In defense of degrowth - Giorgos Kallis

This book is a collection of opinion essays, newspaper articles, and blog posts I wrote the last four years to communicate my thoughts and research to a non-academic audience. I wrote them for three reasons. First, because I wanted to talk toand withpeople outside the university. I wanted to make sure that the ideas we were developing with my friends in Research & Degrowth Barcelona did not stay locked within the pay walls of scientific journals. Second, because I felt a need to intervene 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, that was engulfing us in the South of Europe. Third, because I wanted to throw and test some half-baked ideas, without waiting for the long academic process of researching the literature, examining what others 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 also moments where intuition and passion are called for. Some of my essays are communicating well-founded and empirically supported 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 writing 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 cant. You can no longer hide your own confusion behind complex concepts, impenetrable language, or elaborate math. What you say either makes sense, or doesnt. And if it doesnt, or if you cant 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 academic, 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.

We organized this collection in seven parts. The first part consists of four articles I wrote to present the idea of degrowth in simple terms. These four essays were written at different stages of development of my thoughts on degrowth, and for different audiences. I call them minifestos. They are passionate declarations in support of degrowth, but without the claim to grand theory or certainty that would characterize a manifesto. They are the entry point to this book for the reader not familiar with the core claims behind the missile slogan degrowth.

Part II includes three essays establishing an antagonistic dialogue between degrowth and its arch-nemesis, eco-modernismthat is, the idea that all environmental and social problems can ultimately be solved with the application of technology, and that the only solution to the problems of modern technology is more modern technology. I argue that eco-modernism is factually and conceptually wrong, though funny at times.

Part III is about economics, but its three essays are very different in content and scope. First, I tell a little known story of how dissident voices were purged from the field of economics and university campuses in the early 70s. Then I propose five principles for a new economics, drawing from concepts and ideas developed in our recent book Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era ( vocabulary.degrowth.org ). Then I turn film critic to describe the enigma and magic of capital in Martin Scorseses The Wolf of Wall Street .

Part IV has some half-baked thoughts on capitalism, socialism, and degrowth, and Part V turns into the politics of and the policies for degrowth, starting with ten policy commandments and moving on to a series of mini-interventions ranging from work-sharing and Keynesian policies by Spains Podemos, to AirBnb, the Popes Laudato Si , and the hopes fueled from Barcelonas new city government.

In Part VI I engage with critiques. It is through these engagements that the nuances and uncertainties in my own claims come to the fore. Common criticisms concern both whether degrowth is necessary, and whether the term is appealing and mobilizing. Sometimes the two critiques, or my own responses, mix the two issues. I am sure that what is expressed by degrowth is valid, and the transformations we espouse are necessary. I am less certain of the term, though I defend its use. But no doubt, the debate on both questions is open and ongoing.

In Part VII I come back home. I close with three essays originally written in Greek, which concern the country where I was born and raised, Greece. A few years ago, a focus on Greece might have seemed an idiosyncratic and too personal of a choice, but today it no longer is. Greece with its Great Depression has come to signify the economic crisis at its worst and to embody all that is going wrong with Europe and the West. I am sharing here three fragments of a thought, the two cents of a Greek of the diaspora.

The ideas in the essays were developed over the years through discussions and debates within the Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona ( icta.uab.es ), and the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona ( degrowth. org ). I am grateful to all my companer@s in R&D, and my colleagues and students at ICTA, especially to my good friends and co-authors Giacomo DAlisa and Federico Demaria with whom I have co-developed most of my thoughts on degrowth. I thank the editors of the outlets for which I wrote these essays and my co-authors for those articles that were co-written.