Capitalocene

The Capitalocene is a proposed era of human and natural history, posed as an alternative to the so-called “Anthropocene” era. The Anthropocene is a geologic era defined by the human species' impact on the Earth, as exemplified by deforestation, mass extinction, and the introduction of manmade waste materials into the environment, but above all by anthropogenic global warming. Scholars of the Capitalocene, in contrast, attribute these changes not to humanity as such, but to a stage of the capitalist mode of production and its need for infinite growth, its dependence on fossil fuels, and its compulsion of capitalists to seek profit without regard to “external” or long-term consequences.

Definition and Utility

Capitalocene proponents consider the Anthropocene to be a flawed paradigm with respect to public environmental debates. Its fundamental weakness, in their view, is to attribute environmental crisis to the whole of humanity, or to ingrained human nature. In the first place, it implicates all humans as responsible for the present crises, when this is far from the case. In the words of IFP School professor Victor Court:

To hold all of humanity responsible for climate change is to let capitalism off the hook. … All human beings, to be sure, will bear the consequences of climactic disruption and the collapse of biodiversity, albeit not in equal measure. But it is impossible, in light of history, to claim that all members of humanity share the same degree of responsibility for this disaster. A North American cannot be just as responsible for upheavals of the Earth System as a Kenyan who consumes, on average, thirty times less energy and primary materials than him.

Indeed, as Malm argues, the adoption of fossil fuels was not only the work of a small number of English men, but was imposed domestically against the active resistance of the working class and propagated globally by way of violent imperialism.

While these thinkers appreciate the Anthropocene perspective's role in advancing environmental debate in the public sphere, they believe that it ultimately serves to reify and mystify the real causes of environmental crisis, and even impede the action needed to mitigate it, since doing so would be a vain attempt to countermand the trends of nature. The Capitalocene moves the root of the problem back into the sphere of historically contingent social priorities that can be challenged and remade by those with the will and organization to do so.

Since the Capitalocene notion's debut, it has been applied by scholars in diverse fields such as architecture, literary analysis, digital studies, and pedagogy. It has been invoked approvingly by philosopher Frédéric Lordon and the editorial board of Scientific American, and has been discussed in various general-audience publications.

Origin

The “Capitalocene” framework originated in the early twenty-first century from a dialogue between proponents of the “Anthropocene” and thinkers from the eco-Marxist and ecofeminist traditions. The Anthropocene concept was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen in 2002, who described it as a new, post-Holocene era in which in the global atmosphere is undergoing major, long-term transformation on account of human activity, particularly global warming. Crutzen suggested that this era began in the late seventeenth century with James Watt's design of the steam engine. Since the publication of Crutzen's essay, the Anthropocene has come to be widely discussed in academic and popular writing.

Ecological Marxism traces its roots to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Although anthropogenic global warming was not known to the two men, both were interested in the unintended natural consequences of human modes of production. The topic was an occasional theme in their later writing, as seen most notably in Marx's exploration of “social metabolism” and Engels' passage on the “revenge of nature.” Although this facet of their work was long neglected, the rise of the environmental movement in the late twentieth century provoked a new interest in these passages and in environmental questions more generally among Marxist scholars of that time, exemplified by James O'Connor's theory of the “second contradiction of capitalism” and John Bellamy Foster's exegesis of Marx's “metabolic rift.” As Crutzen's framework spread among natural scientists and filtered down to the wider public, it attracted the attention of social scientists from this and the related ecofeminist school.

The term “Capitalocene” was first coined in 2009 by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm, then a doctoral student at the University of Lund. Through private correspondence it spread to other scholars such as feminist Donna Haraway and geographer Jason W. Moore.

Detailed Overview

Since the first invocation of the the concept, at least two distinct formulations thereof emerged concurrently in the early-to-mid 2010s. The first is that of Malm himself, joined by Alf Hornborg, Kohei Saito, and others broadly associated with the metabolic rift school. The other was developed by Moore and Haraway. The disagreement between these two camps is derived from their adherence, respectively, to the “Political Marxism” of Robert Brenner and the World-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, antagonists in a long-running debate on the origins of capitalism.

