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 InternationalistIn a recently published article in Nature Climate Change, Jeroen van den Bergh argues that neither degrowth nor green-growth strategies might lead to sufficient climate action and hence makes the case for a third option which he calls “agrowth”. While the understanding of degrowth reflected in the article can certainly be disputed – it comes across as mainly targeting a shrinking GDP – his conc...
In his welcome address at the opening plenary of the 5th International Degrowth Conference, Federico Demaria from Research and Degrowth made explicitly clear that immigrants, refugees and their struggles must be integral part of the degrowth community: "Refugees and the other oppressed shall always be kept in mind while imagining degrowth and the socio-ecological transformation we are walking. ...
Das fundamentale Problem unserer Ökonomie ist die Knappheit. Der Gewinn, der Wohlstand, das Wachstum sollen maximiert werden, doch dies kann nur unter bestimmten Nebenbedingungen geschehen. Es besteht nur eine begrenzte Anzahl der sogenannten Inputfaktoren zu Verfügung, die in der Warenproduktion eingesetzt werden können. Es gibt eine bestimmte Menge an Ressourcen. Im neoklassischen Kontext betrachten wir [...]
