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
Environmental protection is needed because we take useful things out of nature and put useless or harmful things back in. The resulting depletion and pollution have reached harmful, unsustainable levels. We know that voluntary behaviour change, led by an elite that encourages, fosters and politely ‘nudges’ the masses, won’t do it. Legislated solutions are needed on the principle of ‘I will if y...
Nächste Woche, vom 6.-8-Oktober 2017, findet in Leipzig die Konferenz „Selbstbestimmt und Solidarisch“ statt. Diese Konferenz ist an der Schnittstelle von Migration, selbstbestimmter Entwicklung und ökologischer Krise angesiedelt. An dieser Stelle beschreibt Olaf Bernau von Afrique-Europa-Interact, worum es gehen wird. Spätestens seit Geflüchtete im Sommer 2015 das europäische Grenzregim...
Things are big in the United States of America. Returning home after a year away reacquaints me with big detached single-family homes, big single-occupant vehicles, and big single-species grass lawns. I find wider roads, longer distances, larger supermarkets, and more stuff everywhere. As a student of ecological economics, it makes me a little anxious. Such individualistic extravagance isn’t e...
