DegrowthUKJun 25, 2025

Njoki Njoroge Njehû
Principal Political Advisor – Movement Building, Pan-African Fight Inequality Alliance.
Begins with a series of Qs on personal experience of poverty/wealth.

Live in Age of Multiple Crises fed by global capitalism. No accidents: deliberate policies from IMF/WB, extraction, sacrifice of communities, over-consumption: by design peoples pushed back. It's systemic, driving inequality and climate collapse.
Those responsible have names.

#DegrowthOslo25

Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Demands for the poor to make amends are unfair.
An illustration.
Earth hour: turn off the light - in Nairobi, the power had been off for 18 hours and came on just before the hour started.
Impossible for some people to think beyond their current reality.
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
5 demands:-
1) Tax the rich
2) Full funded services for all
3) Cancellation of sovereign debt to free nations of the South from debt slavery
4) Dismantle tax havens to end tax dodging
5) Abolish IMF/WB model to build alt financial structures to serve the people
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Degrowth the rich. Stakeholders not Steak-holders!
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025

Now Alf Hornberg.
"Coming to our senses beyond the hubristic pretensions of green technology".
Jaspers: 'Axial Age' - Ancient Greece, India, China - first coined money - exchange value, distancing from the material world. Dualism of spirit and matter.
2nd axial age - believe in progress - again (Cartesian) dualistic.
When measured in money, "All trade is fair".

#DegrowthOslo25

Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Hornborg contd.
But now realised that both unequal and unsustainable - 80% dependent on fossil fuel combustion.
Hence notion of green transition'.
But there never has been an energy transition as replacement.
A myth, because fossil fuels are required in the absolute expansion of just about everything - including all the green technologies.
The 'transition' is additive - more and more and more.
Georgescu-Rogen predicted this.
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
So, we have to rethink the role of technology in human life.
Machines as counterfeit organisms - using organic fossilised energy from millions of years ago.
Solar panels preferable, more efficient than horses, powered by oats?
Machines don't replace slavery but displace it. Tech progress in one place tends to cause exploitation and devastation in other regions. Cotton empire -> slavery & ecological destruction. Solar and batteries - > cobalt mining under super-exploitation in Africa.
Show threadDegrowthUK

But then suggests solution is a new kind of money, which is a category error in my (MB) view.

He's right that the key is unequal resource and energy transfer.

#DegrowthOslo25

Jun 25, 2025 at 7:54amWeb
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025

Now Thomas Piketty, by elec link-up.
(He has a very big bookcase.)

Can't solve problems without a vast reduction in income and wealth inequality, on a global basis.
Low income groups won't accept the changes needed without that.

2 reasons for optimism.
1) Have achieved big reductions in inequality historically (??) Talking about Nordic / Euopean soc dem model
2) Pressure for change from the global South getting stronger and stronger. -> Europe must stop aligning with USA and shift ot global S.

Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
For an empirical economist he seems to have a tunnel vision.
The period of decreasing inequality in W Europe was built on the back of colonial/neocolonial exploitation and unequal transfers. It was also knocked back down by the rise of neoliberalism, in part because ofthe profit crisis of the capitalism that sustained it.
The anti-colonial moment in the global S was also knocked back by the West/North through it institutions of banking and IMF/World Bank - structural adjustment and debt burden.
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025

Thinks Europe could, in alliance with relatively progressive govts in global South could challenge the Washington consensus.
But what is this progressive Europe??

I think he's waffling.

Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Oh good - Miriam Lang (Ecuador) is making a similar point.
Points out that in seeking allies in the global South, don't look to the big powers, the aspirants to domination, the criminally dominated governments....
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Pedro from Pisa now challenging Piketty on (his tunnel vision history) re the reasons for the compression of inequality in the post WW2 period - role of the Soviet Union as counterbalance and source of pressure.
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Piketty counters that now there is China and also that it inequality compression wasn't just due to the Soviet Union - there was a popular movement in W Europe too. Both true, but the point still stands.
Show threadDegrowthUKJun 25, 2025
Turns out that Piketty is regarded by feminists at #DegrowthOslo25 as a domestic abuser following revelations - an old allegation from 2009 resurfaced last year leading to a new complaint of defamation against him from his former partner. FADA, feminists in the #degrowth movement, circulated a newspaper link but its paywalled - https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/200120/thomas-piketty-aurelie-filippetti-and-buried-domestic-violence-case
They boycotted the session. As our thread indicates, they didn't miss much,
Thomas Piketty, Aurélie Filippetti and the buried 'domestic violence' case

Late last year, the acclaimed French economist Thomas Piketty, a best-selling author for his work centred on wealth and income gaps, hailed by the Left and spurned by the Right, gave a conference at the university of Toulouse, south-west France, when he was surprised by a question from a student. It concerned a complaint for domestic violence filed against him in 2009 by his former partner, then a socialist MP and later culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti. His response prompted Filippetti to lodge a new complaint, this time for defamation, which has had the effect of breaking a decade-long taboo among the French media and political circles. Lénaïg Bredoux reports.

Mediapart