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Degrowth, or deconstruction of the economy
Leff, Enrique
Leff, Enrique
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Abstract
"The 1960s were a period of turbulence in the modern world. At the same time as emancipatory and countercultural movements (labour, youth, students, gender) irrupted, an alarmist discourse emerged that warned of the ‘detonation’ of a so-called ‘population bomb’, and suggested that rapid demographic growth was the main cause of the ecological crisis. For the first time since a nascent capitalism in the Renaissance set in motion the machinery of production and market mechanisms, since the West had opened history to a modernity guided by the ideals of freedom and enlightened reason, one of the pillars of Western civilisation cracked: the myth of progress impelled by the power of science and technology, converted into the most servile – and serviceable – tools of capital accumulation, and of unlimited economic growth. The environmental crisis thus questioned some of our most ingrained beliefs: not only human supremacy over all other creatures on the planet and the right to dominate and exploit nature for the profit of ‘man’, but the very meaning of human existence, grounded in economic growth and technological progress. This progress was forged in economic rationality, shaped by the tools of classical science, and set up a structure, a model, that established the conditions for a notion that progress was no longer based on the co-evolution of cultures with their environments, but on an economic development based on a mode of production that carried in its genetic code an imperative of growth – of limitless growth! [...]", p. 101-102
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2009-10
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With permission of the license/copyright holder