Capitalocene

George M. Schmidt

Related terms: Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, becoming-worker, capitalism, geological epoch, multispecies assemblage, world-ecology

The term ‘Capitalocene’ is, to be sure, a reaction to the concept ‘Anthropocene.’ According to personal email communications between Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, and Alf Hornborg in late 2014, it was agreed that Andreas Malm proposed the term “Capitalocene” in a seminar in Lund, Sweden, in 2009 (Haraway 2015, 163). Jason Moore writes of the occasion, quoting the then PhD student Malm who said, “Forget the Anthropocene… We should call it the Capitalocene!” (2016, xi). For Moore and others, the ‘Capitalocene’ would become a vital tool for their thinking around climate change and the ecological crisis more broadly. Those early conversations at Lund University would produce the world-ecology perspective “in which the relations of capital, power, and nature form an evolving, uneven, and patterned whole in the modern world” (Moore 2016, xii). While the early world-ecology conversations began to displace the ‘Anthropocene’ for the ‘Capitalocene,’ the former still seems to have its purchase on the environmental humanities.

Acceptance of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a neologism for the current geological epoch centers, as its name suggests, on the Anthropos – the human species in its entirety. The generally accepted legitimacy of the term not only reinforces a dangerous anthropocentrism but also acts as a political evasion that dilutes the necessary focus on capital accumulation itself. Moreover, the implied universalism of the ‘Anthropocene’ erases histories of racism and classism nurtured within capital’s footprint on Earth. This is all driven by what Eileen Crist calls “a human species-supremacist planetary politics,” which calls humanity to embrace a “managerial mindset and active stewardship of Earth’s natural systems” (2016, 15). Of particular focus for this entry is the Nature-Culture dualism that dominates the stories being told by the Anthropocene discourse. “For the story of Humanity and Nature,” writes Jason Moore, “conceals a dirty secret of modern world history” (Moore 2016, 29). Namely, racial capitalism excludes a great many humans from Humanity. At best, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ obfuscates the complexity of the current epoch. At worst, its discourse drains militant energy away from addressing the source of biological annihilation.

For these reasons, among others, a multiplicity of “-cenes” are proposed as more effective alternatives for properly identifying the perpetrator, or at times protagonist, of/within present conditions now cemented in the geologic time scale (Mentz 2019). While “-cenes” such as the ‘Manthrocene,’ the ‘Eurocene,’ Justin McBrien’s “Necrocene” (McBrien 2016), Donna Haraway’s “Chthulucene,” or the ‘Petrocene’ offer interesting hermeneutical and methodological shifts, ‘Capitalocene’ is the most widely considered as an acceptable alternative to the ‘Anthropocene.’ Capital’s capacity to remake the long dead hidden under the earth into fuel, or to commodify trees into timber (Crist 2016, 28-29), or to make an entity, as Karen Barad would say, “killable” (Barad 2011, 121), speaks to its command of the epochal situation. The term ‘Capitalocene’ conceptually acknowledges the world-making process of capital.

The suggested shift from ‘Anthropocene’ to ‘Capitalocene’ is often misunderstood as a narrowing of the Anthropos to include some human agents and not others. Such a reading is merely more anthropocentrism, now simply reduced to the capitalist-Anthropos. In his 1967 field-shaping essay, Lynn White attributes the singular root of “the ecological crisis” to anthropocentrism (1967, 1204-1205). One of the major conceptual benefits of employing a Capitalocene perspective is the avoidance of this problem. One might argue, however, that humans are the only species that “does capitalism,” which would mean that Capitalocene discourse merely adds another layer over anthropocentrism without doing away with it. Putting aside the alienation of humanity from its own labor under capitalism, at the very least, a case could be made for humanity’s involvement. This, however, is not the same as anthropocentrism. Capitalocene discourse decenters the human in favour of focusing on capital accumulation as an assemblage-in-process.

However, much like Anthropocene discourse, conceptualizing this geological time as the ‘Capitalocene’ may propose an unintended injunction. Every geological epoch describes the conditions in which biotic systems can thrive. While adaptation is an ongoing process, Terran life can only operate to the extent that it meets its ecological surroundings. If the Capitalocene is “a multispecies assemblage, a world-ecology of capital, power, and nature,” then the most adaptive survival responses would make life more acceptable to capital accumulation (Moore, 2016, xi). In the same way an organism in the ocean must adapt or already be adapted to existence in salt water, so too must all life now bend to the dominion of capital. In cynical terms, this might have already taken place for humanity in the transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Economicus. The ‘Capitalocene,’ therefore, is not merely naming the perpetrator but obliquely demanding something of its victims.

