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| "Anthropocene" names a symptom; "Capitalocene" names the disease. Image Credit: Scientific Frontline |
The early twenty-first century has been defined by a growing scientific and social consensus that the Earth system has entered a state of profound and dangerous instability. From the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to the rapid acidification of the oceans and the accelerating extinction of species, the indicators of planetary health are flashing red. For nearly two decades, the dominant conceptual framework for understanding this crisis has been the "Anthropocene"—the "Age of Man." Popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen at the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene thesis suggests that human activity has become the primary geological force shaping the planet, surpassing natural variability. It posits a new epoch in which "Humanity," as a collective biological species, has fundamentally altered the stratigraphic record.
However, a rigorous and increasingly influential critique has emerged from the fields of environmental sociology, historical geography, and eco-Marxism. This critique suggests that the Anthropocene concept, while scientifically useful in describing biophysical changes, is sociologically bankrupt. It argues that the term "Anthropocene" engages in a false universalization, attributing the ecological crimes of a specific historical system to an undifferentiated "humanity." In doing so, it naturalizes the crisis, presenting it as the inevitable outcome of human nature rather than the specific result of a specific mode of production. The alternative framework proposed is the Capitalocene.
Capitalocene Naming the Real Crisis
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This report provides an analysis of the Capitalocene. It does not merely treat the term as a semantic preference but as a robust theoretical architecture that reorients our understanding of planetary history. The Capitalocene argument posits that the origins of the modern ecological emergency are found not in the steam engines of the nineteenth century, nor in the nuclear tests of the twentieth, but in the rise of the capitalist world-ecology during the "long sixteenth century" (c. 1450–1650). It argues that capitalism is not just an economic system but a way of organizing nature—a "world-ecology" that relies on the "cheapening" of life to sustain accumulation.
Through a detailed examination of the theoretical contributions of Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Donna Haraway, and others, this report will trace the genealogy of the concept, explore its core mechanisms (such as the "Seven Cheap Things"), and analyze the historical transitions that defined it. It will grapple with the contentious debates surrounding the "metabolic rift," the racial dynamics of the "Plantationocene," and the political horizons of "Reparations Ecology." Finally, as requested, the report will conclude with a dedicated comparative analysis of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, delineating the profound political and intellectual stakes of this terminological choice.
The Genealogy of a Concept
The intellectual history of the Capitalocene is rooted in a dissatisfaction with the "Species Thinking" that came to dominate environmental discourse in the early 2000s. While the term "Anthropocene" gained rapid traction after Paul Crutzen’s proposal in 2000, critical scholars began to notice a troubling erasure within its narrative. The standard Anthropocene story—often illustrated by the "hockey stick" graphs of the Great Acceleration—depicted a singular human enterprise ascending to planetary dominance. It conflated the subsistence farmer in Bangladesh with the CEO of a fossil fuel corporation, subsuming distinct classes, races, and empires under the monolithic banner of Anthropos.
The term "Capitalocene" was first coined in 2009 by the Swedish human ecologist Andreas Malm, then a doctoral student at Lund University. During a seminar discussion on the Anthropocene, Malm interjected with a critical corrective: "Forget the Anthropocene... We should call it the Capitalocene!". This neologism was not merely a rhetorical flourish but a theoretical stake in the ground. It asserted that the geological epoch was being driven by the dynamics of capital accumulation, not by the innate biological drives of the human species.
From that seminar room in Lund, the concept spread through private correspondence and academic networks. It was quickly adopted by the sociologist Jason W. Moore, who had been independently developing a framework for understanding capitalism as a "world-ecology," and by the feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway, who saw in it a necessary critique of the "Human/Nature" dualism. By 2013 and 2014, the term began to appear in published works, serving as a rallying point for scholars who sought to "name the system" responsible for the crisis.
The emergence of the Capitalocene must be understood as a critique of what Moore calls the "Popular Anthropocene." This discourse, prevalent in media and policy circles, frames the ecological crisis as a Malthusian problem of "too many people" or a technical problem of "inefficient resource use." It presents humanity as a geological agent that has "awakened" to its power and must now learn to manage the Earth system—a perspective often labeled "geo-managerialism." The Capitalocene proponents argue that this narrative is historically illiterate. It ignores the fact that the rise of fossil fuels, the enclosure of the commons, and the global biodiversity crash were not the result of a collective human decision but the outcome of violent class struggles and imperial conquests.
