Search the archive.

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

The international dimension

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

You cannot keep the good and throw the bad

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

Degrowth is incompatible with personal freedom

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

It is impossible to redistribute wealth without growing

Timothee Parrique, “A response to Alessio Terzi: Degrowth for good. Dismantling capitalism to save humanity from climate catastrophe”, WordPress, 17 April 2023, ,

Degrowth misses an allocation mechanism

Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 82-83, 2022,

And while some temporary, localized absolute decoupling has taken place, in particular in some Global North countries with low growth rates, there is no evidence to show that it has, or can, occur at the scale needed to become permanent and global, nor to do so fast enough. For example, between 1980 and 2008, countries such as Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan decoupled their domestic material use from economic growth, and the G8 as a whole halved their domestic material consumption. Yet, when measured in absolute terms and including embedded resources in trade, material footprint closely tracks GDP in all wealthy nations, and, despite dips in GDP rates, continues to grow at an unsustainable rate.23 Furthermore, only fourteen countries have absolutely decoupled GDP growth from both production- and consumption-based CO2 emissions – and this was aided by slow economic growth and, for several, was only temporary. 24 Yet even in these countries, achieved mitigation rates remain very far from what is necessary to achieve climate targets, in particular if equity considerations are taken into account. To put the case directly: the transformations of the Global North economies necessary to achieve annual emissions reductions of around 10 per cent, as is necessary to avert a climate emergency, can only be achieved without economic growth and will most likely result in a reduction of GDP. 25

Andrea Vetter, Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, “The Future Is Degrowth”, Verso Books, Pages 77-78, 2022,

Technological progress and non-fossil energy sources (such as the sun, wind, water, or biomass) cannot beat the entropy law in the long term, especially since resources and land are inherently limited. From this analysis, Georgescu-Roegen deduced that if we begin from an analysis that is grounded in the laws of physics, we can only conceive of an economy that consumes less and less energy and material, since nothing can be 100 per cent recycled and since capturing renewable energy depends on material resources, which are themselves limited. Georgescu-Roegen also formulated initial thoughts on the form such an economy must take, anticipating some of the central degrowth proposals. Thus, it is no coincidence that the word décroissance, although Georgescu-Roegen did not use it himself, first became known through the title of a 1979 French translation of his writings titled Demain la décroissance.

Chris Stewart and Keishia Taylor, “Marx, the ‘Metabolic Rift’ and Capitalism’s Assault on Nature”, The Bullet, 4 January 2023, ,

Capitalism is destroying the earth’s ecosystems. Minerals, nutrients and other raw materials have been vacuumed up from nature while pollution has been vomited back out into the ground, sea, and air. In recent decades as capitalism has expanded into every corner of the globe it has turned 50% of the earth’s land into agriculture, cities, roads, and other infrastructure, driving land-use change that accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Paul Street, “”, Counter Punch, 27 January 2023, ,

