Whether you like it or not, we have to take a new stand, namely that further economic growth is not necessary and is even harmful. The climate crisis has shown that this has led to dramatic developments that are irreversible.
It would be exaggerated to say full stop, but we have to say goodbye to this pseudo-science (economics is a social science rather than a natural science with mathematical formulas).
Opaque products are traded on stock exchanges, and advisors make fun of Lehman grannies and O&S-customers (old and stupid).
The market economy has long since changed into a power economy, called a “super unit” by researchers at ETH Zurich. Here, 147 companies control 40% of all corporate assets on earth.
The economy needs to be changed so that it no longer acts in a way that is harmful to the common good, but is subject to real, democratic control.
The fairy tale of the “social market economy” in Germany had come to an end at the latest with the end of the era of the Helmut Schmidt government.
Since then, the accelerated transformation toward the control of oligopolies and monopolies has been in full swing.
A watershed occurred with the end of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. In the former CMEA states, a brutal and inhumane transformation was carried out that created super-rich people.
Digitalization - also called Third Modernity - is almost completely divided among Google, Meta (Facebook) and Amazon.
Given that this is a very straightforward decision to make (should we have degrowth in the text or not) I think the best way forward is a yes/no vote at the meeting in Strasbourg tomorrow.
At the end of the day, the question should not be if degrowth is a good or bad concept, but wether it is a policy that already exists in the European Pirate Party member parties. If it does, it makes sense to include it in the common European Election Program, if it doesn’t, then I think we would need a broad concensus to want to include it. There’s no reason for us to include concepts that will be voted down by the member parties in the end.
I am with you on the topic of opaque financial products that do not add value but basically produce drag and syphon off money from the real economy.
But I am totally not with you on the real economy.
Your earlier example with AI is a good argument against your position. To efficiently implement AI we need ever more processing power and that can not be built by a biodynamic commune. There currently is just a single cluster of companies that is capable of making semiconductor production equipment for sub 7 nm structures. That cluster is lead by ASML and almost all of it is located in Europe.
The technology is at the absolute cutting edge that is possible at the moment, a very complex supply chain is necessary to build the components and the complete system
Any idea how this will work in a degrowth economy?
Degrowth is essentially giving up and sealing the fate of humanity as a single planet species that can go extinct in a moment by any kind of large scale disaster.
It may have been overlooked that he is talking about two statements here:
If we don’t understand that the business model with economic growth that only serves the 1% super-rich is at an end, we are no better than the right-wing parties with their neocons at the top.
We must end this odyssey, or we will very quickly end up with 3 °C warming.
I have written that the economy needs to be democratized (and that includes, for example, Google finally paying taxes in the first place).
Degrowth can be one way, but it is certainly not the only way. If you continue to assume the need for growth, then that is very unwise and not an alternative to the chatter of the mainstream parties in the EUP. And there is no need for a PPEU anymore either.
How is degrowth supposed to work? Who will decide what can be produced and on which criteria? How is this different from a communist planned economy? How would technology advance work in a world where you have to get some sort of permit to do something?
Fair taxing and control of large corporations is a different thing.
Maybe you remember the joint session of the working groups economy and space? And the things we talked about that are about to come? Resources will not be an issue when we really access space. Giga corporations like Weyland Yutani could become a reality as soon as other planets and moons get colonized. It is time to think about how we can prevent ending up in Alien or The Expanse and get something more like Star Trek.