As the concept matured, it bifurcated into two primary theoretical streams. One, led by Jason W. Moore, emphasizes the longue durée of capitalism as a world-ecology, dating the crisis to the expansion of Europe in the long sixteenth century. The other, led by Andreas Malm, focuses on the qualitative shift to "fossil capital" in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the combustion of coal as the decisive break. Despite these internal differences, the Capitalocene genealogy is unified by a refusal to accept the "Age of Man" as a neutral description of reality. It insists that geology and history are knotted together, and that to unknot them requires an analysis of power, not just chemistry.
Theoretical Foundations I: World-Ecology and the Oikeios
The most elaborate theoretical architecture for the Capitalocene has been constructed by Jason W. Moore. His framework, known as World-Ecology, challenges the foundational binaries of Western thought. Moore argues that standard environmental studies—and indeed, much of standard Marxism—suffers from "Cartesian Dualism." This is the view that "Society" (human organization) and "Nature" (the environment) are separate spheres that interact like billiard balls. In this view, society impacts nature, and nature limits society.
Moore contends that this dualism is not just an analytical error; it is a "technology of power" central to capitalism itself. Capitalism, he argues, could not exist without the "Real Abstraction" of Nature—the conceptual creation of a passive, external world that can be mapped, quantified, and appropriated. To counter this, Moore introduces the concept of the Oikeios.
The Oikeios: The Web of Life as Method
The term Oikeios is derived from the Greek root for "household" (oikos) and "place." For Moore, the Oikeios names the creative, generative, and multilayered relation of life-making through which all human and extra-human activity unfolds. It is the "relation of the whole." In this framework, humanity is not "in" nature, nor is nature "in" humanity. Rather, humanity is a specific differentiation of the web of life. History is the history of the Oikeios.
This perspective shifts the analytical focus from "interaction" (two separate things bumping into each other) to "dialectical unity" (one process unfolding through different forms). Moore argues that capitalism does not "have" an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime. It is a specific way of organizing the web of life. Wall Street, the factory, and the monocrop plantation are not just "social" institutions; they are "bundles" of human and extra-human natures.
Abstract Social Nature and Real Abstractions
Central to the World-Ecology framework is the concept of Abstract Social Nature. Moore draws a parallel between Marx’s "Abstract Social Labor" (the reduction of distinct human activities to a homogenous unit of time/value) and the way capitalism treats the environment. Through surveying, mapping, and the legal codes of property, capitalism creates "Abstract Social Nature." A forest in Indonesia, a wetland in Florida, and a mine in Chile are stripped of their specific ecological and cultural contexts and rendered as interchangeable units of "land" or "resource" that can be valued in dollars.
This process relies on "Real Abstractions"—concepts that become material forces. "Nature" (with a capital N) is one such abstraction. Moore argues that "Nature" was invented in the sixteenth century as a category to describe everything that the bourgeoisie wished to appropriate without payment. This included not only trees and rivers but also the bodies of Indigenous peoples, Africans, and women. By defining these groups as "natural" (closer to nature than to civilization), capitalism justified their "Cheap" appropriation. Thus, the Nature/Society binary is not a neutral description of reality but a class strategy.
Accumulation by Appropriation
Moore distinguishes between two forms of accumulation that must work in tandem: Accumulation by Capitalization and Accumulation by Appropriation.
- Accumulation by Capitalization is the standard Marxist economic cycle: capital buys labor power and machinery to produce commodities. This process is expensive and tends toward a falling rate of profit.
- Accumulation by Appropriation is the seizure of "Cheap Natures"—energy, food, raw materials, and human life—that are "outside" the circuit of capital but essential to it. These are the "free gifts" that subsidize the system.
Moore argues that capitalism operates on a "Law of Cheap Nature." The system can only survive if the cost of the "Four Cheaps" (Labor, Food, Energy, Raw Materials) is kept low relative to the accumulation of capital. The crisis of the Capitalocene, in Moore’s view, is that the opportunities for "Cheap Nature" are running out. We have reached the end of the "Great Frontier," and the costs of climate change and exhaustion are rising faster than capital can fix them.
Theoretical Foundations II: Fossil Capital and Class Power
While Moore focuses on the longue durée of the web of life, Andreas Malm provides a sharper, more specific focus on the energy basis of the Capitalocene. In his seminal work Fossil Capital, Malm investigates the origins of the "Fossil Economy"—defined as a socioeconomic structure of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels.
