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 InternationalistMaking sense of inputs from the Budapest Degrowth Conference The degrowth community in Budapest and other forums formulated a number of concrete policies and identified alliances with other movements. Acknowledging the diversity of perspectives and a more concise set of proposals by Research and Degrowth, this article puts together a number of policies and proposals consistent with degrowth. T...
Since the very beginning of modern growth-critique, starting with the publication of the report „Limits to Growth“ in 1972, the mainstream response to this critique has always been: “Well, we can grow the limits by making things ever more efficient”. Now, with the shiny user interface of the ongoing digital revolution, the holy grail of the efficiency revolution gets yet another new finish: By ...
Von Angelika Zahrnt „Postwachstum“ war 2010, als unser Buch Postwachstumsgesellschaft (Seidl, I./Zahrnt, A.) erschien, noch ein völlig unbekannter Begriff. Heute ist Postwachstum zwar in vielen Ländern (erzwungene) Realität, aber diese Situation wird offiziell als vorübergehendes Phänomen eingeschätzt, das mittels der üblichen wachstumsfördernden Maßnahmen überwunden werden soll – mit staatlic...
