The ubiquitous injunction to consume ‘Your 5 a Day’ quota of fruit and vegetables seems to stand in for a whole governmental ideology of population management in contemporary Britain and beyond.

With investment in stocks and property now inducing ambient neurasthenia, mainstream investors are allegedly turning to ‘alternative investments' like wine and art, not to mention gold. Although art and wine were considered riskier than property in the pre-credit-crunch era, according to one recent article they are now regarded as safer than bricks and mortar (‘Credit crunch fuels investor search for art, wine', Clara Ferreira-Marques, Reuters.com).

Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush’s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America’s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ‘anti-neoliberal’ class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior

In their tango with grassroots green activists, inter-governmental policy makers are taking the lead. Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young analyse the ‘new green order’ and the carbon offset colonialism that accompanies it

David Harvey is an influential academic theorist of the spatial, cultural and economic forms of neoliberal capitalism. Chris Wright and Samantha Alvarez contrast his analysis with that of Michael Hudson, whose Super Imperialism exposed the fiscal foundations of neoliberalism some 30 years earlier

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

John Jordan and James Marriott’s operatic audio tour set in London’s Square Mile is intended to awaken city workers to the impact of financial systems on climate change. But not only does And While London Burns misgauge how much the suits already know, its hysterical tone also harmonises too easily with the coming new eco-order

The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour – particularly other nation-states’ – to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen

Liberal critics assume that climate change is a ‘man-made’ process, not a natural phenomenon. Against this view, Will Barnes argues that global warming does indeed have an inhuman agent behind it – not nature but capital

Capitalist Criminality

A commission for the Mute Vol 2 #5 - It's Not Easy Being Green edition, Summer 2007.

 
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