Welcome to the Capitalocene: Nobody Gets Out Alive What’s the cause? What is the solution? You may have noticed something in what I wrote above – I put the word “humanity” in quote-marks while typing the words “ ‘humanity’s’ carbon-emitting charge past ecological tipping points.” (I also just put quote marks around the word “civilization.”) Is it really humanity that has created the climate catastrophe? Is it really “anthropogenic climate change?” The eco-Marxist world systems geographer/sociologist/historian Jason W. Moore rightly prefers to put the focus on capital and, more to the point, capitalism. Moore explains on why he prefers the term “Capitalocene” over “Anthropocene” when it comes to naming the era in which human activities have altered Earth systems in ways that pose dire challenges to livable ecology: “It was not humanity as a whole that created large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzhen today. It was capital.” It’s an important point. It is not all homo sapiens that has warmed and otherwise polluted the planet to the point where a “livable future” (Welles) is at severe risk. It is not all of humanity but rather executives at Exxon Mobil who suppressed their own firm’s earth scientists’ findings on how the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet. It is not homo-sapiens as such but rather Fossil Capital and its political allies who have conducted a deadly anti-scientific propaganda campaign to obfuscate the findings, projections, and increasingly dire warnings of respectable climate science. If you must blame “humanity,” than at least say “humanity under the command of capital.” Or humanity subjected to the inhumanity of capital. But let’s go deeper. What drives capital to destroy the planet is not some inner demonic pathology on the part of individual capitalists and managers but rather the underlying dynamics of the profits system. It’s not just capital or capitalists that have caused this mess. It is capitalism, with its endless pursuit of surplus value and “cheap nature” – chiefly cheap raw materials, cheap energy sources, and cheap labor power – to buoy up its holy rate of profit. Competition between capitals compels investors to constantly seek new profitable markets, raw materials, energy sources, labor power, transport routes, political environments, and technologies in every corner of the world. Livable ecology be damned: gas and oil must be extracted; forests must be razed; pipelines must be built; labor supplies must be tapped; new forms of built-in-obsolescence must be designed; lakes and rivers must be poisoned; barriers between humans and zoonotic viruses must be collapsed; sustainable local agriculture must be trumped by mass chemical farming to feed animals for slaughter; fertile soil must be [razed] raped to make way for carbon-spewing trucks, cars, and airports and soulless real estate developments; Indigenous people must be removed and defeated to carry out toxic mining and drilling operations; politicians must be bought to prevent government interference with the endless commodification of the planet and its species (people included); melting Arctic ice must be seen as an opportunity for new shipping lanes instead of an existential warning to cease and desist from the relentlless capitalist war on “a livable future.” The anarchy of capital in the material base undermines any effort by the political and state superstructure to impose adequate decent environmental rules. The state and its regulatory agencies and the overall politico-ideological and media culture are captured by profit-mad capitalists whose superior wealth translates into superior political and (anti-)intellectual power. The needs and demands of workers and the broader populace subjected to class rule and exploitation compel constant quantitative expansion – “growth” – for capital and its political operatives to provide the “solution” to structural unemployment and poverty (both of which are built into the capitalist system). Growth, the holy expansion of GDP, is capitalism’s timeworn deadly answer to mass complaints over the economic insecurity that is built into its chaotic system. Politicians take up the cry, citing statistics and the pursuit of quantitative expansion — job growth, income growth, stock market growth — as the basis for their legitimacy and power even as poisoned quantity leads to the qualitative degradation of air, water, and soil and the Earth’s rising self-protective determination to burn the human race off its face. There is also the anarchy and conflict of competing nations. The disorderly multiplicity of nation states in the world capitalist system as it has evolved for half a millennium militates against the establishment of the central political and regulatory authority required for humanity to overcome the planet-wide collapse of “a livable future.” “Accelerating the Race to the Abyss” When leading military powers atop that world state system come into violent conflict each other (as they recurrently and inevitably do), moreover, the prospects of common global action to stop “the thoroughgoing deterioration of earth and nature” (Jameson) are badly damaged. Perhaps some skilled researchers will calculate the carbon footprint of the current inter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war underway in Ukraine before Washington and Moscow solve the problem of global warming with planetary nuclear winter. The investigators will want to factor in how the conflict has accelerated the extraction and burning of fossil fuels outside Russia. As Noam Chomsky observed with his usual eloquent brilliance last fall: “The Ukraine war finds its natural place in [our] collective [eco-cidal] madness. One outcome of Putin’s criminal aggression and the consequent sanctions regime is to restrict the fossil fuel flow from Russia on which Europe relies, particularly the German-based system that is its economic powerhouse. Economic consequences for Europe are severe, though not for the U.S., which is largely immune; or for that matter for Russia, which at least for now is profiting handsomely from rising oil prices and has many eager customers outside of Europe. Europe is seeking alternative sources of oil and gas, a bonanza for the U.S. fossil fuel industry, rewarded with new markets and expansive drilling opportunities to enable it to destroy life on Earth more effectively. And the military industry could hardly be more ecstatic as the killing and destruction mount….One can think of other reasons to bring the horrors to a quick end, but the fate of organized human society is surely one. The Ukraine war has reversed the limited efforts to address the mounting crisis of environmental destruction. While it should have accelerated efforts to move rapidly towards sustainable energy, that was not the path chosen by the political leadership. Rather, the choice has been to accelerate the race to the abyss.” (The giant US capitalist global military Empire — with “roughly 750 military spread across 80 nations!” [so boasts the imperialist Soldiers’ Project] — certainly has the largest carbon footprint of any single institution on Earth.  