The Capitalocene is a critique of "man versus nature" thinking in climate politics. Frequently misunderstood as an alternative geological periodization to the Anthropocene proposal, the Capitalocene's leading proponents argue for the centrality of capitalism in the making of climate crisis. The Capitalocene is a way to understand capitalism as a geohistorical process, not a geological event as conventionally understood. For Andreas Malm, this is the theory of fossil capital. [1] For Jason W. Moore, it is the theory of Cheap Nature in the capitalist world-ecology. [2] Both argue, with Karl Marx, that capitalism is a labor process, and a class struggle, in the web of life. While Malm sees the origins of climate crisis with the ascendancy of fossil capital after 1830, Moore locates the dawn of "capitalogenic" crisis in the long seventeenth century (c. 1550-1700). Both agree with Marx that capitalism is defined by the imperative of endless capital accumulation, which implies increasingly serious metabolic antagonisms.
The Capitalocene, in its simplest terms, is a species of geopoetry, literally "earth poetry." [3] It is a critique of the Anthropocene as a geohistorical concept and its deeper, animating philosophy of "humanity" and "nature." [4] In contrast, historical materialists emphasize the labor process and the class struggle. Class and labor are, for the Capitalocene thesis, metabolic relations through which capitalism shapes environments, and is shaped by webs of life. This critique of Man versus Nature thinking allows the Capitalocene thesis to move beyond theory, and reconstruct a history of the origins of planetary crisis rooted in imperialism, class struggle, and world accumulation, all with and within webs of life. In this approach, class and capital are not only driving forces of planetary crisis, but "guiding threads" for the investigation of power, profit and life in the modern world—and for the elaboration of a socialist climate politics in the twenty-first century.
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. [5] 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 such diverse fields as architecture, [6] literary analysis, [7] digital studies, [8] [9] and pedagogy. [10] It has been invoked approvingly by philosopher Frédéric Lordon [11] and the editorial board of Scientific American, [12] and has been discussed in various general-audience publications. [13] [14] [15]
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 eighteenth century with James Watt's design of the steam engine. [16] Since the publication of Crutzen's essay, the Anthropocene has come to be widely discussed in academic and popular settings.
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 activity. 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.” [17] 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. [18]
Since the first invocation of 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, [lower-alpha 1] Kohei Saito, [19] and others broadly associated with the metabolic rift school. The other was developed by Moore, and endorsed by Haraway. The disagreement between these two camps is derived from differences over the periodization of capitalist origins and the decisive unit of analysis: England versus the Atlantic world. Malm hews closely to the “Political Marxism” of Robert Brenner. Moore is often mischaracterized as an adherent of world-systems analysis. Moore and Wallerstein agree on the periodization of capitalism. Moore has emphasized his distance from world-systems analysis while agreeing with Wallerstein on the centrality of imperialist "political accumulation" in world class formation and class struggle. [20]
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. [21] 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 [22] ) is not sufficient, nor is the widespread use of coal for heating purposes in Elizabethan England. [23] 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. [24]
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. [25] [lower-alpha 2] 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. [26] 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 1824, 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, [lower-alpha 3] and which would be controlled by a joint association rather than within the confines of their own mill. [27] In sum, Malm's thesis is that 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 his opinion, therefore has the advantage of being more accurate and precise than “Anthropocene.”
Jason W. Moore, on the other hand, argues that while climate change is surely the most prominent attribute of the Capitalocene, it is only part of a larger complex of crises in the “web of life.” The root of all these, in his view, is capitalism's drive to appropriate “Cheap Nature” in the form of food, labor, energy, and raw materials. This process is just as foundational to capitalism as those of primitive accumulation, commodification, or proletarianization described in Marx's Capital . Capitalism as a system founded on the value form, claims Moore, can function only because these “Four Cheaps” are kept “off the books” of value exchange and acquired at little or no expense. [28] Such appropriation is itself only possible because of an ideological development of the early modern era that posited a newly absolute conceptual division between society and nature, which Moore equates with Cartesian dualism. [29]
Operating from these premises, Moore dates the onset of the Capitalocene to “a radical shift in the scale, speed and scope of landscape change [that] occurred in the long sixteenth century,” [30] corresponding to the emergence of the capitalist world-system—in Moore's jargon, the capitalist world-ecology. While acknowledging that humans have transformed their environments since prehistory, he posits an enormous acceleration of such practices beginning around 1450, intertwined with the spread of European trade and colonialism through the world. Among the developments of this period were the sudden and rapid deforestation of the Baltic region, Dutch land reclamation, the explosion of mining in Central Europe and the Andes, and the enslavement of human beings relegated to the category of “nature” rather than “society.” [31] It is a mistake, says Moore, to consider the rise of steam industry or the increasing levels of carbon in the geologic record in the 19th century as the beginning of the Capitalocene, because these were merely the delayed effects of a system which emerged centuries earlier.
