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 InternationalistOne argument of those who defend growth is that growth is the natural and inevitable course of the economy. Liberated from governmental or other restrictions, and left to their own powers, entrepreneurs will make an economy grow, as they are endlessly inventive in growing their own incomes. Growth is then seen as the natural product of a free, ‘self-regulated market’. The destiny of the economy...
With the "Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change" published by the International Islamic Climate Change Symposium earlier this month, another world religion has expressed heavy concerns about the pursuit of relentless economic growth. Professor Odeh Al Jayyousi, one of the members of the Symposium, had attended our summer school on degrowth and climate justice right before the symposium a...
Wir freuen uns bekanntzugeben, dass die Frist zum Einreichen wissenschaftlicher "short papers" nochmals bis zum 14. März verlängert wurde. Bis jetzt haben wir 250 wissenschaftliche Beitragsvorschläge und weitere 250 von zivilgesellschaftlichen und praktischen Akteur_innen erhalten. Darüber hinaus wurden 30 Impulspapiere für die Arbeitsgruppen des Group Assembly Process (GAP) eingesandt. Obwohl ...