Sublime

What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate s

sustainability has been fighting a losing battle against profit.

In hospitals and clinics worldwide, patients and doctors have been recast as customers and service-providers. In fields and forests on every continent, economists are calculating the monetary value of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’, ranging from the economic worth of the world’s wetlands (said to be $3.4 billion per year) to the global

Notre tort, c’est de croire qu’il faut choisir entre production et préservation de la nature. À travers la révolution industrielle, l’économie semble avoir trahi la nature.

We need to be able to specify growth for whom, and for what ends. We must learn to ask: where does the money go? Who benefits from it? In an era of ecological breakdown, are we really content to accept an economy where nearly a quarter of total output goes into the pockets of millionaires?

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.