Power of No

Experience tells us that there is a deep chasm between the promises of the new capitalism and the reality of social breakdown. Indigenous scholars have exposed the ugly face and uglier logic of brute capitalism. Footloose capitalism first puts a price on both natural resources and products, then commodifies, then securitises and then profits from speculative financial game

- ASH NARAIN ROY

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto is Planet Earth's cri de coeur against grotesque inequality and vandalization of nature. It was written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine after two years of conversation and launched at a small riverside gathering outside Oxford in 2009. The Manifesto offers "a radical diagnosis of the situation in which our civilisation lives."

The election of Donald Trump and the blueprint of his administration's agenda are scary. Trump dismisses climate change as a "hoax." He is unaunted by super hurricanes and floods and drought-fuelled wildfires that have devastated parts of the United States.

The Project 2025 prepared by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation is widely believed to be the roadmap for the incoming Trump administration. It recommends a U-turn on energy and economic policy.

Other suggestions include promoting oil and gas and not renewable energy and doing away with the goals of reducing emissions and green subsidies. Consequences of such suicidal policies are not hard to imagine.

We are living in an extraordinary time when disparate crises are interacting. Adam Tooze describes it as a "polycrisis." It impacts most severely our Planet Earth and the indigenous people as it involves ethnocide, linguicide, epistemicide and cosmicide.

We have blindly followed Western thought and ideas and ignored the indigenous thinking, knowledge systems and epistemologies. The Western model is extractivist, extinctivist and anthropocenic. It is a one-world modernity.

Capitalism and global free markets, Elon Musk boasts, will save the world. Johan Norberg of the libertarian think tank CATO Institute claims capitalism is "not just successful, but morally right." In his book, The Capitalist Manifesto, he argues that social justice needs more capitalism, not less. "We need free market to end poverty."