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The 10 hottest years in the historical records have all occurred in the decade between 2014 and 2023, with last year breaking records in both land surface and ocean temperature by wide margins. As climate change, global warming and massive loss of biodiversity disproportionately affect people along class, race and gender lines, acknowledging that Climate Struggle is Class Struggle is now more urgent than ever. But debates about how exactly the left should address this multi-layered crisis run deep. Whilst degrowth is increasingly gaining appeal—not the least in the mainstream—, it is necessary critically to assess its proposals and limitations. Can degrowth mean anything more than a ‘programme of aggregate reduction’ or ‘ecological austerity’? How does degrowth fit, if at all, within struggles for socio-economic justice, especially in the Global South? Are the analytical tools and the political arguments deployed by the degrowth movement useful to challenge capitalism?
These are some of the questions that our international panel will address in the seminar. Whilst there might be some agreement over the need to overcome the limitations of the degrowth project, there will also be interesting debates around eco-communism, the feasibility of sustained labour productivity growth, and the imminent choices to be made to escape the ‘lesser evil’ trap—fossil fuels or nuclear power.
This is an online event. To attend via Zoom, register here.
SPEAKERS
Feyzi Ismail is a Lecturer un Global Policy and Activism at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has a long trajectory combining research and activism. Amongst other areas, her research focuses on social movement strategy and organising, NGOs, alternatives to neoliberalism and imperialism, labour and migration, and politics and development in Nepal and South Asia. She is on the executive committee of the Britain-Nepal Academic Council and the editorial board of Capital & Class.
Kai Heron is a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University. His research considers how capital reorganizes agrarian and rural regions across the world to maximise capital accumulation at the expense of people and ecologies, and how workers, communities, and social movements fight back. Kai also researches developments in green political theory, with a focus on degrowth, eco-Marxist, anti-colonial environmentalist thought.
LAU Kin Chi (Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China). Professor LAU Kin Chi is one of the Founding Members of Global University for Sustainability, and Director of its Executive Team; Coordinator, Programme on Cultures of Sustainability, Centre for Cultural Research and Development, Lingnan University; Adjunct Associate Professor of Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University; and Board Member of PeaceWomen Across the Globe. She has written on China’s ecological and socio-economic sustainability, the Fukushima catastrophe, the Zapatistas, and subaltern studies. Her web page can be found here.
Matt Huber is a Professor in the Geography and the Environment Department of Syracuse University. He teaches and researches the geographies of capitalism, climate politics and resource geography. He recently published Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet with Verso Books (2022).