Under the direction of either of the nation’s two capitalist-imperialist parties, it may soon be setting new carbon emissions records in a deadly war over Taiwan with state-capitalist China, itself no carbon-spewing slouch despite its heavy investment in wind and solar.) Thanks to how the war in Ukraine has deepened the dangers of both nuclear war and climate catastrophe, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has just moved its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to Midnight, its highest level in history. Then there’s the endless diversion and flight from historical-material reality provided by a corporate media that fascinates millions with the sex lives and consumption patterns of mediocre celebrities and that  – yes, Amy Goodman – commonly reports an endless and accelerating number of  extreme weather events without mentioning the climatological context for those events, much less the capitalist context behind the climate calamity.  Many more USAers could tell you the name of Gisele Bundchen’s possible new boyfriend (personal trainer Joaquim Valente) than could tell you what a Greenhouse Gas is. “What kind of culture is it,” the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams asked forty years ago, “when some serious analysis (of environmental menace — PS) appears and is almost at once placed as another installment of ‘doom and gloom’? What kind of culture is it which pushes distraction, in its ordinary selection even of news, to the point where there is hardly any sustained discussion of the central and interlocking issues of human survival? There are times, in the depth of the current crisis, when the image materialises of a cluttered room in which somebody is trying to think while there is a fan dance going on in one corner and a military band blasting away in the other corner. It is not the ordinary enjoyments of life that are diverting serious concern, as at times, in a natural human rhythm, they must and should. It is a systematic cacophony which may indeed not be bright enough to know that it is jamming and drowning the important signals, but which is nevertheless, and so far successfully, doing just that” (Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 [New York: Pantheon, 1983], p. 18). What kind of culture does that? A capitalist culture. Greta’s Right: Revolution, Nothing Less David Wallace Wells’ October 2022  New York Times essay, “Beyond Catastrophe,” is surprisingly and excessively impressed by the prospects for “decarbonization” short of eco-socialist revolution in this century? Is he right to suggest that environmental catastrophe can be avoided under capitalism, as numerous other progressive thinkers seems to think? No. We’d do better to take counsel from the 19-year old climate justice icon Greta Thunberg, who recently told an audience in London that climate activists and others must overthrow “the whole capitalist system.” She’s right. That system is far too deeply invested in fossil fuels to give them up before final tipping points are breached (and there are more than enough such fuels still in the ground for capitalism to extract and burn to the point of no return). It is far too anarchic, competitive, exploitation-based, authoritarian, plutocratic, and decentralized, and too attached to nation states, imperialism, and war to be seriously reigned-in by environmental considerations. I’m not sure Ms. Thunberg has worked all of this out yet but she’s on the right track:  it really does come down to the title of the U.S. Revolutionary Communist Party’s (RCP) weekly YouTube television show: “Revolution Nothing Less.” The leading left intellectual Chomsky has recently been suggesting that the main problem is “savage capitalism,” not capitalism as such. My guess is that he knows better than this (he’s too smart not to) — that livable ecology is simply impossible under the class dictatorship of capital — but sees the prospect of eco-socialist transformation as so remote and the climate catastrophe as so urgent that we have no choice but to place our hopes in reversing climate destruction under the profits system. I get it but I don’t. The only thing crazier than calling for global socialist/eco-socialist people’s revolution now is not doing so. Many older, white, and male left-identified people I know reflexively roll their eyes in response to me when I voice this opinion. To them, “saying that we need a socialist revolution is required to save chances for a decent future is to say that we are doomed.  That’s not going to happen.” This judgement typically comes my way without any disagreement over my diagnosis that capitalism is killing us – without any Wellsyian or Chomskyan pretense that the environmental crisis could maybe be solved under bourgeois rule. But, to paraphrase Gramsci, the pessimism of my despairing correspondents’ minds has gotten the better of the “optimism of their will (as recent mind and body research would predict, incidentally). They find it easier to imagine the end of life itself than to envision the end of capitalism. They find it more comfortable to surrender and fade away before capitalist eco-cide than to rise up with others against the system that cancels a livable environment – and they project this surrender on to younger and future  generations cursed with trying to survive under the conditions imposed by the planet-poisoning bourgeois regime their predecessors failed to properly confront. Enough with the idiotic and self-fulfilling cynicism, nihilism, and hopelessness. Of course we can make a revolution. Or die trying.  Because it’s not about the crystal ball, is it? Are the odds bad? Change them with human agency – yours and that of others with whom you join against a lethal system wired to destroy life on Earth.  Make no mistake: capitalism isn’t done until it has made “a livable future” impossible. We have an existential duty to kill it before it kills humanity along with the giant mass of other species it has already wiped out.

