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In addition to its role as a productive system, the market also serves as a space where we learn to be courteous to our suppliers and customers as we participate in market conversations that transcend the bidding over scarce resources and the bargaining between buyers and sellers. We learn to care about the needs of others and place trust in our fellows. In their book, Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals?, Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Seung Choi (2019) find that markets often put us in positions where we can observe and judge the trustworthiness of others, given that successful market exchanges depend on the trust forged between buyers and sellers.

A barber’s clients must trust her to cut and style their hair. And the barber must respectfully consider what her client’s care about if she hopes to be an effective practitioner who successfully improves the well-being of her clients which, in turn, cultivates their increased trust in her and ultimately contributes to her bottom-line. A hungry customer visiting a restaurant will have learned during his previous visits to restaurants to respect her waiter. Although she cares about quickly receiving a high- quality meal, she knows that respecting her waiter will make the experience more enjoyable and might improve the service she receives. The mutual respect that the waiter reciprocates to her customer, in turn, both is likely to increase the waiter’s compensation and demonstrates his habitual peacefulness.

Sociologist and peace scholar, Elise Boulding (2000), explains how a “culture of peace” can develop through the active cultivation of habits of peacefulness, which are routine acts of mutual caring, respect, and well-being, grounded in shared values, beliefs, and behaviors. A culture of peace avoids violence as a means of conflict resolution. Boulding’s approach frames the building of a peaceful society as a bottom-up process through which peaceful habits are practiced by individuals in their various social arrangements.

One type of arrangement that is potentially important for the development of a culture of peace is a friendship, a dyadic relationship developed and maintained through mutual trust and dependence. Friendships occur in a variety of contexts. We are often introduced to our friends by family or other friends, and we tend to meet friends at school, social gatherings, neighborhoods, or places of worship. We engage in what Boulding described as habits of peacefulness as we care for our friends in their times of need, respect their opinions and beliefs, and take into consideration their well-being.

Capitalism and international trade are often linked with imperialism, which refers to an ideology, and the associated policies, of a government expanding its power through military force and economic activity. It is not hard to see why some make this connection—throughout history, governments have used military force to expand markets and secure control over inputs such as natural resources. But does this mean that imperialism is inherent to capitalism and trade?

Marx (1867) believed that capitalism would expand across borders to capture natural resources and exploit cheap labor. “A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the chief centres of modern industry springs up” he argued “and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field” (p. 493). Hobson (1902) also made a similar connection arguing that capital owners who could not find suitable investment opportunities domestically, due to over-saving and under-consumption, would seek opportunities abroad through imperialism. Imperialism, he argued “is the endeavor of the great controllers of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their surplus wealth by seeking foreign markets and foreign investments to take off the goods and capital they cannot sell or use at home” (91).

When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).

Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entrepreneurial successes of the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca which are one of the hallmarks of capitalism (USFDA 2020a, b).

Critics such as Mazzucato maintain that, while economic growth and social welfare is driven by innovation, the state must intervene to prevent private actors from extracting too much value from their own innovations. This argument relies on four important assumptions. First, Mazzucato sees value extracted by private innovators as a rent, not a premium for their efforts and investments. In this perspective, entrepreneurs are myopic and must be prodded by the benevolent Leviathan to take a “patient,” long-term perspective. Even using the Ricardian role of rentiers as responsible of economic stagnation, the modern state is itself a rentier, a much larger one than entrepreneurs or large firms and one that bears little risk (unlike private capital, taxpayers’ money is always available). Moreover, the claim that innovators appropriate too much value from innovations with high social benefits is hard to square with the conventional notion that, in the face of positive spillovers, there is too little innovation in R&D (Arrow, 1962)!.

