(1) A sustainable economy requires, by definition, the internalisation of costs. It must learn cost and consequence and the relation of capability and possibility and implication. Capitalism practices, in contrast, the externalisation of cost, no matter the consequence; it postpones, eschews, ignores, diverts, puts off, limits and, above all, passes off (to others) the implications and costs of its own actions, and it enshrines those attitudes, stances and procedures in what it learns and fails to learn – and, of course, in what it teaches and fails to teach. In short, in respect of costs, it refuses to learn.

(2) Second, a sustainable economy is, by definition, a substantive economy. But thinking things substantively is not an option for capitalism, for which price (exchange value) is the only factor. For capital, if an item cannot be priced, it does not exist. As a previous footnote made clear, for capital, much of what is essential to the sustainable does not exist because it is not priced.[60]

(3) Third, for capitalism, the economy – or more exactly, accumulation – is the end. But in sustainability, the economy cannot be the end. If sustainability has an end, or a telos, it lies in the constitution and enactment of a sustaining hospitable metabolic habitus. But this means that learning in relation to the un-sustainable is (from the point of view of sustainability) a double necessity at minimum: it is the necessity of learning how to steer societies through the crises that will objectively beset them across the next decades; and it is, in parallel and in sequence, a learning as to what, globally and locally, might be entailed in creating and establishing “sustainability.” Learning from the point of view of capital is, however, a far more restrictive process; it is learning how to hold to what-is while developing just sufficient adaptive measures to stave off immediate crises (but only in the core economies; it will allow what it not essential to the world economy to fall into crisis).

(4) For sustainability, learning means, necessarily, learning how to establish affirmative and reconciliatory relations

between the “forces and relations” of production, both in the generality and in the specific forms that Badiou and Benjamin, for instance, offered us. But capital not only has no interest in this; it remains opposed, for it is precisely by operating within the lack of relation engendered here that private accumulation is enabled to create a surplus. Un-sustainability, in this picture, is itself the very dynamic of accumulation. What capital wishes to learn is not how to “overcome” the un-sustainable but how to keep it in being. The absolute contradiction between the possibility of sustainability and the aims, ambitions, logic and principles of organisation of capitalism is rooted here, in its maintenance of the blindness to the disjunction of relations, for it is this, and only this, that allows the principle of the extractive economy to reign.

“Sustainability as a Project of History” Clive Dilnot. Design Philosophy Papers

Selection from a reading for my art history 309 seminar on sustainable design. Really inciteful look into redeveloping the theoretical framework of what sustainability means, with a punch of anti-capitalism. This is only a really small tidbit in what the author offers but it’s well worth the read if you have any interest in sustainable design from a theoretical perspective