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 31-32, 2020

Formal citizenship requirements for copyright registration eventually ended with the International Copyright Act of 1891, a statute that, in theory, extended copyright protection to all individuals in the United States.18 However, the International Copyright Act of 1891 neither ended the nation’s desire to associate American citizenship with whiteness nor prevented the de facto racial discrimination that followed from legal articulations of copyrightability. Lauren Berlant describes sentimental approaches to citizenship, which posit the citizen not as political subject but rather as “someone with attachments and intentions and pain capacities—for example, as a subject of feelings—who longs for what everybody is said to long for, a world that allows access to vague belonging, a sense of unanxious general social membership that ought to be protected by the institutions that bind power to ordinary life.”19

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 191-192, 2020

The frames of creatorship, citizenship, and nation have been organizing ones for my discussion of race and intellectual property. Copyright, patent, and trademark discourses have been intertwined with them for centuries, often through the reiteration of familiar racial scripts. Chapter 4 explored the notion of rewriting the existing racial scripts of intellectual property law and mobilizing new racial feelings as a potentially productive means of unmaking invisible white norms around creatorship and personhood. Each of the three examples discussed—Prince’s seizure of creatorship as a space for Black creativity and personhood, India’s pushback against Western commodification of cultural property, and Marshawn Lynch’s deployment of Black bestiality as a means of contesting ownership of Black bodies—demonstrates the practical impacts of performative resistance to intellectual property law’s conceptions of race and economic structures. Despite the possibilities that such moments of contestation offer, however, they are also fundamentally limited by cultural and material systems that perpetuate inequality. In particular, imagining that the whiteness of capitalism, liberalism, and citizenship can be undone through equal rights ignores the fundamental ideological investments of those systems and the failures of the civil rights movement. Even while recognizing the “epistemic violence”1 involved in calling out inclusionary politics, Amy Brandzel notes that incrementalist approaches are fundamentally limited because

Anjali Vats, “The Color of Creatorship”, Stanford University Press, Pages 7-8, 2020

I argue that the outcome of individual legal cases involving creators of color is less important than how doctrinal standards were forged through epistemically raced conceptions of citizenship. The coalescence of intellectual property and citizenship produced doctrinal language that continues to systematically privilege whiteness even today. More specifically, America’s racial episteme is “the strategic apparatus which permits separating out from among the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within.”24 Understanding citizenship as a “strategic rhetoric of whiteness,”25 in the words of Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, transforms the object of study from the racial outcome in individual cases to the racial logics of doctrine itself. Though the race of the plaintiffs and defendants in intellectual property cases is helpful in locating moments of racial crisis, it is not dispositive in thinking about how race works in those moments.