Second, these criticisms view the state is a priori entitled to appropriate a part (which? Half? 90%? 100%?) of the innovation’s value because of its “dirty job.” An example highlights the inconsistency of this argument. Suppose a firm that produces mobile phones uses a natural resource to create a specific component. The firm can buy the natural resource and make the component in-house or buy from an outside supplier. Either way, this process is facilitated by market transactions, either in the market for the resource or the market for the finished component. Assume the state owns the natural resource or the supplier producing the component is a state-owned firm. In both cases, the firm has paid a price to the state for its contribution to innovation (i.e., owning the natural resource or contracting with the supplier). An entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs perform the central role of combining resources and bearing the uncertainty associated with value creation (production takes place before the product is offered and promoted to consumers, who may or may not buy the product). Why should the state be entitled to a share of the created value? A typical answer is that the entrepreneur is leveraging prior investments, infrastructure, institutions, education, etc. provided by the state. And yet, the entrepreneur, the investors, and other stakeholders have already paid for these, in the form of taxes, credit expansion, or however else the state funds its expenditures. Why should the innovator pay an additional “tax” on innovation?

Going through these arguments, we get a sense of a paradoxical situation. Large parts of the degrowth critique come from a progressive or “Millennial socialist” angle, and are accompanied by calls for tougher stands against inequalities, more support for the poor, and a stronger role for the welfare state more broadly. We have just seen, however, that an economy without growth would leave governments with less financial firepower to fight such challenges, even as it expanded their scale—leaving the much-hated alternatives of austerity or iniquitous inflation to pay for them. It comes as no surprise, then, that degrowth advocates have gravitated to the pipe dream of Modern Monetary Theory as an escape route from this policy conundrum. This theory purports to bust the “deficit myth” (to invoke the title of Stephanie Kelton’s book) by promoting money-printing as a sustainable and unlimited way of financing government, magically without creating inflation.21

Recall that the welfare system was first created back in the nineteenth century precisely to shore up capitalism against some of its most perverse wealth-concentration dynamics, and therefore to contain the insurgence of social unrest. Wouldn’t diminishing the welfare state’s firepower at a time of pressing need do the opposite? We can credibly suppose that it would further destabilize the whole economic system and that, as Heather Boushey argues, the increase in inequality would also stifle competition and innovation.22

But what is the true relationship between capitalism, environmental destruction and climate change? If we compare the ranking of the countries with the highest environmental standards with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, we see a different connection than the one purported by Klein.

For more than 20 years, researchers at Yale University have been publishing the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which ranks countries according to their environmental health and ecosystem vitality. The EPI uses a total of 32 performance indicators in eleven categories:147

Another dynamic element that receives too little attention in the degrowth literature is the international dimension of the policy agenda.42 What happens if one country decides to walk down the ecosocialism path, but others do not? In that case, commitment to degrowth leads, in an act of selfpreservation and contrary to the idyllic narrative, to an insular worldview and closure from the outside world.43

This is true, first, because the economic scale-down envisioned by ecosocialism reins in international trade. Production needs to be carried out on a smaller scale and as locally as possible to avoid environment-damaging global supply chains, so exchanges between countries will shrink. Along the same logic, international travel will need to be reduced, given the inevitable environmental repercussions of airplanes. As society moves full-throttle toward eco-autarky, we can expect less exposure to outside cultures, and possibly more xenophobia. So argues Benjamin Friedman in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, based on patterns of nationalism across US history. Indeed, this realization dates back to Enlightenment thinkers, who saw commerce as breaking through religious groups, political affiliations, and prejudices in its pursuit of economic gains. It inspired the well-known observation by 1800s economist Frédéric Bastiat that “when goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” 44

As climate activist Greta Thunberg likes to remind her audiences, when the house is on fire, you stop whatever you are doing and focus on extinguishing. The message is that in our climate emergency all other, petty concerns must be set aside. Applied to international relations, this aspirational thinking has some believing that climate change will imply the end of conflictual geopolitics.44 There are practical reasons why this type of thinking might have gathered momentum. After all, much of the world’s recent conflict history, including war after war in the Middle East in the 1990s and early 2000s, was driven in large part by issues related to petroleum. It might seem logical that once economies, as part of their climate mitigation efforts, switch to renewables like solar and wind, conflictual international relations will become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that change is very unlikely to represent the end of geopolitics.45

First, the overall premise is wrong, as oil and gas will not disappear any time soon. Rather, we will observe a gradual shift in the energy mix from traditional energy sources toward renewables.46 An effort to fast-track the demise of highly polluting coal, while renewable capacity is still building up, might initially lead to a counterintuitive increase in the use of methane— which is, at least for Europe, another source of conflictual geopolitical relations, in its case with Russia.