The Puzzle of the Steam Transition
Malm’s central contribution is a detailed historical inquiry into the British cotton industry’s transition from water power to steam power in the second quarter of the nineteenth century (c. 1825–1850). The standard "Ricardian-Malthusian" narrative posits that this transition was inevitable due to scarcity: Britain ran out of suitable river sites for water wheels, or population growth demanded more powerful machines. The steam engine, in this view, was adopted because it was cheaper and more efficient.
Malm explodes this myth through rigorous empirical analysis. He demonstrates that in the 1830s, water power was actually cheaper than steam power. The technology of the water wheel had advanced significantly (e.g., the designs of Robert Thom), and there was an abundance of unexploited river sites in the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere. Steam engines, by contrast, were prone to explosion, expensive to build, and required a constant, costly diet of coal.
Why, then, did the capitalists switch?
Steam as a Weapon of Class War
Malm answers that the transition was driven by the dynamics of class power and labor discipline. Water power had a fatal flaw for the capitalist: it was geographically fixed. To use a river, a capitalist had to build a mill in a specific, often remote, rural location. This meant they had to build a town from scratch, import labor, and house them. This created a "tight" labor market. If the workers in a remote water mill went on strike, they were irreplaceable. The capitalist was held hostage by the river and the workers.
Furthermore, water power was subject to "concrete time." Rivers freeze in winter and dry up in summer. Flow varies day to day. This prevented the imposition of a rigid, abstract industrial workday.
The steam engine solved these problems not by being cheaper, but by being mobile. A steam engine could be placed anywhere, which meant it was placed in the hearts of populous cities like Manchester and Lancashire. Here, a "reserve army of labor" (the desperate urban poor) ensured that wages remained low. If workers struck, they could be easily replaced. The steam engine allowed capital to break free from the spatial constraints of the river and the temporal constraints of the season. It allowed for the imposition of "Abstract Time"—the 12-hour factory shift, running rain or shine, summer or winter.
The Fossil Economy
For Malm, this reveals the essence of the Capitalocene: it is not a regime of "energy efficiency" but a regime of power. The smoke rising from the Manchester chimneys was the signal of capital’s victory over labor. The "Fossil Economy" was established to secure control over the production process. This leads Malm to define the Capitalocene as the era of "fossil capitalism," dating its true "start" to this structural transition in the nineteenth century, rather than Moore’s sixteenth century or the AWG’s 1950.
Malm also introduces the distinction between "Flow" (water, wind, sun) and "Stock" (coal, oil). Pre-capitalist and early capitalist societies relied on flow. Flows are intermittent and collective. Stocks are dense, buried, and arguably more amenable to private property—they can be hoarded, transported, and burned at will. The Capitalocene is the "Age of the Stock," where the buried sunlight of the Carboniferous period is exhumed to fuel the accumulation of value.
Historical Origins
A defining feature of the Capitalocene discourse, particularly in Moore’s World-Ecology, is the insistence on pushing the timeline of the crisis back to the "long sixteenth century" (c. 1450–1650). This periodization challenges the "Two Century Model" that sees modernity as a product of the Industrial Revolution. Moore argues that the essential relations of the Capitalocene—the "Law of Value" and the "Law of Cheap Nature"—were established during the rise of the capitalist world-economy and the invasion of the Americas.
Pangea II and the Columbian Exchange
The Capitalocene begins with a geological event enacted by human powers: the reunification of the Earth’s continents. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 initiated the "Columbian Exchange," which Moore describes as the restoration of "Pangea II." For 175 million years, the ecosystems of the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) and the New World (the Americas) had evolved in isolation. Their sudden collision was a biological singularity.
This exchange was the foundational act of "Cheap Nature." The transfer of New World crops—maize, potatoes, manioc, chili peppers—to Europe and Asia revolutionized the global food system. These crops were high-yielding and adaptable, allowing for a massive increase in the caloric supply available to the European proletariat. This surplus of "Cheap Food" fueled urbanization and population growth in the metropolitan cores, providing the demographic base for industrialization centuries later.
However, this cheapness was purchased with necrotic violence. The exchange also brought Old World pathogens (smallpox, influenza, measles) to the Americas, resulting in the "Great Dying." It is estimated that up to 90% of the Indigenous population of the Americas perished within a century—a demographic collapse of roughly 50 to 60 million people. This massive depopulation led to the reforestation of abandoned Indigenous farmlands, which sequestered enough carbon to contribute to the "Little Ice Age" (the Orbis Spike). This was the "Necrocene"—the "New Death"—which cleared the land for colonial appropriation.
The Commodity Frontiers: Potosí and Madeira
The "Long Sixteenth Century" saw the invention of the Commodity Frontier—a strategy of expansion where capital moves to new territories to seize low-cost natures. Two key examples illustrate this early Capitalocene dynamic:
1. Madeira and the Sugar Frontier: In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese colonized the island of Madeira ("Island of Wood"). They clear-cut the dense forests to fuel the boiling houses of sugar plantations. Within decades, the forests were decimated, and the ecological basis of the industry collapsed. Capital simply moved on, relocating the sugar frontier to São Tomé, then Brazil, then the Caribbean. This "slash-and-burn" capitalism established the pattern of exhausting a local ecosystem and moving to the next frontier.
2. Potosí and the Silver Frontier: In 1545, the Spanish discovered the silver mountain of Potosí in present-day Bolivia. Potosí became the engine of the global capitalist economy, providing the liquidity (silver pesos) that lubricated trade from Seville to Shanghai. To extract this wealth, the Spanish colonial state organized the mita, a system of forced Indigenous labor. The refining process utilized mercury amalgamation, poisoning the watershed and the bodies of the workers. Potosí was a "world-eater," consuming forests for fuel and human lives for labor at a voracious rate. It demonstrated the Capitalocene’s reliance on the fusion of state power, colonial violence, and ecological exhaustion.
These examples demonstrate that the "industrial" scale of ecological transformation did not await the steam engine. The landscape transformation of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, in Moore’s words, "a revolution in the scale, speed, and scope of landscape change" that rivals anything in the nineteenth century. This was the dawn of the Capitalocene.
The Mechanisms of Cheapness: The Seven Cheap Things
To sustain the "endless accumulation of capital" in the face of entropy and resistance, the Capitalocene relies on a specific strategy: Cheapness. In their collaborative work A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel expand the analysis of the "Four Cheaps" to "Seven Cheap Things."
"Cheapness" here is not just a market price. It is a strategy of power. It involves the violence of making things cheap—forcing down the cost of reproduction so that capital can profit. It relies on keeping the vast majority of the web of life "off the books."
1. Cheap Nature
Cheap Nature is the ontological ground of the Capitalocene. It is the act of separating the world into "Society" (the internal, the valuable) and "Nature" (the external, the free). By defining nature as external, capital creates a domain of "free gifts." The trees, the water, the minerals, and the air are treated as having no value until they are extracted. This cheapening is achieved through technologies of mapping (cartography), naming (taxonomy), and conquering (colonialism).
2. Cheap Money
Cheap Money refers to the role of finance and the state in facilitating expansion. From the Genoese bankers who funded the Spanish Empire to the modern central banks, access to low-interest capital allows states and corporations to launch the wars and infrastructure projects necessary to open new frontiers. Cheap Money is the "levitating act" that allows capital to operate in the future, betting on the continued appropriation of nature.
3. Cheap Work
Cheap Work is the mobilization of human energy for accumulation. The Capitalocene narrative challenges the idea that capitalism is defined solely by "free wage labor." Instead, it highlights the essential role of unfree labor: slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, and the prison industrial complex. The Atlantic slave trade was a central mechanism of Cheap Work, treating human beings as "Cheap Nature" to be used up and discarded. The policing of time (the clock) and the policing of bodies (the whip) are the tools of Cheap Work.
4. Cheap Care
Perhaps the most significant "hidden subsidy" of the Capitalocene is Cheap Care. This refers to the sphere of Social Reproduction: the birthing, raising, feeding, healing, and emotional support of the workforce. Historically, this work has been assigned to women and relegated to the "private" sphere of the household. It is unpaid or radically underpaid. By defining care work as "love" or "natural duty," capitalism avoids paying for the reproduction of its own labor force. If capital had to pay for every hour of childcare, cooking, and cleaning that produces a healthy worker, the rate of profit would collapse.
