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subrosa wrote

From what I've seen it's not a terrible framework / set of ideas, probably a needed attack on economic growth as a value. But it can easily be turned into a political program or green capitalism of the future type shit, so I'll stick to my let's destroy the economy approach.

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existential1 wrote

I agree with this take. It is better than what currently exists in the West and more "developed" countries, but it is still pro-capital. It is also not explicitly anti-state or archy in-general. It may be a bandaid but it is not a root-cause addressing solution.

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subrosa wrote

There's some people with Marxian backgrounds associated with the term, and newer publications generally have chapters on how capitalism is incompatible with degrowth. But yeah, for lack of any truly radical ideas at its core (no anarchy smh), there's an equal amount of band-aid governmental programs like UBI and "job guarantee" policy proposals attached to it. Not a coherent movement but more of a theme, for better or worse.

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deeppurplehazedream wrote

The term degrowth is new to me. I knew an old-school Marxist who used to say all the time that capitalism must grow or die. So, maybe sort of a materialist take on social change plus an ideology of "if only we were in power we'd fix things!"? lol

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

I generally feel like any "solution" that starts with "have less people and less technology" is how the establishment has tricked us into accepting what they're going to do to us anyway. If we can't do better than "enlightened self-genocide," the universe is better off without us, so there's no reason not to make the bet that we can find technological solutions to technological problems.

The main thing is to make sure we don't take down the whole biosphere with us. As bad as climate change is, that's going to mess up life as we know it. Nuclear war, which seems inevitable if we don't stop centralizing, is significantly more final. Fortunately, our most exciting technologies are all about decentralizing. There's just this little quibble that they're mostly being used to buy stock in the heroin trade and trick poor people into doing the same. Hopefully we figure that out soon.

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subrosa wrote

I generally feel like any "solution" that starts with "have less people and less technology"

What are you even talking about.

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

I'm guessing "degrowth" as you mean it isn't what it sounds like, then?

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subrosa wrote

Maybe it's because "degrowth" is somewhat popular in German-speaking Europe, and maybe that's not the case anywhere else. But either way, it seems odd to me that you'd rather assume it's about "having less people and less technology" than do a quick search to find out:

Degrowth is a term used for both a political, economic, and social movement as well as a set of theories that critiques the paradigm of economic growth.

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RatifyGuy1776 wrote

Okay, I can see how this can be different. Most of our consumption is currently devoted to war, so it's fair to say we can bring it down significantly without sacrificing much. The word without this context really carries dire implications, so it confused me.

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