It is hard to make a critique of a proposition like Jeremy Lent’s vision for ecocivilization, on the surface, I agree with many of Jeremy Lent’s concerns. We are living through a polycrisis marked by the hegemony of capitalist modernity. Human supremacy is rooted in this modernity, exchange value and capital are valued above all else, we are embedded in hierarchical structures, and we are moving toward deepening social and ecological crises.

That said, I disagree with Lent’s proposal in terms of how the transformation he advocates might come about. My hope is that these disagreements are not taken as a foreclosure of debate, but as an invitation to challenge its human-centeredness, limited analysis of capitalism, and confidence in large-scale institutional design. Rather than moving toward an ecocivilization, I would suggest that we think in terms of the pluriverse, which better captures the challenge of fighting, resisting, and proposing alternatives to capitalist modernity.¹

First, Lent is right to identify neoliberalism as one of the most successful forms of cultural hegemony. It has naturalized the idea that humans are self-interested, competitive, and best governed by markets, making capitalism appear less like a historical system than a fact of life. Yet focusing too heavily on neoliberalism leaves capitalism itself insufficiently examined. Neoliberalism is not a deviation from capitalism but one of its historical forms. Similarly, critiques of “techno-feudalism” risk treating monopoly, rent, data extraction, and platform domination as evidence that capitalism has been superseded, rather than as signs of capitalism’s capacity to mutate.² The issue is not only neoliberalism’s hegemony, but capitalist modernity as such.

I would push Lent’s genealogy one step further back. If neoliberalism has been a powerful hegemonic project, development may be an even more pervasive colonial grammar. It did not only reorganize economies; it taught people to see themselves as lacking, backward, and in need of expert correction. As Gustavo Esteva argues, Truman’s invention of “underdevelopment” in 1949 made billions appear as incomplete versions of the North, pushed to abandon their own paths in order to “catch up” with a model that was neither desirable nor possible.³ The authors of the The Development Dictionary show how development became a mental structure through which the North’s mixture of “generosity,” bribery, and coercion toward the South could be presented as benevolent improvement.⁴ It was here that the language of “needs” transforms autonomous capacities into deficits to be administered by professionals, markets, and states. The “underdeveloped” subject, then, precedes and prepares the neoliberal subject: before people are asked to become entrepreneurs of themselves, they are first taught to experience their worlds as backward, insufficient, and dependent on external expertise. This is why Lent’s account would benefit from a stronger post-development perspective, especially one rooted in the experiences and critiques emerging from the Global South.

Second, Lent’s use of Greta Thunberg’s call to focus on “what needs to be done” rather than on “what is politically possible” is compelling, but also revealing. Similar to her “Act now” speech, the question is, to whom is this question addressed?⁵ State leaders? CEOs? Large environmental institutions? If the appeal is directed mainly to those actors, then the imagination remains trapped inside the architecture of power that produced the crisis. I agree with Lent that our political imagination has been narrowed, but I differ on where that narrowing comes from. It is not only neoliberal common sense; it is also the Hobbesian assumption that without the state there is only chaos, private capture, or collapse.

Recently, I was in a situation where I spoke of creating autonomy from the state. To some people, this sounds like absolute nonsense: “The autonomy you speak about is creating a vacuum for the private sector and the market to expand,” they told me. When people are trapped in a Hobbesian mentality and dualism, between the state or chaos, we usually end up in what seems like a dead-end alleyway where we seem to have no way out. Graeber and Wengrow show how this opposition between state order and violent disorder is a false inheritance, one that erases the wide range of political forms through which people have organized life beyond centralized authority.⁶ Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly makes a similar point through the idea of an autonomous sphere of subaltern politics: in many peasant and Indigenous struggles, politics has not simply flowed from parties, states, or elites, but from dense worlds of defending and conserving memory and collective forms of organizations. The task, then, is not to ask power to develop a conscience, nor to reform the existing architecture of the nation-state and its institutions, but to recover and strengthen the collective capacities that modern individualism, development, and the state have systematically weakened.

