Transitioning to Geocratia — the People and Planet and Not the Market Paradigm — First Steps

Parting from the fact that saving Planet Earth, our home, changes everything, we need to build a new ethos where the majority of humankind commits to a system whose only purpose is the pursuit of the welfare of people and Planet Earth. This requires that all Earth resources necessary for the enjoyment of life of all living things be managed to achieve true long-term sustainability. — Álvaro J. de Regil

The Unbearable Unawareness of our Ecological Existential Crisis

Over the past two years, the full report on Climate Change Mitigation by IPCC scientists, as well as research from other centres such as the Stockholm Resilience Centre, has consistently confirmed that we are on a doomsday trajectory. Unless we move rapidly in the opposite direction, the chances that we will face planetary catastrophes that seriously threaten the existence of life on our planet in the next twenty years are realistic and probable. Unsustainable capitalism keeps us deluded and largely unaware that we are on the brink of a serious existential risk. Therefore the great challenge is to provoke the awareness and critical thinking of ordinary citizens. Only a Citixens Revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arouse Now! –– Álvaro J. de Regil

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The update of the planetary boundaries framework reveals that six of the nine boundaries have been transgressed, suggesting that the Earth is now outside the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is about to be exceeded, while aerosol loading exceeds the limit regionally. Stratospheric ozone levels have recovered slightly. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries previously identified as exceeded. Given that primary production drives the biosphere functions of the Earth system, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for the functional integrity of the biosphere. This boundary has also been transgressed. Modeling the Earth system with different levels of transgression of climate change and Earth system boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on the Earth system must be considered in a systemic context. —Katherine Richardson et al

Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global Context

The corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints. –– Nubia Barrera Silva

The pressing priority of saving the Amazonia

The world's most biodiverse region is threatened by deforestation levels close to the point of no return. Despite this, the countries involved failed to reach agreements at the last summit in Brazil in August. –– David Roca Basadre

Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries

Humanity is well into the Anthropocene, the proposed new geological epoch where human pressures have put the Earth system on a trajectory moving rapidly away from the stable Holocene state of the past 12,000 years, which is the only state of the Earth system we have evidence of being able to support the world as we know it. Seven of eight globally quantified safe and just Earth System Boundaries (ESB) and at least two regional safe and just ESBs in over half of global land area are already exceeded. We propose that our assessment provides a quantitative foundation for safeguarding the global commons for all people now and into the future. — Johan Rockström et al

‘The energy transition has not yet begun’

Interview with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (France, 1977), historian of science, technology, and the environment, and professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He has just published Without Transition: A New History of Energy (Seuil), which will be translated and published in Spanish by Arpa. He is also the co-author, with Christophe Bonneuil, of The Anthropocene Event: The Earth, History, and Us (Points Histoire) and The Joyful Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk (Seuil). —Hervé Kempf

Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Core Issues and Implications for Practical Implementations

According to current forecasts, global heating is likely to exceed 2.8 °C by the end of this century. This makes substantial adaptation measures necessary to secure a broad basis for livelihood provision and the conservation of biodiversity. While the implementation of top-down and technocratic adaptation efforts predominates, related adaptation shortcomings of a socio-economic and ecological nature are becoming more and more apparent. Community-based adaptation (CBA), with its participatory, inclusive and needs-based bottom-up approach, offers a promising and powerful alternative. This article uses a semi-systematic literature review approach to screen the current literature and identify core issues of CBA. ––Tom Selje et al

Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, Mortality Since the Long 16th Century

This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to access essential goods), and that global human welfare only began to improve with the rise of capitalism. The rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. –– Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel

Marine plastic pollution as a planetary boundary threat – The drifting piece in the sustainability puzzle

The exponential increase in the use of plastic in modern society and the inadequate management of the resulting waste have led to its accumulation in the marine environment. There is increasing evidence of numerous mechanisms by which marine plastic pollution is causing effects across successive levels of biological organisation. This will unavoidably impact ecological communities and ecosystem functions. –– Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, Sarah E. Cornell, Joan Fabres

Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we explore the rapidly advancing field of post-growth research, which has evolved in response to these concerns. The central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing. —Giorgos Kallis et al

Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Implications for Nature-Based Solutions

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications, and potential future risks based on estimated energy matrixes and policy pathways. The aim of this publication is to assess the risks climate change poses to biodiversity using projected IPCC climate scenarios for the period 2081–2100, combined with key species-sensitivity indicators and variables as a response to climate change projections. —Cor A. Schipper et al

Communicating with policy makers about climate change, health, and their intersection: a scoping review

Ambitious policies are urgently needed to protect human health from the impacts of climate change. Civil society, including researchers and advocates, can help advance such policies by communicating with policy makers. In this scoping review, we examined what is known about effectively communicating with policy makers to encourage them to act on public health, climate change, or their nexus. Based on this literature, we have produced a list of strategic questions that communicators might wish to consider as they prepare to communicate with policy makers. —Joshua Ettinger et al

Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance

To paraphrase Mao Zedong: Where do ideas come from? Do they drop from the sky? No, they come from social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle, and scientific work. There is a close link between what goes on in the world, the project of classes and states, and theoretical and political debates. This is Arghiri Emmanuel’s life story, of which his theory of unequal exchange is a prime example. —Torkil Lauesen

Value Transfer and Labour Arbitrage Based on Unequal Exchange: The Case of Mexico – United States

Unequal exchange is a key concept in Marxist critiques of the capitalist global system, proposing that uneven development between the global core and periphery is driven by the core's retention of a substantial portion of value produced in the periphery. This occurs by establishing average global profit rates and international market prices across the global market despite stark wage disparities. This study highlights that wage disparities are crucial for monopoly capital accumulation, resulting in diminished wages and precarious social conditions in Mexico, with a labour value drainage of $135 billion dollars in 2023, representing 7.5% of its GDP. —Mateo Crossa Niell – Álvaro de Regil Castilla

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with an approach rooted in needs-based analyses, increasing the specific forms of production necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. —Jason Hickel / Dylan Sullivan

Materialising the Revolution: The Movement Toward Ecosocialism

Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. In my work on social justice, for many years I was primarily concerned with understanding and exposing the global exploitation of workers in the Global South through unequal exchange perpetrated by corporations through labour arbitrage. However, after reading much of what you have written this century, I have concluded that the planetary crisis we are experiencing as a result of dominant monopoly capital poses an imminent existential risk to human and non-human beings and all life at our home unless we urgently organise ourselves to force a radical paradigmatic shift. This new paradigm would replace capitalism with new ecosocialist communities whose only purpose is the pursuit of the well-being of people and the planet through a revolutionary movement. With this vision in mind, I would like to focus on how you envision moving from theory to the actual materialisation of arevolutionary movement that successfully transitionsto the ecosocialist paradigm. —John Bellamy Foster and Álvaro de Regil Castilla

he War in Ukraine —A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order

The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has been driven by internal and external factors. Those factors constitute two blades of a scissors, and explaining the conflict requires taking account of both blades. The external factors center on post-Cold War U.S. geopolitical strategy and the concomitant U.S.-sponsored eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That expansion can only be understood by reference to the fractures (internal factors) created by the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The external factors reveal the role of the United States, which is implicated to the point of provoking the conflict and obstructing peace. —Thomas I. Palley

Imperialism and WhiteSettler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

The concept of settler colonialism has always been a key element in the Marxist theory of imperialism, whose meaning has evolved gradually over the past century and a half. Within what has become the dominant paradigm of settler colonialism, the approach to the Israeli occupation of Palestine is far removed from historical materialism. Rather than relying on a highly restrictive logic, Marxist analysis seeks to situate the reality of Israeli settler colonialism within a broader and more dynamic historical perspective that captures the complex and changing dialectical relationships between capitalism, class, and imperialism/militarism. —John Bellamy Foster

Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy

Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages. We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income. —Jason Hickel et al

Crisis or collapse? Overshoot and degrowth

The delicate state of the Earth system has been described as a crisis or a set of crises: “ecological crisis,” “climate crisis,” “biodiversity crisis.” Our ecosocial situation has also been described as a crisis. The answer to the dilemma between crisis and collapse could ultimately lie in the combination of the incontrovertible diagnosis of serious ecological overshoot and the urgent need to decelerate—in order to hopefully prevent the consequences of overshoot from forcing a traumatic deceleration. — Asier Arias

Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections and Jeopardising Scenarios for Sustainable Futures

The size of the world population has profound implications for the demand for food, energy, and resources, changes in land use, and greenhouse gas emissions. This study examines why most population projections have underestimated global population growth and the implications for the actions needed to achieve sustainable societies. —Jane N. O'Sullivan

Overconfidence in climate overshoot

Global emission reduction efforts remain insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goal. This makes the systematic exploration of so-called overshoot pathways, which temporarily exceed the global warming limit set before reducing temperatures to safer levels, a priority for science and policy. Only a rapid reduction in emissions in the short term is effective in reducing climate risks. — Carl-Friedrich Schleussner et al

Advancing the Welfare of People and the Planet with a Common Agenda for Reproductive Justice, Population, and the Environment

Driven by rising consumption and population, human demands are depleting natural resources essential to human life, damaging farmland, freshwater supplies, fisheries, and forests, and driving climate change. This report offers a strategy to protect natural systems and improve well-being by expanding reproductive justice, a concept that includes family planning, reproductive health, and gender equity, and the preservation of the environment and climate. —J. Joseph Speidel and Jane N. O'Sullivan

Just population policies for an overpopulated world

After decades of neglect, environmentalists are once again becoming aware of the need to limit the number of human beings. But, like Rip Van Winkle, we find that the world has changed while we were asleep. There are now billions more people, hundreds of millions of new members of the global middle class, and high consumption among the rich. Meanwhile, the planet has become warmer, more polluted, more domesticated, and more impoverished. This article specifies what just population policies look like for an overpopulated world: one where most national populations must decrease significantly to create sustainable societies, and where failure to do so threatens environmental disaster for humans and the rest of life on Earth. — Philip Cafaro

Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific — An Introduction

As respected international relations specialist David C. Kang has argued in American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and other works, there has been a general decline in military spending as a percentage of GDP in the largest East Asian states over the past two decades. Taking the eleven largest states, it has fallen to approximately half of what it was two and a half decades ago, declining from an average of 3.35% in 1990 to an average of 1.8% in 2015, a trend that has continued. This objectively points to a growing, rather than declining, sense of national security in the region. It is this climate of peace that the United States threatens to disrupt, not for the sake of East Asia, but with the aim of preserving its preeminence as a world power at all costs. —John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark

Sustainability transitions in consumption-production systems

The need for faster and deeper transitions toward more sustainable development pathways is now widely recognized. How to meet that need has been at the center of a growing body of academic research and real-world policy implementation. This paper presents our perspective on some of the most powerful insights that have emerged from this ongoing work. In particular, we highlight insights on how sustainability transitions can be usefully conceptualised, how they come about and evolve, and how they can be shaped and guided through deliberate policy interventions. —Frank W. Geels, Florian Kern and William C. Clark

The Perpetual Storm

There is a vast and fatal lack of awareness of the reality we are about to face on the coastline that gave birth to modern civilisation. I do not like writing this. Nor do I like, at times, knowing what I know. However, I like it even less, much less, that, knowing what I know, more people are not aware of it, because what is at stake is absolutely incalculable. When so much is at stake, the comfortable silence of those who know can be as eloquently treacherous as the worst of lies. —Juan Bordera

“The climate movement has to be part of a broader anti-austerity movement”

Beyond carbon footprints, waste management and ‘green’ policies, responsibility for the climate crisis lies with a capitalist minority that leaves little room for action to reverse its course. This is the central thesis of the latest essay by Matthew T. Huber (Chicago, 1970), professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. An analyst of the relationship between economics and geography with capitalism, climate policies and social justice, he has just presented The Future of Revolution: Climate Change and the Quest for a Global Democratic Insurrection (Errata Naturae), in which he proposes a reformulation of solidarity, the recovery of public ownership of key sectors (especially energy) and the decommodification of the needs of the working class. —Ester Peñas

The Ecological Rift in the Anthropocene

—A conversation with John Bellamy Foster on ecology, ecological imperialism, and potential solutions to the ongoing planetary crisis. —John Bellamy Foster, Fabio Querido, Maria Orlanda Pinassi, and Michael Löwy

