"By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not primarily to meet human needs or to achieve social progress, much less to deliver on any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is the capitalist law of value. And to maximise profits, capital requires perpetual growth – ever increasing aggregate production, regardless of whether it is necessary or harmful.

So we end up with irrational forms of production as a result: we get massive production of things such as SUVs, mansions and fast fashion, because these things are highly profitable to capital, but chronic underproduction of obviously necessary things like affordable housing and public transit, because these are much less profitable to capital, or not profitable at all.

Similarly with energy. Renewables are already much cheaper than fossil fuels. Alas, fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable. Thus capital forces governments to link electricity prices to the price of the most expensive liquified natural gas, not of cheap solar energy. Similarly, building and maintaining motorways is many times more lucrative for private contractors..."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/capitalist-model-climate-growth-capitalism-species-humanity
#Capitalism #ClimateChange #Degrowth #ModeOfProduction #LawofValue #Inequality

"To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:

1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.

2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.

How can delinking be achieved in the 21st century? Some basic principles include the following:

A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.

These options are increasingly available to Southern countries now because of China."

https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/what-is-delinking

#Delinking #PoliticalEconomy #Imperialism #Capitalism #LawOfValue #EconomicSovereignty #Monopolies