Though a significant minority across the world enjoy the gross material benefits of a prodigiously productive global economy, our planet is at the same time beset by escalating system-level crises. Deep economic inequality is intensifying both between and within national polities. Ecological degradation is calling into question the future of the earth as we know it, with disruptive climate change only the most prominent issue. Global (dis)order is stoking increased militarisation, including the possession of…
In the conversations that led to this volume, there was a common agreement that the challenge of navigating beyond 'neoliberalism' is central to dealing with the present daunting civilisation crisis - of which disruptive climate change is the most prominent (albeit not the only) symptom. Like many on the Left, we have been perplexed by the resilience of the neoliberal regime even after the global financial crisis. We have also been intrigued by the complex…
In his reflections a decade ago on forty years of Arena, Guy Rundle observed: Beneath the surface of current events, a far more substantial change has occurred - the disappearance from the Left political imagination of the possibility of a world transformed in the image of human equality, freedom and possibility (whether it be called the socialist project, communism or whatever). That possibility, which has been the horizon within which political action has been set…
A 2007 report on climate change policy by David Spratt and Phillip Sutton, Climate Code Red, has as its sub-title 'The Case for a Sustainability Emergency'. To speak of a 'sustainability emergency' is a very useful way of re-framing policy development not only in relation to climate change, but also oil depletion, pervasive ecological destruction and other serious socioenvironmental challenges. In particular it resists the easy cooption to business-as-usual politics that has been the fate…
When David Cameron's Big Society project was launched in Britain recently, it provoked a good deal of critical and derisory responses from both sides of British politics. In their opinion pieces in 'The Guardian', columnists Jonathan Freedland and Madeleine Bunting endorsed the generally sceptical assessment of the credibility of the Big Society rhetoric, given that the new government was at the same time enacting savage budget cuts which would take away the funds from those…
