>post- orgs
- Post-growth Economics Network
- postgrowth.org/ “for a future better not bigger”
- Post Growth Institute
- postgrowthplanning Collective for leading common spaces beyond growth
yahoo.com 11-2023 Inside the techno-optimist cult influencing OpenAI’s Sam Altman – by Lucy Kenningham
…The most extreme version of this techno-optimist, effective accelerationist ideology can be seen in a corner of the internet dominated by ultra-wealthy tech entrepreneurs who espouse capital letters and embrace anarcho-capitalism. They view themselves as disruptors in the ‘move fast and break things’ vein. They view regulation as anti capitalist. They worship the philosopher Ayn Rand who believes that self-interest is good and altruism is always bad.
E/acc grew out of accelerationism – an ideology created by British academic Nick Land out of the University of Warwick’s infamous Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (also a haunt of Mark Fisher). Accelerationism believes technology and capitalism must be sped up either because this is for the good of humanity or because such progress is inevitable. On 16 October Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, whose bio on X reads “Techno-optimist. E/acc. Pro AI, and open for business” published the Techno Optimist Manifesto. It was greeted with enthusiasm by the likes of Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase, and a host of other influential ‘tech bros’.
The founder of this apparently founders-less movement is ostensibly an anonymously-owned Twitter/X account @BasedBeffJezos. Descended from British philosopher Nick Land’s concept of accelerationism – the belief that computer tech must be advanced as quickly as possible at all costs – effective accelerationism hits out at effective altruism, the other tech bro cult symbolised by Sam Bankman-Fried. E/accs fundamentally disagree with effective altruists who – amongst many other goals – fret about the existential dangers of technology and have become consumed with infighting about how much money to commit to preventing future AI and tech-generated catastrophes.
@BasedBeffJezos describes the ideology thus: “e/acc is simply a viral memetic metacognitive hack to cybernetically control the civilizational meta-organism to hyperstitiously induce an acceleration of its own growth and thereby produce massive widespread prosperity and cosmic hyperproliferation of intelligence as a whole”. The account recently described AI regulation as totalitarian….
ft.com 29-5-2023 Quinn Slobodian: Crack-Up Capitalism — is democracy in danger from free-market dogma? – by Felix Martin
> post-capitalism, digitalisation
amazon.com – goodreads.com 2017 Speculations on Postcapitalism: How Digitalization Is Disrupting Everything We Know about Modern Civilization – by Anthony Signorelli
Part Noam Chomsky and part Elon Musk, this book draws on intellectual traditions and inspired business perspectives to chart a course for the postcapitalist future. Part Naomi Klein and part Peter Diamandis, this book protests the injustices of the world capitalist elites, while celebrating the amazing creative power of capitalist economics. Part Robert Reich and part Mark Zuckerberg, this book doesn’t seek to save capitalism, but to explain why its origins and driving forces will destroy capitalism and transform the world.
These essays describe the transition, the forces at work, and the inevitability of the change. They demonstrate that it is capitalism’s own intrinsic logic-the driving force of modern civilization-that is leading the way. And they show that the metaphors of civilization-networks, collaboration, and commonly owned property-will shape the new postcapitalist future.
It is a future many are talking about-Jacque Fresco, the Venus Project, Buckminster Fuller, Peter Joseph, the Zeitgeist Movement, Guy Alperovitz, and the Next System Project, for example. …not to mention Paul Mason (Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future) and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (Inventing the Future).
>post-capitalism, Monetary Economics, Political Economy, Capitalism, Socialism
academia.edu – gg/pdf 2020 CAPITALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVE – Dragomir Tatchev
Following a deep discontent of the current economics, a new approach to the economic system is proposed. Rather than objective economic laws, it seeks to discover a connection between combined action of many people and the result of that action. Three examples are demonstrated. The exponential growth of the broadest monetary aggregate, the exponential growth of inequality and specific shape of the income and wealth distributions in capitalist economic system follow from the action sequence of investing money, acquiring profit, and reinvesting that money and the profit. The exponential growth of the broadest monetary aggregate is established based on data for 32 countries and semi-quantitatively linked with the growth of the individual wealth. It is argued, that the practice of making monetary profit should be considered as major principle of the capitalist economy defining a positive feedback in the economic system. Such principle inevitably introduces the question of money ownership, which leads to non-circular component of the circular flow diagram of the economy. Based on these findings a new simplified non-profit economic system is proposed, that can be a smooth continuation of the current capitalism. In this system the accumulation of capital is replaced by reduction of work time. It is capable of diverting the humankind away from consumerism and compulsory economic growth to sustainability and effectiveness.