5. Cheap Food
Food is the primary determinant of the value of labor power. If food is cheap, wages can be low. The history of the Capitalocene is the history of "agricultural revolutions" designed to drive down the cost of calories. This connects the sixteenth-century Polish wheat frontiers to the twentieth-century Green Revolution. The Chicken McNugget is cited by Patel and Moore as the icon of Cheap Food. It is a commodity that integrates all the Cheaps: the bird is a genetic modification (Cheap Nature) fed on soy grown on deforested land (Cheap Energy/Nature), processed by low-wage workers (Cheap Work) who rely on unpaid care at home (Cheap Care), and subsidized by state corn/soy policies (Cheap Money). The result is a caloric bomb sold for pennies, keeping the working class fed and quiet.
6. Cheap Energy
Energy amplifies labor productivity. A worker with a chainsaw cuts more wood than a worker with an axe; a worker with a bulldozer moves more earth than one with a shovel. Cheap Energy (wood, peat, coal, oil) allows capital to squeeze more commodities out of every hour of human labor. However, Moore argues that the era of Cheap Energy is ending. As the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) declines (we now have to drill miles deep for oil), the "free lunch" of fossil fuels is over, creating a crisis of accumulation.
7. Cheap Lives
Cheap Lives refers to the "ethico-political" management of populations. To maintain the system of cheapness, the state must constantly police the boundaries of who matters. Racialization is the primary tool here. By designating certain populations (Indigenous, Black, Brown, colonized) as "less than human" or "part of nature," the state justifies their dispossession and extermination. Cheap Lives describes the differential value of human life in the Capitalocene—whose life is protected, and whose life is expendable in the sacrifice zones of extraction.
The Metabolic Rift Debate
The Capitalocene theoretical space is animated by a rigorous and often sharp debate over the concept of the "Metabolic Rift." This concept, reclaimed from Karl Marx’s work by sociologist John Bellamy Foster, attempts to theorize the ecological destruction of capitalism through the lens of material flows.
The Orthodox Rift: John Bellamy Foster
Foster’s "Metabolic Rift" theory is grounded in Marx’s study of nineteenth-century agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig. Liebig observed that modern capitalist agriculture was depleting the soil of essential nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium). This occurred because of the Town-Country division. As the population urbanized, the food (and its nutrients) was transported from the countryside to the city. The waste products of the urban population (human excrement), which should have been returned to the soil to close the nutrient cycle, were instead flushed into rivers, causing pollution.
Foster interprets this as an "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism." He argues that capitalism creates a material rupture in the natural cycles of the Earth. Foster’s framework maintains an analytical distinction between "Nature" (the universal metabolism) and "Society" (the capitalist mode of production). He argues that this dualism is necessary to diagnose the specific injury capitalism inflicts on the planet.
The World-Ecological Critique: Jason W. Moore
Jason W. Moore challenges Foster’s interpretation. He argues that Foster’s insistence on "Society" and "Nature" as separate spheres ("Cartesian Dualism") reproduces the very ideology of the Capitalocene. Moore asserts that there is no "rift" between two separate things; there is only a "shift" in the configuration of the web of life.
For Moore, the metabolic rift is not just a biophysical problem of soil chemistry; it is a problem of accumulation. The "rift" is a rupture in the relation of value. When the soil is exhausted, it threatens the strategy of "Cheap Food." Moore argues that we should think of a "singular metabolism"—the Oikeios—rather than two interacting metabolisms. He suggests that the "metabolic rift" theory risks becoming a "Green Arithmetic" that merely adds up environmental damages without explaining the internal logic of how capitalism co-produces nature. Moore posits "multiple rifts" that shift historically (e.g., the nitrogen rift of the 19th century, the carbon rift of the 21st), each specific to the regime of accumulation of its time.
This debate is not merely academic. It reflects a deeper disagreement about political strategy. Foster’s view tends to emphasize the violation of "natural limits" and the need to restore "natural cycles." Moore’s view emphasizes the "internal limits" of capitalism—the fact that capitalism is running out of Cheap Nature to appropriate—suggesting that the system will collapse not just from ecological catastrophe but from the rising cost of doing business.
Plantationocene and Chthulucene
The critique of the Anthropocene opened the floodgates for alternative namings of the epoch. Two of the most significant concepts that intersect with the Capitalocene are the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene.
The Plantationocene
Proposed by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, and elaborated by geographers like Janae Davis and anthropologists like Sophie Chao, the Plantationocene identifies the Slave Plantation as the transformative model of the modern world. While the Capitalocene focuses on the abstract logic of value, the Plantationocene focuses on the material and racial logic of the monoculture.
