Capitalocene

I learned this term from Donna Haraway’s writing, but she didn’t coin it. Jason Moore describes it thus: “Capitalocene is a kind of critical provocation to this sensibility of the Anthropocene, which is: We have met the enemy and he is us.” One criticism of “anthropocene” is that it seems to assume that colonial capitalism is a simple product of human nature. That needn’t be true - you could argue that what’s killing the world right now is a set of specific historical circumstances, and that these circumstances share very little in common with the precedent set by the untold thousands of years of human activity that preceded the development of capitalism. This may be the first time in history that humans have been the main agent of geological change, and this is not because of what humans intrinsically are, but what humans are doing at this moment. A problem with “capitalocene” is that it implies that the problem would automatically be solved if we did away with capitalism, but maybe this is not necessarily true - another economic system could be equally extractive and harmful! Elsewhere: Wired

Person: Jason Moore