De-growth, in the sense that it provides the philosophical foundations for a project for an autonomous society, is probably not a humanism because it is based upon a critique of development, growth, progress, technology and, ultimately, modernity and because it implies a break with Western centralism.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 99

A critique of the growth society implies a critique of capitalism, but the converse is not necessarily true. Capitalism, neo-liberal or otherwise, and productivist socialism are both variants on the same project for a growth society based upon the development of the productive forces, which will supposedly facilitate humanity's march in the direction of progress.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 89

The technological and promethean fantasy that we can create an artificial world is a way of rejecting both the world and being.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity Press, 2009) p. 35

The emergence of death is then at that point the signal that it has been possible to take the point of view of the species upon human existence. Utopia necessaraily takes the point of view of the species upon human history, thus emptying it of much that we consider not merely historical but irreplaceably significant in human life. For the urgent specificity of historical events is at one with their uniqueness and their contingency: the irrevocable moment when this special possibility had to be grasped or forever lost. History is the most intense experience of this unique fusion of time and the event, temporality and action; history is choice, freedom, and failure all at once, inevitable failure, but not death. Utopia is set at a height form which those changes are no longer visible: even if the Utopia in question is one of absolute change, change is nonetheless viewed from that well-nigh glacial and inhuman standpoint as absolute repetition, as a sameness of change as far as the eye can reach. A state of society that does not need history or historical struggle lies beyond much that is precious to us in individual as well as collective existence; its thought obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 122-123

Modernization, by stripping away the traditional representations with which human temporality was disguised and domesticated, revealed for one long stark moment the rift in existence through which the unjustifiability of the passing of time could not but be glimpsed, by Baudelaire, who called it ennui, the ticking away of the meter still running, the look downward into the meaninglessness of the organic, which does not set you any tasks but only condemns you to go on existing like a plant.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 84-85

I have already suggested that the thinking of totality itself – the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching that we can at least name – has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternate systems, something we can now identify as our old friend Utopian thinking. Of the antinomies, perhaps we can conclude a bit more, namely that their ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference is to be attributed to a blocked mechanism, whereby in our episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction, as they have seemed able to do in other moments of the past (and not only in the Hegelian dialectic). If so, that blockage can only have something to do with the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change: for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 70-71

For the ideals of Utopian living involve the imagination in a contradictory project, since they all presumably aim at illustrating and exercizing that much-abused concept of freedom that, virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified: if you know already what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 56-57

But surely ecology is another matter entirely; and while its rediscovery and reaffirmation of the limits of nature is postmodern to the degree to which it repudiates the modernism of modernization and of the productivist ethos that accompanied an earlier moment of capitalism, it must also equally refuse the implied Prometheanism of any conception of Nature itself, the Other of human history, as somehow humanly constructed. How antifoundationalism can thus coexist with the passionate ecological revival of a sense of Nature is the essential mystery at the heart of what I take to be a fundamental antinomy of the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 46-47

So it is that the end of modernism is accompanied not merely by postmodernism but also by a return of the awareness of nature in both senses: ecologically, in the deplorable conditions in which the technological search for profits has left the planet, and humanly, in the disillusionment with people's capacity to change, to act, or to achieve anything substantive in the way of collective praxis.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 50-51

The violence was no doubt always implicit in the very conception of ownership as such when applied to land; it is a peculiarly ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations of dying organisms, should have imagined they could somehow own parts of the earth in the first place. [...]

The point is, however, that where the thematic opposition of heterogeneity and homogeneity is invoked, it can only be this brutal process that is the ultimate referent: the effects that result from the power of commerce and then capitalism proper – which is to say, sheer number as such, number now shorn and divested of its own magical heterogeneities and reduced to equivalencies – to seize upon a landscape and flatten it out, reorganize it into a grid of identical parcels, and expose it to the dynamic of a market that now reorganizes space in terms of and identical value. The development of capitalism then distributes that value most unevenly indeed, until at length, in its postmodern moment, sheer speculation, as something like the triumph of spirit over matter, the liberation of value from any of its former concrete or earthly content, now reigns supreme and devastates the very cities and countrysides it created in the process of its own earlier development. But all such later forms of abstract violence and homogeneity derive from the initial parcelization, which translates the money form and the logic of commodity production for a market back onto space itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 24-25

The experience and the value of perpetual change thereby comes to govern language and feelings, fully as much as as the buildings and the garments of this particular society, to the point at which even the relative meaning allowed by uneven development (or "nonsynchronous synchronicity") is no longer comprehensible, and the supreme value of the New and of innovation, as both modernism and modernization grasped it, fades away against a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless.

What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously. [...]

What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is that henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, nothing can change any longer. [...] The persistence of the Same through absolute Difference – the same street with different buildings, the same culture through momentous new sheddings of skin – discredits change, since henceforth the only conceivable radical change would consist in putting an end to change itself.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 17-18

Today, the very meaning of demolition as such has been modified, along with that of building: it has become a generalized postnatural process that calls into question the very concept of change itself and the inherited notion of time that accompanied it.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) p. 12

It is conceivable that our environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent. Thus, while practical considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom.)

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 33

Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

[...] While the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 32

By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future (Green Anarchist, 1995) p. 24

Art is disappearing because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the world that must be voided.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 70

The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading role denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prizes novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated.

But avant-garde culture cannot compete with the modern world's capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically). Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 69

Language itself is a repression, and along its progress repression gathers – as ideology, as work – so as to generate historical time. Without language all of history would disappear.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 41

To assert that humanity is only human because of language generally neglects the corollary that being human is the precondition of inventing language.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 35

Civilization is often thought of not as a forgetting but as a remembering, wherein language enables accumulated knowledge to be transmitted forward, allowing us to profit from other's experiences as though they were our own. Perhaps what is forgotten is simply that other's experiences are not our own, that the civilizing process is thus a vicarious and inauthentic one. When language, for good reason, is held to be virtually coterminous with life, we are dealing with another way of saying that life has moved progressively farther from directly lived experience.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 35

As the subjects live less, death grows more precipitous, more terrifying.

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (The Seabury Press, 1973) p. 370

This triumph [of time], as noted above, awakened a great spatial urge by way of compensation: circumnavigating the globe and the discovery, suddenly, of vast new lands, for example. But just as certain is its relation to "the progressive disrealization of the world," in the words of Charles Newman, which began at this time. Extension, in the form of domination, obviously accentuated alienation from the world: a totally fitting accompaniment to the dawning of modern history.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 16

Technological society can only be dissolved (and prevented from recycling) by annulling time and history.

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia Alternative Library, 1999) p. 16