Why the world ignores Cassandra

Reality is our problem and also our answer. For, as always, the answer to the problem lies not in running away from it — there is simply nowhere to run to — but in turning to face it.

— Peter Kingsley, Reality (2024)

Cassandra's wound
It is true - and it should be stated clearly from the outset - that the way in which capitalism is structured as a mode of global civilisation, and not only as a system of production, profoundly conditions our ability to perceive and understand the civilisational collapse underway. This difficulty is especially accentuated when we live in the centre of the system, a centre that, in order to sustain itself as such, has had to recurrently provoke partial or local collapses in the savage, backward or underdeveloped peripheries - the former colonies - today once again plundered and abandoned to their fate.

Late capitalism has become an integral machinery of symbolic, affective, and existential control: the Megachine of which Fabian Scheidler (2024) speaks, which penetrates, transforms, and regulates all dimensions of life. As we well know, it does not limit itself to exploiting labour or resources: it produces subjectivities, shapes ways of feeling, filters collective emotions and designs the frameworks of the sayable and the imaginable. It has become an ontological structure that imposes what can be perceived, what can be said, and, above all, what can be believed.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance
• Moorpark, California

Refuting the hollow notion of the polycrisis

Why capitalism's structural crisis is all-encompassing

It is a commonplace that the world in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is facing multiple, multifaceted crises, threatening all world civilisation and the future of humanity itself. So omnipresent is the contemporary world disorder that received ideology has settled on a single word to describe it: “polycrisis.

However, anyone who wants to know what polycrisis is and where it comes from—beyond representing intersecting and accelerated crises, each with their own separate causes, but today interlocking inevitably runs up against a blank wall. This is equally the case when the question of concrete solutions to this overarching polycrisis is raised: no solutions are offered. In fact, the vacuousness of the concept of polycrisis is not accidental, but, intentional, to which the concept owes its primary importance in received ideology.______________________________
 

The Shale Revolution, U.S. Imperialism, and Mexico's Energy Dependence

U.S. imperialism has historically hinged on its control of global fossil fuel, leveraging it as a core mechanism of geopolitical power and global dominance. In the early twentieth century, the United States emerged as the world’s preeminent oil producer, embedding its imperial power in the structures of fossil fuel-based capitalism. Corporate oil giants such as the global cartel of the Seven Sisters (Standard Oil of New Jersey [Exxon], Gulf Oil, Texaco, BP, Shell, Mobil, and Chevron) were monopoly formations instrumented by imperial force, enabling U.S. industrial ascendancy and global influence. As U.S. fossil fuel production reached “peak oil” and domestic oil reserves declined since the mid-twentieth century, the United States shifted from extraction-based supremacy to an imperial mode of governance centered on controlling global fossil fuel-based energy flows. This strategic transition, which was accelerated by the oil shocks of the 1970s, marked a deepening reliance on coercive mechanisms: military interventions, regime changes, and economic manipulation in oil-rich regions, particularly across the Middle East and the Global South.

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Systemic Strategies for a Complex Transition
 

This post summarises my talk on 11 July 2025 at the Summer Course of the University of Cadiz, Remedies for a Planet in Crisis. The talk was entitled Strategies for another possible energy model for other possible worlds. It came after those of Antonio Turiel, Alicia Valero, Ferran Puig, Antonio Aretxabala and José Luis Yeltes, who had already clearly defined the problems of energy, material and ecosystemic limits. This presentation aimed to identify solutions, and I used system dynamics tools to do so.

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The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear

It has become increasingly difficult to speak of Palestine without falling into one of the two dominant registers of Western discourse: on one side, a humanitarianism that evokes compassion but leaves structures of domination untouched; on the other, a strategic realism that calculates but cannot imagine. In both cases, Palestinian resistance is hollowed out—reduced to emotional pathology or excluded from the realm of political rationality. When it is not pitied, it is criminalised. And more and more often, this criminalisation bears the familiar marks of Islamophobia: resistance is framed as terrorism, survival as threat, and thought as potential radicalisation.

Yet, as pro-Gaza demonstrations multiply across Europe—often marked by a belated, conditional, and at times self-exculpatory awakening of conscience—there remains a lesson no intermittent outrage can obscure: Palestinian resistance preceded this moment, persists through it, and will endure beyond it not as a desperate reaction, but as a proposition for the world. It is a resistance that thinks, creates, and envisions futures. It seeks no approval from above but calls upon every political conscience unwilling to surrender to the imperial order.

