In
their powerful book The Imperial Mode
of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso, 2021),
Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen demonstrate how our life in the capitalist
centres and its dominant forms of production, distribution and consumption can
only be maintained, because the related social and ecological costs are
externalised to other parts of the world. Published originally in German in 2017, this volume is
now also available to the English reading audience. In this blog post, I will
draw out some of the authors’ crucial findings.