Capitalocene

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theory and history offered by the most significant environmental concept of our times: the Anthropocene. But are we living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man”? Is a different response more compelling, and better suited to the strange—and often terrifying—times in which we live? The contributors to this book diagnose the problems of Anthropocene thinking and propose an alternative: the global crises of the twenty-first century are rooted in the Capitalocene; not the Age of Man but the Age of Capital.

作者： 拉傑・帕特爾（Raj Patel）、傑森・摩爾（Jason W. Moore）▎譯者：林琬淳

哥倫布航行世界各地，「其他世界」的人和資源都臣服於他，他則為效忠的國王和皇后征服處女之地。性和取得銀礦的討論方式不該相提並論，然而在有人遷居到地球另一端的同時，他們用性別語言統治財產、征服產權的方式，與性征服雷同。從一開始，統治廉價自然和廉價工作，為的不只是改變人類如何擁有以及擁有什麼，同時也改變誰可以擁有和誰要工作，以及他們的出生和受到照護的方式。

烹飪、教導、養育、治療、組織和敬神這些工作，都早於資本主義。照護工作主要透過使用火而造成現代人類第一次大規模的生態改變。不過在資本主義的疆界，照護活動歷經劇變，反應和強調出現代基督教早期關於性與權力的概念。

Rozdział "Tania natura" z książki: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore: "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (Black Inc., Carlton 2018) w przekładzie: Andrzej W. Nowak, Przemysław Czapliński. Przekład zamieszczony w książce: "O jeden las za daleko". Red. P. Czapliński, Joanna B. Bednarek, Dawid Gostyński (2019). Autorzy opisują zapoczątkowany w XVI wieku proces wyodrębnienia natury z rzeczywistości ludzkiej i przekształcenia jej w "naturę tanią" - eksploatowalną, zyskowną, należącą do bogatszych. Na początku XXI wieku taniość natury dobiega końca, co znaczy nie tylko, że produkty naturalne (woda, pożywienie) będą coraz droższe, lecz także, że w postaci zakłóceń klimatycznych urealniają się wielowiekowe koszta niszczenia natury. [The authors describe the process of separating nature from human reality initiated in the 16th century and transforming it into a "cheap" nature - exploitable, profitable, belonging to richer ones. At the beginning of the 21st century, the cheapness of nature is coming to an end, which means not only that natural products (water, food) will be more and more expensive, but also that the centuries-long costs of destroying nature become real in the form of climatic disruptions.]

Lewis and Maslin explore geological markers for the beginning of the "Anthropocene"-beginning, in their periodization, in either 1492 (naming the birth of capitalism as the cause of planetary crisis) or 1945 (naming elitedriven militarization as its cause). In this essay, I argue for a synthesis of these two dynamics, locating both the birth of capitalism and a transformation of elite-driven militarization in the conquest of the New World during the Long Sixteenth Century. As such, I propose narrating planetary history through a "capitalocene as polemocene," "the age of capital as an age of war" framework.

The first ever ecological and ethical assessment of animal gelatin in analogue photographic film, calculating the environmental impact of film and the moral quandary that arises from using a product so tied to the structural violence of industrial animal agriculture - ultimately asking, is art a legitimate reason to exploit nonhumans and devastate our natural environment?

Elements for a World is a series of five publications specially produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Let's Talk About the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis" curated by Nora Razian and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016). Featuring newly commissioned essays and visual contributions, each publication is organized around a material reference – stone, wood, sky, water, and fire – symbolizing the elemental building blocks of our world. Each "element" examines urgent ecological concerns from a local and global perspective. The publications are edited by Ashkan Sepahvand, in collaboration with Nora Razian and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, and are published in Arabic and English.

