Quick thoughts on this:

I would not equate degrowth and self-sufficiency. While it’s plausible and possibly even necessary to increase self-sufficiency in a successful degrowth scenario, there should still be abundant international trade on important sectors. Degrowth is not a turn away from technology in eg. low-carbon energy production, electrification and bioeconomy.

Ensuring defense capabilities is of course vital, especially in the short term, and can be achieved through prioritization of resource use. Notably, in the long term the turn away from geopolitical competition, weakening the influence of fossil and military-industrial capital, increased self-sufficiency in resource use and increased global solidarity (in eg. trade policy, climate policy, development policy) would all greatly serve to promote peace and the decrease of tensions. This is not to say one should be naive towards governments like Putin’s authoritarian Russia.

While this might sound like a lot of things lumped together, for example this research article is helpful in understanding how all these things relate: https://zenodo.org/records/15529759

Joplin is an awesome FOSS note app and alternative to Obsidian. Love it, I use WebDAV to link between devices. Lots of plugins for extra functionality as well.

Based on the text I would not consider it a functional degrowth economy. What they have so far is the payment system, and some promising emerging use for it. But a great initiative and a great read anyway.

I’d love to like Tuta but man was using their service a constant pain. The search is incredibly slow for any messages not downloaded and keyword matching is somehow weird, the spam filter fails terribly (my spam folder was always full of legitimate messages), assigning rules is clumsy, and you can’t even bulk export mail to switch services:((

The tweet that seemed to be bootlicking Trump was worrying and troubling in my opinion as well. However, reading this deeper analysis alleviated at least some of my fears https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Also the foundation model decisively limits the influence of the founder. There seems to be no other European email service that’s quite on par with Proton. Therefore I still think they are the top alternative.

Great, hope you find them fruitful!

Thanks for sharing! A great, informative and concise piece, with a lot of learning points for co-operatives.

I hope so. Although I’m not sure whether it is solarpunk or some other term under which the ideas will be popularized (eg. degrowth, eco-socialism, minor paradise, doughnut economy, ecological civilization). But I find it likely that solarpunk will be packaged together with communism, as communism, by the right. And demonized.

I’m not sure whether we have the same idea of what it means for capitalism to be compatible with something. Maybe setting aside direct action for now, major reforms in all of the areas you mentioned could be implemented in a society with a predominantly capitalist mode of production, with enough political power. It would be a move away from capitalism, strengthening socialist and statist modes of production. But it would not mean the end of capitalism as a mode of production. It doesn’t mean those reforms could be implemented only or even preferably by completely terminating capitalism, i.e. private capital and production, at once through total revolution.

There are always multiple modes of production active in a society. For an example case, compare the USA and any nordic country. Both are predominantly capitalist states, but in a nordic country, there is far more production following a socialist and statist mode than in the US. Of course, major transformations are also needed in the nordic countries to get on the path of degrowth, that’s for sure.

For reference, André Gorz, who is one of the most influential degrowth scholars, developed the concept of “non-reformist reforms” which are anti-capitalist reforms in a capitalist system. Another good read is this piece, “How to think about (and win) socialism”. Erik Olin Wright writes about the complexities of production relations and strategic logics of transformation.

I was gonna suggest The Dawn of Everything. I think one of the major arguments they make in the book is that humans have lived in very differing cultures and societies throughout (pre-)history. So attaching any one mode of societal organization to “human nature” is hardly possible.

I agree that in the long run degrowth is not compatible with capitalism, at least not capitalism as we know it. Even if markets and private property continued to play some role in the economy. However, I think it’s important to emphasize that we don’t need to first somehow completely rid of capitalism (that would require some higher order magic) and then implement degrowth. There are many reforms that can start building the path of a prosperously degrowing society. A good overlook of degrowth policies can be found in this article. Of course, the need to reduce material flows is absolutely urgent, and I definitely advocate building popular support and implementing degrowth policies asap.

Just adopted Joplin (FOSS all the way) for notes on desktop and mobile, using my own Seafile instance as the cloud service through webdav. Very happy with it so far, be it short and quick or long and complex notes.

Also using Zotero for bibliography management and related notes, also backing up to Seafile webdav. Joplin and Zotero also play together, but haven’t tried that out yet.

That was amazingly witty, ingeniously highlighted the euro-anglocentricity of western media

Clarence Kennedy

While a tempting logic, in my understanding of the dairy market this is not correct. To my knowledge, here in Finland the big retail chains initiate auctions for the milk contracts, which are highly competed. If a producer tries to raise the price, they will likely not sell any milk at all. On top of that, milk is an important loss leader for the retail chains. The price is kept as low as possible, and it might even be sold at a loss, to tempt customers who will then compensate for this loss with the rest of their shopping basket. Against this, it would be very incorrect to assume that nobody bats an eye if the price of milk increases ten cents.

I find it quite convincing. I’m involved in activist groups with a lot of young people here in Northern Europe, and I see a lot of this “smash capitalism” attitude. And I think it’s very relatable, and in some places has real potential for changing things. But I wish to see it combined ever more often with concrete goals and plans in eroding and taming capitalism. And I think it is important to keep the rage there, in the spirit, not to become cynical and calculative and opportunist.