>post apocalypse
theguardian.com/ 2021 New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse – Study citing ‘perilous state’ of industrial civilisation ranks temperate islands top for resilience
theguardian.com 28/07/2021 New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse – Study citing ‘perilous state’ of industrial civilisation ranks temperate islands top for resilience by Damian Carrington
The study, published in the journal Sustainability, said: “The globe-spanning, energy-intensive industrial civilisation that characterises the modern era represents an anomalous situation when it is considered against the majority of human history.” The study also said, that due to environmental destruction, limited resources, and population growth: “The [academic] literature paints a picture of human civilisation that is in a perilous state, with large and growing risks developing in multiple spheres of the human endeavour.”
goodreads.com 1999 The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age – by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg
theguardian 2018 Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by Mark O’Connell
…”Thiel is in one sense a caricature of outsized villainy: he was the only major Silicon Valley figure to put his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vengefully bankrupted a website because he didn’t like how they wrote about him; he is known for his public musings about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy. …
Just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by. (Other prominent boosters include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the US to form its own corporate city-state.) …
The Sovereign Individual’s co-authors are James Dale Davidson, a private investor who specialises in advising the rich on how to profit from economic catastrophe, and the late William Rees-Mogg, long-serving editor of the Times. …
… The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical rotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:
- The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.
- The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.
- The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.
- Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.
The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. …”…
>post growth – post-capitalist goodreads.com – wikipedia.org – postgrowth.org
theguardian.com 9-10-2022 Cop27: Is it time to rethink endless economic growth? – Presented by Ian Sample
A key goal of governments around the world is economic growth – continually increasing production and consumption to keep GDP rising. But can our economies grow on a rapidly warming planet with finite resources? According to a recent UN report, the only way left to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”. In our third Cop27 special, Ian Sample speaks to ecological economist Tim Jackson about the myth of eternal growth, other ways to think about progress and prosperity, and what an economic system in balance with our planetary system might look like
theguardian.com 5/2021 Post Growth by Tim Jackson review – life after capitalism – The ecological economist adds to his message that relentless economic expansion is killing the planet with a set of more philosophical reflections. But does ‘post growth’ offer as many answers as the Green New Deal?
earthbound.report 3/2021 Book review: Post Growth, by Tim Jackson BY JEREMY WILLIAMS
theecologist.org 6/2021 Life after capitalism – review by Molly Scott Cato
We are offered a fascinating cast of characters that include the 1960s US science power-couple Carl Sagan ,Lynn Margulis, Hannah Arendt, Wangari Maathi, John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet and, as they say, many, many more.
Jackson illustrates the power of stories by describing how the ‘law of the jungle’ became the defining myth of globalized capitalism when 19th-century economists projected their own selfish and competitive motivations onto an innocent natural world.
He quotes the historian Theodore Roszak: “Far from reading the ethos of the jungle into civilized society, Darwin read the ethos of industrial capitalism into the jungle, concluding that all life had to be what it had become in the early mill towns: a vicious ‘struggle for existence’.”
Where Darwin led, economists followed, and Darwin himself admitted being guided to his insights into evolution by that most dismal of all economists, Thomas Malthus.
Far from the war-zone imagined by 19th-century philosophers, an unbiased observation of nature displays the cooperative and symbiotic relationships between species as described by ecologists and sought after by ecological economists.
goodreads.com 2021 Heaven in Disorder by Slavoj Žižek
“Passages of beauty… a hire-wire juxtaposition of far-left political theory and pop culture, held together by the force of [Žižek’s] rumpled charm.” —BuzzFeed
As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.
Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” The contemporary relevance of Mao’s observation depends on whether today’s catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself.
Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj Žižek’s new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond.
Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and—above all—an urgent, “wartime” communism.
goodreads.com 2009 Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
After 1989, capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system. What effects has this “capitalist realism” had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?
goodreads.com 2020 Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures – by Mark Fisher, Matt Colquhoun
Edited with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this idiosyncratic collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — sketching the outlines of a project that Fisher’s death left so bittersweetly unfinished.
…”… pays tribute to the work of the late writer and philosopher on all aspects of capitalism, Mark Fisher. Drawing on the glimmers of hope enfolded in Fisher’s 2009 work Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Bown argues that the events of 2016 have turned the glimpses of optimism identified by Fisher into concrete and pressing opportunities for rupture in the workings of capitalism – ones that he urges the Left to seize.”…
Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.
