Ecologica

The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression.\' So wrote Andre Gorz in 2007 in an article reproduced in this last collection of his writings and interviews. In pages that seem, at times, to foretell the meltdown of 2008, Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current economic and political predicament. The work of the Austrian-born philosopher and social theorist Andre Gorz has shot back to prominence in France since his death in 2007. This collection of five articles and two interviews, compiled by the author himself as a kind of political testament, focuses on the ecological thinking he pioneered in Europe. But, as he stresses, it is a work of political rather than scientific ecology: in other words, the key to planetary survival it advocates is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switchover to non-consumerist modes of living amounting almost to a cultural revolution.