The title Joy Forever refers to the false promise of a common happiness, constantly played out by the proponents of the creative class and creative economy - the very promise that since Romanticism has been ascribed to art itself, a vow which remains unfulfilled. The aim of F/SUW's publication is to scrutinize the false promises of distributed creativity as an ideology of cognitive capitalism. The authors devote themselves to critical examination of the structural links between art, creativity, labour and the creation of value under contemporary relations ...

Ground down, disenchanted, but committed to education. Unable to quit, yet deploring everything education has become. We suffer a weakened and weakening cynicism. This cynicism exploits the last remaining educational commitments of an otherwise broken workforce, draining that workforce of its final pleasure: Revolt. Our cynicism is reactionary and conditional – exhausting us where it might invigorate, rendering us complicit, giving safe passage to bad temper – but can be reclaimed. This book claims we need more cynicism, not less. With The Cynical ...

Capitalism is ecologically irredeemable. It simply cannot be fixed. This is because capitalism is based on endless capital accumulation, entailing growth in material throughput, whereas the planet Earth is finite. From this conclusion of ecological Marxism, this book continues to theorise how capitalism is reproduced in the 21st century. It is argued that the logic of capital and production based on the profit motive, competition and productivity enhancements is not enough to reproduce capitalism, but a wide variety of national and transnational institutional ...

The hegemonic University represented in the institutions of the global North is an increasingly hopeless place. Defined against value and generation of surpluses, the University is a critical node in the social metabolic control of capital. As such, it acts to deny human agency and autonomy, forms of mutuality, and alternative life worlds, precisely because it serves to reproduce capitalist social relations. These relations foreclose upon the idea that humans might make their own history, and in fact we have been told that we are at the end of history. Here ...

Degrowth is a counter-hegemonic movement that has the ambitious aim of transforming society towards social and ecological justice. But how do we get there? That is the question this book addresses. Adhering to the multiplicity of degrowth whilst also arguing that strategic prioritisation and coordination are key, Degrowth ' Strategy advances the debate on strategy for social-ecological transformation. It explores what strategising means, identifies key directions for the degrowth movement, and scrutinises strategies in practice that aim to realise a degrowth ...

Degrowth is an experience. It is about fathoming that being-in-nature is finite. Experiencing finitude offers the long-awaited theoretical foundation for the degrowth movement. In this book, Pasi Heikkurinen argues that we must understand limits 'from within' in order to effectively reduce matter-energy throughput. He coins the metabolic cutback as the minimalist definition of degrowth . He also provides a lucid critique on how technology, transformations, and nature are perceived in cultures of growth. To overcome the shortfalls of our perception ...