For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think…
These lectures provide the substance of a module of the same name, taught within the university’s then-newly formed MA in Contemporary Art Theory. In his capacity as a lecturer, Fisher coaxes his students through the questions explored and raised by the concept of postcapitalist desire, described as the “shadow” to the ideas explored in-depth in Fisher’s earlier, unexpectedly successful work, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). Capitalist Realism drew attention to a burgeoning paradigm, in which (as per the brief summary Fisher here offers his students) “the idea that there’s no alternative to capitalism becomes the ambient political assumption”. Postcapitalist Desire is then, an extension, or mirror-image of that previous work. It examines the consequences of late capitalism, boring deeper into the antagonisms that seem to plague the contemporary human condition, or “the nefarious and entangled relationship between desire and capitalism, and the extent to which the former can both help and restrict us in our attempts to escape from the latter”. This “escape”, Fisher is keen to stress, must not, cannot, be figured as a return – to a romanticised fantasy of a society before capitalism. Rather, it is to be achieved by moving through capitalism, adopting practical and political transformations to prioritise “working less and determining your own needs”.
socialcapitalresearch.com 2019 Capitalism in Transformation: Movements and Countermovements in the 21st Century – Edited by Roland Atzmüller, Brigitte Aulenbacher, Ulrich Brand, Fabienne Décieux, Karin Fischer, Birgit Sauer
Contributors: R. Atzmüller, B. Aulenbacher, R. Bärnthaler, K. Becker, D. Bohle, U. Brand, M. Brie, A. Buğra, M. Cangiani, F. Décieux, C. Deutschmann, K. Dörre, K. Fischer, C. Görg, B. Greskovits, B. Jessop, E. Langthaler, M. Leiblfinger, M. Markantonatou, A. Novy, A. Palumbo, K. Polanyi-Levitt, V. Satgar, B. Sauer, A. Scott, B. Silver, B. Stadelmann, C. Thomasberger, H.-J. Urban, B. Weicht, M. Williams, M. Wissen
Presenting a profound and far-reaching analysis of economic, ecological, social, cultural and political developments of contemporary capitalism, this book draws on the work of Karl Polanyi, and re-reads it for our times. The renowned authors offer key insights to current changes in the relations between the economy, politics and society, and their ecological and social effects.
Editorial Review: Capitalism in Transformation explores the relationship between economy and society in a way that transcends the cramped confines of economistic thinking. Utilising Karl Polanyi’s[1] approach and concepts, the authors analyse the current multiple crises and social movements affecting numerous countries in the early 21st century. Can humans survive industrial capitalism and achieve justice and freedom for everyone in complex society? We are currently experiencing a financial crisis, a crisis of democracy, an ecological crisis, climate disaster, and widening inequality, to name just a few problems. Capitalism in Transformation looks at the question of whether we are witnessing a deep transformation to reorder our society and economy. Are we facing the end of capitalism and an uncertain post-capitalist future? Or will social protection movements reign in marketization? What role will increasing extreme left- and right-wing political movements have in this transformation? These are extremely topical questions for most of the worlds’ population and urgent issues requiring critical consideration.
Other Notable Editorial Reviews : ‘The book provides new historical and theoretical reflections on the work of Karl Polanyi and its relevance to today’s movements and countermovements, including new fictitious commodities, such as knowlede and care, the rise of the populist right throughout the world and the transformation of labour markets.’ – Marguerite Mendell, Director, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, Concordia University, Canada
academia.edu 2016 How to Get Out of the Multiple Crisis? Contours of a Critical Theory of Social-Ecological Transformation by Ulrich Brand read/download PDF here
academia.edu 2013 Post-growth policy instruments by Peter Ferguson
> limits to growth; post-growth economics; policy instruments; thegrowth imperative; biophysical throughput; well-being; working hours; labour productivity; equality; basic income; environmental taxation; fossil fuel subsidies; alternative measures of progress
Abstract: This paper proposes a framework to evaluate post-growth policy instruments which gauges their capacity to lessen the pressure for growth emanating from the labour market and the state’s contradictory legitimisation and accumulation imperatives, whilst increasing societal well-being and reducing the biophysical throughput of the economy. It is argued that the most effective policies to do this are measures to reduce average working hours,expand low productivity sectors and reduce inequality. Specific policies instruments include public sector expansion and the promotion of cooperatives,the introduction of citizens’ basic income schemes, environmental tax reform,the abolition of fossil fuel subsidies, reforms to monetary policy, financial regulatory reform and the introduction of alternative measures of progress to gross domestic product.
