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 InternationalistOn the Need for Collaboration Between Social Movements and Activisms By Lucie Bardos Not that long ago, I left North America and arrived fresh and starry-eyed in Lund, Sweden, ready to begin my master’s degree in a program entitled Culture, Power and Sustainability. In my second year, I decided to write my thesis about the Transition Town movement, a social movement out of Great Britain born ...
By Oscar Krüger By now, there are likely few who have not heard of Pope Francis's recent encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si'”. And as many of the readers of this blog might already know, the Spanish and Italian versions contain what appears to be a direct endorsement of degrowth: the use of the term „decrecimiento“ (sp) and „decrescita“ (it), even if this is watered down to „decreased ...
Die Initiative LebensLernOrte ist ein von der Sinn-Stiftung initiiertes und mit Partnern getragenes Netzwerk. Ihr Ziel ist es, Menschen mit Erfahrungsräumen ‘gelebter Zukunft’ in Verbindung zu bringen und Lernprozesse zu begleiten. Jonathan Klodt arbeitet als Koordinator des Netzwerks LebensLernOrte. Auch mit ihm haben wir ein Interview geführt, das fiktiv im Jahre 2030, in einer Zeit [...]