"In its current neo-liberal phase, industrial capitalism is seeking to even further privatise, 'enclose', commodify and exploit the last remaining niches and refuges of evolved life, wildness and the human commons."

1. The inherent 'logic' of contemporary industrial capitalism is destroying the planet. This logic is at odds with the 'logic' of the biosphere (ecology).

2. Capitalism's inherent drive for self-accumulation (growth) works by attempting to turn both people and planet into a 'proletariat' and commodity to be bought, sold and exploited.

3. This inherent 'logic of Capital' is the end result of over-layered and complex socio-economic, ecological and cultural processes beginning at the end of the Palaeolithic period and the last ice age.

4. Apart from the New Guinea highlands, it was mainly the specific characteristics of Eurasian plant and animal ecologies which facilitated the first 'agricultural revolution' around 10,000 years ago (Jared Diamond).

5. Psycho-cultural development concomitantly moved from an animistic 'magic' to a 'mythic-heroic' phase (Ken Wilber).

6. Eurasian domestications of wild plants (cereals) and animals provided the first material and energy surpluses for humans beyond individual or small group needs. This translated into growing populations.

7. Material/energy surpluses also opened up social conflict over their control and distribution. Patriarchal class society, still in existence, was born.

8. Those men gaining control over these surpluses through cunning, plunder, trade, tribute, taxes or coerced labour (slavery, serfdom) became the ruling classes (chiefs, lords, kings etc) in the new Eurasian and Egyptian hierarchical patriarchal civilisations around 4-5000 years ago.

9. Products, animals, women and men now became resources and properties to be traded, bought and sold and exploited for material gain and the accumulation of wealth.

10. By controlling the labour of women and slaves and/or monopolising the means of subsistence (land, animals, tools, knowledge), patriarchal clan headmen and ruling classes could channel energies and materials towards themselves for their own pleasure, leisure, status, power and self-aggrandisement.

11. Social surpluses however also enabled a freeing of some from direct subsistence production (artisans, traders), the split between manual and mental labour, more specialised cultural workers (priests, scribes) and a greater general division of labour and technological progress.

12. Rational (de-mythologised), critical and abstract thought arose in close connection with the expansion of trade and a money economy in urban centres of ancient Greece.

13. This greater division of labour and trade in turn increased productivity and the development of technologies that enabled the capture of other strong exo-somatic energies (fire, clay, metals).

14. Most of these ancient civilisations were military empires (e.g. Mesopotamian, Greek, Chinese, Persian, Inca, Mayan, Roman) that over-exploited not only their subjects but also their ecosystems, overshot regional carrying capacity and thus collapsed (Toynbee, Diamond).

15. The economies of all of these hierarchical and patriarchal civilisations of class domination were - even when parts of slave-based empires - still usually subsidiary to and strongly embedded within various social and cultural systems of traditional custom and transcendent belief.

16. Early European mercantile capitalism is contemporaneous with the increasing dissolution of such old non-material frameworks. Massive genocidal colonialism, violently enforced unequal exchange and slave trading funnelled wealth from other continents to the ruling aristocratic and emerging middle classes of metropolitan Western Europe.

17. Capitalism's radical innovation is the total liberation of the economy and market relations from all socio-cultural embedding and control. While technological innovation is stimulated and productivity increased, peasants and artisans lose their own means of production and are, usually violently, forced into the new condition of wage slavery.

18. In a long process of historical inversion, social relations, culture and identity now all become subsidiary to 'the economy' as market relations and the drive for the accumulation of capital (Karl Polanyi's 'Great Transformation').

19. Social relations become alienated from producers and reified into money/capital (Karl Marx). The tail begins to wag the dog. 'Things sit in the saddle and ride mankind' (R.W. Emerson).

20. The key psycho-social expression of this historical process of social liberation, expropriation, alienation, dis-embedding, inversion and fragmentation is the growth of European middle class individualism.

21. European individualism is inherently ambivalent: it is both liberation from hierarchical authority/oppression/custom/dogma, on the one hand, and isolation/fragmentation/alienation of community, self and nature, on the other.

