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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.

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Gathering degrowth in the American pluriverse

Degrowus2018 haymarket

By: Sam Bliss

“When you told your friends and family you were going to a degrowth gathering, they asked, ‘What is degrowth?’ How did you respond?” The 2018 degrowUS gathering from September 28-30 2018 in Chicago began with this question. The first day’s thirty-odd attendees wrote their responses on sticky notes as they scraped the last bites of lunch off the dishes the event’s organizers had told them to ...

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My Journey toward degrowth

By: Sam Bliss

By Sam Bliss Growth means a process of increasing in physical size. When we think of economic growth, it is difficult to fathom what exactly grows, since 'the economy' is an invented concept that describes billions of human interactions as if they were one giant entity. But gross domestic product is a rate -- the total money value of economic activity per year -- and thus growth really means ...

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Sommerschule: Kurzfristige Ortsänderung!

Kurz vor dem Start des Klimacamps und der Degrowth-Sommerschule im Rheinland wechseln wir den Ort unseres Camps. Wir haben ein noch besseres Gelände in unmittelbarer Nähe vom Tagebau Garzweiler gefunden. Mehr dazu gibt es hier