By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.
By Adam Barrett, The Conversation
Previous studies on “post-growth economics” have tended to search for an elusive sweet spot where the economy would be steady and robust enough to cope with all shocks. But theorising along those lines fails to address the question of whether an end to growth would, in general, make an economy more or less stable.
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Insurge Intelligence
We are living in extraordinary times and transformation is already happening and accelerating all around us. Many technological, social, and environmental changes are racing up the steep end of the exponential curve. I
By Erik Lindberg, Resilience.org
If we truly want to increase equality, then, it will have to be created at a sustainable level, and thus ones much lower than that enjoyed by the rich, middle-classes, and even workers of advanced industrial nations alike. We may choose to fight inequality by way of strikes, wage increases, and taxation, but that will not return us to a golden age; it will hasten our rendezvous with economics in the age of resource exhaustion and mounting clean-up costs.
By Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine
In these tumultuous times, after all, the left urgently needs its brightest and most creative minds to focus on the intractable puzzle that now confronts it: the question of how to break up the vicious cycle of endless compound growth and bring an end to the institutionalized madness of economic reason before it lays waste to all human civilization.
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
Sadly, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things replaces concrete analysis with an artificial schema that reduces the complex organic relationship between society and the rest of nature to “cheap things.” It misrepresents or ignores ecological science. The programme it promotes is so vague that it can scarcely be called liberal.
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
Patel and Moore present a provocative and highly readable guide to the early centuries of capitalism, showing how its then radically new way of relating to Nature remains at the root of world political economy today. As for a guide to the future, however, the authors do little beyond posing a few big questions.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So as I see it humanity now faces a choice. We can continue extolling the virtues of ‘development’, pin our hopes on a rapid decarbonisation of the energy system while retaining something like present levels of energy usage, and imagine that a further iteration of the capitalist economy will somehow overcome the grinding poverty that afflicts so many people in the world today. Or we could take the view that the forms of development offered by this ‘modernism’ have failed.
By Kevin Carson, P2P Foundation
Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.” Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities...
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
Jim Koplin, who developed the most comprehensive and consistent radical left/feminist/anti-racist/ecological politics of anyone I have ever known, talked with great affection about his time as a bank teller.
By Nicole Aschoff, Open Democracy
A growing group of elite storytellers present radical solutions to global problems, but their ideas actually inhibit real change and strengthen the status quo.