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Technological Dynamics of Growth and Stability

Chapter Seven from the Authors, "The Physics of Capitalism"
 

The ecosphere is capable of handling and assimilating a great deal of human waste and low- grade energy without getting severely destabilised. However, our current age of industrial capitalism is testing that proposition in every possible way. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional gas-powered vehicle. The typical onshore wind plant needs nine times more minerals than a conventional gas-fired power plant. Since 2010, every new unit of power generation has required on average 50 percent more mineral resources. But despite the impressive scale of this transition, the world is still using more energy, emitting more greenhouse gases, and setting new records in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. That’s in large part because the transition to renewables is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, as raw minerals are mined and transported using vehicles powered by fossil fuels.

Moreover, the idea that we can do more with less is seductive, but there are several reasons why this strategy will fail over the long run, if we choose to keep pursuing it. The most fundamental reason is that nature imposes absolute physical limits on efficiency that no amount of technological progress can overcome. Aggregate efficiency gains for entire economies are almost always associated with higher levels of energy use and consumption, not less. Increases in energy efficiency are generally used to expand accumulation and production, leading to greater consumption of the very resources that the efficiency improvements were supposed to conserve. Thus, a person driving a Tesla would have produced roughly the same carbon emissions as someone driving a Honda Accord.

Most of these debates have in common that they’re happening within the ideological framework of capitalist economies. The reason why elites frame the potential solutions to our common global problems as a simple matter of technological tinkering is simply because that’s what would allow them to preserve their wealth and power, to preserve the status quo from which they benefit. Capitalists are the apex predators of the ruling classes, and capitalists anywhere and everywhere are masters of deception and distraction.

Given all these challenges, a renewable strategy based on the “Holy Trinity”—wind, solar, and hydro—is the most plausible and realistic path forward in the future. A radical and rapid transition toward renewable energy can and must take place, but only if it’s accompanied by massive cutbacks in aggregate energy use. Electricity generation can undergo a radically quick transition toward renewables; there’s no technological barrier there at all. It’s purely social and political barriers that are the problem.

We need new political and economic institutions that prioritise the long-run stability of our biosphere as well as the economic concerns of workers worldwide. And to get there, we’ll need to better understand the complex relationship between society, energy, and technology—that is, to understand how the actions of the social institutions that govern our lives affect the energetic and technological dynamics that are increasingly governing the global ecosphere.

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Degrowth and flourishing, or stay the same and perish along or stay the way

If we truly desire a dignified and thriving future for generations to come, we have no choice but to degrow by decisively eliminating our consumerist culture
 

So far this century, in a sector already fully aware of the planetary crisis, ordinary citizens have been called upon with increasing frequency to reduce their consumption urgently. We call for cutting fossil fuel consumption, abandoning them and replacing them with renewable energies, eliminating our consumerist habits, caring for nature, our entire planet, Gaia. However, we have not managed to transcend the citizen's maginary to become aware that either we cut our consumption or we will face an enormous existential risk. This is because capital has systematically prevented this, alienating us from our essence. This not only alienates us in our work and social relationships, from our sense of identity with the community to which we belong and with nature, of which our species is a part, but also prevents us from talking about the impact of the capitalist system on our planet, our home. Indeed, capitalism alienates us from our essence, harassing societies daily with its Promethean discourse that everything can be achieved through technology, that happiness lies in having—not in being—and that we must therefore strive to possess and consume.

The fact is that the vast majority of studies published by the scientific community have consistently sounded the alarm throughout this century, warning that unless we urgently change the unsustainable course we are currently on under capitalism, we will face planetary catastrophes not only from climate change, the most visible of these, but from eight other essential planetary processes that provide the conditions necessary for life to flourish and be sustained. If we fail to do so, as early as 2040, we will face multiple catastrophes that will cause perhaps millions, if not billions, of human deaths in the decades that follow. Likewise, we are well on the way to bringing about the sixth mass extinction of species and the probable extinction of life on the planet, as known to those who survive. This constitutes the collapse of civilisation and an enormous existential risk. A collapse which, ironically, is being brought about directly by the very civilisation that is so often touted—preeminently Western civilisation—because of its capitalist, warmongering, colonialist, and racist nature, the emblem of which is undoubtedly the United States. 

This essay is based on the geocratic paradigm I have been developing since 2020, which proposes reorganising ourselves to take care of our planet. To take care of us, it is necessary to put the planet's needs before our own. The latest version of Geocratia can be found here.

