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 InternationalistAnthropological thoughts on degrowth Degrowth energizes and interconnects remarkably heterodox thinking and surprisingly heterogeneous action. To advance dialogue among diverse pathways, a recent Journal of Political Ecology issue on “Degrowth, Culture and Power” joins studies of 15 initiatives to forge worlds that prioritize well-being, equity and sustainability rather than expansion. My intr...
As much as building walls cannot be the answer to the horrible situation of refugees seeking asylum in Europe, it cannot be the means of choice for protecting national economies either. In the face of a resurgence of sovereigntist and nationalist rhetoric from both the Right and the Left, the French Degrowth Project makes the case for open relocalization as a basis for a new international: By...
Die Grenzen der Megamaschine von Kontext-TV Nach mehrjähriger Recherchearbeit hat Kontext-TV-Redakteur Fabian Scheidler sein Buch "Das Ende der Megamaschine. Geschichte einer scheiternden Zivilisation" vorgestellt. David Goeßmann sprach mit ihm über die Ursprünge des kapitalistischen Weltsystems, die ersten Aktiengesellschaften, die Zusammenhänge zwischen Geldökonomie und Krieg, über den...