The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

One week after the January 20, 2025, inauguration of Donald Trump in his second stint as U.S. president, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memorandum to federal departments and agencies ordering a temporary pause of agency, grant and loan, and financial assistance spending throughout the federal government. This was the opening shot in what the right has called the “Cold Civil War.” In line with all movements in the fascist genus, the current regime will inevitably betray its mass MAGA supporters on the radical right, seeking to relegate them to a more and more subservient and regimented role and negating any policies in fundamental conflict with its capitalist-imperial ends. —John Bellamy Foster

Global synthesis and regional insights for mainstreaming urban nature-based solutions

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as a key strategy for sustainably addressing multiple urban challenges, with rapidly increasing knowledge production requiring synthesis to better understand whether and how NbS work in different social, ecological, economic, or governance contexts. Insights in this Perspective are drawn from a thematic review of 61 NbS review articles supported by an expert assessment of NbS knowledge in seven global regions to examine key challenges, fill gaps in Global South assessment, and provide insights for scaling up NbS for impact in cities. —Timon McPhearson et al

Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” and ‘Monthly Review’: A Historical Introduction

Albert Einstein, the world's most famous theoretical physicist and its most celebrated scientist, had fled Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler, emigrating to the United States in 1933, where he became a citizen in 1940. However, for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, Einstein remained a dangerous and anti-American figure who threatened the internal security of the United States by his very presence in the country. His 1949 publication of an article entitled ‘Why Socialism?’ for the new magazine Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine was thus seen by the FBI as direct confirmation of his strong ‘Communist sympathies.’ —John Bellamy Foster

The Non-Aligned Movement Then and Now

Faced with the nuclear threat and bipolarity of the Cold War, the non-aligned movement has since the 1960s put forward an alternative model based on decolonial solidarity and a fairer global trading system, but ultimately failed to materialise its most far-reaching economic proposals. Today, non-alignment narratives are revived by the BRICS and sometimes by EU ambitions, but a just multipolar world should prioritise environmental cooperation and have the Global South at its centre. An interview with sociologist Paul Stubbs. —Green European Journal

Value Transfer and Labour Arbitrage Based on Unequal Exchange: The Case of Mexico – United States

Unequal exchange is a key concept in Marxist critiques of the capitalist global system, proposing that uneven development between the global core and periphery is driven by the core's retention of a substantial portion of value produced in the periphery. This occurs by establishing average global profit rates and international market prices across the global market despite stark wage disparities. Today, global trade inequality and value transfers largely stem from multinational corporations relocating production to periphery countries, where similar productivity levels are achieved, butwage disparities only grow. These terms of trade underscore the supremacy of the law of capitalist accumulation over a monopoly driven global economic order. Mexico's export manufacturing sector illustrates this pattern, with productivity levels comparable to those in the United States yet a widening wage gap. This study highlights that wage disparities are crucial for monopoly capital accumulation, resulting in diminished wages and precarious social conditions in Mexico, with a labour value drainage of $135 billion dollars in 2023, representing 7.5% of its GDP.

.______________________________________________


 

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...

item3

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.

item25a
item26a
Home
Overpopulation and sustainability
Overpopulation and sustainability
item55

Chinese-Style Modernisation: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance

In Western ideology, China is no longer perceived as a socialist country, although traces of its revolutionary legacy remain. According to this perspective, the objective of modernisation in China has replaced that of revolution, which has in turn played an important role in stabilising the global capitalist system. In other words, China’s integration into global capitalism has helped to solidify the process of capitalist globalisation. Consequently, modernisation and revolution, as well as globalisation and revolution, are presented as dichotomies, similar to that of democracy versus authoritarianism, freedom versus autocracy, and state versus society. These dichotomies can be viewed as the extension of Cold War ideology into the politics of the 1990s, subtly embedded within the theories of “globalisation” and “modernity.” Today, the world remains confined by dichotomous thinking, which is the foundation for the intellectual and ideological continuity in the so-called “New Cold War,” to alarge extent also serving as the boundary between the GlobalSouth and Global North. This thinking, however, does a disservice to understanding China’s path of development toward socialist modernisation and national sovereignty since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was formed in 1949.