If, as we imagine alternative institutions, we choose to ignore basic human cultural traits (perhaps blinded by false dichotomies such as whether people are inherently good or bad), then the mechanics of our society will rapidly turn perverse, as people find ways to go around those institutions. With this understanding, we can see why people would not suddenly embrace a narrative of sufficiency or a steady-state economy. We can appreciate that they would not simply ignore the fact that neighboring countries would begin to have more, thanks to their sustained economic growth and technological progress. We can recognize that impulses to emigrate would begin under ecosocialism. And we can see why redistribution alone, without growth, would lead to an unsustainable equilibrium. In sum, we can understand why capitalism has proved a successful way to organize society hitherto. It channels some basic human impulses.

Rather than fantasizing about changing human nature altogether, it is more promising to acknowledge these traits and try to align them with the environmental imperatives laid out by scientists.70 The odds of achieving this should be stacked up against the odds of accelerating technological change—which, as we saw, is the chief mechanism humanity has used to solve problems throughout its history. It is to this topic that we turn in Chapter 6.

The main topic of this book is the relationship between capitalism and the growth imperative, and this is an essential relationship to understand as we consider a societal rethink to address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. The point that must be accepted is that economic growth is a result of human desires, rather than a top-down imposition by capitalism on otherwise indifferent individuals. The quest for more will endure as long as humans populate the planet, whether we tear down capitalism or not. It is best to acknowledge this and craft our sustainability strategies accordingly.

While we have looked at the origins of the growth imperative from a more individual, or microeconomic, perspective, it is also possible to do so at the country level. Skeptics will surely point to historical estimates of GDP, such as the ones displayed in Figure 5.2, to claim that capitalism and industrialization brought a growth-obsession phase to an economic history previously characterized by simple stability. Such an interpretation of the data is understandable, but fallacious. Aggregate economic growth has accompanied humankind throughout its history, but it accelerated enormously from the Industrial Revolution onward thanks to certain conditions: the Scientific Revolution, better protection of property rights, presence of capital, an extensive banking system, high wages in England, and more.

Great Reset proponents see “capitalism” as an outdated, inefficient, and unjust system and want its current “neoliberal” manifestation supplanted with a much more regulated system. However, as we have argued capitalism simply means that most means of production are privately owned, that unhampered markets are used to allocate resources, and that there are high levels of economic freedom because state intervention is relatively limited. Economies organized on these principles also tend to be associated with high levels of social and political liberty. In such a system, firms concentrate on learning how to better serve customers. If customers want firms to produce more “socially responsible” products and services (and we certainly don’t deny that huge segments among modern customers and consumers hold such preferences), that is what firms will do. Not so in a cronyist system where the attention of managers is focused instead on winning favors with bureaucrats (lucrative contracts, network connections that may be of value in the future, harm done to competitors, privileges and even monopolies). Consumers lose directly because their interests and preferences may be overridden in favor of the preferences of bureaucrats and politicians. The wrong goods and services are produced and resources are spent on influencing public decision makers. Again, what is criticized by the critics of “capitalism” is in actuality “cronyism” (see also Klein et al., 2021).

Research on cronyism suggests that economies with high levels of government engagement with the economy are likely to exhibit particularly high levels of cronyism. There are reasons to expect a Great Reset to result in more cronyism. A recent WEF (2017) proclamation says that.

In this article, we offer a critical view of the Great Reset thesis, defined as the insistence on more government intervention in the innovation process through subsidy schemes or direct involvement, more emphasis on stakeholder capitalism brought about by a combination of legislation and pressure on business, and new metrics used to monitor private as well as public actors’ performance with respect to sustainability, innovation, and stakeholder performance. The Great Reset thesis is a set of normative propositions, calls for a better world that supposedly should be championed by management scholars as well as political and business leaders and the public. While Great Reset proponents do not a call for eliminating markets or capitalism, they call for new, normative management theory that in many ways is inconsistent with the market economy in its current form. The Great Reset is not only about changing managers’ objectives, beliefs, and actions, but also changing how organizations interact. In essence, calls for stakeholder management, new metrics for assessing social and environmental impact, and greater government intervention in markets to achieve social and environmental goals are closely related; they represent complementary arguments for restructuring the conventional capitalist model in which the means of production are privately owned and these owners—for large companies, shareholders—are responsible for managing their assets.

