The general law of overpollution synthesizes these insights, highlighting three moments. It specifies the relational asymmetry between surplus value and surplus pollu-tion, the latter reckoned as forms of toxification “surplus to” the geobiological capacities to metabolize –and neutralize – wastes …
Waste in the Limits to Capital: How Capitalism Lays Waste to the Web of Life, and Why It Can’t Stop
My critique, and its reconstructive alternative, recognizes that Civilization (‘Society’) and Savagery (‘Nature’) do exist, but as strategies of domination and superexploitation – hence the structural recurrence of bourgeois naturalism in the geocultures of domination. (Every era of capitalism must reinvent racism, …
Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History, Part II
The roots of Cheap Nature and its double register – economic exploitationand geocultural domination – are found in modern imperialism. Imperialism is thebourgeoisie’s preferred mode of class formation because it more readily brings to bearthe military and juridical power of …
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 …
In 2012, global CO2 emissions were 58% higher than in 1990, causing, among other things, hurricanes to become stronger due to higher temperatures in ocean catchments and Arctic ecosystems to reach a number of tipping points. The limit at which …
How does capitalism work through the web of life? How can we begin to understand capitalism not simply as an economic system of markets and production and a social system of class and culture, but as a way of organising …
In the Anthropocene era, internationalism must become that of an internation, where only an economy of neganthropy can effect this ‘transition’ without sinking into ‘greenwashing’. It is an epistemological affair as well as an economic, juridical and social one – …
In this intervention, I put forward five short theses on the topic of ‘ Anthropocene mobilities. ’ My aim is not to unpack every concept con-tained herein but rather to provide a provocative introductory synthesis of five big ideas about …
The man made catastrophe called climate change is already a reality for many people. This catastrophe hits those hardest, who have the least capacities of adapting to it – and the least responsibility of creating it. Given this situation, how …
Climate crisis and self-critique: “We thrive uninvited where we were never meant to grow.”
The Capitalocene argument therefore rejects anthropocentric flatten-ing — “We have met the enemy and he is us” (as in Walt Kelly’s iconic 1970 Earth Day poster) — along with economic reductionism. To be sure, capi-talism is a system of endless …
ABSTRACT 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 …
Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology
Introduction Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labour in the process of production; or …