This essay focuses on demonstrating that it is perfectly possible to reverse the dystopian trajectory we are on, and that this is done by applying market logic through the exercise of our power of consumption. First, it is argued that it is clearly possible to greatly reduce our planet's response to the crisis the capitalocene has brought it into, after having enjoyed the equilibrium it maintained throughout the Holocene. This is achieved by changing our way of life, through a cultural shift, by decreasing our consumption of resources to styles that allow us to fully enjoy life while taking care of the planet, staying within the planetary boundaries necessary for its stability, and living much better by consuming less of everything. In Geocratia, degrowth is a consequence of cultural change and not a model or an end in itself. The end is to save ourselves by saving our planet by replacing capitalism. Second, there is a clear way to convince the majority needed to materialise such a change, by replacing the dystopian trajectory we are unconsciously following through the subterfuge of the culture of consumerism. This happens by following market logic, adopting a new culture of sustainable consumption aimed at satisfying our real and universal needs, and discarding everything the market instils in us about what we must consume, even if it is absolutely unnecessary and harmful to people and the planet. Indeed, market logic is the only one that significantly influences government decision-making, because by adopting the new geocratic consumer culture, the blow to the system is direct, forcing governments to change the bulk of their economic, social and environmental policies for the benefit of people and planet and to the detriment of capital. Moreover, regardless of the pace at which governments replace their policies, people and the planet will benefit from the fall in consumption. Finally, applying market logic, it also opens the door to organising ourselves in rural and urban geocratic communities under different forms of social organisation (nation, province, municipality, city, community, village...), beyond the increasingly obsolete concept of the nation-state

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Geocratia, the Paradigm that Pursues the Well-being of People and the Planet, Not the Market

Organising to save ourselves by saving the planet is the most important thing we will ever undertake in our lives; it is our last chance to have a future

From the moment I became aware of the planetary crisis, back in 2010, I began reflecting and imagining how we humans could live in harmony with nature. I was alarmed that, given the path we are currently on, it seems impossible for our species to remain within the planetary boundaries necessary for the reproduction and sustainability of life and health on our home, planet Earth. After much research and interaction with a community increasingly concerned about the planetary crisis, in 2020, I published a proposal to imagine and suggest how to abandon the current paradigm. It is about moving towards a vision that guarantees a dignified, pleasant and sustainable life for future generations by caring for Gaia, our planet's biosphere, to maintain the conditions necessary for the flourishing and conservation of all forms of life. Geocratia is a practical concept whose dialectic directly contrasts with the current market-driven paradigm; therefore, it must be concluded that it is anti-capitalist by nature. Five years later, after observing how those in absolute control of the reins of power insist on maintaining the same trajectory that ensures a high existential risk to humans and non-humans, I am reviewing and deepening the geocratic proposal. This is reinforced by commentary from colleagues and by new research published by a variety of authors, confirming that humanity's current trajectory is leading us straight to our final cliff. The first part situates us in the context in which we find ourselves, from a political, ecological, economic, and consumer perspective. The second part presents the proposal to transition to Geocratia in its symbiosis with the Gaia hypothesis, its structure and the practical way to implement it. It concludes by suggesting how to take the first step at the community level, raising awareness and forming citizen cells, the most basic and organic form of transitioning to Geocratia.

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«Geocratia proposes to establish a social contract with our planet»

A conversation with his ideologue

On the occasion of the publication of his latest essay (2026), Geocratia, the paradigm that goes for the welfare of people and the planet and not the market, we wanted to talk to the Mexican author to explore his original political proposal.

Introductory biography
Álvaro de Regil Castilla is the executive director of the Jus Semper Global Alliance. This organisation has been promoting living wages as the basis of any sustainable and democratic society since 2003. He launched the Living Wages North andSouth (TLWNSI) initiative, an international benchmark in denouncing unequal exchange through labour arbitration in global supply chains generated by corporate globalisation. He is also a founding member of the International Living Wage Observatory (OISAD) at La Salle University in Mexico City.

Since 2015, his work has centred on promoting the need to build the imaginary of a new paradigm for the well-being of people and planet in a truly democratic environment, free from capitalism. As part of this transformative concept, he works in the fields of labour rights, business and human rights, degrowth/steady-state economics, basic income, and the drastic reduction of humanity's environmental footprint as the only way to achieve the sustainability of life on our home planet, Earth.

Alvaro is also a contributor to the vision and transformative praxis of the Great Transition Initiative at the Tellus Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and a consultant on the underlying causes of immigration with several community organisations in California and with California Lutheran University.

Starting concepts
Laura G. Vales: Five years have passed since you wrote the first version of Geocratia, a proposal that now has a much more forged structure. How would you summarise this paradigm for a citizenry that already perceives that the current system is in crisis, but does not know where to look?

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