doughnut economics

By JohnWarwick, et. al. - Anarchist Federation, 2018

We are in a period of crisis that we in MEDCs cannot yet see. The signs are there if you look hard enough but at the moment the water is still flowing, the crops are still reliable the ski lifts are still running. The first wave of climate refugees are trying to make their way into Europe but they are being dismissed as "economic migrants" or those displaced by war. In all likelihood, MEDCs will not feel the effects of climate change for some time; our relative wealth will push the impacts onto those who haven't the means to adapt or whose local climates were less temperate to begin with. The longer we wait to act, however, the bigger the coming crunch will be.

Collectively, MEDCs are responsible for the overwhelming majority of cumulative carbon emissions and will have to radically change their energy and transport systems if an ecological disaster is to be avoided. Who will bear the brunt of the costs and who will get rich from this process is sadly predictable. The working class in MEDCs and most people in LEDCs will pay for the fossil fuel addiction and growth-at-all-costs model of the capitalist system. We have already begun to see this happen in the black, working-class communities devastated by natural disasters in the USA and flooding killing thousands in Bangladesh.

Capitalism relies on constantly increasing accumulation of profits. This has been achieved historically by appropriations (a polite term for thefts) both internal and external to the nation state. Internally, in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards, this has followed the model of stealing common land from the people to create a proletarian class dependent on wage labour to support itself. Externally, this expansion was tied to a move outside Europe's borders to exploit natural resources and labour in other locations. Thus colonialism and capitalism were, from the beginning, linked to processes of resource extraction and accumulation.

Capitalism is now in crisis; with so few areas beyond its reach, there are no easy sources of growth to appropriate, and the ability of the earth's ecosystems to accommodate further growth is being seriously questioned. How then to continue growth and profit? In MEDCs, we are seeing a fresh attack on workers? rights, with more precarious jobs, lower pay and poorer social care. In LEDCs, the neoliberal development model is pushed with privatisation and financial deregulation extracting the most profit for the capitalists.

We write this pamphlet to discuss the environmental problems that capitalism has created, with a focus on climate change and the false solutions offered up to us. There has been wider understanding of environmental issues since mainstream publications such as Silent Spring, Gaia and An Inconvenient Truth; however, an anti-capitalist critique has been lacking.

Read the report (PDF).

Kate Raworth interviewed by Adam Simpson - The Next System Project, August 23, 2017

This week on The Next System Podcast. Adam talks with Kate Raworth about her Doughnut Economics model. The pair discuss economic justice, unpaid labor, the commons, and much more. You can learn more about Doughnut Economics at Kate's website or purchase the book wherever books are sold. You can also follow Kate on twitter.

The Next System Podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, and Stitcher Radio. You can also subscribe independently to our RSS feed here.

Adam Simpson : I'm joined today by Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Kate is a senior visiting research associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute and a senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Her previous work at Oxfam and the United Nations, centered on confronting human deprivation, a challenge quite literally at the center of her new doughnut economics model.

Kate, thanks for joining me today.

Kate Raworth : Oh, my pleasure.

Simpson : Obviously, we're talking about your new book, Doughnut Economics but before we get started I did want to get a sense about your own trajectory into writing this book and your experiences and the concepts that led you to becoming an advocate for this doughnut model of economics.

Raworth : I studied economics at university 25 years ago because I wanted to change the world. I was really frustrated and disappointed by what I was taught because it pushed or marginalized most of the things that I cared the most about, like environment integrity and social justice. At the end of three, four years of study, I was too embarrassed to call myself an economist because who would want to be that? So I walked away from academic economics and immersed myself in what I considered to be real world challenges. I spent three years working in the villages of Zanzibar with bare foot entrepreneurs. I spent four years at the UN helping to write the human development reports, so working very much on the global understanding of what is ‘human development.’

Then I spent a decade working with Oxfam on the front line of campaigning, from women workers rights in global supply chains to climate change and adaptation and who should pay. And then I became a mother of twins, and immersed myself in the household economy and really lived the reality of that. Through all of this, I realized that you can't just walk away from economics because it frames the world we live in. It's the mother tongue of public policy. And if I wanted to change any of these issues that I fundamentally cared about, I believed that actually, economics needed to change. So I decided to walk back towards economics but to try and flip it on its head and put front and first, the values that I think are the most important in the world, of what we're trying to achieve as human well-being. Then ask ourselves, what kind of economics would even give us half a chance of achieving that? And that's the goal at the heart of the book.