was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent. It tallies up all money-based activity, but it does… - Jason Hickel

But the rise of capitalism also depended on something else. It needed labour. Lots of it, and cheap. solved this problem too. With subsistence economies destroyed and commons fenced off, people had no choice but to sell their labour for wages – not to earn a bit of extra income, as under the previous regime, nor to satisfy the demands of a lord, as under serfdom, but simply in order to survive. They became, in a word, proletarians.

The plunder of Latin America left in its wake. In India, 30 million died of . Average living standards in India and China, which had been on a par with Britain before the colonial period, collapsed.

It's no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don't weep. We don't get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren't in here; they aren't part of us. It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself.