Capitalism always was an economic system at odds with the planet--an organism in inescapable conflict with its own life-support system. For this reason alone we should celebrate its collapse. Despite attempts to obscure the definition of capital by allowing the invented concepts of natural or social capital, we all know why Marx thus labeled the economic system we have labored under for two centuries and more: because in capitalism, money talks. Green economists call for a reassessment of values and of what we choose to value. The distortion of value has run parallel to the disembedding of the economy from the planet. (1) In previous economic systems money operated as a medium of exchange for goods which were extracted from and derived their value from the environment. But the mechanism for capitalist money creation, as debt and via the money multiplier inherent in the banking system, detaches the monetary economy from its planetary base. This creates the gap between real and nominal economic value which produces the destructive boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economics; and it creates the divorce between the economy and the environment it relies on for all true wealth which is the cause of the planetary crisis. Thus we find that the two crises we face--financial and environmental--are actually two sides of the same coin.
