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«[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.
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The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?

Indeed, there is a bitter irony to the fact that we have been persuaded to use the word ‘growth’ to describe what has now become primarily a process of breakdown.

Under capitalism, the rate of growth is the rate at which nature is being commodified and roped into circuits of accumulation. That we have come to rely on this as our primary indicator of progress reveals the extent to which we have come to see the world from the perspective of capital rather than from the perspective of life.

A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world.

The sole purpose of a virus is self-replication. Capital too is built on a self-replicating code, and like a virus it seeks to turn everything it touches into a self-replicating replica of itself – more capital.

capital behaves a bit like a virus. A virus is a piece of genetic code that is programmed to replicate itself, but it cannot do so on its own: it has to infect a host cell and force that cell to create copies of its DNA, and then each of those copies goes on to infect other cells in order to create more copies, and so on.

Yes, capitalism has driven some extraordinary technological innovations, and these innovations have driven an extraordinary acceleration of growth. But the main contribution that technology makes to growth is not that it produces money out of thin air, but rather that it enables capital to expand and intensify the process of appropriation.

Enclosure, colonisation, dispossession, the slave trade … historically, growth has always been a process of appropriation: the appropriation of energy and work from nature and from (certain kinds of) human beings.

«Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing.»
Murray Bookchin

We are all heirs of dualist ontology. We can see it everywhere in the language we use about nature today. We routinely describe the living world as ‘natural resources’, as ‘raw materials’, and even – as if to emphasise its subordination and servitude – as ‘ecosystem services’.

«Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.»
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

As the Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire put it, colonisation is, at base, a process of thingification.

Descartes’ dualism was recruited for this task too. Within the dualist framework, bodies were set out on a spectrum. Women were regarded as closer to ‘nature’ than men. And they were treated accordingly – subordinated, controlled and exploited.41 No need for compensation. As with all nature, the costs of extraction were externalised.

it was enclosure that first produced the figure of the housewife that remains with us today, by cutting women off not only from the means of subsistence but from wage labour too, and confining them to reproductive roles. In the new capitalist system, a mass of hidden female labour was appropriated by elites virtually for free.

In the 1800s, factories developed timetables and the assembly line, with the purpose of extracting maximum productivity out of each worker. The early 1900s gave us Taylorism, with every tiny motion of a worker’s body reduced to the most efficient possible movement. Work was progressively stripped of meaning, pleasure, talent and mastery.

In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; time is money. In the Calvinist theology that was popular in Western Christianity at the time, profit became the sign of moral success – the proof of salvation. To maximise profit, people were encouraged to organise their lives around productivity.

During the 1600s, Descartes’ views were leveraged to bring the body under control, to defeat its passions and desires, and impose on it a regular, productive order. Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral.

In Descartes’ hands, the continuum between humans and the rest of the living world was sliced into a clear, unbridgeable dichotomy. This vision came to be known as dualism, and Descartes’ theory of matter came to be known as mechanical philosophy.

In an attempt to prove the point, Descartes took to dissecting living animals. He nailed their limbs to boards and probed their organs and nerves – including, in one particularly grotesque episode, his wife’s dog. While the animals writhed and wailed in agony, he insisted this was only the ‘appearance’ of pain, just a reflex: muscles and tendons responding automatically to physical stimuli.

«Humans are unique among all creatures in having minds (or souls), he claimed – the mark of their special connection to God. By contrast, the rest of creation is nothing but unthinking material. Plants and animals have no spirit or agency, intention or motivation; they are mere automatons, operating according to predictable mechanical laws, ticking away like a clock.»
Descartes

Descartes realised that the domination of nature Bacon called for could only be justified if nature was rendered lifeless.

Just as Bacon saw torture as a weapon against peasant insurrection, so he saw science as a weapon against nature.

«Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her», Bacon wrote.

To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into what he called a ‘common harlot’. He cast nature, and indeed matter itself, as devious, disordered, wild and chaotic – a beast that, to quote his words, must be ‘restrained’, ‘bound’ and ‘kept in order’.

Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature.

in order to possess and exploit something you must first regard it as an object.