capital-centered production, and measures that foster international solidarity such as reparations for the most-affected people and countries or the restructuring of global production chains. Many of these proposals are far from being unique to the degrowth current. The authors contend that this is Samuel: Your book is full of concrete proposals, solutions, and vision: what do you think it would take to present those proposals and visions in such a way as to capture policymakers and convince the wonk class to support it (or, again, should we bother? Are other aims more important)?

Nevertheless, this compelling historical account of degrowth's forerunners has a certain bias towards intellectual critiques of growth. While the authors correctly include Marxism, critical theory, ecofeminism, or postcolonialism into the heterodox intellectual field of growth critiques, Samuel: To what extent do you see this current landscape as an opportunity for degrowth advocacy, versus a major hurdle?Samuel: If you see degrowth as a means of unifying disparate movements, or providing a unified set of goals and pathways, how can that work begin? the critique articulated by social movements is all too often only mentioned in passing. A more comprehensive view of the history of growth critique The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to A World Beyond Capitalism” is an amazing new book enriching the degrowth discourse. Written by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter, it discusses why and how to break free from the capitalist economic system. Jana talked to Aaron, R&D member and co-author of the book, about theories of change, about feminist and decolonial origins and about what it is like writing a book during a worldwide pandemic. On the other hand, the authors challenge what they call “progressive productivism” by showing that even leftist programs for social justice and Degrowth is utopian, as should be clear by now. And utopias are, as Ernst Bloch puts it, “the education of desire.” Without the ability to imagine a better world, we won’t have the desire, nor the courage, to enact it. But utopian thought is often dismissed as impractical. Without a strategy to challenge the well-organized interests of capital, utopia remains just a daydream. While our book does not provide a blueprint for change, we do offer some ways to think about strategy and the mutually reinforcing roles that different kinds of strategy can play in the ecological transition.

Hornborg, A.: Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World, Revised edition, Routledge, London, New York, ISBN 9780415614863, 2012. I am also increasingly focused on storytelling and science fiction and its role in imagining and creating the desire for a different future. We badly need a new imaginary, one which does not take technology or capital as the agent of history, but rather working people and the ecologies that they foster. And, more simply, I’ve personally felt the need for injecting some play and whimsy into my life. If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution! But there is also a larger demographic—roughly 10% of the global population, which includes most of the middle class—whose way of life is dependent on global exploitation of cheap labor and on a massive environmental footprint. While this group largely calls the Global North home, it is expanding in the Global South too.To do so, we turned to the indispensable work of Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright. Published just after the 2008 financial crisis, Envisioning Real Utopias is one of the most accessible books out there on what we can do today to break out of capitalism, with useful, and concrete examples of the actually existing alternatives already out there. The book is structured similarly to ours: it first offers a critique of capitalism, then describes socialism as a utopian alternative, and finally describes the strategies available to us to make it happen. Thus, Wright shows that post-capitalist alternatives are not just desirable, it is also achievable. And he provides a framework for thinking through strategies of radical change, on which we rely in the second half of our book. There, we we discuss policies that democratise the economy, "now-topias" that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth.

The second chapter is dedicated to seven critiques of growth: the ecological, socio-economic, cultural, and feminist critiques, along with the critique of capitalism, the critique of industrialism, and the South-North critique. The authors detail the different arguments, exposing different positions within them. For example, within the broader sustainability debate, degrowth supporters are said to be “more amenable to a critique of capitalism than steady-state economy or post-growth proponents”. Degrowth radically questions the fossil-fuel powered way of life, and with that its central institutions and infrastructures. It makes visible how, through democratic and planned reduction of production and consumption in the global North, global ecological justice can be achieved and a pluriverse of interdependent ways of living can emerge. As a critique of neoclassical economics, it is of course inspired by heterodox approaches to economics—from ecological economics to Neo-Keynesianism. However, as we argue in our book The Future is Degrowth, degrowth is also fundamentally about social power and hierarchies . In celebration of Earth Day, we decided we would highlight five books that are key inspirations for degrowth, which are critical of power structures and offer viable alternatives. Andrea: I think this depends on whether one assumes that economics will stay the scientific branch that is most influential in forming policies (like it was since the 1950s). One could also build the hypothesis that with Covid and global warming natural science (like climate scientists, virologists etc.) have taken the lead of most influential sages forming policies while people and politicians do not care as much as they did what economists say whatsoever. Or military experts …Matthias: Definitely, these are key questions that we need to discuss. That’s also a reason why, as we argue in the book, only focusing on the local level is not enough. The experience of cooperatives and projects of the solidarity economy in Europe, which where particularly strong since the 1980s, were largely, over time, being crushed by competition. They either adapted to market constraints by compromising on their social, democratic or ecological objectives, or they went bankrupt. Therefore, next to local alternatives, postgrowth nowtopias and cooperatively organized companies degrowth must restructure society as such and create new rules that incentivise social and ecological behavior. Matthias: As the climate crisis escalates much faster than most of us had thought, even than the science said, we also need to escalate our strategies. There is now more and more discussion of the real possibility of mass death and extinction. Scientists are calling for more research on the possible extinction of humans… so yes, the process needs to be much faster. And it cannot depend on alliances with and support of broad factions of capital, as neoliberalism did, or transformation from above. Rather, it will likely depend on action from below and social tipping points. We’ve wasted decades by hoping that the alternative strategy of green growth would lead to rapid mitigation. Finally, in the energy transition, it's not an either or: we need both a rapid, publicly financed roll out of renewables, Green New Deal-style, and drastic demand side reductions. Foster, J. B.: Marx's Ecology. Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, New York, ISBN 9781583670125, 2000.