Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Now, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis – the “libertarian Marxist” former finance minister of Greece – makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism:
At a minimum, we must align the signifiers of economic success with known ecological indicators — and this is just the first step on a long, complex realignment. If we fail to undertake this journey, we will be stuck paying for our own apocalypse.
If humanity is to survive, it will have to learn how to get in sync with natural systems, culturally and economically, and actively contribute to the flourishing of earthly and human systems in tandem.
Reading this back, it seems to me like a programme which, if well articulated, could resonate with people who have had close to two decades of a low growth wage squeeze, and who have watched their public resources wrecked by austerity. (Quite apart from creating a positive story about the response to climate change).
The steady-state/degrowth movement opens the possibility of re-defining “needs” and reorienting engineers to achieving equitable prosperity on our one shared planet.
Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity.
Yet, whether it is this collective or another that resonates with your particular diagnosis of the current multidimensional crisis, it is only through joining together with others with the will to change the future that we stand any chance of contesting those who lead us ever further into catastrophe.
A growing number of organizations around the U.S. and beyond are already reenvisioning growth and prosperity in ways that advance communal needs and planetary stewardship.
This volume contains seven stories of resistance, resilience and regeneration across the world that highlight how peoples proactive responses to the multiple crises the world faces—ecological, socio-cultural, political, economic, spiritual—are widespread and diverse.
In the dominant cultural imaginary of growth societies, this figure of the growth subject is powerfully gendered: it is coded as masculine.
Energy and materials flows must (a normative and ethical claim) shrink to avert worst case scenarios of anthropogenic climate disruption. And they will shrink in this time frame due to increasing resource scarcity.
This book outlines Ecocentric Socialism as a theory of humanity embedded in nature to understand and help solve social and ecological crises of the twenty-first century