22. Capitalism as a social system of expropriation (enclosures), separation, uprooting and universalising only starts to become generalised in early 19th century Western Europe with the Industrial Revolution and the violent introduction of the coercive Factory System, the new wage-slave proletariat and the industrial city exploiting yet divorced from its surrounds.

23. Despite initially strong protest, revolt and resistance deriving from an initial peasant or artisan acculturation within pre-capitalist social structures and values, both people and nature become increasingly differentiated and dissociated, culturally adapted and industrialised.

24. Industrial capitalism is 'carboniferous' (Lewis Mumford), i.e. it is historically impossible without coal and steam technology. The Industrial Revolution (including later 20th century oil/nuclear extensions) is based on the immense and cheap photosynthetic energy stored in fossil fuels, a once-only store of fossilised sunlight.

25. The fossil-fuelled global expansion of capitalism (industrialisation) is thus identical with the destruction of evolved natural and human communities and non-material values and their gradual and increasing replacement with a 'technosphere' of artificial and simplified agro-industrial, urban and cultural systems or monocultures mainly structured for the exclusive pursuit of profit and capital accumulation.

26. Early social democratic Marxism and Leninism were the ideological expressions of soi-disant 'socialist' variants of this fossil fuelled, capitalist Factory System: a state capitalism of terroristic industrialisation for national late-comers to the global world economy (Germany, Russia, China).

27. In obliterating evolved biodiversity, capitalism is thus ecologically 'counter-evolutionary' (Murray Bookchin) and ultimately ecocidal because, in seeking to transform all evolved organisms, ecosystems, human cultures and qualities into abstract, quantifiable commodities ('resources') to be bought and sold, it seeks to create a monocultural 'new nature', a 'spectacle' (Guy Debord), a totally artificial, autistic or narcissistic world in its own image.

28. In its current neo-liberal phase, industrial capitalism is seeking to even further privatise, 'enclose', commodify and exploit the last remaining niches and refuges of evolved life, wildness and the human commons (patenting of life forms, terminator technology, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, geo-engineering, commodification and privatisation of water, food, air.)

29. Carboniferous capitalism is also 'counter-evolutionary' in that it even destroys the evolved atmospheric balance by releasing the immense reservoirs of carbon embedded in fossil fuels (global warming) - carbon that early plant forms had captured from the atmosphere and thus enabled oxygen-breathing animals to flourish. The resultant climate change threatens the survival of civilisation.

30. The survival of humane civilisation, humanity and global life support systems are now threatened also because earlier revolutionary attempts to 'invert the capitalist inversion', i.e. to subsume the lethal dynamic of capitalism under some form of democratic social control, failed and even the original humanistic ethical impetus behind these attempts has now been largely forgotten.

31. A materialist parameter of hope is the fact that industrial capitalism has now also, for the first time, created the material pre-conditions for a global social utopia: the immense wealth and the technology that, radically re-distributed and democratically managed, would allow a guaranteed minimum standard of living for all the earth's people without the need for paid work or the unsustainable exploitation of nature (including the use of fossil fuels/nuclear).

32. Industrial capitalism has now also, for the first time, created the immaterial pre-conditions for a global social utopia: the 'universal (or 'globalised') individual' (Marx) linked to an emerging world culture of diversity and democratic values and embodying One World consciousness (Ken Wilber's 'vision-logic').

33. Survival, at least of humane civilisation (vis-a-vis a possible continuation of the current slippery slide into post-liberal barbarity or friendly fascism), would now seem to be largely dependent on the radical pris de conscience, communication and organisation of a critical mass of these 'universal individuals' willing to struggle for the realisation of such a global, ecological, post-capitalist and post-carbon social utopia of greater equality, global solidarity and direct democracy based on ecologically sustainable levels of resource consumption.

Peter and his wife Barbara manage a 20 acre permaculture farm, including 94 varieties of heritage apples, at Bundanoon in the southern highlands of New South Wales, Australia.