oekom.de/ 2012 Liberation from excess – The road to a post-growth economy – by Niko Paech – »Self-determination depends not in having much but on needing little.« Niko Paech
After a stressful week at work, we all feel we sometimes deserve a treat too: perhaps the latest smartphone, an iPad, or a flatscreen television. Before we know it, we are stuck in the vicious circle of consumer desire and time poverty. And that is not all: the constant demand for »more« is causing raw materials to disappear and driving environmental destruction forward. The world is still not ready to abandon the drug of »growth«. However, the debate about the end of excessiveness is gathering momentum. Sustainability researcher Niko Paech provides a timely polemic that unmasks the »green« growth as a myth. Yet »green« growth and »sustainable« consumption are seen as the new and best way forward. Despite this, the subtle distinction – here »good«, there »bad« growth – is held by Paech to be nothing than a sham. In his counter model of a post-growth economy, he calls for restrictions upon industrial value added processes and for patterns of self-sufficiency to be strengthened. This form of economic activity would not only be more frugal but also more stable and environmentally friendly. And it would also provide a release for the many people who already find life in the rat race of material self-realisation very uncomfortable.
>post capitalist, Marxist Economics, Heterodox Economics, Marxist political economy
>Economic Theory, Marxist Ecology, Political Economy, Stagnation
monthlyreview.org 2011 Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem by John Bellamy
academia.edu/gg/pdf 2019 Envisioning the Economy of the Future and the Future of Political Economy
>post imperial
vsa-verlag.de/ – leseprobe/pdf 2020 Post-Wachstum und Gegen-Hegemonie – Klimastreiks und Alternativen zur imperialen Lebensweise – Mit einem Beitrag zur Corona-Krise – von Ulrich Brand
suhrkamp.de 2020 Die Welt nach den Imperien – by Adom Getachew
Aufstieg und Niedergang der postkolonialen Selbstbestimmung – Aus dem Englischen von Frank Lachmann
Die Dekolonisierung hat die internationale Ordnung im 20. Jahrhundert revolutioniert. Doch die Standardnarrative, die das Ende des Kolonialismus als unvermeidlichen Übergang von einer Welt der Imperien zu einer der Nationalstaaten darstellen, verdecken, wie radikal dieser Wandel war. Anhand des politischen Denkens antikolonialer Intellektueller und Staatsmänner wie Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley und Julius Nyerere zeigt Adom Getachew in ihrem gefeierten Buch, wie enorm die Sprengkraft der dekolonialen Bewegung war, deren Ehrgeiz weit über die Neugestaltung einzelner Länder hinausging.
Vehement stellten die von Rassismuserfahrungen geprägten Protagonisten des »Black Atlantic« die internationale Hierarchie in Frage – mit dem Ziel, eine egalitäre postimperiale Welt zu schaffen. Politische und wirtschaftliche Herrschaftsverhältnisse wollten sie überwinden, ihr Recht auf Selbstbestimmung innerhalb der neu gegründeten Vereinten Nationen sicherstellen, Föderationen in Afrika und der Karibik gründen und eine Neue Weltwirtschaftsordnung entwickeln. Gestützt auf zahlreiche Archivquellen, präsentiert Getachew die fesselnde Geschichte der dekolonialen Bewegung inklusive ihres Scheiterns – und eröffnet eine faszinierende Perspektive auf die Debatten über die heutige Weltordnung.
>Social Change, Aesthetics, Feminism, Aesthetics and Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics, Anarcho-autonomism and political transformation
academia.edu/video/ 2020 “HOW TO IMAGINE A POST-IMPERIAL WORLD?” Part 1 of the talk “THE FUTURE IS A RISK MASQUERADING AS A PROMISE”. Transformation – Unfolding the Future, Akademie Schloss Solitude
The talk will tackle three issues: In the first part, I will address the question: “How to imagine a post-imperial world?” In the second part, I will engage with the responses put forth by Vladimir Lenin, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida to the question “What is to be done?” And finally I will grapple with the question, which Angela Davis raises: “How does change happen?”
>post status quo
goodreads.com 1994 Post-Capitalist Society – by Peter F. Drucker
Business guru Peter Drucker provides an incisive analysis of the major world transformation taking place, from the Age of Capitalism to the Knowledge Society, and examines the radical affects it will have on society, politics, and business now and in the coming years. This searching and incisive analysis of the major world transformation now taking place shows how it will affect society,economics, business, and politics and explains how we are movingfrom a society based on capital, land, and labor to a society whoseprimary source is knowIedge and whose key structure is theorganization.
see also
- DeGrowth-auf-deutsch
- DeGrowth
- eco crisis
- climate crisis
- Ecological Economics
- energy
- GDP
- Green Finance/Investment/ESG
- Greenwash
- growth & Greta
- growth! gdp growth, de-growth, what growth? –updates
- growth! what growth?
- natural resources
- Pluriverse
- resources
- sustainability
more> post-capitalism: goodreads.com – wikipedia.org