The Great EconoCon

In the face of climate catastrophe, why have existing conceptions of collective life appeared so impervious to critique? One concept stands out: the idea of the economy, and our preoccupation with its continued growth. The answer proposed in this essay is twofold. First, there has been a lack of understanding of what the economy does. It should be seen as an apparatus that operates as a mode of subjection, one that enables a minority in the present to live at the expense of most people in the future. This includes the majority's subjection today to the repayment of past extractions from previous futures, a debt the majority must continually and increasingly bear. Second, there has been a lack of understanding of growth. For most people, economic growth appears as the natural movement of capitalist society, driven by a process of technological improvement or an endless accumulation of capital. It is almost never connected to capitalization, or the capitalist modes of extraction from the future. Growth is a device for securing the repayment of debt. This does not make it any less damaging to collective well-being. But it does allow growth to be grasped not as the inevitable movement of capitalist expansion but as a more recent arrangement that arises from—rather than simply causing—a mode of living at the expense of the future.