The Anthropocene has not yet been recognised as a geological epoch, but the term is suitable to define our current condition. On the one hand, it shows that the human species has the power to change the composition of the planetary atmosphere and leave traces in its geological strata (Latour 2017: 111–16). On the other hand, the droughts, floods, fluctuating temperatures and other phenomena caused by these changes, including the sixth global extinction (Kolbert 2014; Ceballos et al. 2017), threaten to destroy our habitat and bring civilisation to an end (Spratt and Dunlop 2019). This threat should make us change the way our economies are run, but it is difficult to reach a global consensus when powerful actors, such as fossil fuel corporations, invest heavily in protecting the status quo (Fischer 2013; Klein 2015). To make matters worse, for people on whose support governments depend, the cares of today will always overshadow the threats of a distant future. ‘Meanwhile’, the writer Roy Scranton says, ‘the world slides into hatred-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy’ (Scranton 2018: 7).

If we want to transform the economic system and our thinking, we first have to break them. ‘Political and cultural struggles are all’, Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘in some sense, directed to bringing into existence the futures that dislocate themselves from the dominant tendencies and forces of the present’. This means that one has to disrupt linear time by creating something ‘untimely’ (Grosz 2014: 14). Many are trying to imagine what that ‘untimely’ could be. Some, like Bruno Latour, suggest we should act counterintuitively and lose hope in order to realise ‘progress in reverse’, to experience time differently (Latour 2017: 13). Those in the position of power can hardly commit to disruption or dislocation. Therefore, people start fighting like partisans engaging in illegitimate activities. The system tends to reject such fighters as ‘irrelevant’ and ‘weird’ or even destroys them. The ‘partisans’, on the other hand, cannot expect either victory or recognition; their only hope is to transform the system slowly from the inside, while continuing to be unappreciated and persecuted.