Simulating the apocalypse: towards a genealogy of ecopolitical governamentality

Abstract

Founded in 1968, the Club of Rome sought to address the «world problematique» – a complex set of global political, economic, and ecological crises – through long-term planning and risk management. Its 1972 report The Limits to Growth, developed at MIT, warned that unchecked resource consumption would lead to the collapse of economic and demographic growth within decades. Widely influential, the report helped shape ecological transition policies for the next fifty years.
This paper examines the report as an early instance of what Frédéric Neyrat terms the «biopolitics of catastrophe»: the ecological turn in biopolitical governance via cybernetic and predictive models. It also considers the radical critique offered by Giorgio Cesarano in 1973, who interpreted the report not as a warning for humanity, but as the ideological endpoint of capital itself. For Cesarano, The Limits to Growth unwittingly confirmed Marx’s insight: capital, driven by its logic of boundless self-valorization, inevitably encounters the ecological limits of its own reproduction.