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Redistribution, not growth - why the Left should embrace degrowth

09.11.2015

By Giorgos Kallis

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

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Digitalization, Efficiency and the Rebound Effect

By: Tilman Santarius

Since the very beginning of modern growth-critique, starting with the publication of the report „Limits to Growth“ in 1972, the mainstream response to this critique has always been: “Well, we can grow the limits by making things ever more efficient”. Now, with the shiny user interface of the ongoing digital revolution, the holy grail of the efficiency revolution gets yet another new finish: By ...

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A radical political-ecological view on Jeremy Rifkin’s ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, five years later

By: Andreas Roos

By Andreas Roos  “The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication revolutions merge with new energy regimes”. This is the beginning of an article by Jeremy Rifkin in the Guardian back in 2011, echoing the promise he laid out in his then newly written book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and World. The book claims, i...

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Degrowth Konkret: Call for Courses geöffnet!

Klimacamp3

Für unsere Degrowth Konkret - Klimagerechtigkeit Sommerschule 2015 suchen wir noch nach Anbieter*innen von Kursen. Die Sommerschule findet vom 9. bis 14. August 2015 im Braunkohleabbaugebiet Rheinland zusammen mit dem Klimcamp statt. Die Kurse sollen als Herzstück der Veranstaltung 4 oder 2 Tage lang laufen und damit die Möglichkeit zur Themenvertiefung bieten. Eine bestimmte Form oder Struktur...