Global social-ecological transformations and the need for degrowth: questioning the ecological modernisation of the imperial mode of living

One of the most striking features of the current debate on transformative approaches is that implicitly or explicitly it refers to the local or national scale and rarely to the international one. This might have to do, first, with the fact that when looking beyond the local and national things become really complicated. How to reorganise global commodity chains which become increasingly complex? How is an alternative thinkable and doable beyond the political game of the powerful states? Secondly, the absence or, at least weakness, of truly global political alternatives could root in the fact that common experiences of social protests, struggles and alternatives are often made at local, regional or national scales and rarely at the international one. Of course, there are differences when we think about Latin America where people can more easily be informed about what is happening in neighbouring countries than between African or Asian countries. Or in the case of the European Union where many political initiatives from above are formulated at the European level. But here, too, when it comes to alternatives, respective debates and practices are largely organised at the national level. And thirdly, I contend that the mentioned absence of global alternatives has to do with a strong historical experience of alternative thinking and doing – that the national state is the main instance to secure and give a certain durability to emancipatory achievements. This is quite obvious when it comes to anti-colonial struggles (historically framed as “national liberation”) or the welfare state in the global North and some countries of the global South. The state is also the main addressee of political demands from various actors and interest groups. In light of these observations, in my contribution to the panel I argue that one of the root causes of the climate crisis is the “imperial” mode of production and living, its economically and materially escalating logics and its crucial moment of “externalisation”. The current ecological modernisation of the imperial mode of living, i.e. strategies of “green growth” and a “greening” of the economy has a hegemonic potential among large parts of the populations in the global North and the upper and middle classes in the global South. This is the playing field for emancipatory transformative approaches.The degrowth perspective formulates since some years a broad agenda for such radical transformative change. But it is also not very explicit on its international implications. I would like to develop some ideas about an internationalist understanding of degrowth and will argue – as first ideas - that (a) degrowth is a perspective for societies in the global North as well as in the global South, (b) the required de-escalation of capitalist commodity production needs to consider many commodity chains, particularly those that are organised internationally, (c) the false promise of a greening or decarbonisation of the economy needs to be questioned, (d) a crucial terrain of conflict for radical approaches is to stop the externalisation mechanism of the imperial mode of living and (e) the state and the dominant understanding of politics need to be radically changed. I will focus particularly on aspects (d) and (e).