It’s only when humans started running out of things to kill that we turned from hunting to agriculture.

This completely misses the point that “degrowth” is targeting overall economic growth (GDP)/ecological footprint! And in the second half of the book, he covers what we can do about it, but it requires a radical shift to a new paradigm of how we view the world and our place in it. De eerste helft is een uiteenzetting van wat tegelijkertijd als een totale open deur als als een revolutionair verhaal. And it was surprising that most of the shocking information in the introduction was already known to me from various documentaries on the topic.A planet has finite boundaries and we are now staring in the face of many of them - pollution, resource exhaustion, etc. All products are made to be sold, and when a company figures out how to make a product better/faster, they simply want to sell MORE of it. This objectification facilitated extraction/commodification/privatization (property) of nature, as well as of labour (human body as machines… thus productivity and disciplining of labour). But in 2016, two American scientists published an article in the journal Nature pointing out that it may well happen a lot faster. Jason Hickel w tym kompleksowym, zgrabnym i niezadętym eseju rozprawia się z mitami na temat kapitalizmu, kreśląc jego rzeczywistą, brutalną historię, obala paradygmat wzrostu, krytykuje zachodni dualizm człowiek-przyroda, a przy tym proponuje wiele rozwiązań, które mogłyby uratować planetę i jej mieszkańców, przedstawia wizję świata postkapitalistycznego i postwzrostowego - a jest to świat, o którym warto marzyć, o który warto walczyć, mimo że jest utopią.

The first two chapters provide an easy-to-understand “creation story” of capitalism that is in line with the tradition of dialectics. For years, I (and many others, I suspect) have been reacting to this tug the same way: Saying Yeah, something is wrong here and then continuing to go about my day. Even though I agree in pretty much all what the book claims, I find the book very negative and depressing. I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of capitalism and found it both informative, with loads of well presented data, and a bit scary as well to know why things are as they are in the world in terms of excessive inequality.Overall, I would have given it 3/5 if not for the fact that the main theme of the book is the most important public conversation of today.