Entro il 17 febbraio 2021 è possibile iscriversi alla Corso 3 - Donna Haraway, Chthulucene. Sopravvivere su un pianeta infetto, promosso dall’Atelier Narrazioni, spazio di ricerca transdisciplinare di IAPh Italia - Associazione Internazionale delle Filosofe, con il sostegno del Master in Studi e Politiche di Genere dell’Università Roma Tre.
Il corso è dedicato allo studio del volume della filosofa e biologa californiana, attraverso l’adozione di una metodologia che unisce “close reading”, lettura diffrattiva e ricerca postqualitativa. Il corso mira a rendere accessibili gli strumenti lessicali, narrativi e teorici del pensiero più recente di Donna Haraway, utili per figurare la particolare congiuntura storica attuale. Il corso è a cura di Isabella Pinto

Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This “withering” is perhaps most evident in capitalism’s failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model – as agro-biotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one amongst many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture’s contradictions to produce new contradictions: negative-value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation, and which can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly, toxic, and dangerous strategies. The rise of negative-value – whose accumulation has been latent for much of capitalist history – therefore suggests a significant and rapid erosion of opportunities for the appropriation of new streams of unpaid work/energy. As such, these new limits are qualitatively different from the nutrient- and resource-depletion of earlier, developmental crises of the longue durée Cheap Food model. These contradictions, within capital, arising from negative-value, are today encouraging an unprecedented shift towards a radical onto-logical politics, within capitalism as a whole, that destabilizes crucial points of agreement in the modern world-system: What is Food? What is Nature? What is Valuable?

¿Afronta actualmente el capitalismo el “fin de la naturaleza barata”? Si así es, ¿qué podría significar esto y cuáles con las implicaciones para el futuro? Estamos, de hecho, siendo testigos del fin de la naturaleza barata en un sentido específico histórico. En vez de contemplar el fin de la naturaleza barata como la reafirmación de “límites de crecimiento” externos, sostengo que, a día de hoy, el capitalismo ha agotado la relación histórica que la produce. El fin de la naturaleza barata se comprende mejor como el agotamiento de las relaciones de valor que han restaurado periódicamente los “Four Cheaps”: trabajo, alimentos, energía y materias primas. Fundamentalmente, estas relaciones de valor son coproducidas por, y a través de, humanos con el resto de la naturaleza. La cuestión decisiva, por lo tanto, enciende las relaciones que envuelven y despliegan las sucesivas configuraciones de la naturaleza humana y extra-humana, simbólicamente capacitadas y materialmente realizadas, a través de la larga duración del sistema-mundo moderno. Significativamente, la apropiación de trabajo no remunerado —incluyendo los “regalos gratuitos” de la naturaleza— y la explotación del trabajo asalariado, forman una unidad dialéctica. Los límites del crecimiento enfrentados actualmente por el capital son suficientemente reales, y son “límites” coproducidos a través del capitalismo como ecología-mundo, uniendo la acumulación de capital, la búsqueda de poder y la coproducción de naturaleza como un todo orgánico. El límite de la ecología-mundo del capital es el capital en sí mismo.

Autora: Donna Haraway
Traducción: Alexandra Navarro y María Marta Andreatta
Enlace a la fuente: http://revistaleca.org/journal/index.php/RLECA/article/view/53/48

No cabe duda que los procesos antropogénicos han producido efectos planetarios, en inter/intra-acción con otros procesos y especies, desde que nuestra propia especie puede ser identificada (desde algunas decenas de miles de años atrás); y la agricultura ha tenido un enorme efecto (desde algunos miles de años atrás). Ciertamente que, desde el inicio, las bacterias y sus parientes fueron, y aún son, los mayores de todos los terraformadores (y reformadores) planetarios, también en un sinnúmero de tipos de inter/intra-acción (incluso con las personas y sus prácticas, tecnológicas y otras)[1]. La propagación de plantas por dispersión de semillas, millones de años antes de la agricultura humana, representó un gran cambio en el planeta, como así también muchos otros eventos ecológicos de desarrollo histórico, revolucionarios y evolucionarios.

