the necessary farewell to infinite growth

We are honored to host this article published in A Fuoco’s news letter by Sara Manisera, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, who brings into focus one of the founding paradigms of our association.

When people talk about the climate crisis, they rarely mention the big elephant in the room: the economic system. Yet the functioning of capitalism itself, based on the primacy of unlimited production and accumulation, is inherently unsustainable, as it breaks the “metabolisms of life,” writes Japanese philosopher Saitō Kōhei in his book“Capital in the Anthropocene,” and condemns society to a dead-end future.

Indeed, the economic, cultural and political framework of liberalism and growth at all costs is characterized by the absence of limits and a “culture of sufficiency and sobriety”: everything is based only on the maximization of profit and the factors of production, particularly labor, capital and nature.When people talk about the climate crisis, they rarely mention the big elephant in the room: the economic system. Yet, the functioning of capitalism itself, based on the primacy of production and unlimited accumulation is inherently unsustainable, as it breaks the “metabolisms of life,” writes Japanese philosopher Saitō Kōhei in his book“Capital in the Anthropocene,” and condemns society to a dead-end future.