“All that is solid melts into PR” Mark Fisher warns us in his manifesto Capitalist Realism. Capitalism absolves all, and if we aren’t careful, our green progressive ideals will be churned into empty slogans. This danger also exists when we set out to create social change. When engaging in the political arena as we do with Degrowth, we must stay vigilant to avoid reproducing the status quo. Ensuring that our revolution truly is a revolution. Not a degrowth revolution for some, but for all. This was the perspective that, in our view, was missing at the Alt Shift Festival, and it led us to work with anti-oppression themes.
With a background in years of organizing grassroots climate movements, I didn’t have a specific connection with the degrowth movement yet. Still, I made my way to Alt Shift in the summer of 2023, set up my tent, ready to explore degrowth. Coming from work related to issues of climate justice and politicizing the Dutch climate movement, I expected themes that were not explicitly linked with ‘degrowth’.
I had expected workshops on the presence of Frontex and borders, on solidarity with current indigenous communities fighting for survival, on the pervasiveness of xenophobia in Europe and its dangers to realize a utopian degrowth society for all. Yet as I made my way through the days of Alt Shift, I didn’t find this perspective.
I found myself in a workshop dreaming of our utopian world. What would our ideal town look like? What services would be there? Well, there would be a bakery where anyone could learn how to bake, education would be centered around the elderly teaching the youth, electricity would come from green sources, food was locally grown, and so on.
At no point did we ask: “Who is allowed to participate in this utopia? What makes these dreams possible? Who is allowed to dream?”. Because indeed, while this particular utopia is possible in a totally just world, it is also possible in a world where thousands of drones swarm over the Mediterranean sea, protecting fortress Europe.
It was then that we started to talk. How come there is such a lack in linking degrowth with wider decolonial and antiracist struggles? And more importantly, what can we do about it? So, we decided to host a workshop exploring themes of anti-oppression. For this specific workshop we decided to focus on Racism, Colonialism and White Supremacy.
About 15-20 people attended, because they, too, had sensed the lack of explicit solidarity with antiracist and decolonial struggles. After exploring what the three terms meant, we had discussions on how they relate to Degrowth. In perhaps the most fruitful part, we collectively thought about recommendations for the organizing team. How can we make sure that next year, these themes are sufficiently addressed? How can we transform the Alt Shift Festival into a space where everybody feels truly and fully welcomed? The suggestions ranged from strikingly simple additions to vast and idealistic visions for future editions.
We didn’t want the ideas to remain within the workshop group. In fact, we hoped that the organization would be willing to sit down with us, hear our ideas and work on them.
(in movies, this is what they call foreshadowing! As this is exactly what happened!)
Indeed, the organizers were very open to listen to us and some of us formed a working group to prepare a meeting. We prepared who would say what, how to present our ideas and how to move forward. From the organizing team, everyone was present as well as more than a handful of volunteers.
The conversation was moving, vulnerable, honest, emotional and very precious. The temporary ‘anti-oppression’ workgroup came out of it feeling heard, and we felt that the organizers realized that the next edition of the festival could not leave out this theme. Anti-oppression work so often is an afterthought, as understandably happened this time. Yet alluding to the danger I mentioned before, if our political projects fail to make explicit time and time again who is included in our revolution, we run the danger of working into the hands of the status quo - or even more frightening: ecofascism.
- Sebastiaan Vannisselroy