Il presente elaborato si pone l’obiettivo di indagare la questione ecologica, intesa come l’insieme dei temi sollevati dal degrado ambientale e dalle trasformazioni delle relazioni socio-ecologiche, e il campo della sua rappresentanza nella città di Bologna. Per conseguire questo progetto l’elaborato si articola in due parti : la prima è dedicata alla rassegna della letteratura e si compone di tre capitoli, la seconda parte invece è riservata alla restituzione della ricerca empirica ed è costituita da due capitoli più un terzo dedicato ai metodi e alle tecniche della ricerca.
Il percorso tracciato dai primi tre capitoli riguarda l’individuazione, la definizione e l’analisi di alcuni temi ritenuti centrali per la costruzione di un corpus coerente con gli obiettivi della ricerca. In primo luogo è stato necessario chiarire il significato dell’espressione Antropocene e delle diverse narrazioni associate alla sua interpretazione: l’insieme delle prospettive teoriche sulla nuova epoca geologica segnata dall’impatto dell’uomo, in quanto specie o secondo la divisione in classi sociali, hanno permesso quindi di definire un cambio di paradigma nell'analisi sulla questione ecologica.
A partire da tale riflessione è stato possibile di affrontare le implicazioni della governance neoliberale dell’ambiente nella sussunzione formale della natura all’interno della green economy e nella delimitazione del campo di azione nel cittadino all’interno del consumo responsabile. Il terzo capitolo, infine, rappresenta la cerniera tra le due sezioni della tesi attraverso la presentazione del filone di ricerca sui movimenti per la giustizia ambientale e dell’ascesa dei Partiti Verdi in Europa e in Italia.
La seconda parte dell’elaborato si basa dal punto di vista metodologico sulla definizione di campo di forze di Pierre Bourdieu : a tale scopo la ricerca è stata realizzata utilizzando gli strumenti dell’etnografia, nello specifico l’osservazione partecipante, l’analisi documentaria e le interviste semi-strutturate. Il campione, individuato attraverso il campionamento a valanga, è costituito da esponenti di comitati e associazioni ambientaliste, referenti di alcuni sindacati bolognesi con interessi specifici verso il rapporto ambiente-lavoro, rappresentanti delle istituzioni locali e soggetti significativi per l’attività lavorativa in relazione a temi legati all’ecologia.
La ricerca ha quindi permesso di far luce sulle pratiche, le narrazioni, i rapporti, anche di tipo conflittuale che configurano il campo della rappresentanza della questione ecologica in città sollevando, inoltre, spunti di approfondimento in merito alle modalità con cui tale campo è attraversato dalla sovrapposizione di assi identitari relativi a genere, classe e razza.

“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?

Le dérèglement climatique nous aurait fait entrer dans « l’Anthropocène », définie comme cette ère géologique où, depuis l’industrialisation, l’espèce humaine serait devenue la force écologique majeure, notamment avec ses émissions de gaz à effet de serre. Mais est-ce vraiment « l’espèce humaine » de manière indifférenciée qui est responsable du dérèglement climatique ? Des historiens ont mis en doute cette vision simpliste, en faisant de l’industrialisation fossile – et donc du dérèglement climatique – un processus résultant avant tout des dynamiques du capitalisme, proposant à cette occasion un nouveau concept en substitut de celui d’Anthropocène : le Capitalocène.

The rogue in the postcolony is a pícaro (in the literary sense), and an instantiation of the internally displaced persons who Mike Davis chronicles in his Planet of Slums. These rogues live in the shadows of a new “lettered city”—an imperialist fantasy made possible by the discovery of petrol, if not silver and gold.  His tale deploys such picaresque signatures as hunger and privation to critique and expose the real economic consequences of extraction for persons displaced by companies like Shell or Texaco-Chevron, not to mention mining companies across the Global South. Rife with moments of Swiftian abjection, Chris Abani’s picaresque novel GraceLand (2004) is an exemplar of the form. It sutures corporeal depictions of life in Maroko--a slum community on the outskirts of Lagos--within an episodic narrative that defies the chrononormativity of the development paradigm.

Common approaches to Lagos generally evince one of two images: what Matthew Gandy calls “eschatological” images, which recall V.S. Naipaul’s writings, or the utopian landscapes of what recent architects have called “new modes of urbanism.” The latter, in their potential to efface the region’s economic history, are surely no less problematic than the former. This essay proposes that neither image is sufficient to the task of representing the increasingly invisible rogue,  who continues to be occluded in our myopic vision of globalization. We might look instead to petro-picaresque novels like Abani’s as a means of navigating the aporia between the actual conditions of the city and the simulacra that saturate popular representations.

Update: If you'd like to watch an accurate, funny, and brief take on Eco-Nihilism, please go to #wisecrack on Youtube: Did South Park Turn Anti-Capitalist, where the central argument from Eco-Nihilism is quoted at several junctures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_MglOKUFRg.

