> Before industrial society, people and land were also resources from which value was extracted, often quite literally belonging to a small group of people.

Extractive value is the basis for most of civilizations, whether they are industrial or not. That's where we get the exploitation of labor (slavery, serfdoms, indentured servitude, etc.) and wars over resources (most of them) although the ecological footprint is much smaller compared to that of industrial societies. Many of those civilizations still devastated ecologies, communities, and human potential.

What I am asserting is that it is not the industrial practices themselves but the whole paradigm of value-extraction (and its offshoots) that is the core problem. Industrialization mainly scaled up the problem.

> I don't think that a purely extractive-value paradigm is the only way for an industrial society to run.

Carol Sandford with the regenerative paradigms and to some extent, permaculture, has offered up non-extractive-value paradigms.

> For example, if we better priced the harm that comes from things like fertiliser run-off and emissions from fertiliser manufacturing, would we still use synthetic fertilisers? Almost definitely yes, we would just be more careful about using it only where really required.

That's coming from a "Do Less Harm" paradigm that's a typical response to "Value Extraction". It doesn't really address the core issue. Usually, the response to "Do Less Harm" is "Do More Good", but that has its own problems.

At the core of extractive value is that some outside, externalizing process is controlling or regulating the behaviors of the people involved. Regenerative paradigms inverts that, where the intrinsic motivation of individuals are connected to some meaningful contribution. In other words, each individual looks for ways to contribute value to the society and whole, and their capabilities for doing so are developed so that they can.

> The systems that were replaced by the early modern civilisation and then subsequently by industrial civilisation, were much more deeply unequal than our modern system, at least in NW Europe which is the history I know best. Those systems, often not quite accurately described as "feudalism" were much more sustainable but also not very pleasant for most people who lived in them.

"Sustainability" is, I am sad to say, a "Do Less Harm" paradigm. Yeah, the not-quite-feudalism you speak of were sustainable as far as ecological footprint when compared to modern, industrial practices. They were still devastating to human potential, and to communities (all the various wars fought by various polities). Here, instead of trading houses that extracted value, the polity itself still exploited (extracted value) from their peasantry.

While not all polities used their surpluses of food for wars of conquests, many did. The Roman Empire, for example, expanded until it collapsed. Qin Dynasty Chinese used their agricultural surplus and standardization of weapons manufacture (let's call that proto-industrial) in wars of conquest.

Or look at the Hundred Years War in Europe -- conditions and incentives that lead to a period of brutality (to put it mildly).

> what we shouldn't simply say, "Industrial civilisation? Feh, it's bad" without really understanding how it works.

As I stated in my very first comment: It isn't as if I don't understand how it works. I make my statement because I understand how it works.