The plantation was a system of "simplification for control." It took complex, diverse ecosystems and replaced them with a single crop (sugar, cotton, rubber) designed for export. It took diverse human populations and reduced them to units of forced labor. The Plantationocene argues that this logic—"scalability," homogeneity, discipline—is the blueprint for the factory, the prison, and the industrial farm.
Crucially, the Plantationocene centers Race. It argues that the ecological crisis is inextricably bound to the history of white supremacy and colonialism. The "cheapening" of the earth was predicated on the "cheapening" of Black and Brown bodies. By focusing on the plantation, this concept highlights the "ongoingness" of these relations; the plantation didn't disappear, it metamorphosed into the "Green Desert" of the soy field and the palm oil estate.
The Chthulucene
Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene is a radical departure from both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The term derives from the Greek khthôn (earth/ground), referring to the chthonic powers of the earth—the microbes, the fungi, the spiders, the ancient ones. (Haraway explicitly distinguishes this from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, which she views as a patriarchal monster story).
Haraway argues that both "Anthropocene" and "Capitalocene" are "tragic" narratives. They tell a story of a single hero/villain (Man or Capital) destroying the world. This, she argues, is a "God’s eye view" that breeds cynicism. The Chthulucene is a name for the "now"—a time of "staying with the trouble." It emphasizes "Sympoiesis" (making-with) rather than "Autopoiesis" (self-making).
In the Chthulucene, we are all "compost." We are inextricably entangled with other species. The political imperative is not just to "overthrow capitalism" (though that is necessary) but to "Make Kin"—to forge new, non-biological family structures across species lines. It is a call for a "tentacular" thinking that recognizes the messy, muddled, multi-species reality of life on a damaged planet. While the Capitalocene names the disease, the Chthulucene names the terrain of survival.
Critiques and Counterarguments
The Capitalocene framework, while powerful, is not without its detractors.
The "Socialocene" and the Problem of Existing Socialism
One of the most persistent critiques comes from scholars like Serge Audier, who point to the environmental record of twentieth-century state socialism. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Eastern Bloc were responsible for horrific ecological devastation—the draining of the Aral Sea, the Chernobyl disaster, the massive pollution of the "Black Triangle." If the crisis is specific to Capitalism, why did Communism destroy nature just as efficiently?
Critics argue that the term "Capitalocene" obscures the role of "Productivism"—the shared industrial ideology that views nature as a resource to be conquered for human development. Some propose terms like "Socialocene" or "Industrialocene" to capture this broader dynamic.
Capitalocene defenders, particularly Moore, respond by arguing that these socialist states were still part of the Capitalist World-Ecology. They were forced to compete in a global market, sell resources for hard currency, and militarize against capitalist powers. Therefore, their "socialist" nature strategies were structurally constrained by the "Law of Value" of the broader world system. They were "sub-imperialisms" within the Capitalocene, not exits from it.
Eurocentrism and Determinism
Postcolonial scholars have raised concerns that the Capitalocene narrative remains fundamentally Eurocentric. By locating the "motor" of history entirely within European expansion (1492) or British industrialization (1830), does it reduce the rest of the world to passive victims? Does it ignore the ecological agencies and histories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas prior to colonization?
Furthermore, critics like Victor Court argue that the focus on "Fossil Capital" can lead to Technological Determinism—the idea that the steam engine "caused" the social relations, rather than vice versa. Malm explicitly fights this interpretation (arguing the social caused the technical), but the danger of reducing the crisis to a "resource" story remains.
Reparations Ecology
The debate over the Capitalocene is ultimately a debate over the future. If the problem is misdiagnosed as "humanity," the solutions proposed are often "geo-managerial"—technocratic fixes, population control, and carbon markets. These solutions leave the underlying system of accumulation intact.
If the problem is diagnosed as the Capitalocene, the horizon of possibility shifts. Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel propose "Reparations Ecology" as the necessary political project for the twenty-first century.
Reparations Ecology argues that we cannot simply "green" the economy. We must repair the deep structural violence that created the "Seven Cheaps." This involves:
1. Recognition: Acknowledging that the wealth of the Global North was built on the unpaid work of slaves, women, and nature. This requires a "accounting" of the true cost of the modern world.
2. Redistribution: A massive transfer of wealth and resources from the accumulators to the dispossessed. This includes land reform, the cancellation of debt for the Global South, and the funding of adaptation and resilience.