Third, Lent’s appeal to design principles drawn from living systems is attractive, but it reveals a tension at the heart of the ecocivilization proposal. Although he rejects human supremacy and argues for the intrinsic value of all life, his formulation of “flourishing” quickly returns to a human-centered register: civilization is to be redesigned so that “all people” or “each person” can flourish on a regenerating Earth. The more serious problem, however, is scale. Lent argues that the polycrisis cannot be addressed “domain by domain” but requires the coherent redesign of the world system as a whole. Yet this risks reproducing the abstraction it seeks to overcome. A pluriversal politics would not deny interdependence, but it would begin from situated worlds, local and vernacular knowledges, and the limits of what communities can actually perceive, govern, and care for. Leopold Kohr warned that social misery grows with bigness: when problems are scaled up to the world system, they demand oversized instruments of administration, and those instruments tend toward domination rather than conviviality. Ivan Illich similarly insisted on proportionality: forms, tools, and institutions must remain within reach of those who use them. Wendell Berry’s argument against “global thinking” makes the same point.⁷ Ecological responsibility cannot be administered as an abstraction; it must be practiced locally, with the right scale, knowledge, tools, and affection. This is why the search for a benevolent macro-subject—a state, world-system, or civilizational Leviathan—seems dangerous rather than emancipatory.

This also helps explain why the proposal sometimes risks sliding into a search for a benevolent state, a world-system, or even a China-like civilizational Leviathan capable of imposing ecological repair from above. In the current geopolitical moment, this temptation is understandable, but dangerous. It imagines that the scale of the crisis requires an equally scaled apparatus of response, when the problem may be precisely the concentration of power, and administration at scales no community can meaningfully govern.

Fourth, when Lent turns to the concrete components of ecocivilization—economy, finance, technology, law, and global governance—the proposal again becomes too universal and institutionally (or state) confident. The use of Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is symptomatic of this problem: it offers an appealing image of human needs within planetary limits, but, as critics such as Clive Spash suggest, remains ambiguous on growth, capitalism, and capital-accumulating economies.⁸ These domains appear as if they could simply be redesigned and placed in the service of life, but each is already embedded in relations of power, accumulation, coercion, and dependency. Technology is not a neutral tool; as Marxist and critical technology traditions remind us, technology is capital in material form, carrying with it the extractive, logistical, and disciplinary relations that make it possible.⁹ Even “distributed,” “open,” or “green” technologies may reproduce the same asymmetries if their mineral, labor, land, energy, and infrastructural conditions remain untouched. The law, likewise, is not merely a moral framework that can be rewritten toward relationality; it is produced, suspended, and enforced by hegemonic powers.¹⁰ Finance does not simply circulate value; it organizes abstraction, debt, and subjectivities. Global governance, even when articulated through subsidiarity or reparative justice, risks becoming an authoritarian management system operating above the worlds it claims to protect. The lessons of Latin American progressivism are sobering and should be taken into account: governments that came to power through popular struggles often institutionalized those struggles, absorbed movements into the state, expanded social programs while deepening extractivism, and produced new bureaucratic elites without transforming underlying class or property relations.¹¹

Sixth, this raises the harder question of what we do with the state. For this, I would proscribe the formula that we have discussed in multiple spaces like the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South: it is possible to act in it, against it, and beyond it, but always without mistaking it for the horizon of transformation.¹² Lent’s backcasting exercise is useful because it refuses to reduce politics to what currently appears possible, but it still remains too attached to the future as the privileged site of hope. From a Zapatista and Illichian perspective, the task is less to design a utopian future than to recover autonomy in the present: to remember and strengthen those eutopias (those good places), practices, and relations that already exist.¹³ The problem, then, is not only whether the state can deliver a social dividend, reform corporate charters, convene assemblies, or legislate rights of nature. Lent presents these as structural cornerstones of transformation, but each still presumes the state and its legal-administrative machinery as the guarantor of emancipation. The state is not a neutral container that can be sufficiently greenwashed, whitewashed, or pinkwashed; it is a colonial dispositif that organizes law, territory, violence, recognition, and dependency. The question is therefore not how to perfect liberal-democratic institutions, but how to reduce their monopoly over life while recovering collective capacities to learn, heal, move, decide, and subsist beyond them.

From a Civilization to a Pluriverse

The word civilization is not neutral. It carries a long and difficult history, and for that reason, it deserves to be treated carefully. Walter Benjamin’s warning immediately comes to mind: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”¹⁴ Historically, the language of civilization has often been used to divide the world between those who are seen as advanced, rational, developed, or modern, and those who are treated as backward, deficient, primitive, or in need of correction. To speak of a new civilization, even an ecological one, risks reproducing a universalizing gesture that has accompanied capitalist modernity from its beginning.

