Post-capitalism, post-growth, post-consumerism? Eco-political hopes beyond sustainability

Abstract

As a road map for a structural transformation of socially and ecologically self-destructive consumer societies, the paradigm of sustainability is increasingly regarded as a spent force. Yet, its exhaustion seems to coincide with the rebirth of several ideas reminiscent of earlier, more radical currents of eco-political thought: liberation from capitalism, consumerism and the logic of growth. May the exhaustion of the sustainability paradigm finally re-open the intellectual and political space for the big push beyond the established socio-economic order? Looking from the perspective of social and eco-political theory, this article argues that the new narratives (and social practices) of postcapitalism, degrowth and post-consumerism cannot plausibly be read as signalling a new eco-political departure. It suggests that beyond the exhaustion of the sustainability paradigm, we are witnessing, more than anything, the further advancement of the politics of unsustainability -and that in this politics the new narratives of hope may themselves be playing a crucial role.

Rethinking Populism: Peak democracy, liquid identity and the performance of sovereignty

“…Section four outlines the challenges of the late-modern politics of identity, begins to specify, from this new perspective, the political role of populist movements in contemporary neoliberal societies and explains why their conceptualization as regressive or reactionary is misconceived. The concluding section then synthesizes our theoretical considerations in line with the model of a new third modernity (Blühdorn, 2013a(Blühdorn, , 2017. It elaborates how -as a discursive arena for the performance of sovereignty -populist movements are a constitutive feature of the particular brand of politics that is characteristic of this new era.…”

“…Canovan, 1999;Arditi, 2004;Laclau, 2005;Mudde, 2007Mudde, , 2010Mudde, , 2013Kriesi, 2014;Kriesi and Pappas, 2015;Müller 2016), it understands right-wing populism as the political beliefs and logic of movements, parties and individuals, which invoke the idea of a homogeneous people with a unified collective will and claim this people as the sole source of political legitimacy; whose discourse is shaped by a logic of othering, exclusion and portraying the good people as victims of corrupt elites, sinister conspiracies and parasitic social free-riders; and which swiftly translate all substantive issues into moral debates displaying anti-pluralist, illiberal and xenophobic value orientations. Working from this generalist understanding, the article rethinks the current proliferation of right-wing populism: (1) from the perspective of recent democratic theory, notably the diagnosis of a post-democratic turn (Blühdorn, 2013a(Blühdorn, , 2013b moving contemporary societies into a post-democratic constellation (Blühdorn, 2014(Blühdorn, , 2017) that is not well described by polemic notions of post-democracy as popularized by Colin Crouch (2004); and (2) from an explicitly modernization-theoretical perspective that interprets contemporary right-wing populism as indicative of a new phase of modernity beyond Ulrich Beck's second or reflexive modernity (Beck et al, 1994;Beck, 1997).…”

“…Bell, 1976;Fukuyama, 2006), the evaporation of societal coherence and social capital under conditions of differentiation and complexity (Zolo, 1992;Putnam, 2000), and a marker of the neoliberal era of postdemocracy and post-politics (Crouch, 2004;Dean, 2009). The diagnosis of a postdemocratic constellation (Blühdorn, 2014(Blühdorn, , 2017 takes up elements of all of these, but distinguishes itself from the latter, in particular, in suggesting that democracy is not simply threatened by neoliberal elites who have suspended democratic processes, withheld democratic rights, and obstructed the fulfilment of democratic promises but that, in the wake of a post-democratic turn (Blühdorn, 2013a(Blühdorn, , 2013b, democratic norms themselves have actually become exhausted or at least highly ambivalent and are, in advanced modern societies, perceived as a threat at least as much as they entail a promise. Furthermore, this diagnosis suggests that this post-democratic turn has occurred in the wake of a progressive, emancipatory process that has profoundly remoulded both core principles of liberal democracy, i.e.…”

Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology

“…Innovation in niches might become relevant at the regime or even landscape level. By referring to the SRN concept, we argue that a more precise understanding of the objects of transformation is required in order to understand the "sustainability of unsustainability" and the rootedness of unsustainability in everyday practices [11,19,49,50]. It is neither an environmental crisis nor an interplay of multiple societal crises, but the interplay of both: a comprehensive crisis of the interactions between societal and biophysical processes (we will come back to this point in Section 4).…”

The Problems of Tourist Sustainability in Cultural Cities: Socio-Political Perceptions and Interests Management

“…Some have been articulated within the capitalist system, where capital must prevail over all other aspects [115]. Others are critical of this narrow conception and consider that sustainability has to bring about change on a much deeper level so that alterations and even alternatives to tourism, as a form of capitalism [116,117], can be made. They condemn the conceptual and instrumental narrowness of certain policies [118] and seek to direct the system towards a form of post-capitalism [119].…”