Forums: Shapes of Post-Growth Societies

Organised by: Hans Rackwitz (Jena)

Climate and earth scientists are continuously warning about an rapidly closing time frame to face the crisis of the world ecology in time. In spite of all declarations of intent and efforts, there is a lack of factual successes to substantially halt or slow down the overexploitation of resources and the depletion of ecological sinks and the worsening of the ecological crisis. Apparently, the ability of capitalist market economies to co-ordinate the necessary social transformation is failing. Capitalism is an economic and social system that must permanently expand in order to stabilize itself. Unlimited expansion on a finite planet inevitably leads to an disruption of the planet's reproductive cycles.

This is the background against which ecosocialist thought has experienced a certain upswing in recent decades, both as independent initiatives as well as in green and left-wing parties and social movements. Ecosocialism does not imply a single fixed contend and program. Common to ecosocialist perspectives is that they see the organization of the economy and, above all, the organization of work as the key to a sustainable transformation of society. The panel will discuss various types of ecosocialist crisis analyses and societal visions and will primarily focus on differing ecosocialist transformation strategies.

Organised by: Christine Bauhardt (Berlin), Wendy Harcourt (Rotterdam, NL), Guelay Caglar (Berlin)

We would like to contribute to the debate on post-growth societies from a Feminist Political Ecology background. By building on examples of „doing the economy otherwise“ we would like to share experiences with commoning and other care practices that recognise non capitalocentric economies. Our starting point is a denaturalized concept of care – for oneself, for other people, for the more-than-human world. 
The lived experiences of practising Feminist Political Ecology are rooted in alternative values and visions of social reproductive activities and practices, creating networks, relationships, non-monetary exchange relations based on empathy for the world around us. Such visions mean recognising the environmental, political and social crises we are in by „Staying with the trouble“ (Haraway) and acknowledging that we need to adapt and shape a new world out of the messiness of the social and natural environments we have created. 
The event will be an interactive open workshop based on storytelling practices of hope linked to academic analysis bringing together scholarly and activist feminists working in various urban and rural contexts and from various disciplines and political visions.

Organised by: Noel Cass (Lancaster, GB), Katharina Manderscheid (Hamburg)

The growth of transport and of the economy are inseparably linked. For personal transport, in present societies, the private car constitutes the hegemonic mode of movement. Yet, car based personal transport constitutes a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite all socio-political attempts to reduce these emissions, the distances travelled by private car as well as the average size of the car engines continuously grow and counteract technologically-induced improvement of efficiency or the increase of alternative modes of travel within cities. To tackle these problems, sustainable transport policy debates suggest environmental impacts have primarily technological solutions, such as electrification, automated driving or smart traffic control. Such ‘technical’ solutions ignore systemic issues, the increasing compulsions to travel, social injustices and freedom constraints in the automobile-centred mobility system.

We argue that rather than ‘greening’ automobility, we need to question ‘compulsions to be mobile’ in order to reconcile environmental and justice dimensions of ‘sustainable’ mobility: understanding the automobility system to be unsustainable and unjust, curtailing freedoms to pursue capabilities and flourishings, without being forced to move. The event we propose here explores radical concepts of autono-mobile futures in post-growth societies. This requires focussing on mobility as an integral part of everyday lives, and addressing the socio-economic implications of its sustainable transformation. We demand practical utopias, and discussion of their conditionalities and implications, rather than a limiting questioning of their feasibility within a growth paradigm.

Organised by: Vivianna Asara (Wien, AT), Maura Benegiamo (Paris, FR), Alice Dal Gobbo (Cardiff, GB), Emanuele Leonardi (Coimbra, PT), Luigi Pellizzoni (Pisa, IT), Salvo Torre (Catania, IT)

The panel will be structured as a collective discussion on the different aspects of change in the production of a new social vision of a post-capitalist scenario. Participants will be involved in a series of brief reflections about their research on social-ecological transfor-mation and the ways their results relate to social movements’ claims.
The case study of the movement-party Barcelona en Comú will be addressed, as well as the analysis of some ideas emerging from the latest social conflicts. The centrality of non-human labour in current commodification processes will also be analysed. Another point will be the relevance of working-class transformations for understanding and politically enacting an emancipatory politics of Degrowth.
Furthermore the panel will explore the different theoretical and methodological transformations in the analysis of social change in the age of ecological transition. It will face the potentials for desire to be a force of transformation. Finally, environmental politics will be analysed as a politics of time, that has increasingly taken the shape of pre-emption.