We argue that the Great Reset thesis is based on a fundamental lack of appreciation of the power of markets to bring about desirable social outcomes. In calling for a break with the traditional capitalist model, it leads to a world in which pressing social, environmental, and political challenges are exacerbated rather than alleviated. Moreover, the Great Reset thesis rests on a naïve conception of how governments work that neglects well-known problems concerning what governments (can) know, their incentives to take the right actions, and their vulnerability to rent-seeking on the part of organized special interests. It also mistakenly believes that the current system is a mostly unfettered market-based economy (e.g., Schwab, 2020) when, in reality, there is already massive government intervention—and, as a result, crony capitalism (Klein, Holmes, Foss, Terjesen, & Pepe, 2021)—in every major sector of the economy (Stiglitz, 1989, Majone, 1994).

While the Great Reset is fundamentally a set of normative propositions—a call for large-scale political and corporate action in the service of broad, societal goals such as sustainability—it is based on underlying descriptive assumptions. The basic, and mostly unanalyzed, premise of the Great Reset is that the existing social organization of economic activities (imprecisely described as “neo-liberalism”) has proven unable to deal with “grand challenges.” These challenges include the Covid-19 pandemic (as well as future, as yet unknown pandemics), the alleged increase in worldwide inequality, the various climate challenges, and the supposed declining innovativeness of private business which translates into reduced ability to deal with the other challenges. In other words, the Great Reset thesis rests on a strong claim of what economists call “market failure” (mainly “externalities”; Bator, 1958; Zerbe & McCurdy, 1999).

Those who call for the Great Reset may not use this terminology. Instead, they criticize “capitalism” for causing inequality, making natural resources being too heavily exploited, failing to direct innovation in the best possible ways, ignoring sustainability concerns, and so on (World Economic Forum, 2020). Much of this critique lacks concreteness and is entirely “boilerplate.” In particular, it is rarely explained how exactly “capitalism” does all these things; all are common to all known forms of social organization. Economic activity is driven by human wants and needs and the ability of people to satisfy those wants and needs, given the constraints of scarcity, production, and knowledge. Capitalism is merely a way of dealing with these basic facts (although some may of course argue that capitalism creates “unnecessary” needs and wants). Many proponents of Great Reset thinking claim they are not against capitalism per se, just the forms of capitalism that are most common today.

Degrowth, by definition, will reduce available resources and create some scarcity, albeit, according to its advocates, only for goods or ser vices that are unnecessary or superfluous. The implicit assumption, or hazardous bet, is that this would be voluntary scarcity—that everyone, once free from the iron cage of consumerism, would gladly embrace it as part of a superior mode of simple living.68 In this chapter we saw that, if this were not to happen, and the “infinite desire for more” (as Daniel Cohen calls it) were to remain prevalent, degrowth would likely turn into the proverbial road to hell, paved with good intentions.

Ecosocialism does not have an allocation mechanism, or a way to assuage tensions within society. The problems this chapter has described would rapidly cause the entire degrowth utopian vision to unravel, leaving citizens with some combination of perceived misery, social tension, autarky, emigration, and welfare reductions. An intricate web of rules would be spun up to regulate most aspects of life—all presided over by a strong central government at high risk of turning illiberal in its efforts to shore up its ideological raison d’être. The distance between ecosocialism and ecoauthoritarianism is shorter than one might imagine.

