'The Capitalocene'

Alternative Proposed Geologic Epoch Language

Anthropogenic biomes, also known as anthromes or human biomes, describe the terrestrial biosphere in its contemporary, human-altered form using global ecosystem units defined by global patterns of sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems.

Capitalocene

• The Capitalocene thesis, by contrast, foregrounds how capitalism evolved within and against nature's web of life, as well as brought ecological transformations to it. In other words, the crisis of climate change, according to this perspective, owes not simply to a substance like oil or coal, or to a chemical element like carbon - and certainly not to humanity's species being - but to complex socio-economic, political, and material operations, involving class and commodities, imperialisms and empires, and biotechnology and militarism. 
• Globalisation of neo-liberal capital 
• The need for this terminological choice provides prospective and transformative justice – to pursue an effective transition toward a post-fossil fuel future that is socially and politically just 
• Create a world structure where all will not be blamed for the activities of a few and where culpability for ecocide is assigned to those responsible so that the future becomes not only possible but guaranteed. 
• Sheer complexity and multiple dimensionality of this geo-politico-economic formation 
• Inspire emergent cultures of survival 

Subcategory of the Capitalocene
Platantionocene

• Highlight the plantation system and its nexus of corporate colonialism, quasi or explicit slave labour, and the commodification of nature as a structural cause of geological transformation
• From the 18th and 19th century Spanish-mission-led colonialisaiton of California to the cotton and sugar slave-worked plantations in North and South America of the same era
• From the Belgian rubber plantations in the late 19th century Congo to the current sites of biogenetically assisted industrial agriculture in Argentina, India and Indonesia
• The plantation system intensified the oppression of women and the regimentation of normative racial and gender codes, and supressed interspecies co-becomings and naturalcultural mutualities

Homogenocene 

• A result of the plantationocene 
• Anthropologist Anna Tsing: The epoch of genetically and industrially induced monocultures, at the cost of mass extinctions, identifying the de-biodiversifying effects of globalisation’s reduction of nature to the commodity form via corporate-extractivist-strip-mining-oil-drilling-monocrop-planting-dam-building neoliberalism. 
• “The destruction of global biodiversity needs to be framed […] as a great, and perhaps ultimate, attack on the planet’s common wealth”
• Ashley Dawsons recent research on modern species loss is reaching a rate of 140,000 species a year, making the current mass species extinction event the greatest loss of biodiversity since the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event approximately 66m years ago
• “extinction needs to be seen, along with climate change, as the leading edge of contemporary capitalisms contradictions”
• An effect of Capitalocene exterminism 

Plasticine

• Age of plastic 
• Heather Davis Argues, this figures as perhaps the most exemplary material substrata of living and dying in contemporary capitalism
• So much plastic in our systems that micro polymer particles have been omnipresent
• We can expect traces of the material to last in fossil records for millennia to come 
• Expressive of the fantasy of unending economic growth, the material’s seemingly death-defying quality is made possible by its petrochemical basis, which also indicates permanency of its environmental devastation
• Ubiquitous in consumerist society, its production is only set to grow: 260m tons of plastic was produced in 2015, expectedto rise to 33bn by 2050 (The Material Politics of Plastic)

Chthulucene

• 'draws on the resources of science fiction as much as science fact, speculative feminism as much as speculative fabulation, in naming our present age of multi-species intra-actions, non-patriarchal becomings, and generative collaborations’ 
• Haraway’s neologism is proposed rather as a name of names with a thick and global mythological genealogy…referencing the “diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa…Spider Woman…Raven…and any many more.” 
• As such, the Chthulucene suggests “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages, including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-human.” 
• Such is the post-anthropocentric, non-human-exceptionalist 

Gynecene

• a gender-equalised, feminist-led, anti-anthropos environmentalism, with locates human-caused geological violence as coextensive with patriarchal domination, linking ecocide and gynecide.
• Contesting the ravages of anthropos, and equally the inequalities of capitalist rule, the Gynecene manifesto calls for new models of eco-feminist stewardship, resonating in part with Indigenous postcolonial reverence for Mother Earth or Pachamama, as set within the multifaceted rights-of-nature mobilisations in South America. 
• Addresses a radical left where all is equal, free and ungoverned (civil disobedience) as the only solution to challenge the radical right system of now that will dominate the Anthropocene 
• Economic equality, 
• Universal citizenship and basic income
• No second-class citizens
• Opposes physical, economic and symbolic violence, 
• Acceptance and embracement of all humanisms, 
• Rejects the patriarchy of religion
• Use of technology for nature repair 
• Calls for an understanding of nature’s resources 
• ‘It is togetherness in its most abstract form that should be capable of creating a sense of unity across our seemingly incompatible histories and a total break with History, after extracting its most emancipatory moments, and that could propel us from the “man” made Anthropocene to the true collective existence of the Gynecene

Further Reading:
The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

Jason W. Moore
This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.

The creatures, too, must become free. (Thomas Münzer, 1524)
In this essay Moore explores the roll of historical events and philosophies that underpin our shared reasoning of current societal structures and cultures (imperialism, industrialisation, commodification, globalisation). He captures the ways that capitalism has shaped our considerations of nature as a force separate from humanity, as well as the contexts that formed our understanding of materialism, modernism (production and power).

He notes the social origins of environmental consequences as the ‘strikingly linear view of history’ provided by charts, that link a ‘direct casual line from the steam engine to global warming’, once more emphasising the rigidness of capitalist thought and depiction.