3. Re-sacralization: Moving beyond the view of nature as a "dead matter." This does not necessarily mean a return to religion, but a cultural shift to viewing the web of life as a partner in "life-making" rather than a warehouse of resources.
4. De-commodification: The most radical demand. Food, housing, energy, and care must be removed from the logic of the market. They are human rights, not commodities.
Reparations Ecology aligns with the movements of the "environmentalism of the poor"—La Via Campesina (food sovereignty), the Movement for Black Lives (social justice), and Indigenous resistance (Water Protectors). It posits that there is no "environmental justice" without "social justice." We cannot save the "Nature" of the Anthropocene without ending the "Cheapness" of the Capitalocene.
Anthropocene vs Capitalocene
The distinction between the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene is the defining intellectual fault line of our time. It dictates not only how we write history but how we imagine the future. While both concepts agree that the Earth System has undergone a catastrophic state shift, they diverge radically on the agents, the timeline, and the remedies.
Anthropos vs. Capital
The Anthropocene attributes the planetary crisis to Anthropos—the human species as a collective geological force. Its narrative often relies on the "We": "We have altered the atmosphere," "We are destroying biodiversity." This framing implies that the drive to dominate nature is innate to the human condition—a biological imperative of Homo sapiens. It flattens the vast inequalities of history into a singular "human enterprise." It equates the carbon footprint of a subsistence farmer in the Sahel with that of a hedge fund manager in Manhattan.
The Capitalocene critiques this as a "false universalization." It identifies Capital—specifically the logic of endless accumulation and the class relations that sustain it—as the agent. It argues that the "We" of the Anthropocene is a fiction. The vast majority of humanity has been the object of the ecological transformation, not its subject. The crisis was driven by a specific class (the bourgeoisie), in specific nations (the imperial core), using specific tools (law, empire, finance) to organize the web of life. Moore famously states, "The Anthropocene is the geology of a race; the Capitalocene is the geology of a system." The crisis is Capitalogenic, not Anthropogenic.
The Timeline: 1950 vs. 1450
The Anthropocene, particularly in its "Geological" formulation (championed by the Anthropocene Working Group), locates the start of the epoch in the mid-twentieth century (c. 1950). This is the era of the "Great Acceleration," marked by the exponential spike in CO2, plastics, and radionuclides (the "Golden Spike" of atomic testing). This timeline focuses on the consequences—the moment the stratigraphic signal became undeniable.
The Capitalocene offers a deeper historical diagnosis.
- Jason W. Moore argues for the Long Sixteenth Century (c. 1450). He contends that the relations that produced the crisis—the separation of Nature and Society, the global conquest, the cheapening of life—were established with the rise of the capitalist world-ecology. The "state shift" began with the Columbian Exchange and the first global commodity frontiers.
- Andreas Malm argues for the Early Nineteenth Century (c. 1800-1830). He identifies the structural transition to Fossil Capital—the class-driven switch from water to steam—as the qualitative leap that locked the system into a trajectory of climate change.
The Solution: Management vs. Revolution
The Anthropocene framing often leads to Geo-Managerialism. If "Humanity" is the problem, then "Humanity" (led by scientists and technocrats) must take control of the planetary controls. This leads to solutions like geoengineering (solar radiation management), carbon capture, and market-based mechanisms (carbon taxes). It seeks to manage the Earth System while often leaving the economic system unquestioned. It is a politics of "adaptation" to the inevitable.
The Capitalocene framing demands Revolution. If the crisis is caused by the fundamental logic of capitalism—accumulation by appropriation—then "sustainable capitalism" is an impossibility. The solution requires dismantling the relations of production that rely on "Cheap Nature." It points toward Reparations Ecology, Eco-Socialism, and the abolition of the Nature/Society divide. It argues that we cannot "technologically fix" a problem that is social and historical in nature. As Malm argues, we must "pull the emergency brake" on the locomotive of history, not just try to steer it better.
My Final Thoughts
In the final analysis, the Capitalocene is an argument that we cannot solve a problem we cannot name. The term "Anthropocene" names a symptom; "Capitalocene" names the disease. By shifting the focus from "Man" to "Capital," the Capitalocene opens the door to a politics that is not just about survival, but about justice.
Research Links Scientific Frontline: What Is: The Anthropocene
Reference Number: wi010426_01
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