I may not have made South Park directly--but Wisecrack--close enough!!

Wendy Lynne Lee

This is the preface for Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), February 2017.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739176887/Eco-Nihilism-The-Philosophical-Geopolitics-of-the-Climate-Change-Apocalypse.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road,  tells the story of a dying father’s heroic effort to protect his child from starvation, violence, and disease as they struggle to cross the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what’s happened to bring about so tragic and terrorizing a circumstance, but we’re nonetheless drawn to the stark images McCarthy evokes and, though we work feverishly to deny that such a tragedy could befall us, we can imagine it.

Indeed, for Syrian refugees, Niger Delta villagers, Northwest Kenyan pastoralists, Chukchi Sea coastal fishermen, Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, Mexican fishermen, Pennsylvania farmers, indigenous Sengwer, the citizens of Kiribati Island’s thirty-two atolls, and many more, fables like The Road reek of a reality already poisoned nearly beyond repair and foreshadow future crises—environmental, economic, geopolitical, social, and moral—for which the prospect of recovery seems little more than fiction.

Such crises are as predictable as are the implications of an economic system, namely, neoliberal or conquest capitalism, whose objectives and governing logic are, I’ll argue, inherently incompatible not only with the just, the good, or the beautiful—but with life itself. Conquest capital devours and digests values, ethical, civic, and aesthetic, reducing each to that single value without which it can neither replicate itself nor grow: exchange. In so doing it generates a state of affairs that can only rightly be described as pathologically nihilistic: capitalism destroys its own existential conditions through the wholesale commodification of the finite ecosystems upon which it depends. It cannot do otherwise and be capitalism. Hence, to continue down this road guarantees a future disfigured by the violence consequent on abject desperation and subjugation not only to domination by multinational corporations, but ultimately to more prosaic though terrorizing prospects—like thirst.

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

The Popular Anthropocene limits our thinking about possible answers —
and the stories they’re embedded in — before we can really get started. By asking us to return to view of environmental problems premised on “humans” against “nature,” this Anthropocene returns us to the thinking that created these crises in the first place. Far from an innocent binary, the binary of “man” and “nature” has been fundamental to colonial rule, environmental change, and genocide ever since Columbus landed on Hispaniola. The idea of Humanity as the agent of environmental crisis —
today crystallized in the language of anthropogenic change — has been an indispensable weapon in capitalism’s arsenal.

Who is responsible for the climate crisis? For everyone who isn’t a climate denialist, there’s an easy answer to the question: humanity. Who, in their right mind, would challenge the idea that climate change is anthropogenic (made by humans)? Are we not living in the Anthropocene: the Age of Man as geological force? Well, yes and no. It turns out that saying “Humans did it!” may obscure as much as it clarifies. A world of political difference lies between saying “Humans did it!” — and saying “Some humans did it!” Radical thinkers and climate justice activists have begun to question a starkly egalitarian distribution of historical responsibility for climate change in a system committed to a sharply unequal distribution of wealth and power. From this standpoint, the phrase anthropogenic climate change is a special brand of blaming the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty. A more nearly accurate alternative? Ours is an era of capitalogenic climate crisis.

isbn 9788874902866 _ La catastrofe ecologica ci permette oggi di ripensare lo spazio che le nostre società hanno assegnato all'arte. La creatività, lo spirito critico, lo scambio, la trascendenza, il rapporto con l'Altro e con la Storia sono altrettanti valori insiti nella pratica artistica che presto si dimostreranno vitali per il futuro dell'umanità. Abbiamo bisogno dell'arte per dare un senso alle nostre vite – il sistema bancario ce ne fornirà ben poco. Cercando di delineare e analizzare alcune delle figure estetiche che fluttuano nell'immaginario planetario, questo libro si propone di descrivere le sfide dell'attività artistica nell'epoca del capitalocene e allo stesso tempo di perorarne il riconoscimento come bisogno vitale.
_ Nicolas Bourriaud

This is the introduction, with table of contents, to Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). Order from PM Press: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=779 .

Relacionar mujeres y ecología es una invitación a transformar nuestra manera de mirar el mundo. Desde la colonización a la modernidad, hemos aprendido a distinguir entre naturaleza y cultura, femenino y masculino, racionalidad y emocionalidad, tecnología y materia prima. Estas divisiones atraviesan nuestros modos de pensar, sentir y actuar: dan forma a nuestras realidades, generan costos y beneficios para nuestras vidas y nuestros pueblos. En plena crisis civilizatoria, el desafío de transformar esta perspectiva puede resultar abrumador por su magnitud y urgencia. En este escrito, ofrezco algunas pistas para el camino, con la esperanza de aliviar la carga y sostener el proceso.

Stare into the Caffenol to Reveal your Future is a blueprint for an ecological future for photography, inspired by London Alt Photo Collective's sustainable darkroom residencies. Featuring interviews from analogue photographers, the paper proposes an alternative vision for photography to be tried and tested worldwide.

In the Productivore’s Dilemma three overarching claims are explored in a manuscript of chapters split into two parts: First, that human and more-than-human life is not only threatened by extinction but is more importantly threatened by systemic extermination. Second, utilizing the coast redwood tree (Sequoia sempervirens) as an object for analysis, I seek to show that one of the largest known plant species is not only threatened by extinction, but by negative production of space, a concept theorized throughout the manuscript. The coast redwood tree is a remarkable example of the fact that there are important differences between extinction caused by natural processes and extinction caused by Anthropogenic systems. Third, using the analytical apparatus of systemic extermination helps to clarify a long-unfolding and intensifying species-level crisis, which I identify as the Long Extermination, an historical event – highly stretchable in its temporal coordinates.  At the center of this critical re-framing of the debate about the so-called sixth mass extinction and its epochal designation the Anthropocene, is what I refer to as the Productivore’s Dilemma: born of the realization that the main difference between the human species and all other species on the planet is not merely that we can consume and use for fuel a wide variety of plants, fibers, and animals, due to our omnivorous nature, but that we can consciously produce our habitats and our food. Hence, we are productivores. A dilemma then arises: are humans destroying the planet or are the systems that direct our productive capacities destroying the planet? If it is the latter, then we are witnessing systemic extermination. If it is the former, we are causing a mass extinction. The answer will please nobody, and thus it is a dilemma. That said, there is an answer. In providing an answer, this manuscript, while broad and synthetic in its structure and scope, takes aim at a set of ideas and historical processes that deserve to be critically interrogated. Critiques of the Anthropocene and the sixth mass extinction move freely between the internal and external, leading to one central counterpoint: That we are not witnessing the sixth mass extinction, but the maturation of a long-term extermination event that is systemic much more than it is species oriented.

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.

In the age of machine learning, cryptocurrency mining, and seemingly infinite data storage capacity enabled by cloud computing, the environmental costs of ubiquitous computing in modern life are obscured by the sheer complexity of infrastructures and supply chains involved in even the simplest of digital transactions. How does computation contribute to the warming of the planet? As information technology (IT) capacity demands continue to trend upward, what are some of the ecological obstacles that must be overcome to accommodate an ever-expanding, carbon-hungry Cloud? How do these material impacts play out in everyday life, behind the scenes, where servers, fiber optic cables, and technicians facilitate cloud services? This case study draws on firsthand ethnographic research in data centers—sprawling libraries of computer servers that facilitate everything from email to commerce—to identify some of the far-reaching and tangled environmental impacts of computation and data-storage infrastructures. It surveys a range of empirical accounts of server technicians to illustrate on-the-ground examples of material and ecological factors that permeate everyday life in the Cloud. These examples include air conditioning and thermal management, water cycling, and the disposal of e-waste. By attending to the culture of workplace practice and the behaviors and training of technicians in data centers, this case study reveals that the Cloud is not fully automated, nor is it hyperrational; emotion, instinct, and human judgment are enlisted to keep servers running. This case study closes with a speculative vignette that scales up from various local impacts to a planetary framework, sketching some of the particular ways that computation contributes to climate change and the Anthropocene.

We live at a crossroads in the history of our species—and of planetary life. What comes next is unknowable with any certainty. But it is not looking good. Environmentalist theory and research tells us, today, just how bad it is. Mass extinction. Climate change. Ocean acidification. To these planetary shifts, one can add countless regional stories—runaway toxic disasters on land and at sea; cancer clusters; frequent and severe droughts. Our collective sense of " environmental consequences " has never been greater. But consequences of what? Of humanity as a whole? Of population? Of industrial civilization? Of the West? Of capitalism? How we answer the question today will shape the conditions of life on Earth—for millennia to come. Once we begin to ask this question—What drives today's disastrous state of affairs?—we move from the consequences of environment-making to its conditions and causes. And once we begin to ask questions about human-initiated environment-making, a new set of connections appears. These are the connections between environment-making and relations of inequality, power, wealth, and work. We begin to ask new questions about the relationship between environmental change and whose work is valued—and whose lives matter. Class, race, gender, sexuality, nation— and much, much more—can be understood in terms of their relationship within the whole of nature, and how that nature has been radically remade over the past ive centuries. Such questions unsettle the idea of Nature and Humanity in the uppercase: ecologies without humans, and human relations without ecologies.

El Capitaloceno se ha convertido en la contranarrativa más importante al Antropoceno popular y a su reposicionamiento neoliberal del lamento de Pogo: “Hemos conocido al enemigo y somos nosotros”. La fuerza mítica del hombre y la naturaleza no se socava fácilmente, y sus linajes cartesianos, lockeanos y maltusianos son muy fácilmente olvidados —si es que acaso se les dio un vistazo en primer lugar—. Sin embargo, como cualquier idea que gana fuerza, la tesis del Capitaloceno ha sido ampliamente malentendida. Abundan las caricaturas.

Of modernity’s illusions, none is so powerful—and none more fundamental to the imperialist bourgeoisie’s belief structures—than Man and Nature (Moore 2021e). I have written these words in the uppercase because they are not merely words; they are instruments of bourgeois rule. I call them ruling abstractions, and they are the ideological building blocks of capitalism’s structures of domination: Prometheanism (Man over Nature), racism (White over Non-White), sexism (Man over Woman) (Moore 2019; 2020; 2021d). The history of capitalism and its long history of entwined genocide and ecocide, beginning in 1492, is more than a “material” history of devastated environments, mass graves, and profit-making opportunities created by empires and seized by capitalists. It is a history functionally enabled by ideological models specifically designed to allow empires and bourgeoisies to manage planetary life in the interests of endless accumulation

This article situates Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People within current discussions about narrative form and the enabling fictions of liberal humanism—its philosophical underpinnings and literary expressions.  I argue that in its engagement with materialist questions attendant to slow violence in Bhopal, the novel is surely an “environmental picaresque”—the province of the picaresque novel historically attending to the vagaries of everyday life; but more than a conventional pícaro, Sinha’s titular rogue functions as a memento mori for the western reader.  “Animal” is a Faustian presence, whose mutilated form reminds the reader of the folly of economic programs that thrive on human suffering and environmental devastation.

Effective ideologies blur the lines between empirical realities and political interpretation. Some members of the human species are indeed driving planetary life into the planetary inferno. This geological and geohistorical transition is often narrated as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. Major corporate news platforms – like The New York Times and The Economist – are very happy with that formula, Age of Man. It supports an ideological claim – the idea of Man as a collective actor, the “human enterprise” – with another: Good Science. It’s not a new trick. Invoking natural law is ancient sport in capitalism. Malthus did it. The eugenicists did it. Paul Ehrlich and neo-Malthusians did it again after 1968. In every case, it’s a means of erasing capitalist webs of power, profit and life behind the planetary crisis. It is a way of short-circuiting the possibility that working classes will grasp the climate crisis as capital-induced rather than human-induced: as the result of capitalogenic rather than anthropogenic forcing.

"Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative." Azimuth 9.1 (2017): 71-79.

The Anthropocene has become the most important -- and also the most dangerous -- environmentalist concept of our times. It is dangerous not because it gets planetary crisis so wrong, but because it simultaneously clarifies ongoing 'state shifts' in planetary natures while mystifying the history behind them. No phrase crystallizes this danger more than the words anthropogenic global warming. Of course this is a colossal falsification. Global warming is not the accomplishment of an abstract humanity, the Anthropos. Global warming is capital's crowning achievement. Global warming is capitalogenic. The Anthropocene's popularity derives from something more than impressive research. Its influence has been won on the strength of its storytelling power, and on its capacity to unify humans and the earth-system within a singular narrative. How it unifies earth-system and humanity within a singular narrative is precisely its weakness, and the source of its falsifying power.

Adventure is a relic of imperialism and the European romanticization of place. It has evolved from quests for domination of place and people (colonialism), to spiritual or consumeristic escape from the modern world, to an attempt to return or reconnect to nature. This paradigm implies that if humans must reconnect to nature, there is an inherent disconnect or a separation. This reconnection is rooted in romantic notions and Cartesian duality of man and nature. However, approaches towards adventure and tourism apart from such dominant Western mountain traditions focus on the critical and contextually based aspects of adventure experiences. These approaches, informed by indigenous meanings of place, traditional ecological knowledge, and ecofeminism, decenter human experience. Likewise, a feminist new materialist approach towards understanding place and materiality also allows for an awareness of entanglements and intra-active relationships of human and more-than-human to emerge, as did this research.
This dissertation examined place in the context of adventure trekking tourism in the upper Solukhumbu District, Nepal through a walking ethnography of the trails in and around Mount Everest base camp. This research was based on the following questions: 1. How can the future of development of Nepali Himalayan adventure tourism industry move forward ethically and with reciprocity towards the interconnectivity of mountains and people; 2. How can the adventure tourism industry consider the complexities of influence on a place—from both a direct impact and that of greater anthropogenic impacts? This research was grounded in the background and orientations of Everest tourism, which developed within discourse and materiality of Khumbu, shifting with local identities and meanings of place. Tourism in this context mangles in the edges of local and global cultures looming within immanent threats of the Anthropocene. Discourse composed and idealized from outside the mountain boundaries contributes to motivations for traveling to the Khumbu and perceptions of this place, in turn shaping the expectations of the tourist. In these contact zones mountains are sacred, a business venture, a personal challenge, place of revelation and spirituality, imperial conquest, neocolonial stomping ground, to scientific object of study. Within these complexities, this dissertation examined the concept of place and how meaning and agency develop in relation to adventure tourism experiences in Khumbu and the Anthropocene. A reciprocity develops in which human amongst more-than-human becomes embedded and inseparable. Shifting an anthropocentric gaze that privileges and sets matter apart as isolated and constrained by boundaries determined by humans, demonstrated the vibrant agential reality of more-than-human intimacies such as forgotten landscapes, rocks, dirt, glaciers, and altitude. Nature is not a passive object upon which humans descend, but rather an entangled subjectivity. This awareness allows for a rethinking of human enactments of Anthropocene and complicit behaviors of this epoch, reframing approaches to adventure. The conclusions of this research found that mountains—more-than-human—have agency and meaning and are not passive or in the background of human experience. This applies to a practical application of the research through a praxis tool for new materialist research and the adventure industry, in turn decentering the human/anthropocentrism and identified practices of tourism that are both sustainable and more inclusive of the entanglements of people and place.
Keywords: adventure tourism, Nepal, new materialism, walking ethnography, Khumbu, Anthropocene

Dualism, dialectics and the problem of value
Nature, geopower and capitalogenic appropriation
Unpaid work/energy and the accumulation of capital
Historical natures: value, world-praxis and abstract social nature
Value as project and process
Abstract social nature and the rise of capitalism
From Anthropocene to Capitalocene
Capital, nature and work/energy in the twenty-first century
References
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Abstract

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.

The Talk (in Bangla) is against the climate change denialists, or global warming denialists. The speaker shows, with the help of a simple experiment, how the so-called "developmental” paradigm as preached by the WB-IMF-WTO hampers the environmental conditions.
The talk was organized by the Rik Prakshani (ঋক প্রকাশনী) in the year 2020.

What happens to a culture in which the death drive has been totally repressed and turned into a narcissistic desire to consume? Alexander Bove’s response to A. Kiarina Kordela’s first book, $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), puts ethics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and biopolitics in conversation with each other. Drawing out a gap in Kordela’s logic, Bove concludes that the insertion Levinas’s concept of the face allows us to conceptualize the role of the death drive in ethics in late capitalism. (Jen Hedler Phillis)