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...and join us to add other languages! Ever wanted to listen to the book "Vocabulary of Degrowth" because you prefer having an audio book over a physical one? Well, we hear you and share your feeling. That's why we started the "Vocabulary of Degrowth Audiobook Podcast". Currently we are recording individual chapters of the book and publish them as a podcast. This way we eventually get to recor...
While agreeing with many points of van den Bergh's excellent review of the growth versus climate debate, I would like to point to a fundamental misrepresentation of the quoted research on degrowth: degrowth is not a strategy "aimed at reducing the size of the GDP". In fact, the degrowth proposition is that the relationship between fossil fuels/carbon emissions and GDP growth is mutual, and th...
By Fabian Scheidler In the face of climate change, financial crises and mass poverty, a growing number of people agree that we need a fundamental social-ecological transformation that includes all areas of society. Luckily, a huge variety of concepts and practices for such transformation already exists. These, however, have not yet been able to leave their niches. Why is this so difficult? Are...
