Abstract
The latest work of Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen is a timely intervention in an era marked by an increasingly urgent socio-ecological crisis. Capitalism at the Limit: A Political Ecology of a World in Crisis examines how multiple crises converge and give rise to competing political trajectories. The authors’ overarching goal is “to present a contemporary diagnosis of capitalism at its limits” (p. 4). For Brand and Wissen, ecological, energy, geopolitical, authoritarian, and social reproduction crises are not separate developments but dimensions of a broader historical conjuncture. Ecological crisis thus appears not simply as an environmental problem, but as one reproduced through hegemonic relations. What links these different dimensions of the crisis is the imperial mode of living, which the authors define as the normalised patterns of production and consumption through which capitalist and imperial relations are reproduced in everyday life. As the authors argue: [C]onsumption patterns, notions of an appropriate income, the division of labour, forms of work, and work discipline - the capitalist-imperial mode of production becomes entrenched in people’s everyday practices and common sense. Likewise, the stability and persistence of structurally unequal social relations between classes, genders, the Global South and the Global North, and racialized relations arise precisely from their being normalized in everyday life and being legitimized in hegemonic discourses (p. 65).
The crisis of the imperial mode of living does not generate a single political response. Rather, the book analyses green capitalism, authoritarian politics, and solidarity-based alternatives as competing responses to efforts to stabilise or overcome it.
Contemporary capitalism, the authors argue, has been unable to generate a new stable mode of regulation as the conditions that historically enabled capitalist stabilisation are becoming increasingly constrained. In their assessment, while green capitalism seeks to stabilise the existing order and secure consent, its reliance on continued extraction and global inequalities generates what the authors conceptualise as “eco-imperial tensions.” Moreover, support for ecological modernisation becomes fragile when the costs of transformation are experienced unevenly in everyday life, particularly in relation to how people commute to work, heat their homes, and cope with rising living costs. As a result, green capitalist projects increasingly struggle to secure consent. Against this backdrop, the authors argue that “authoritarian stabilization represents a hegemony project” (p. 111). It gains support by mobilising insecurities and fears intensified by the socio-ecological crisis among subaltern and middle-class groups. Furthermore, far-right parties redirect grievances towards migrants and other perceived outsiders while appealing to what the authors describe as a “cross-class form of masculinity” (p. 112). At the same time, the authoritarian right channels intensifying class antagonisms while continuing to pursue “the politics of liberalization, privatization, deregulation, financialization, and austerity in many areas” (p. 111), as left-wing forces have struggled to articulate a sufficiently compelling alternative.
Nevertheless, Brand and Wissen do not adopt a pessimistic stance, as the crisis of the imperial mode of living remains politically open and contested. The authors trace the possibilities for alternative modes of living in the current period and outline elements of “transformative politics” (p. 140). Solidarity emerges as a common thread running through the alternatives for “overcoming the imperial mode of living” (p. 55). An institutionalised expression of this solidarity is socialisation, which prioritises public good over market interests through certain infrastructures such as healthcare, education, and mobility. This points towards a politics of socialisation based on “the democratic management of infrastructures” (p. 145). The implications of this point extend beyond questions of ownership. The question, then, is not only who owns critical infrastructures, but also according to which priorities they are organised. This suggests that organising infrastructures around social needs rather than profit opens the possibility of transforming the very logic of production and consumption. Accordingly, the authors reject approaches that reduce socio-ecological transformation to individual morality or consumption choices. The question, in their view, is not only how people live, but also how the conditions under which they live are organised.
By linking political ecology to questions of hegemony and everyday life, the book offers a distinctive perspective on the contemporary socio-ecological crisis. Its most interesting aspect, however, lies in its analysis of the contradictory political trajectories that emerge around the crisis of the imperial mode of living, ranging from authoritarian forms of stabilisation to solidarity-based alternatives. They discuss possibilities for alternative modes of living as actually existing practices and political experiments that point beyond the imperial mode of living. The challenge, however, is not simply the existence of solidarity-based alternatives, but the conditions under which they can become embedded in everyday life across different social and spatial contexts. Brand and Wissen thus open avenues for further research into the everyday processes and lived experiences through which these trajectories are normalised or contested, as well as into the collective actors. Capitalism at the Limit offers an important contribution to critical debates on the relationship between ecological crisis, the logic of capitalist growth, and political transformation. In the context of an increasingly unstable conjuncture, it provides a valuable framework for understanding the socio-ecological crisis as a fundamentally political question.