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
Economic growth can’t reduce inequalities; it merely postpones confronting exploitation. The emergence of interest in degrowth can be traced back to the 1st International Degrowth Conference organized in Paris in 2008. At this conference, degrowth was defined as a “voluntary transition towards a just, participatory, and ecologically sustainable society,” so challenging the dogma of economic gr...
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 ...
Von Lasse Thiele Ist Degrowth nur im Kontext „übersättigter“ Industriegesellschaften denkbar, während der „globale Süden“ weiterhin auf Wachstum angewiesen ist? In den beiden Teilen dieses Beitrags sollen derartige Annahmen hinterfragt werden: Zunächst werden entwicklungskritische Positionen vorgestellt, die das westliche Wohlstandsmodell nicht übernehmen wollen; im nächsten Schritt werden die...
