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...
Should arguments for degrowth be anthropocentric or ecocentric? And what does this mean in practice? There is an interesting discussion going on, starting with two recent court rulings in New Zealand and India about rivers being granted personal rights. We present an article by Ashish Kothari, Mari Margil and Shrishtee Bajpai, first published for The Guardian. Several geographically-distan...
Unter dem Motto „Besser – Anders – Weniger“ beleuchtet das aktuelle Böll.Thema den weltweiten Trend zur Suche nach alternativen Wirtschaftskonzepten, denn schneller als die Wirtschaft wächst in vielen Teilen der Welt „das Unbehagen an einer Vorherrschaft der Wirtschaft, die alle Lebensbereiche dominiert“. Das Heft zeigt und verknüpft einige der vielfältigen konkreten Alternativen, die zunehmend [...]