The scenario sketched above highlights that ecosocialist degrowth transitions would most likely occur in a context of deepening political-economic crisis, intensifying climate shocks, and worsening insecurity for the majority of populations. A key danger, then, is that even in the best-case scenario in which powerful red-green movements decisively shift the balance of power vis-à-vis capital and elect leftist parties following ecosocialist platforms, this could lead to “authoritarian” forms of ecosocialism, understood as ecosocialist regimes that institutionalize “state of emergency” provisions such as unchecked executive power, the suspension of democratic rights and procedures, restrictions on free speech, and military-police repression of dissent (Petras and Fitzgerald Citation1988). This has of course been one of the primary challenges confronting all socialist transitions historically, which have had to fight off external military intervention, resistance from capitalist elites, and reactionary currents from below in order to protect revolutionary gains. Things would be no different for future ecosocialisms-in-transition, particularly given the likely contradiction between the speed at which consumption cuts may need to be made in the global north and the slowness with which post-materialist cultural change would occur, yet such problems have not been systematically explored by ecosocialists and degrowth scholars. The risks are twofold: first, that authoritarian measures would be needed to enforce lifestyle changes upon recalcitrant populations and “deal with the exceptional circumstances of direct and serious threat” to the survival of ecosocialist regimes in their early phases; and second, that such measures, rather than being temporally limited and abolished once the “exceptional circumstances” are dealt with, become the new normal (94).

Quincy Saul and Andreas Malm are among the few ecosocialists who don’t shy away from this problem. Saul, for one, writes that “a period of ‘emergency rule,’ when the expropriators are expropriated, must be revised for the twenty-first century, it cannot be dismissed or glossed over” (Saul Citation2011, 58–59). Similarly, Malm suggests that carrying out the transition in the needed time frame would require.

Fuchs (2020b) talks about ‘class struggle social democracy’. This aims to move to democratic socialism and involves: a pluralist convergence of radical reforms and the gradual transformation of institutions; trade union industrial action with working-class struggle (trade unions are another topic that could get more attention when discussing alternative societies and routes to them); new social combinations across classes and other divisions and identities; electoral parliamentary politics, social movements and movement parties; organization spontaneity and new prefigurative forms of social co-operation; the building of democratically controlled commons within as well as beyond capitalism; leadership and mass action; both conflict antagonistic politics and taking power. This includes different but complementary political strategies and rejects seeing these as contradictory or mutually exclusive. There are parallels here with what I am advocating in this book. I may not use the term ‘social democracy’ for this approach as that implies staying within capitalism, although in this context it refers to building from political reformism within capitalism to something beyond. Fuchs discusses thinkers as diverse as Rosa Luxemburg (2008), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017), and Bhaskar Sunkara (2019) as advocating change along these lines. Likewise, Eagleton (2022: 191), discussing a post-Corbyn Left in the UK, argues that the ‘the priority must be to grow this movement through every available channel’, numerous existing and thriving examples of which he gives.

This leads to the second conjoined tendency, which is to neglect difficult strategic questions, trade-offs, and dangers that would likely emerge during the transition process and beyond. The majority of ecosocialists ignore these sorts of questions altogether, while others address them more tepidly. Michael Löwy, for example, who has done some of the finest work on elaborating the ecosocialist alternative, does not consider whether there might be a trade-off between calls for “democratic planning” and the simultaneous emphasis on biospheric limits within which we must constrain consumption. Indeed, he affirms that “nobody has the right to tell people what their needs are” (Löwy Citation2015, 34), but then the question of whether this may require allowing energy-intensive modes of consumption that transgress planetary boundaries to persist is left unaddressed. Instead, Löwy expresses faith that “the rationality of democratic decisions will prevail once the power of commodity fetishism is broken” (28). This is perhaps plausible, but as Löwy himself recognizes, there will be a long period of transition in which the “old habits of consumption would persist” (34), and he doesn’t grapple with the question of how they would be transformed within the requisite timeframe to avoid runaway climate change (i.e. by 2050 or shortly thereafter). Joel Kovel and Michael Lebowitz also recognize that ecosocialism(s)-in-transition would remain marked by the defects of capitalism for some time; thus they emphasize the importance of democratic praxis in forging the new subjectivities and social relations that would be needed to sustain a long-term revolutionary transformation, which otherwise risks lapsing into the same authoritarian statism that has plagued socialism throughout its history (Kovel Citation2007, 272; Lebowitz Citation2006, 66). This is an important insight, though it still begs the question of how a society-wide transformation towards ecosocialist/degrowth principles might occur in the needed time-frame. Given the possible intransigence of energy and emissions-intensive consumption practices, particularly in a context of rising rightwing populism and “fossil fascism” (Malm and Collective Citation2021), we should grapple squarely with the risk that state coercion would be needed enforce ecosocialist degrowth in rich countries. On the other hand, if we choose to follow the democratic will wherever it leads us, even if this entails the perpetuation or even expansion of material-energy intensive modes of living, then we must deal with the biospheric consequences. Might there be a trade-off, then, between degrowth and non-degrowth paths to ecosocialism, each with its own set of challenges and dangers? Ecosocialists have not systematically investigated these sorts of questions.

