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 InternationalistThe fifth international Degrowth Conference is over, the call to host the sixth has been opened. A lot could be said about the conference, yet I do not intend to give a comprehensive overview, nor examine how it stands in relation with the former conferences. Instead, I want to share five aspects of the conference, which I found particularly insightful. 1. A Degrowth Conference in Hungary? ...
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...
Auf twitter, im Hörsaal und im Feuilleton hat das „andere Wirtschaften“ Konjunktur. Es soll Vieles zugleich leisten: das Wachstumsparadigma ablösen und den Marktfundamentalismus. Die vielfältigen Bedürfnisse der Menschen befriedigen, die Umwelt schonen und dem Einzelnen Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten bieten. Während in Seminaren und Talkshows diskutiert wird, öffnen Labore und Nischen, Bauernhöfe und...
