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Degrowth and the Aporia of Utopia

Developing a Future-Oriented Vision of Social Wellbeing within Planetary Boundaries

Post-capitalist imaginary is caught in a double bind of climate realism and political pragmatism. Climate realism cautions that there is no empirical evidence that the existing growth-oriented technocapitalist processes can be brought within planetary biophysical boundaries [@hickel_green_2019]. Political pragmatism cautions that we cannot easily decouple the existing organisation of social needs from the intensely technological world designed on the high throughput of energy and matter [@huber_lifeblood_2013]. Accordingly, the utopian imaginaries of eco-socialist transition tend to polarise into opposing visions: accelerated eco-modernisation through socialisation and greening of the existing technological base or restorative slowdown through technological downscaling and radical redefinition of social needs. The polarisation gives a deep relief of the aporia that haunts the imaginary of a transition to an environmentally sustainable and socially just post-capitalist world in the present: what needs to be done in socio-metabolic terms, might not be socially and politically practicable. In my paper I will discuss how the de-growth as a transitional framework is trying to grapple with this aporia by developing both concrete proposals of radical redistribution and concrete proposals of lowering throughput.

Info

Day: 2023-08-30
Start time: 16:45
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-3
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Technology and science for degrowth

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