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 InternationalistBy Andreas Roos “The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication revolutions merge with new energy regimes”. This is the beginning of an article by Jeremy Rifkin in the Guardian back in 2011, echoing the promise he laid out in his then newly written book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and World. The book claims, i...
By Chandran Nair A seminal paper jointly authored by a dozen international scientists and academics and released in April has created a ripple in the conservation community. It is a lengthy essay but what An Ecomodernist Manifesto says is that accelerated technological progress combined with socio-economic change will 'decouple' human economic pursuit from its impact on the environment. Transl...
Viele Publikationen, die für Suffizienz und eine Abkehr vom Wachstums-Paradigma plädieren, adressieren allein an die Politik. Sie müsse für veränderte Rahmenbedingungen sorgen, „damit gutes Leben einfacher wird“ (Schneidewind/Zahrnt). Sie müsse das Geldsystem in ein Vollgeld-System umwandeln (Huber) und/oder endlich eine ökologische Steuerreform durchführen (Binswanger/Nutzinger), um den Naturverbrauch mit monetären Anreizen zu reduzieren. So richtig diese Argumentationen [...]
