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 InternationalistWhat is capitalism? A kind of state? An institution? Some values? A power structure? Ideology? A Culture? What governs capitalism? Supply and demand Invisible hand Enclosure of land The drive to expand Market mechanism Class schism Racism The moral virtue of productivism. Innovation! Invest! Impress! Progress! Entrepreneurial quest for Technological success in Pursuit ...
Degrowth aims at undoing growth. Undoing growth both at the level of social structures and social imaginaries. Although the focus is very often on the latter, i.e. the “decolonization of imaginaries” as put by Serge Latouche, the degrowth perspective still seems to lack a comprehensive understanding of the role of ideology, the path dependencies and the power that shape these imaginations. Degr...
Frederik Grüneberg war Mitglied der Redaktionsgruppe der „Mainzer Botschaft“ der Ökumenischen Versammlung 2014 und ist auch Mitglied im Organisations-Kreis der Degrowth-Konferenz 2014. Im Interview im Rahmen des Stream towards Degrowth legt er dar, wo sich die beiden Bewegungen auf der Suche nach „einer Ökonomie des Lebens“ treffen. Inwiefern ist unsere Gesellschaft wachstumsabhängig? Unsere Gesellschaft ist in [...]
