Overview

Clive Spash uses the COVID-19 pandemic as an indicator of the current limits of capitalist economies based on the exploitation of nature and human beings, but also of the narrowness and irrelevance of economic theories that advocate and legitimise economic growth even in times of multiple and systemic crises.

In the current pandemic crisis, the financialisation of the economy has revealed the competitive, aggressive and unequal logic of capitalism and, paradoxically, the nationalism of economic policies and supply chains. Sustainable, green and inclusive economic growth emerges as a deception, especially in a context that heightens the limits of biophysical reality and natural resources.

Clive Spash concludes optimally on the possibility of the present crisis leading to a reflection and a change of paradigm, now based on the provision of basic needs for all and on a social and ecologically ethical mode of production.