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Redistribution, not growth - why the Left should embrace degrowth

09.11.2015

By Giorgos Kallis

A new Left has to be an ecological Left, or it won’t be left at all. Environmental change ‘changes everything’ for the Left too, Naomi Klein argued. Capitalism requires constant expansion, an expansion predicated on exploitation of humans and non-humans, that irreversibly damages the climate. A non-capitalist economy will have to sustain itself while contracting. But how can we redistribute or secure meaningful work without growth? There is not yet a concrete ‘economics of degrowth’. Lamentably, Keynesianism is the most powerful tool the Left, even the Marxist Left, has for dealing with issues of policy. But this is an economics of the 1930s when unlimited expansion was still possible and desirable.

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De-[Constructing] Growth: Decoupling Profits from Unsustainable Production*

By: Nicholas A Ashford

Degrowth has been described as a “movement” rather than an ideology1, and as such it presents several variations. For some of its proponents, degrowth is a proxy for sustainable consumption, and to a lesser extent production2. A second group of degrowth advocates are those for whom an emerging discussion of “sufficiency” as a societal norm is taking shape, as a result of activism3. Finally, a t...

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Landgrabbing – global pressure increases as new players enter the scene

By Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Leah Temper and Lucía Argüelles An interviewed Anuak farmer from the Gambella region in Ethiopia assures that nobody in his village supported the land deal for Al Amoudi´s Southern Star Farm project from the beginning. Despite of this, the contract was signed and the villagers were kicked off the lands. He lost his crop land and also his access to the now cleared ...

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Anmeldung geöffnet, Grundprogramm steht

Wir freuen uns bekanntzugeben, dass die Anmeldung zur Vierten Internationalen Degrowth-Konferenz nun geöffnet ist. Auch das Programm mit sieben Hauptvorträgen, über 20 Podiumsdiskussionen und ausgewählten wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Veranstaltungen ist jetzt auf der Konferenz-Homepage einsehbar. Im Laufe der nächsten Wochen wird es durch ca. 250 Workshops und weitere wissenschaftliche Veranstaltungen vervollständigt. Es lohnt sich [...]