Despite condemning the misfocus on the terminology of a proposed Anthropocene, he notes its important contribution ‘as a public and scholarly dialogue that has put artists, cultural critics, political economists, historians, geographers, biologists and many others into conversation.’ as we begin to address and define our affects on the planet. 

Notes:


 
 
 

• It shapes our thinking of planetary crisis and its origins, preconceptualizing humanity and nature as separate first, connected second. 
• Green Arithmetic - Nature becomes a factor, a variable, a part of the story. 
• First is Humanity and Nature as real abstractions – abstractions with operative force in reproducing the world as we know it. These abstractions elide decisive questions of difference amongst humans, and how that difference is constituted through relations within the web of life. Second, I consider historical capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital and nature, dependent on finding and coproducing Cheap Natures. Finally, I ground these two moments in the history of capitalist origins – which is also the origins of ecological crisis. In successive and overlapping philosophical, politico-economic, and world-historical registers we might begin to identify twenty-first century capitalism’s spaces of vulnerability and contradiction – spaces co-produced through the web of life 
• The social sciences emerged not only on the premise of fragmentation and the autonomy of spheres (culture, politics, economy, etc.) but also on the ground of human exceptionalism. Seeing human relations as not only distinct from nature, but as effectively independent of the web of life, has shaped social thought for two centuries. 
• human exceptionalism expresses the peculiar idea that humanity ‘alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies’ 
• In the dominant Anthropocene presentation, the human species becomes a mighty, largely homogeneous, acting unit: the ‘human enterprise’ (Steffen et al. 2011a). (Could a more neoliberal turn of phrase be found?) Inequality, 596 Jason W. Moore commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racism and much more – all have been cleansed from ‘Humanity’, the Anthropocene’s point of departure 
• The Capitalocene, as McBrien reminds us, is also a Necrocene – a system that not only accumulates capital, but drives extinction (2016; also Dawson 2016). 
• At stake is how we think through the relations of Capitalocene and Necrocene – between the creativity of capitalist development and its deep exterminism. That exterminism is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic 
• Too often in the Anthropocene narrative, something like the taxonomy of ‘Anthromes’ (Ellis et al. 2010) – ecosystems dominated by humans, and therefore not ‘wild’ – tends to precede the interpretation of historical change. Highly linear notions of time and space are substituted for the complex task of historical-geographical interpretation. At the same time, Anthropocene scholars cannot escape the conclusion that humans, too, are a ‘geophysical force’ – the singular is important here – that operates within nature (Steffen et al. 2011b, 741). 
• Such views evidently rest upon Human/Nature dualism and its cognates. This dualism obscures our vistas of power, production and profit in the web of life. It prevents us from seeing the accumulation of capital as a powerful web of interspecies dependencies; it prevents us from seeing how those interdependencies are not only shaped by capital, but also shape it; and it prevents us from seeing how the terms of that producer/product relation change over time. For instance, it is clear that capitalogenic climate change is undermining crucial relations of capitalism’s Cheap Food regime in the twenty-first century – Cheap Nature increasingly confronts forms of nature that cannot be controlled by capitalist technology or rationality (Moore 2015b; Altvater 2016). 
• Green Arithmetic, in other words, offers a Human/Nature binary that can proceed only by converting the living, multi-species connections of humanity-innature and the web of life into dead abstractions – abstractions that connect to each other as cascades of consequences rather than constitutive relations 
• The Anthropocene’s most important contribution: as a public and scholarly dialogue that has put artists, cultural critics, political economists, historians, geographers, biologists and many others into conversation. 
• This dialogue suggests something of the zeitgeist: the intuition that Nature/Society dualism cannot serve us in an era of accelerating climate change and mass extinction. At the same time, the responsibility of the radical is to name the system and identify how the Anthropocene is implicated in capitalist power, symbolically and materially. That the Anthropocene, at its core, is a fundamentally bourgeois concept should surprise no one. 
• Consider how every era of capitalist development turns on agricultural revolutions that comprise not only class, production and power, but also new agronomic and botanical knowledges (see esp. Cañizares-Esguerra 2004; Kloppenburg 1988; Brockway 1979; Perkins 1997). 
• capitalism is premised on the separation of Humanity and Nature. The whole thrust of capitalist civilization develops the premise that we inhabit something called Society, and act upon something called Nature. This is the problem of alienation, shaping everything from the structures of work to the structures of feeling (e.g. Marx 1977; Braverman 1974; Williams 1977). Society and Nature are, in this sense, not only expressions of alienation but instruments of it. 
• Thus, relations of accumulating ‘men’ and ‘capital’ – to paraphrase Foucault – are thinkable only through the web of life and a new ontology of Society and Nature that assigns value to some work, and some lives, while excluding the vast majority 
• Humans produce intra-species differentiations which are ontologically fundamental to our species-being: inequalities of class especially, inflected by all manner of gendered and racialized cosmologies. 
• Here is the Anthropocenic syllogism: ‘fossil fuels = capitalism = more fossil fuels = climate catastrophe’. 
• For early modern materialism, the point was not only to interpret the world but to control it: ‘to make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature’ (Descartes 2006, 51). Modernity’s thought-structures are therefore something more than ‘superstructures’. Systems of thought, to paraphrase Marx, become ‘material forces’ when seized by empires and bourgeoisies (1970, 137) 
• At the heart of modern thought is a substantialist bias, persuasively challenged by critical thought since Marx (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Watts 2005). Animals become machines, machines and resources become things abstracted from socio-ecological relations (Marx 1977, 512–513).