Donna Haraway, another popularizer of the concept, largely concurs with Moore's formulation and periodization. [32] Drawing from Anna Tsing, however, she proposes that “the Anthropocene [lower-alpha 4] is more a boundary event than an epoch, like the K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene.” [33] In contrast to historical investigation, she considers it necessary to imagine what sort of epoch—the "Chthulucene"—could be constructed on the other side of this boundary. [34] Although Haraway considers the Capitalocene the most appropriate term for our era, [35] she distances herself from any version of it “told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History”; in short, from its articulation as an overly grand narrative. [36]
Though the two versions of the Capitalocene idea outlined here share the same basic critique of the Anthropocene, they are marked by substantial theoretical differences. Malm [37] and Kohei Saito, [19] responding to Moore and Haraway, have each defended an analytical—if not ontological—distinction between society and nature, in relation to the metabolic rift theory. According to Malm, Moore's insistence on the identity of the two leads him to overlook important binary antagonisms that underlie society, and to underestimate capitalism's capacity to survive climate crisis even as millions of human beings do not survive it. He further accuses Moore and Haraway of obscurantist prose “that seeks to ruin as much analytical equipment as possible while charging with lowered lances.” Saito, in turn, charges Moore with cherrypicking Marx's œuvre to support his own positions. [38] Moore, on his part, considers much of Malm's study of fossil capital to be compatible with and useful to his own theory, but overly limited in its focus on an ideal type of capitalism. [39]
Dipesh Chakrabarty has dismissed the debate over Capitalocene and Anthropocene terminology as “silly.” [40] Peter Sutoris, writing in The Conversation, concedes that the Anthropocene is not a perfect framing, but defends it for the sense of urgency and dire consequences that it conveys. [41]
A common objection to the Capitalocene is to highlight environmental damage on the part of socialism, or regimes which defined themselves as such. Philosopher Serge Audier , in his 2019 book L'âge productiviste, writes: "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." [42] [lower-alpha 5]
To this objection, Malm concedes the poor environmental record of socialist states, but argues that the collapse of almost all such regimes has made this a far less pressing concern. “We do not live in the Vorkuta coal-mining gulag of the 1930s,” he writes. “It is no more. But the world that Lancashire founded in the 1830s encompasses us all as the ecological reality we have to deal with.” [43]
Moore's response is to consider Eastern Bloc states semi-peripheral territories of the capitalist world-system, and thus a part of the Capitalocene in their own way. Since the publication of Audier's book, sociologist Zsuza Gille [44] has published a study on the “Socialocene,” from a similar world-systems approach. This study devotes particular attention to how industrial waste and waste-producing processes were outsourced from the imperial core to the socialist bloc.
