Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

The priority is to derail the possibility of a potentially rebellious youth, and, in order to conceal their jobless, worldless future, there is the dismal fiction of a generation aspiring to become “influencers,” founders of start-ups, or otherwise aligned with spiritless entrepreneurial values.

The capitalist state, he wrote, “is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”

to affirm that the world is animate and that all livings things are interconnected and interdependent. An animate world, as the etymology of the word suggests, is one that breathes, that unites everything in it with the rhythmic pulse of a world-soul.

we are now in the last stages, not just of capitalism, but of the entire European world-system that has been in place for nearly 500 years,

“steering mechanisms” serving to limit, shape or redirect public debate.

modern project of domination over nature begins in the sixteenth century.

Capitalism approaches its exhaustion when human productivity is not just augmented by technology but replaced by it.

absence of any substantive or credible promises of a better future.

My goal here is not to present a nuanced theoretical analysis, but, in a time of emergency, to affirm the truth of shared understandings and experiences and to insist that forms of radical refusal, rather than adaptation and resignation, are not only possible but necessary.