_________________________________
 

Top

Site Map
item6
item5
Castellano
item26
item2a1a2a
item15
item2a1a
item18
item2a1
item14
Our Newsletters!
Summer-Autumn 2025!
item22

Materialising the Revolution: The Movement Toward Ecosocialism

an interview...

Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. In my work on social justice, for many years I was primarily concerned with understanding and exposing the global exploitation of workers in the Global South through unequal exchange perpetrated by corporations through labour arbitrage. However, after reading much of what you have written this century, I have concluded that the planetary crisis we are experiencing as a result of dominant monopoly capital poses an imminent existential risk to human and non-human beings and all life at our home unless we urgently organise ourselves to force a radical paradigmatic shift. This new paradigm would replace capitalism with new ecosocialist communities whose only purpose is the pursuit of the well-being of people and the planet through a revolutionary movement. With this vision in mind, I would like to focus on how you envision moving from theory to the actual materialisation of arevolutionary movement that successfully transitionsto the ecosocialist paradigm.

 

 

______________________________________________
 

item25

Marxist Ecology in China: From Marx’s Ecology to Socialist Eco-Civilisation Theory

In the face of pressing global environmental challenges, Marxist ecology has emerged as a foundational pillar of global left analysis. It represents a critical examination of the modern environmental crisis. The Chinese academic community has been engaging in Marxist ecology research since the 1980s, drawing on traditional studies on Marxism and on the history of socialist modernisation. This differs from the trajectory of Marxist ecology in the West, which has gone through different stages, from denying or supplementing Marx’s ecology to rediscovering and developing it. Chinese scholars have highlighted the interpretation of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s ecological perspectives from the outset. They have proactively referred to Western insights from eco-Marxism/ecosocialism, aiming to formulate a socialist ecological civilisation (eco-civilisation) theory with distinctive Chinese characteristics. This article discusses some of the diverse research paradigms and their course of development within Chinese Marxist ecology while also highlighting the accomplishments of and challenges facing Marxist ecology in China.

 

______________________________________________
 

 

 

 

 


 

item20

Global synthesis and regional insights for mainstreaming urban nature-based solutions

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have emerged as a key strategy for sustainably addressing multiple urban challenges, with rapidly increasing knowledge production requiring synthesis to better understand whether and how NbS work in different social, ecological, economic, or governance contexts. Insights in this Perspective are drawn from a thematic review of 61 NbS review articles supported by an expert assessment of NbS knowledge in seven global regions to examine key challenges, fill gaps in Global South assessment, and provide insights for scaling up NbS for impact in cities. Eight NbS challenges emerged from our review of NbS reviews including conceptual, thematic, geographic, ecological, inclusivity, health, governance, and systems challenges. An additional expert assessment reviewing literature and cases in seven global regions further revealed the following: 1) Local context-based ecological knowledge is essential for NbS success; 2) Improved technical knowledge is required for planning and designing NbS; 3) NbS need to be included in all levels of planning and governance; 4) Putting justice and equity at the center of urban NbS approaches is critical, and 5) Inclusive and participatory governance processes will be key to long-term success of NbS. We synthesised findings from the NbS review results and regional expert assessments to offer four critical pathways for scaling up NbS: 1) foster new NbS research, technological innovation, and learning, 2) build a global NbS alliance for sharing knowledge, 3) ensure a systems approach to NbS planning and implementation, and 4) increase financing and political will for diverse NbS implementation.

______________________________________________
 

item24
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
item27
Transitioning to Geocratia — the
item9

The authoritarian tendencies of 21st-century capitalism

A major economic, political, cultural and geopolitical battle is being waged in the context of capitalism's quest for repositioning and its authoritarian intentions to reorganise the global geo-economic order

The quest for self-determination is a constant theme in Iberian America and the Caribbean. At different times and in various contexts, proposals for sovereignty emerge and become the backbone of challenging projects for change, sometimes localised and sometimes systemic, such as those that have shaped the region's destiny so far this century. At the same time, there are recurring bouts of authoritarianism which, with different nuances, are also a constant feature, serving to maintain the prevailing conditions of subjugation.