In sum, we can see that the ecosocialist and degrowth movements have so far devoted limited attention to important strategic questions and trade-offs regarding ecosocialist transitions. Thus they are vulnerable to critiques like those of Matt Huber, who claims that degrowth variants of ecosocialism fail to articulate how their utopian aspirations could be “realistically built out of the present” (Huber Citation2019). Instead, Huber advocates what he calls a “scientific ecosocialism” that eschews the emphasis on degrowth and instead endorses a “traditional socialist politics not of limits and less, but of more” (Huber Citation2019). Unfortunately, Huber’s proposal is itself “utopian” in that it disregards the biospheric devastation that would be entailed by more consumption in the already over-developed global north (which I will expand on below). However, he indicates a crucial problem that must be addressed by the degrowth ecosocialist left: how might an ecosocialist vision based on degrowth (in rich countries) win popular majorities? As Hubert Buch-Hansen bluntly states: “the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and type of support it needs if its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes” (Buch-Hansen Citation2018, 160). This is undoubtedly true, at present, and thus more strategic thinking about the how of transition is needed. Following Sam Gindin, we need “an honest presentation of the risks, costs, and dilemmas the [eco]socialist project will face, alongside credible examples and promising indications of how the problems might be creatively addressed” (Gindin Citation2018, 14). Furthermore, as Erik Olin Wright says, we need to understand “not simply the obstacles and openings for strategies in the present, but how those obstacles and opportunities are likely to develop over time” (Wright Citation2010, 18).

It should not come as a surprise that a change of the dominant mode of production of human society takes place by a clash of brute forces, of worldwide war. Limiting his attention to the aspect of equality of men the anthropologist Walter Scheidel describes in fascinating historical detail how wars always preceded the setup of large scale new organization of society, see [Scheidel, 2017]. To which extent such a war again is on the agenda today - contrary to the existence of DC - clearly is a question of forecasting. The previous section of this chapter used a scenario technique to sketch some contours of a possible third World War. These scenarios are not independent, mixtures of them are to be expected, e.g. a common strategy of a player in scenario 1 is to stir up national civil war (scenario 2) in a satellite country of its opponent (e.g. Yugoslavia); or to use the rhetoric of scenario 3 to support the fight of national class struggle (scenario 2). But will WW3 happen at all?

Not necessarily, but with a frightening high probability. Some counterstrategies already have been mentioned along the discussion of the scenarios. The immediate candidate, of course, is a global peace movement. This movement already played a pivotal role in ending the Vietnam War, being an incubator for the worldwide cultural revolution of 1968. As the short life and the macroeconomic impotence30 of this rebellion showed, any movement with durable impact needs not only roots in personal perceptions and feelings, it also needs a very sophisticated and well-developed blueprint of the overall working of a global democratic society. A mode of production is a complicated political economy entity, which needs a complicated system design. Fortunately, the explosive accumulation of human knowledge, of science, should be able to provide just that – if it were not handcuffed by the singular tasks tailored by Disintegrating Capitalism. The next best counteraction thus is to organize the carriers of this knowledge, e.g. scientists, in a progressive global class. Even if WW3 happens, chances are that a restart is possible and the blueprint of a better mode of production is needed. In this case Umberto Eco’s vision of an upcoming new Middle Ages31, with monasteries (today: universities?) preserving and developing secret knowledge, might become reality.