In L'Emballement du monde, a social history of energy exploitation, IFP School professor Victor Court evaluates and ultimately rejects the Capitalocene. [lower-alpha 6] Like Moore, he objects to Malm's situation on fossil industry as eliding the importance of earlier merchant capitalism. Beyond this, he too raises the objection of twentieth century socialism's environmental record, and is not persuaded by Malm's aforementioned rejoinder: to concede that other economic systems contributed to climate change is to undermine the whole Capitalocene premise. Fundamentally, Court believes that while capitalist dynamics undeniably cause environmental damage, they are only one exemplar of the true problem, namely “protean and omnipresent relations of domination between individuals.” [lower-alpha 7] Ending capitalism, therefore, is a necessary but not sufficient step toward environmental equilibrium; even a hypothetical socialist society of the future would still have to specifically tackle the problem of resource use. [45]
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. The defining characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, recognition of property rights, self-interest, economic freedom, meritocracy, work ethic, consumer sovereignty, economic efficiency, limited role of government, profit motive, a financial infrastructure of money and investment that makes possible credit and debt, entrepreneurship, commodification, voluntary exchange, wage labor, production of commodities and services, and a strong emphasis on innovation and economic growth. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
The Anthropocene was a rejected proposal for a geological epoch following the Holocene, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. This impact affects Earth's oceans, geology, geomorphology, landscape, limnology, hydrology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is credited with first coining and using the term anthropocene informally in the 1980s; Paul J. Crutzen re-invented and popularized the term. However, in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist. He and Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for their work on atmospheric chemistry and specifically for his efforts in studying the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone. In addition to studying the ozone layer and climate change, he popularized the term Anthropocene to describe a proposed new epoch in the Quaternary period when human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth. He was also amongst the first few scientists to introduce the idea of a nuclear winter to describe the potential climatic effects stemming from large-scale atmospheric pollution including smoke from forest fires, industrial exhausts, and other sources like oil fires.
In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.
Metabolic rift is a theory of ecological crisis tendencies under the capitalist mode of production that sociologist John Bellamy Foster ascribes to Karl Marx. Quoting Marx, Foster defines this as the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism". Foster argues that Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country.
John Bellamy Foster is an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory. He has given numerous interviews, talks, and invited lectures, as well as written invited commentary, articles, and books on the subject.
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism.
John Robert McNeill is an American environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He is best known for "pioneering the study of environmental history". In 2000 he published Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, which argues that human activity during the 20th century led to environmental changes on an unprecedented scale, primarily due to the energy system built around fossil fuels.
The commodification of nature is an area of research within critical environmental studies that is concerned with the ways in which natural entities and processes are made exchangeable through the market, and the implications thereof.
Eco-socialism is an ideology merging aspects of socialism with that of green politics, ecology and alter-globalization or anti-globalization. Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.
Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing through eco-economic decoupling, i.e., by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a Chinese American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms.
World-Ecology is a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life. An evolving conversation rather than a theory, the world-ecology approach is unified by a critique of Nature-Society dualisms, a world-historical interpretation of today's planetary crisis, and an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender in capitalism's environmental history. Key figures in the world-ecology conversation include Jason W. Moore, Sharae Deckard, Raj Patel, Christian Parenti, Tony Weis, Neil Brenner, Kerstin Oloff, Andrej Grubacic, and Marion Dixon. Since 2015, the World-Ecology Research Network has sponsored an annual conference.
Andreas Malm is a Swedish author and an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University. He is on the editorial board of the academic journal Historical Materialism, and has been described as a Marxist. Naomi Klein, who quoted Malm in her book This Changes Everything, has called him "one of the most original thinkers on the subject" of climate change.
Ecologically or ecological unequal exchange is a concept from ecological economics that builds from the notion of unequal exchange. It considers the inequities hidden in the monetary value of trade flows not only in terms of wages, and quantities of labor but also regarding materials, energy and environmental degradation. As labor is also a form of energy, unequal exchange of embodied labor can even be considered a subset of the wider phenomenon of ecologically unequal exchange. There is an uneven utilization of the environment at the global level not only due to the uneven distribution of resources, but also to shift the environmental burden. The consumption and capital accumulation of core countries are based on environmental degradation and extraction in periphery countries. Sustainability analysis and solutions with a production-based perspective in core countries may thus keep increase unsustainability at the global level. The current configuration of global production networks that leads to this asymmetric trade patterns has evolved historically with colonialism. Whereas ecological unequal exchange is a concept developed in academia, the concept of ecological debt is used in an activism context of environmental justice. The latter defines the accumulation of this unequal exchange through history.
Kohei Saito is a Japanese philosopher. He is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo. Saito works on ecology and political economy from a Marxist perspective. His 2020 book Capital in the Anthropocene has been credited for inspiring a resurgence of interest in Marxist thought in Japan. He is an advocate of degrowth communism.
Capital in the Anthropocene is a 2020 non-fiction book by Japanese academic Kohei Saito. Drawing from writings on ecology and natural science by Karl Marx, the book presents a Marxist argument for degrowth as a means of mitigating climate change. Capital in the Anthropocene was an unexpected commercial success in Japan, selling over half a million copies.