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 InternationalistOne argument of those who defend growth is that growth is the natural and inevitable course of the economy. Liberated from governmental or other restrictions, and left to their own powers, entrepreneurs will make an economy grow, as they are endlessly inventive in growing their own incomes. Growth is then seen as the natural product of a free, ‘self-regulated market’. The destiny of the economy...
Dragon Dreaming offers simple, objective and playful tools for visionary processes, planning, implementation, evaluation and celebration to make our dreams come true. Thus it helps building a degrowth society. We have a world economy where eight men have a wealth equivalent to more than 50 per cent of the world’s people, while three billion try to live on less than three dollars a day. We ar...
Wer produziert, muss auch die Möglichkeit haben, seine Arbeitskraft zu reproduzieren. Unser heutiges Leben in einer westlichen Gesellschaft untersteht der Logik des Kapitalismus. Ist es da nicht folgerichtig, auch den Reproduktionsaspekt des Alltags in das ökonomische System einzugliedern? Die Antwort auf diese Frage lautet meiner Meinung nach: nein, und zwar aus folgenden Gründen: Bis vor wenigen [...]
