ABSTRACT
A genuine critique of modern political economy must begin by pointing out that not just industrial civilization, but civilization itself, is the outcome of a millennia-old process of predatory development destructive of all pre-existing natural and cultural forms. Civilization, militarism, and economic development arose together and can be said to be identical merely—different aspects of a single process in which the extraction of more matter and energy from nature necessarily involved political control, military “protection,” and economic exploitation of rural peasants by urban lords. An escalated war against nature provided the economic basis for the rise of the nation-state and its subsequent imperialist career. If the ecological destruction and militarism of modern times are simply intensifications of phenomena that date back to the origin of civilization, the modern extirpation of household and community via economic development is without precedent.
