There is a common misconception among critics that degrowth proponents do not engage with the question of technology, instead leaving the implementation of technological solutions to the planetary crisis to green growth advocates. Jason Hickel shows that not only is this narrative false, it obscures the possibilities for technology unfettered by capitalism. | more…
Minqi Li asks: How can China, the world’s largest energy consumer, be “de-grown”? What policies and institutions must change, and what are the potential social implications? How can social ownership of production, redistribution of wealth the working class, and democratically controlled planning bring the country closer to a zero growth scenario? | more…
Kent Klitgaard surveys degrowth thought, starting with the essential contradiction of capitalism presented by Marx, which gives rise to our current planetary crisis. Through an understanding this contradiction and degrowth literature spanning twentieth century, the author presents a plan for a sustainable and planned future socialist society. | more…
The popular narrative that capitalism has led to a general improvement in human well-being over the last two hundred years is, historical data show, not supported by evidence. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan enumerate the empirical and methodological problems on which this narrative is built and explore the potential benchmarks for truly understanding human welfare. | more…
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…
Degrowth promises to liberate society from the imperative of capital accumulation. “So how,” Matthas Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth wonder, “might planning beyond growth look?” It is not, they write, only a proposal for a postcapitalist society, but for a radical transformation of our institutions and social relations to create a more sustainable and just world. | more…
In nine theses, Michael Löwy elaborates on the central themes of ecosocialist degrowth. “The ecological crisis,” he begins, “is already the most important social and political question of the twenty-first century.… The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be decided in the coming decades.” | more…
“Degrowth” may often be associated with the left, but can also have conservative—even ecofascist—implications. What do proponents and critics mean by “degrowth”? How do these differences play out ideologically? Ying Chen writes that, for radicals, the answer is to place the economic system at the center of the degrowth narrative, thus naming the system that must be replaced with a more just and equitable socialist society. | more…
Historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century narrative in the West, is understood as confined to social sciences and humanities. However, John Bellamy Foster writes, Marx and Engels did not have such a limited conception, instead engaging with the natural sciences, providing insight into the dialectics of nature. | more…
Helena Sheehan turns her incisive eye on the so-called anti-disinformation industry, and wondering whether the mainstream media is using a newfound interest in fact-checking, fake news, and disinformation studies to conceal deeper biases, ones that occlude the hidden ideologies deceiving much of the public. | more…
In this interview, originally published in the Czech journal Contradictions, John Bellamy Foster discusses the history of environmental thought among socialists from Marx to the present day, with a view to the need to mobilize in order to protect humanity’s only home. | more…
What did Marx mean in his discussion of “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital? Here, Ian Angus argues that the term is widely misunderstood—but its illumination reveals great insight to the conditions of exploitation and expropriation. | more…