Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance between Two Movements

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Notes

¹CES conference on The Revival of Political Economy, Coimbra, October 21–23, 2010. I am grateful to Patrick Bond and Larry Lohman for information and comments.

²Sahlins made two main points. The first, in primitive stateless societies (based on the “domestic mode of production”), material and ritual needs can be satisfied with few hours of work. Second, and in the same direction, peasant societies (if left alone) function according to Chayanov's rule, i.e., the higher the ratio of workers to consumers in families, the less the workers need to work. Sahlins’ ideas were immediately influential in France because of his 1968 article in Le Temps Modernes (Sahlins 1968).