Jacobin. Latin America, No. 3, Austral Autumn 2021, pp. 114-118.
The concatenation of economic and public health crises affecting the world-system at least since 2008 has not activated anti-capitalist political alternatives that summon shared social imaginaries at the global level. The capacity of capitalist realism to neutralize the opening of possible futures is persistent. Even a dimension as difficult to assimilate in material terms, such as the dynamics of ecological collapse, which should force an economic paradigm based on perpetual growth to take charge of the planet’s biophysical limits, is reconverted into the design of new ways of life through greenwashing strategies. But apart from this “ecological” redefinition of the dominant consumption model – with the social distinction of habits that goes with it – it is interesting to note the way in which green capitalism seeks to prolong both the hegemonic worldviews around technological progress and the policies implemented in the past to address cyclical ecological crises. This article deals with this problematic and discusses how the Green New Deal could politicize the critique of that historical inertia.
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