The Being Way of Degrowth
For those of us seeking post-capitalist futures: rather than burning ourselves out Doing — the energy of the capitalist system we are trying to topple — why not try Being, the energy of degrowth?
Economy featured
Hedging bets on catastrophe
It’s not rare for people to be left behind by profit-driven corporations, or even overlooked by underfunded and understaffed government agencies. In that case, we must learn to turn to each other. And in preparation for such times, we must bolster community resilience through initiatives like community gardens, tool libraries, and the like.
Capitalism and reproduction
Perhaps the main problem for capitalism and the problem with capitalism is that it is dependent on the same free “services” from nature and humans as it destroys?
Wealth without wages, wages without wealth
Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value.
Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the relationship between technology and wealth when viewed through a global biophysical lens.
We’re racing down the highway to a Mad Max world: But there’s a degrowth way out
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Relationalized Finance: Bridging the Chasm
Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.
Nourishing the Bioregional Economy: Essential Resources
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
SMPLE-KOIN A Buddhist Cryptocurrency Optimised for Material Sufficiency within Game Theory Dynamics
SMPLE-KOIN will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity.
Toward Socio-ecological Markets
We must move from a finance that demands private benefits at scale, as purely transactional and extractive, to finance systems grounded in particular places and cooperative relationships, all closely aligned with living systems.
Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative
The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities
Commoning as Relational Provisioning & Governance
In the face of capitalist economics and states intent on asserting their dominance and control, commoners have a mindset that is more expansive, experimental, self-reliant and localist than the market/state dares to imagine.
