Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is in that capacity that I come before you today, as a commoner. Much more about that shortly, but suffice it to say that the commons, to me, is a vehicle for social and political emancipation.
Therefore, we advocate for an opening up of spaces for debate and co-production of knowledges on strategies towards a degrowth society, even if this initially necessitates conflicts within the degrowth movement.
I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. Here is a fairly short overview, which I think gets to the nub of things.
Those who benefit most from the status quo spend a lot of money to persuade the rest of us that this – an economy that serves the top 1% — is good for us and, in fact, the best we can do.
Cooking may seem like an act of self-preservation, an act that is both self-serving and necessary, but if you look beyond the immediate and beyond the narrow definition of what cooking is, you can see that cooking is and has always been an act of resistance.
Thousands of civil rights advocates, low-wage workers, and religious leaders kicked off massive protests on May 14, launching a 40-day campaign across the nation in an effort to revive Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign.
Despite the legitimate concerns surrounding a guaranteed income, there is at least one self-evident ethical reason a guaranteed, non-labor income of no less than equivalent to a living wage (today about $15 per hour) should pay every American: most today suffer a state of forced labor.
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.
In summary, we have on the one hand, scientists insisting that the biosphere is being gravely disrupted by our excesses; on the other hand economists telling us that if growth stops, the economy collapses. So what is the civically minded citizen to make out of this?
Our basic intuition, which we started out by developing in a series of articles, was that a genuinely sustainable society requires a circular and regenerative economy which, as a result, needs to give up growth as it guiding and regulating principle.
