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
What could an alliance of techies and greens bring for a social, democratic and ecological future? The conference "Bits and Trees" ("Bits & Bäume" in German), which took place in Berlin on November 17th and 18th of this year, tried to shed light on this question. It brought together around 1.700 people interested and organized around digitalization and sustainability. Merely the name of ...
By Sam Bliss Growth means a process of increasing in physical size. When we think of economic growth, it is difficult to fathom what exactly grows, since 'the economy' is an invented concept that describes billions of human interactions as if they were one giant entity. But gross domestic product is a rate -- the total money value of economic activity per year -- and thus growth really means ...
Interview mit Reinhard Loske Prof. Dr. Reinhard Loske ist Professor für Nachhaltigkeit und Transformationsdynamik an der Universität Witten/Herdecke. Er war von 1998 bis 2007 Mitglied des Bundestages für die Partei Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und von 2007 bis 2011 Senator für Umwelt, Bau, Verkehr und Europa der Stadt Bremen. Sein Artikel "Ist ohne Wachstum wirklich alles nichts?" in der Frankfurte...