Lent is right to insist that the current crisis cannot be addressed through minor adjustments to the existing system. However, a postdevelopment perspective does not ask how development, governance, law, or civilization might be redesigned in more ecological terms. It asks whether these categories are themselves part of the problem. As the now famous dictum byArturo Escobar poses, we are not interested in “development alternatives,” but in “alternatives to development”: ways of living and organizing that reject the paradigm itself, including its attachment to progress, state power, extractivism, and the fantasy of a one-world world more than likely administered from above.¹⁵ In Latin America, the interruption of the monologue of development is usually articulated as a common no to imposed futures, which through that refusal, opens space for many yeses: other ways of inhabiting, healing, learning, defending, and reproducing life.

Capitalist modernity is indeed in crisis, but it will not simply wither away or be reformed into a better universal system. It has repeatedly shown its capacity to absorb critique, incorporate alternatives, and convert opposition into reform. Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum remains useful: the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born. Yet the “new” should not be imagined as a single replacement civilization. It is better understood, following the Zapatistas, as a world in which many worlds fit. For this reason, I would suggest moving from the language of ecocivilization to the language of the pluriverse. This shift does not reject the desire for ecological transformation that animates Lent’s proposal. Rather, it asks that such transformation be grounded more firmly in the struggles, knowledges, and practices that have long resisted capitalist modernity. The pluriverse is not a future civilization waiting to be designed. It is already present in the many struggles that refuse development and defend life against the world that calls itself a civilization.

1. By capitalist modernity, I refer to the historical order that emerged through the entanglement of capitalism, colonialism, and Eurocentric modernity from the sixteenth century onward. Following Wallerstein, Quijano, and Öcalan, it is understood not simply as an economic system, but as a civilizational regime organized around endless accumulation, colonial hierarchies, teleological progress, human separation from nature, and the imposition of a narrow universalism. It continually reproduces itself through technological innovation, the expansion of commodity frontiers, and the appropriation of territories and spheres of subsistence—including ecosystems, communal life, and care work—while degrading both nonhuman beings and those humans rendered exploitable, disposable, or “less than human.”
2. Kochei Saito and Ryuji Sasaki, “Rentier Capitalism, Technofascism and the Destruction of the Common,” Area Development and Policy 11, no. 1 (2026): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2025.2557911; Evgeny Morozov, “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” New Left Review, 133/134 (2022), doi.org/10.64590/13n.
3. Gustavo Esteva, Gustavo Esteva: A Critique of Development and Other Essays, trans. Kathryn Dix (Routledge, 2023).
4. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary (Zed Books, 1992).
5. Robin Pomeroy, “This is What Greta Thunberg Just Told Davos,” World Economic Forum, January 21, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/01/greta-thunberg-davos-message-climate-change/.
6. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021).
7. Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (Routledge, 1957); Ivan Illich, “The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr,” Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 1994, https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-wisdom-of-leopold-kohr/; “Out Of Your Car, Off Your Horse by Wendell Berry,” Classical Carousel, February 22, 2016, https://classicalcarousel.com/out-of-your-car-off-your-horse-by-wendell-berry/.
8. Clive Spash, “Apologists for Growth: Passive Revolutionaries in a Passive Revolution,” Globalizations 18, no. 7 (2021): 1123–1148, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1824864.
9. Andreas Roos and Alf Hornborg, “Technology as Capital: Challenging the Illusion of the Green Machine,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 35, no. 2 (2024): 75–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2024.2332218.
10. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
11. Decio Machado and Raúl Zibechi, Changing the World from Above: The Limits of Progressivism (PM Press, 2025).
12. See https://pactoecosocialdelsur.com/.
13. Sylvia Marcos and Carlos Tornel, “Eutopía,” in The Dictionary of Radical Alternatives, accessed July 15, 2026, https://dictionaryofradicalalternatives.org/Concepts:Eutop%C3%ADa/Sylvia_Marcos_and_Carlos_Tornel.
14. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (Suhrkamp, 1940), https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.
15. Arturo Escobar, “Farewell to Development,” interview by Allen White, Great Transition Initiative (February 2018), https://greattransition.org/publication/farewell-to-development.