A winning strategy for the world's climate justice movements
The promise of a capitalist green economy is to transform ecological constraints on development into business opportunities. This may sound appealing but proves problematic on closer inspection. Emanuele Leonardi explains how this reasonable ideology fails by drawing on the work of Andre Gorz, the militant communist, editor of Les Temps Modernes, and journalist at Le Nouvel Observateur. The result connects degrowth thinking to Marxism. Labour, Nature, Value is a programmatic horizon for the socio-ecological conflicts proliferating internationally. The aim is to reduce pressure on the biosphere while facilitating an ever-wider diffusion of care activities and knowledge production.
Degrowth and Marxism are natural allies in the fight for a fair and sustainable world.
What People Are Saying
"This is a beautiful piece of intellectual work. Via the theories of Andre Gorz, Leonardi generates an original interpretation of the logic driving the encounter of Marxist and Degrowth thought, and a compelling argument for the importance of this unexpected rendezvous." Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism
"Reading Andre Gorz, via the Italian operaismo, as a fundamental source for a Marxist interpretation of degrowth, this book comes up with a truly radical proposal: that of redefining wealth away from the capitalist value system. This makes it a much-needed contribution to working-class ecological politics today." Stefania Barca, author of Workers of the Earth
"Do you still believe that the market is capable of resolving its own disasters, that capitalism can be reformed, that workers are concerned solely with production, and that Marx was a Promethean modernist or an early ecologist? Then read Labour, Nature, Value. With André Gorz as its guide, the book takes a compelling journey through the quagmire of the green economy and the pitfalls of a direct valorization of nature, towards the promise of an emerging working-class ecology." Luigi Pellizzoni, author of Nature, Neoliberalism and New Materialisms: Riding the Ungovernable