For Malm, the Capitalocene is the era governed by “fossil capitalism,” a mode of production characterized by “self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions.” Malm, then, follows Crutzen in narrowly identifying CO₂-driven warming as the defining attribute of our era, on account of its major consequences for every part of the biosphere. Though he does not deny the importance of other forms of environmental disruption, he considers climate change worthy of special attention and an adequate yardstick for all the others. Malm departs from Crutzen, however, in his periodization. The Capitalocene begins not with the invention of Watt's steam engine, but with its ascendancy as the main source of power for the British cotton industry in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. To him, the mere invention of the engine (let alone that of fire, as argued by some Anthropocene proponents ) is not sufficient, nor is the widespread use of coal for heating purposes in Elizabethan England . It was only when fossil fuels became a means of “self-sustaining growth” by way of provisioning generally applicable industrial power that massive and growing carbon emissions became an economic imperative.

The adoption of fossil power, by Malm's account, was not due to inherent drives of the “human enterprise” such as population growth, “limited productive powers of the land,” or the self-evident superiority of steam technology. Fossil Capital argues that steam power's real advantage at the time and place of its adoption was the degree of control over production it gave to British textile mill owners. Adoption of new technology is typically assumed to be driven by its potential to reduce wage expenses; in the case of weaving, however, mechanization was actually caused by the extremely low cost of labor power. Following the Panic of 1825, weavers' wages plummeted to bare subsistence level; this, however, compelled weavers—who generally worked from home, without continual supervision—to make a living by embezzling their product and selling it on the side, incurring losses to their employers. Yet even in this case, writes Malm, it is not obvious that steam-powered mechanization should have prevailed over more established water power. Beginning in 1924, Scottish engineer Robert Thom developed a highly advanced industrial water supply system, first implemented in the town of Greenock, Scotland, which could power mills at one-eighth the expense of steam power. This attracted wide interest from British manufacturers, and ambitious plans were made to construct similar infrastructure on the River Irwell and near Saddleworth, before being abandoned. While the exact reason for the cancellation of these projects is uncertain due to the loss of relevant documents, Malm argues that it was fundamentally a collective action problem: manufacturers were not willing to make a necessary large, pooled investment that might benefit their competitors more than them, and which would be controlled by a joint association rather than within the confines of their own mill. In sum, the rise of fossil fuels was not a collective decision of mankind nor the inevitable result of its nature, but the outcome of specific dynamics of capitalist production. “Capitalocene,” in Malm's opinion, therefore has the advantage of being more accurate and precise than “Anthropocene.”

WIP

Criticism and Revision

Victor Court, while finding the term useful, opines that it overemphasizes the last two-hundred years of fossil fuel capitalism. According to him: “If there is a Capitalocene, it first emerged in the sixteenth century, if not at the onset of the second Middle Age (twelfth century), and perhaps even antiquity in certain diffuse forms.” Court goes on to note that in the twentieth century, “non-capitalist [regimes]—or at any rate those not characterized by private property—were also extremely extractivist and responsible for a great deal of pollution. Just like capitalist societies, these socialist-inspired totalitarian and bureaucratic collectivist regimes relied massively on fossil fuels, all the while engendering ecological disasters comparable to those of Western capitalism.”

Along similar lines, philosopher Serge Audier [fr] wrote in his 2019 book L'Âge productiviste [The Productivist Age]: "If we are to speak of the “Capitalocene,” then perhaps we are also obliged to speak of a kind of 'Socialocene,' or, all the more appropriately, of a 'Communistocene.' Curiously, none have been willing to take that step. However vexing it may be to acknowledge the major role in the ecological crisis played not just by communist regimes, but by the broader socialist left on account of its majoritarian tendencies, this historic responsibility must be fully reckoned with."