Jessica Silbey, “Against Progress”, Stanford University Press, Pages 16-17, 7 June 2022

Uncertainty over the meaning of “progress” is one source of destabilizing tension. Technological advances occur at a rapid pace, while wealth inequality and political divisiveness related to these technological resources appear to be at unprecedented levels without foreseeable amelioration.16 Against Progress explores this tension by attending to intellectual property disputes in court and in everyday life in such a way that calls into question the shifting meaning of “progress of science and useful arts” in the age of digital reproduction and rapid technological change.17 Rather than focusing on the nature of inventorship, authorship, and commercial incentives, which are typical intellectual property concerns, I focus on how disputes about intellectual property revolve around more basic fundamental values. In a world rich with technology but facing rising global political instability and looming ecological disaster, this book sets aside conventional accounts of intellectual property’s justification and reimagines progress of science and the useful arts for the Anthropocene. Fundamental values like equality, privacy, and distributive justice are central to human flourishing and human dignity but have been largely absent from intellectual property law and policy. The book frames current intellectual property law and its role in everyday life as about these values and their contested contours as a bellwether of changing social justice needs in the Digital Age.

Michelle Meagher. 03/24/2021. “Adaptive Antitrust.” SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 3816662, Social Science Research Network. .

Real world impacts are critical to bear in mind because we find ourselves at a particular moment in history. This is an age of environmental breakdown, of deep inequalities and inequities, of populism and autocracy, of globalism, of monopoly and of surveillance.

Jessica Silbey, “Against Progress”, Stanford University Press, Pages 306-308, 7 June 2022

A third hypothesis explaining the effect of IP’s mainstreaming in everyday culture is that intellectual property law is a new terrain over which to fight about old problems in service of an updated form of “progress” focused on shared resources, resources that are not limited to clean air and water but also include information and privacy. 13 This new terrain reframes old debates. I do not mean to imply it is a return to an idyllic past or that this evolution “against progress” reflects the cyclical rise and fall of dominant industries, a push and pull of history. 14 My point is simpler but also time-sensitive. Interrogating emerging fundamental values deeply rooted in our system of constitutional democracy within the new contexts of intellectual property reminds us that we have not achieved equality, protected privacy, fortified our democratic institutions, or provided a fair opportunity to thrive for all in this age of rapid technological innovation, and these failures are spreading and becoming potentially cataclysmic. The contemporary intellectual property stories in this book undermine the optimism of Information Age capitalism, born of individualism and market freedom, and urge us to shift gears. The stories emphasize instead a kind of egalitarianism, structured around a revitalization of public interests and human interconnectedness that the Digital Age makes more urgent and possible. These new intellectual property stories re-center and extend the public domain’s importance and situate our shared fate within it as a measure of hopeful progress for the twenty-first century.

Barbara Ransby, “Racial Capitalism Is in Real Peril This Time”, In These Times, 31 August 2023, https://inthesetimes.com/article/racial-capitalism-racism-socialism-organizing-revolutionary-optimism-empire

Racial capitalism is in crisis! Again, you say? Of course there are cyclical crises, but something different is going on. In January, the elite World Economic Forum declared the global economy is facing a major potential ​“polycrisis” as dangerous risks converge, including natural resource shortages. In April, the venerable capitalist economic strategist Albert Edwards warned ​“we may be looking at the end of capitalism” as he connected inflation to the unchecked quest for greater and greater profit. Just to put this in context, Edwards works for one of France’s largest banks, the 159-year old Société Générale, with assets worth 1.5 trillion euros.

