Lecture by Jason Hickel: "Imperialism and the Degrowth Imperative" and Comment by Federico Demaria

[@chrisyates2591]

This is the most important challenge of our age. This workshop and webinar is led by enlightened and extremely motivating scholars - thank you for the tremendous work and webinar. We draw upon Jason's work in our MA core course on education and development at the UCL-IOE in London at our Centre for Education and International Development (CEID). This a most inspiring talk and discussion. I am only sad so few comments have yet been added. But be reassured hundreds of our MA students over the last 2-3 years have received this message thanks to the available internet talks, books and research papers and also the Fresh-Ed podcast Jason did with my colleague Will Brehm. Please keep going. We have nothing that is more important than to work for degrowth, decolonisation and reformed capitalism in the north and west. Thank you all.

[@Antuan2911]

Very good lecture! Workable solutions for sure! Thank you!

[@TW-cz1jk]

I would worry about power grabs and violence coming from people willing to take what they want by force. Whether that comes from within a Country trying to degrow, or from without.

[@kevinmccormick7671]

Modern Monetary Theory is the same as the Federal Reserve Monetary System, but explained in progressive language. Note that the MMT suggestions have nothing to do with money, they are policy prescriptions that are not based on monetary incentives or processes. Unfortunately, all the wonderful ideas expressed here would never be implemented through the MMT theory because the capitalists would still control the money. The lumping of "guaranteed jobs (MMT)" with "guaranteed income" shows the confusion -- guaranteed jobs mean the government pays for workers to do work that corporations don't want to pay for, but guaranteed income places economic power in the public, since they have the money and time to do things. MMT was adopted by the Democrats in the U.S., which says it all.

[@gillonblank]

Your solutions are right on. How are these solution different than Steady-State economics?

[@cmossman6580]

How can we provide living income if we keep reproducing ourselves exponentially? How many fractals can we keep reducing the global pie by?

[@cmossman6580]

Not only has capitalism relied on colonisation, but is it not also predicated on perpetual growth of base of consumers/ population increase?

[@andrewnelson3681]

Excess resource use? Who are you to decide that?

[@cmossman6580]

And how about the end of oil? That will have its deleterious impact on the current status quo and perpetual accumulation.

[@cmossman6580]

More growth = more people= more energy demands...

[@martinjanecek4950]

OK Ecofascist.

[@anthonymorris5084]

Degrowth is a term utilize by people who don't even know what growth means.

[@jamesruscheinski8602]

sovereign God substantive choice organizing peoples of world

[@discoveringthegardenofeden7882]

Growth and resource use are independent variables. One is abstract, the other is concrete. They can overlap, they can correlate but do not have to. Hence 'growth' which is an 'abstract' measure of the performance of an economy CAN exist without an increase in use of 'concrete' natural resources and commodities. As long as people are unable, intellectually, to understand the difference the baseless demonization of 'growth'' will continue. Growth is a good thing. The more money people across the world have, a result of growth, and growth of wealth, the more easy it becomes to implement good management of natural resources, which requires skills and the salary to pay for the continued implementation of these skills. If you eliminate 'growth', while inflation continues to exist (which it will), the wealth will dwindle and evaporate, making it impossible to pay for good ecological management. You get what you don't want: poverty. Poor people will go into the jungle to collect firewood, to cut down trees, to eat wild life, to eat other humans, to emigrate and start wars. It happened before, your policies will help to bring it about again, faster.