See Also

• Aral Sea—object of an ecological disaster caused by a socialist state, as alluded to by Audier and Court
• Degrowth
• Ecosocialism

WIP

Further Reading

• Antonacci, John Peter (2021-08-14). "Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene: Militarized Ecologies of Accumulation in the Long Sixteenth Century". Journal of World-Systems Research. 27 (2): 439–467. doi:10.5195/jwsr.2021.1045. ISSN 1076-156X.
• Corwin, J. E., Gidwani, V. "Repair Work as Care: On Maintaining the Planet in the Capitalocene". Antipode. doi:10.1111/anti.12791. ISSN 1467-8330. Retrieved 9 August 2023.
• Ferdinand, Malcolm [in French] (2022). Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Critical South. Translated by Smith, Anthony Paul. Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-5038-8.
• Gunderson, Ryan; Stuart, Diana (2 January 2020). "Human-animal relations in the capitalocene: environmental impacts and alternatives". Environmental Sociology. 6 (1). Routledge: 68–81. doi:10.1080/23251042.2019.1666784.
• Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-6224-1.
• Jansen, K., Jongerden, J. (14 December 2021). "Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies". The Capitalocene response to the Anthropocene. Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 636–646. doi:10.4337/9781788972468.00080. ISBN 978-1-78897-246-8.
• Moore, Jason W. (May 2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press. ISBN 9781629631486.
• Moore, Jason (2018). "The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy". The Journal of Peasant Studies. 45 (2): 237–279. doi:10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587. ISSN 1743-9361.
• Saito, Kohei (2 February 2023). "4. Monism and the Non-identity of Nature". Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 103–135. ISBN 978-1-00-936618-2.

References

• Arons, Wendy (2020-05-01). "Tragedies of the Capitalocene". Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. 8 (1): 16–33. doi:10.1515/jcde-2020-0003. ISSN 2195-0164. Retrieved 2023-01-04.
• Béraud, Philippe; Cormerais, Franck (2020). "Bernard Stiegler et le Capitalocène : l'appréciation d'une controverse avec Jason W. Moore" [Bernard Stiegler and the Capitalocene: Evaluation of a Debate with Jason W. Moore]. Études digitales (in French) (9): 109–121. doi:10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-11521-2.p.0109.
• Brenner, Neil; Katsikis, Nikos (January 2020). "Operational Landscapes: Hinterlands of the Capitalocene". Architectural Design. 90 (1): 22–31. doi:10.1002/ad.2521. eISSN 1554-2769. ISSN 0003-8504.
• Colombo, Fabien (2020). "Vers un Capitalocène de plateforme ? Éléments pour une articulation théorique" [Towards a Platform Capitalocene? Elements of a Theoretical Articulation]. Études digitales (in French) (9): 67–88. doi:10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-11521-2.p.0067. ISBN 978-2-406-11521-2.
• Crutzen, Paul J. (January 2002). "Geology of mankind". Nature. 415 (6867). Nature Publishing Group: 23–23. doi:10.1038/415023a. ISSN 1476-4687.
• Malm, Andreas; Hornborg, Alf (1 April 2014). "The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative". The Anthropocene Review. 1 (1). SAGE Publications: 62–69. doi:10.1177/2053019613516291. ISSN 2053-0196.
• Malm, Andreas (2016). Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-78478-129-3.
• Moore, Jason (2017). "The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis". The Journal of Peasant Studies. 44 (3): 594–630. doi:10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036. ISSN 1743-9361.
• Pedersen, Helena, Windsor, Sally, Knutsson, Benjamin, Sanders, Dawn, Wals, Arjen, Franck, Olof (23 February 2022). "Education for sustainable development in the 'Capitalocene'". Educational Philosophy and Theory. 54 (3). Routledge: 224–227. doi:10.1080/00131857.2021.1987880. ISSN 0013-1857.