Capitalism is not a dispassionate system of exchange. It is premised on cruel, racialized, long-term asymmetries of power, such as the aggressive, escalating exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. “Drain,” or the unequal exchange of resources that is compelled by the Global North via geopolitical pressure and financial engineering, has totaled $62 trillion from 1960 to 2018, or $152 trillion if lost growth is included, an unimaginable scale of deprivation and violence. The climate crisis is largely the Global North’s doing, but the Global South bears the brunt of the suffering. … For Fernand Braudel, the market economy of supply, demand, and prices is merely the middle layer of our hierarchical society, above the material life of the non-economy, but below the anti-market, the top layer and the real home of capitalism, where “the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.”

XREF: Echoes dependency theory and world-systems analysis from Braudel, Wallerstein, and contemporary degrowth/ecological debt arguments.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 61