Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Working in sustainability, one understands that context is key. When we fail to identify or understand the nuanced, complex, systemic and local context of a situation, the best-intentioned solutions simply won’t solve society’s most pressing problems.
There’s no place for Progress here. Or, rather, we need to define progress as the avoidance of imminent catastrophes in pursuit of a life of abundant joy.
How can cooperatives serve as vehicles for social change, especially in online spaces? What practical interventions could check the anti-social behaviors of Big Tech? These are two questions that I explored recently with Nathan Schneider…
Neither empirical evidence not the application of green technologies or practices discussed in this article support that economic growth can be combined with reduced resource demands.
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, a new book by London-based economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, confronts that rift, delineating the gulf between “green” growth strategies, on the one hand, and the transition to a post-capitalist economy, on the other.
Our plan (as they always are) was simple. We would open a bank, print our own money, sell it, raise enough money to buy up £1 million worth of debt on the secondary debt markets and then destroy it.
What form should reparations take? How much should they be? Who should pay them? Who should receive them? How should that transfer be made? What will happen if this is done? Would it really help anyone?
The climate clock is unforgiving. Multiple overlapping crises – political, ecological, economic, pandemic – are already upon us. We lost the election, we have lost the party leadership, but we have not yet lost the chance to build our movement.
The truth is that democracy, in its authentic direct form, has nothing to do with capitalism and is in fact at odds with it. James Madison, one of US’s Founding Fathers, seems to have been aware of this when saying that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.
This is what I call the Death Economy, that defines success as the maximization of short-term profits for corporations and short-term accumulation of material things for individuals, regardless of the environmental and social costs.
Can this crisis provide a window of opportunity to re-organize and shift power to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?
As Giorgos Kallis has put it, “capitalism cannot survive under conditions of abundance”. MMT provides an opportunity for us to create a post-growth, post-capitalist economy.
