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.
Read the whole article in the New Internationalist
„Wer von der Akkumulation des Kapitals nicht reden will, soll zum Wachstum schweigen,“ so einer der vielen prägenden Sätze des Politikwissenschaftlers Elmar Altvater, der am 1. Mai gestorben ist. Als Lehrer, Redner, Autor und kritischer Denker ist sein Werk prägend für die deutschsprachige wachstumskritische Debatte und darüber hinaus. Die Diskussion um Postwachstum und Degrowth hat viel von ih...
In his welcome address at the opening plenary of the 5th International Degrowth Conference, Federico Demaria from Research and Degrowth made explicitly clear that immigrants, refugees and their struggles must be integral part of the degrowth community: "Refugees and the other oppressed shall always be kept in mind while imagining degrowth and the socio-ecological transformation we are walking. ...
By Oscar Krüger By now, there are likely few who have not heard of Pope Francis's recent encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si'”. And as many of the readers of this blog might already know, the Spanish and Italian versions contain what appears to be a direct endorsement of degrowth: the use of the term „decrecimiento“ (sp) and „decrescita“ (it), even if this is watered down to „decreased ...