But there are times when authoritarianism comes tothe fore, especially when it comes to disciplining the peoples to promote systems related to the implementation of a specific mode of accumulation. This has been the case in recent decades, when the imposition of neoliberalism came hand in hand with dictatorships and fierce shock operations. Subsequently, to achieve neoliberal globalisation, repressive and military interventions were combined with communication strategies to win hearts and minds, seeking to convince people that there is nothing better than being at the bottom of the global supply chain, with all the exclusions that this entails, but with a mobile phone connected to the capitalist market.

__________________________________
 

“The first necessity is not to lose one's life in working to satisfy unlimited desires”

Aurélien Berlan (Paris, 1976), who divides his time between translation, part-time teaching, food production and political activism, likes to describe himself as a philosopher-gardener. The Barcelona publishing house Virus has just published Autonomía y subsistencia. Una teoría ecosocial y materialista de la libertad (Autonomy and Subsistence: An Eco-Social and Materialist Theory of Freedom, translated into Spanish from Terre et liberté. La quête d'autonomie contre le fantasme de délivrance, published in 2021 by La Lenteur), a stimulating essay that criticises the philosophical foundations of our modernity.... An interview.

________________________________
 

item11
item12

The End of the Megamachine: The History of a Civilisation on the Brink of Collapse

Excerpt from the books preface

On January 25, 2017, a few days after Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, two significant events coincided. Amidst the frenzied cheers of traders and shareholders, the Dow Jones index reached the 20,000-point threshold for the first time in history. On the same day, the hands of the so-called “doomsday clock” moved to two and a half minutes to midnight. It was the closest they had been since 1953, when the first hydrogen bombs were detonated. The clock reflects the assessments of leading scientists of the imminent dangers of nuclear war, environmental destruction and high-risk technologies. Since 2025, there are only 89 seconds left. The ecstasy of shareholders and the proximity of midnight for humanity: it is difficult to express more clearly that our current economic system is on a course of imminent collision with the Earth and its inhabitants. The jubilation of the stock market is our downfall.

Almost everyone I have spoken to over the past ten years—whether conservative, left-wing, environmentalist, young or old—no longer believes in the future of the system when they are honest and take off their professional masks. The blame for having set ourselves on a deadly path is often attributed to neoliberalism, but this is merely the latest phase of a much older system that, from inception, has been based on plunder. Every society cultivates its own myth that underpins and justifies its specific order. However, the problem with these myths is that they not only give us a distorted view of the past but also diminish our ability to make the right decisions in the future. But as soon as I broaden my perspective and change my focus, a completely different view emerges. I must step outside my protective bubble and see the world through the eyes of people whose voices are often drowned out by the megaphones of power. The expansion of the last 500 years, for most of humanity, has been associated from the outset with displacement, impoverishment, violence and destruction. Even more important, the Megamachine is part of a larger global system on which it depends: the biosphere of planet Earth.

The combination of ecological and social dislocations produces an extraordinarily complex and chaotic dynamic, and in principle, it is impossible to predict where this process will lead. However, it is clear that a profound systemic upheaval is inevitable and has, in part, already begun. This is not just a matter of overcoming neoliberalism or replacing certain technologies (although both are necessary); it is a transformation that goes to the very foundations of our civilisation. The question is not whether this transformation will take place – it undoubtedly will, whether we like it or not – but how it will take place and in what direction it will develop.

The rapid rise of fundamentalist and far-right movements, as well as the increase in tendencies towards a police state, show that it is also possible for totalitarian forces to take over the economic and political structures that are in the process of collapsing. In this situation, the future depends on all of us. Remaining spectators of the spectacle is not an option, as even inaction or passivity is a decision that will help determine the outcome of history.

 

______________________________________________
 

item17
item4

The Case for Sufficiency

Moving away from extractivism and overconsumption would drive positive transformation in Europe while addressing global injustice. This could be achieved by implementing sufficiency policies, which aim to reduce demand for energy, materials, land, and water while delivering wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries. An interview with Yamina Saheb, a lead author of the IPCC report on climate change mitigation.

__________________________________

item30
Castellano