. Socialist growth is an oxymoron 95 Part V: Politics and policies 13. Yes, we can prosper without growth 104 14. Spanish Keynesianism without growth? 111 15. The right to leisure 114 16. Fridays off 118 17. Barcelona’s new commons 131 18. The “sharing” economy is not a commons 133 19. A Pope for degrowth 139 20. A society without growth: The planet of The Dispossessed 141 Part VI: Conversations 21. The degrowth debate 148 Fourteen responses to “The degrowth alternative” 148 Response: In defense of the degrowth alternative 160 22. Will trees grow in a degrowth society? 167 1 Giorgos Kallis Outgrowing the twin simplifications of growth and degrowth Preface (Andy Stirling) 167 Response: Why we need degrowth (Giorgos Kallis) 176 This book is a collection of opinion essays, newspaper articles, and 23. Is degrowth a compelling word? 181 blog posts I wrote the last four years to communicate my thoughts and “Degrowth”—a problematic economic frame (Brian Dean) 181 research to a non-academic audience. I wrote them for three reasons. Why degrowth has outgrown its name (Kate Raworth) 185 First, because I wanted to talk to—and with—people outside the univer- You’re wrong Kate, degrowth is a compelling word (Giorgos Kallis) 189 sity. I wanted to make sure that the ideas we were developing with my 24. Will degrowth be voluntary or involuntary? 193 friends in Research & Degrowth Barcelona did not stay locked within A very optimistic version of Degrowth? (Brian Davey) 193 the pay walls of scientific journals. Second, because I felt a need to inter- In defense of a Mediterranean spirit (Giorgos Kallis) 204 vene in public debates; that I am doing something that may make some, even if tiny, difference in the face of the turmoil, chaos, but also hope, Part VII: A view from the South (of Europe) that was engulfing us in the South of Europe. Third, because I wanted 25. The growth curse. How the tigers became PIIGS 210 to throw and test some half-baked ideas, without waiting for the long 26. Extractivism, the Greek way 214 academic process of researching the literature, examining what others 27. Islandizing the city 217 have said before, confronting my hypotheses with evidence and all the rest. There is a place and moment for reason and rigour, and there are Further reading 220 also moments where intuition and passion are called for. Some of my Useful websites 223 essays are communicating well-founded and empirically supported Academic publications by the author 224 claims. Others are just pitching concepts and ideas that someone else might want to follow up on, or are simply making emotional pleas for a different course of action. Writing these essays was not an easy experience. I have mastered the art of writing an academic paper and getting it published, but I was never taught how to write something that a friend can read. My academic writ- ing is clunky at times, but this is fine since it is other clunky writers that evaluate my work. A clunky blogpost, though, will simply not be read. It is a hard moment of truth when you try to simplify your ideas, only to find that you can’t. You can no longer hide your own confusion behind complex concepts, impenetrable language, or elaborate math. What you say either makes sense, or doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, or if you can’t express it in a way that it does even if you feel that it does, then frustration, if not depression reigns. What a great satisfaction though, when it does make sense, when language and emotion sync, as I feel they do in “The battle for Harvard” (chapter 8), or “The Wolf of Wall Street” (chapter 10)! The essays included here were written at different times, for different audiences and with different purposes in mind. Some are more academ- ic, others, more direct. Some of the same ideas may appear and re-appear in different articles, in different forms with different words. I want to think that this is not repetition, the same refrain played over and over, but rather different variations on the same musical motive, played one way here, and in another there. 2 3 In defense of degrowth Giorgos Kallis We organized this collection in seven parts. The first part consists of Greece with its Great Depression has come to signify the economic crisis four articles I wrote to present the idea of degrowth in simple terms. at its worst and to embody all that is going wrong with Europe and the These four essays were written at different stages of development of my West. I am sharing here three fragments of a thought, the two cents of a thoughts on degrowth, and for different audiences. I call them minifes- Greek of the diaspora. tos. They are passionate declarations in support of degrowth, but without The ideas in the essays were developed over the years through discus- the claim to grand theory or certainty that would characterize a manifes- sions and debates within the Institute for Environmental Sciences and to. They are the entry point to this book for the reader not familiar with Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (icta. the core claims behind the missile slogan “degrowth”. uab.es), and the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona (degrowth. Part II includes three essays establishing an antagonistic dialogue be- org). I am grateful to all my companer@s in R&D, and my colleagues tween degrowth and its arch-nemesis, eco-modernism—that is, the idea and students at ICTA, especially to my good friends and co-authors Gi- that all environmental and social problems can ultimately be solved with acomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria with whom I have co-developed the application of technology, and that the only solution to the prob- most of my thoughts on degrowth. I thank the editors of the outlets for lems of modern technology is more modern technology. I argue that which I wrote these essays and my co-authors for those articles that were eco-modernism is factually and conceptually wrong, though funny at co-written. times. The book was edited, formatted, and published by Aaron Vansintjan. Part III is about economics, but its three essays are very different in Aaron did not just put the essays together: he read them carefully, re- content and scope. First, I tell a little known story of how dissident voices fined them, contextualized them and made the whole better than the were purged from the field of economics and university campuses in the sum of its parts. Without him, this book would not have been available. early 70s. Then I propose five principles for a new economics, drawing All the articles in this book were originally published on various news from concepts and ideas developed in our recent book Degrowth: A vo- outlets, online magazines, and blogs and several were co-written with cabulary for a new era (vocabulary.degrowth.org). Then I turn film critic friends and colleagues: to describe the enigma and magic of capital in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
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