Ajnesh Prasad, “Racial capitalism and COVID-19”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2 May 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03095-1

The statistics from the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have substantiated the claim long-held by social scientists that health outcomes are unequally distributed and experienced by different racial and ethnic groups (e.g., Dovidio et al., 2008; Nelson, 2002). Indeed, the numbers circulated about the pandemic suggest that minority racial and ethnic groups were disproportionately affected by the virus (Laurencin & McClinton, 2020; Williams & Blanco, 2020). This empirical evidence led academics, government officials, health professionals, and social justice activists to declare COVID-19 to be a racialized disease—that black and brown bodies are inequitably subjected to its most detrimental health outcomes (Yearby & Mohapatra, 2020).

Alan J. Dettlaff, “The Unrealized Dream of Abolition”, HUMAN SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS: MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP & GOVERNANCE, 20 February 2024, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23303131.2024.2317310

As we begin to engage in this work, we must also understand the real problems that prevent thisvision from being realized. As social workers, and as a society, when faced with a problem, we are often challenged by the limits of our imagination that have been shaped by our experiences and socialization within our current society – we tend to think of solutions to our problems that exist within the realm of what we know to be possible. For example, when we consider the problem of poverty –a fundamental problem that facilitates injustice and oppression – we are able to think of what many would consider necessary solutions to address poverty – universal basic income, living wages, guaranteed child allowances, and other solutions. In other words, if the problem we face is that people do not have enough money, we can imagine solutions that provide money. Yet we do not ask ourselves why we live in a society where people are required to have money in order to survive.

Alexander D. Barder, “Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy”, Oxford University Press, Pages 19-28, 2 August 2021,

The rapid expansion of European settler colonialism beginning in the fifteenth century had profound ramifications for the emergence of the idea of the global. What emerged in the aftermath of the genocidal land appropriation in North and South America and the enslavement of Africans was a racialized transnational political economy that came to structure the very foundation of proto-capital accumulation and an imaginary of the global based on racial hierarchy. With respect to the former, Cedric Robinson famously argued that the rise of the “world system” was predicated upon what he calls the formation of “racial capitalism,” which itself emerged from an already racially striated European continent.33 Europe’s own internal “others” were already subject to forms of racialized dispossession, internal colonialism, and indentured servitude or slavery, which would provide the model for European expansion, appropriation of land, and enslavement of peoples across the centuries—essentially, building the global order. As Robinson writes, “Racism . . . was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”34 The important point that Robinson makes is that race should not be viewed as a form of ideological mystification that provides, in a sense, a cover for the violence of accumulation and dispossession at the heart of the European colonial project. “Racialism,” Robinson adds, should be understood as a “material force . . . [that] would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”35 In other words, what is at work here is a process of racialization that expanded across the planet and created a material and ideological reality in which racial difference and hierarchy came to be understood as constitutive of the order of things.36

Arun Saldanha, “A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 5 September 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819871964

Another option presents itself: simply continue using “Anthropocene” in an informal and capacious manner and accept there are many environmental and sociological markers which together point to North England at the end of the 18th century as its beginning. Between earth science and other practices, we can inhabit the impasse instead of ignoring it. If it turns out the Anthropocene officially starts in 1964, those outside earth science will have to accept that conclusion. But explaining the radioactive stratum will still require explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, industrial technology, and empire, and these have their roots in the racializing capitalisms of early modernity. What after all is the Great Acceleration an acceleration of? The destructive apparatuses of the World Wars and then the Cold War are culminations of geopolitical, technological, and legal processes which first took form much earlier (think of the papally backed Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain of 1498 dividing the world for colonization). But this essay has argued it is the transition to an economy of perpetual speeding-up that is definitive, more than either the beginnings of colonial arrogance or the mad resort to nuclear arsenals. The military–industrial complex has been spectacularly wasteful and dangerous, but it is instigated by the growth imperative, by the “miracle” of the conjoining of primitive accumulation, gendered wage-labor, and commodification in little North English towns (compare Alliez and Lazzarato, 2018; Jones, 1981). The political upshot is that to avoid this system’s catastrophic exponentialities, it will not be possible to simply slow it down.