To be sure, adaptive survival responses from the perspective of the Anthropocene often take the form of misanthropy and Malthusian arguments about “overpopulation.” For instance, Donna Haraway has been widely criticized for her urgent insistence on reducing the human population to around two billion. She argues that we rethink notions of kinship, reproduction, and care beyond relational bloodlines in the hopes of decreasing the human population by embracing our “kinship” with humans and the non-humans (e.g., animals, plants, ecosystems), calling for us to “make kin, not babies!” (Haraway 2016, 103). For theorists like Haraway, mitigation of planetary devastation then becomes mitigating humanity itself. Conversely, Capitalocene discourse suggests that the apex predatory system of capital produces its own grave-diggers: the proletariat. Capitalism is the driver of proletarianization; the growth of capital entails the growth of the working class. That being said, the Capitalocene greatly expands this same mechanism to planetary dimensions. The global “organizing of nature as a whole” (Moore, 2016) is both worldmaking and proletariat-making. That is to say, within the logic of the Capitalocene is an eschatological roadmap beyond it.

In this sense, the ‘Capitalocene’ demands that we see human survival as inextricably linked to the question of what human beings and all earthly life are becoming because of the world-making dominion of capital. Capital cannot appropriate fossil fuels without also appropriating surplus labor, making a heavy withdrawal on the body of the worker. Capitalocene discourse, consequently, does not suggest a look inward to a private psychic life, those places that Sallie McFague described as “wild spaces” (McFague 2008, 152), but rather to turn outward and find in once wild spaces what Joerg Rieger calls “laboring space” (Rieger 2009, 115). Rather than deploying a form of deep ecology, the ‘Capitalocene’ explores a deep dialectical materialism that extends and accepts eschatological understandings of geological time. By employing a strategic anthropomorphism, Capitalocene discourse could be employed for a proletarianization of ecology.

In classical Marxist theory, proletarianization is a complex historical process that describes the production of a working class, forcing it into subordination to and in conflict with a capitalist class. As capitalism expanded into new regions and became more complex, new questions began to arise in regard to the process of proletarianization. Is the peasantry included in the proletariat in pre-industrial societies? Does reproductive labor count toward entry into the working class? Are slaves counted among the proletariat? What of non-productive maintenance labor? Finding a definition for a proper ‘proletarian’ became an increasingly mercurial effort. The classic Marxian schema of proletarianization would eventually expand to fit increasingly larger multitudes of subjects, e.g., the ‘new working class,’ service personnel, and professional occupations. Advanced forms of capitalism necessitated evermore complex conceptions of the proletariat and proletarianization. In a similar fashion, what might today’s expansion of the proletariat look like? Perhaps, with the ‘Capitalocene’ in mind, such an expansion would begin to include the non-human. Just as Latour called for “an enlarged democracy,” the ‘Capitalocene’ implicitly calls for “an enlarged proletariat” (Latour 1993,141).

To this point, E.P. Thompson in his pivotal work The Making of the English Working Class writes, “I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category,’ but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships…” (1963, 9). In less anthropocentric language, he continues, “class is a relationship and not a thing…” (1963, 10). In part, this speaks to the relation between proletarianization and capital accumulation. The growth of capital entails the growth of the proletariat. As this process continued into the Capitalocene, a “capitalist world-ecology” emerged.  Capital accumulation as such became world-historical processes that, in the words of Jason Moore, “are neither social nor environmental as conventionally understood. Rather, these processes are bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled” (2016, 97). Capitalocene discourse, therefore, captures the supercharged effects of capital accumulation. The process of proletarianization, if the concept is to meet the moment of the Capitalocene, must be retheorized to grasp the scope of capital’s new self-organizing patterns of world-making.

Just as previous advancements of capitalism gave rise to expanded conceptions of the proletariat, the Capitalocene demands a similar undertaking. Capital’s command of the epochal situation is to such an extent that there is no limit to commodification. But perhaps the Master’s tools can in fact bring down the Master’s house. As Marx and Engels proposed in the Communist Manifesto, what capitalism “produces, above all, is its own gravediggers” (1988, 222).  To conceive of the Capitalocene’s gravediggers, it seems the concepts of ‘proletarian’ and ‘proletarianization’ must be stretched to their limits by embracing non-human comrades. This would entail an acknowledgment of capitalism’s alienating effects upon non-human actants and the comradeship of those same actants. It would be important to clarify, however, that such camaraderie with the non-human would mean camaraderie with a proletariat in-itself and not for-itself. While the latter would characterize an organized effort with the non-human that might interest object-oriented ontologists and New Materialists, the ‘Capitalocene’ would only define the non-human as a class in-itself, meaning that the human and the non-human share a common exploiter and interest. Rather than “making kin,” as Haraway suggests, the ‘Capitalocene’ necessitates that we seek to expand traditional bonds of solidarity as we seek to ‘make worker.’ By doing so, fertile ground becomes available for new assemblages and solidarity formations.

References

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Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1988. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. Translated by Martin Milligan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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McFague, Sallie. 2008. A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Mentz, Steve. 2019. “The Neologismcene.” In Break up the Anthropocene, 57-64. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Moore, Jason W., ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Moore, Jason W. 2016. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78–115. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Rieger, Joerg. 2009. No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, NY: Random House.

White, Lynn. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203–7.