Anthropocene or Capitalocene? ― Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceansall point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity’s relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make sense of this extraordinary transition? 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 strangeand often terrifyingtimes 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. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers a series of provocative essays on nature and power, humanity, and capitalism. Including both well-established voices and younger scholars, the book challenges the conventional practice of dividing historical change and contemporary reality into Nature” and Society,” demonstrating the possibilities offered by a more nuanced and connective view of human environment-making, joined at every step with and within the biosphere. In distinct registers, the authors frame their discussions within a politics of hope that signal the possibilities for transcending capitalism, broadly understood as a world-ecology” that joins nature, capital, and power as a historically evolving whole. Contributors include Jason W. Moore, Eileen Crist, Donna J. Haraway, Andreas Malm, Elmar Altvater, Daniel Hartley, and Christian Parenti.

Elmar Altvater is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Free University of Berlin. He is author of numerous articles and books in German, and in English, of the landmark The Future of the Market: An Essay on the Regulation of Money and Nature after the Collapse of Actually Existing Socialism’ (Verso, 1993). Eileen C. Crist is associate professor, Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech. She is author of Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Temple, 1999), and coeditor Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, and Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth. She is on the editorial advisory board of Environmental Humanities. Donna J. Haraway is Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of When Species Meet (2008); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManc_Meets_Oncomouse? (Routledge, 1997); Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991); and Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science ((Routledge, 1989). Daniel Hartley is lecturer in the Department of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. He is author of The Politics of Style: Marxist Poetics in and beyond Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson (Brill, 2015). Andreas Malm is lecturer in the Human Ecology Division, Lund University. He is author of numerous books and scholarly articles, mostly recently Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2015). Jason W. Moore teaches world history and world-ecology at Binghamton University. He is author of Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015). His essays on world history, environmental history, and political economy have been honored with the Bernstein and Byres Prize in agrarian studies, and distinguished scholarship awards of the American Society for Environmental History and the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association). He is coordinator of the World-Ecology Network. Christian Parenti teaches in the Global Liberal Arts program at New York University. He is author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, 2011); The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press, 2004); The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003); and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Verso, 1999).