Plenary events by the Research Group on Post-Growth Societies

24.09.2019 • 10:30 – 13:00

Organised by: Silke van Dyk (Jena)

Discussion participants: Silke van Dyk (Jena), Brenna Bhandar (Manchester, GB), Massimo de Angelis (London, GB), Timo Daum (Berlin)

The plenum ›Beyond Property?‹ will explore the relationship between property relations, growth and socio-economic issues in a global perspective and thus surmount the widespread narrowing of the social question to the distribution of resources. At the same time, proprietary theoretical perspectives need to be questioned more closely than it has been the case to date about their implications for future growth policy. What role, so the initial question of the plenum, will private property play for future capitalism? What is the significance in this context of common goods, digital platforms and sharing economies through which economies of use and sharing beyond property titles have left the niches of left-wing alternative projects? How are such economies structured and embedded in the global North and South? Do they transcend capitalism and its growth dynamics, or do we rather observe new modes of marketization as responses to secular stagnation in con-temporary capitalism? In order to be able to pursue these questions, the discussion of global property relations is dependent on a historical analysis that is sensitive to (post-) colonial conditions. The plenary will discuss Brenna Bhandar’s analysis of the global enforcement of capitalist property rights as a racial capitalism with two competing diagnoses on the transformation of contemporary capitalism: Massimo de Angeli’s draft of a post-capitalist economy of the common on the one hand and the diagnosis of platform capitalism beyond private ownership on the other.

24.09.2019 • 15:00 – 17:30 Uhr

Organised by: Hartmut Rosa (Jena), Hanna Ketterer (Jena), Peter Schulz (Jena)

Discussion participants: Hartmut Rosa (Jena), Margaret S. Archer (Lausanne, CH), Hanna Ketterer (Jena), Miriam Lang (Quíto, EC)

The fact that the logic of dynamic stabilisation today has reached its limits in many ways is shown by ecological, social, and political crisis phenomena – one of the key findings of the Post-growth Societies research group. Instead of stabilising modern societies, the principle of dynamic stabilisation – the structural constraints of permanent growth, ac-celeration, and innovation – is increasingly leading to ›dynamic destabilisation‹. On the part of the subjects, the pressure for indefinite upward growth correlates with experiences of social estrangement and sclerotic world relations; it thus tends to threaten to shut out subjective approaches to alternative ideas of a good life.
However, we do see approaches for a successful life: a) If accelera­tion and dynamisation is the problem, then resonance relationships (not deceleration) could be the solution; b) an unconditional basic income which would guarantee secure, market-external livelihoods could provide an exit option from the ›hamster wheel‹ and allow for individual access to a livelihood that is less oriented to paid work and consumption and more oriented to work on or in the democratic community. The panel intends to confront these propositions, which were discussed in the Post-growth Societies research group, with the theoretical concepts and empirical findings of academics outside the research group.