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 InternationalistThe picture above shows some of the statues decorating the northern entrance of the Corvinus University in Budapest where the recent Degrowth Conference took place. The building has not always been a university. It once was a place of trade, and the statues over the entrance depict virtues which, back then, were considered central to trade. Virtues like courage, faith, love and honesty. When di...
By Ashish Kothari, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta André Reichel’s very thoughtful piece ‘Retaking sustainable development for degrowth’ raises several very important issues. We start by acknowledging that we and Reichel are clearly on the same page in criticizing current models of ‘growth’ including in its ‘green’ and ‘eco-modernist’ forms. We concur also on the need for the world to move...
Das „Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie e.V.“ veranstaltet vom 11. bis 16. August 2014 zum zweiten Mal eine Workshop-Woche zum Thema „Wirtschaft anders machen – Konzepte für Heute und Morgen!“ in Leipzig. Dabei haben junge Erwachsenen die Möglichkeit, sich gemeinsam mit uns über Grenzen und Probleme des derzeitigen Wirtschaftens auszutauschen und neue Ansätze kennenzulernen. Neben einer theoretischen [...]
