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 InternationalistSince the 2014 Leipzig Degrowth Conference, the argument that climate justice cannot exist without degrowth has repeatedly been made. In a keynote at the Degrowth conference in Budapest, in September 2016, I developed this line of thinking further and argued that the opposite is equally important: There is not degrowth without climate justice. My argument, which I presented as someone involved ...
In a recent article with Stefan Drews, we discussed why degrowth might be an unfortunate name and slogan for the alternative economics movement. We listed several expressions that could possibly be better, but we were also upfront about their disadvantages. Here I propose a new term that might combine the advantages of the word degrowth with those of its more positive alternatives. For an asse...
Eindrücke von der Degrowth Sommerschule und dem Klimacamp im Rheinland Zum zweiten Mal ist jetzt die Degrowth Sommerschule auf dem Klimacamp im Rheinland zuende gegangen mit ca. 800-900 Teilnehmenden auf dem Camp. Während es letztes Jahr vor allem um Klimagerechtigkeit ging und darum, die Degrowth- und Klimagerechtigkeitsbewegung zusammenzubringen, ist dieses Jahr daraus eine solide Partnersc...
