Capitalocene

Concept and origins

The Capitalocene framework took shape in the early twenty-first century from a dialogue between Anthropocene proponents and eco-Marxist and ecofeminist thinkers. The atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen proposed the Anthropocene in 2002, describing a new post-Holocene era of long-term atmospheric transformation due to human activity; the Capitalocene emerged as a critique of that framing. Ecological Marxism itself traces back to Marx and Engels, whose later writings touched on the unintended natural consequences of human activity, notably Marx's 'social metabolism' and Engels' 'revenge of nature.' This was long neglected until the late-twentieth-century environmental movement revived interest, exemplified by James O'Connor's 'second contradiction of capitalism' and John Bellamy Foster's work on Marx's 'metabolic rift.'

Andreas Malm coined the term in 2009 while a doctoral student at Lund University, and it spread through private correspondence to Donna Haraway and Jason W. Moore. At least two distinct formulations emerged concurrently in the early-to-mid 2010s. Malm's, joined by Alf Hornborg and Kohei Saito, is broadly associated with the metabolic rift school; Moore's was endorsed by Haraway. Their disagreement derives from differences over the periodization of capitalist origins and the decisive unit of analysis, England versus the Atlantic world. Malm hews closely to Robert Brenner's 'Political Marxism'; Moore, often mischaracterized as a world-systems analyst, agrees with Wallerstein on imperialist 'political accumulation' while emphasizing his distance from world-systems analysis.

Two formulations

For Malm the Capitalocene is the era governed by 'fossil capitalism,' a mode of production characterized by self-sustaining growth predicated on growing consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating sustained growth in CO2 emissions. Following Crutzen he treats CO2-driven warming as the defining attribute of the era, while not denying other forms of environmental disruption. He departs from Crutzen on periodization, however: the Capitalocene begins not with Watt's steam engine but with the ascendancy of steam as the main power source for the British cotton industry in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The adoption of fossil power was not driven by inherent human drives such as population growth or the self-evident superiority of steam, but by the degree of control over production it gave British textile mill owners.

Moore dates the onset of the Capitalocene to a radical shift in the scale, speed and scope of landscape change in the long sixteenth century, corresponding to the emergence of the capitalist world-ecology, with an enormous acceleration beginning around 1450. Since the same literature elsewhere describes him as placing the dawn of 'capitalogenic' crisis in the long seventeenth century (c. 1550–1700), this dating should be presented as his own formulation rather than as a single uncontested year. Moore's account centers capitalism's drive to appropriate 'Cheap Nature' in the form of food, labor, energy and raw materials, as foundational as primitive accumulation, commodification or proletarianization. The 'Four Cheaps' are kept off the books of value exchange and appropriated at little or no cost, enabled by an early-modern ideological division between society and nature that Moore equates with Cartesian dualism. He points to the Potosí silver mine in Bolivia as an early example, alongside Baltic deforestation, Dutch land reclamation, expanded mining in Central Europe and the Andes, and the enslavement of people categorized as 'nature' rather than 'society.' Treating the rise of steam industry or rising nineteenth-century carbon levels as the beginning is, for him, a mistake: these were delayed effects of a system that emerged centuries earlier.

Donna Haraway largely concurs with Moore's formulation and periodization but, drawing on Anna Tsing, proposes the Anthropocene is 'more a boundary event than an epoch' and argues for imagining a 'Chthulucene' beyond it. She considers the Capitalocene the most appropriate term for our era while distancing herself from versions told in the idiom of 'fundamentalist Marxism.'

Distinctions and relations

Context for the distinction with the Anthropocene: the Anthropocene was originally a proposal for a geological epoch following the Holocene, rejected as such in 2024 by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences. The term has been used informally, with proposed start dates ranging from the Neolithic Revolution to the 1960s, and Crutzen's popularization (2000) fixed the start at the steam engine c. 1780. Alternative '-cene' monikers were generally proposed by social scientists, whereas the Anthropocene alone was proposed as a legitimate addition to geological time scales.

The Plantationocene and Chthulucene emerged as responses to critiques of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The Plantationocene was coined in October 2014 in a recorded conversation among Anna L. Tsing, Donna Haraway, Kenneth Olwig, Noburu Ishikawa and Scott Gilbert; it posits that the plantation system and its long-term impacts are the transition producing current climate change, noting the plantation predates capitalism. Haraway and her co-authors treated it as a supplementary 'story' rather than a replacement for the Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Chthulucene. The Plantationocene emerges from the Capitalocene idea in an attempt to account for settler colonialism, plantation agriculture and chattel slavery predating capitalism by most economic timelines. Other '-cene' proposals include Ferdinand's Negrocene, Haraway's Chthulucene, and Anglocene or Oliganthropocene. The Capitalocene is situated alongside degrowth, ecosocialism, ecological economics, environmental history, world-ecology, post-capitalism and the throw-away society.

Criticisms and examples

Dipesh Chakrabarty has dismissed the Capitalocene/Anthropocene terminological debate as 'silly'; Peter Sutoris defends the Anthropocene while conceding it is imperfect. A common objection highlights environmental damage by socialist or self-defined socialist regimes, including the Aral Sea's disappearance through Soviet planning decisions. The philosopher Serge Audier, in L'âge productiviste (2019), argues that speaking of a 'Capitalocene' obliges acknowledgement of a 'Socialocene' or 'Communistocene.' Malm concedes the poor environmental record of socialist states but argues the collapse of almost all such regimes makes this far less pressing; Moore responds by treating Eastern Bloc states as semi-peripheral territories of the capitalist world-system and thus part of the Capitalocene in their own way. The sociologist Zsuzsa Gille has published a study on the 'Socialocene' from a world-systems approach, attending to how industrial waste and waste-producing processes were outsourced from the imperial core to the socialist bloc. Victor Court, in L'Emballement du monde, evaluates and ultimately rejects the Capitalocene, objecting like Moore to Malm's focus on fossil industry as eliding earlier merchant capitalism and raising twentieth-century socialism's environmental record; he argues capitalist dynamics are only one exemplar of 'protean and omnipresent relations of domination between individuals,' so ending capitalism is necessary but not sufficient for environmental equilibrium.

Among the examples used in the argument are the McConnel & Company mills in Manchester c. 1820, where fossil fuels were first used as a generalized power source in the British textile industry; the 1825 Panic and weavers' wage collapse as context for steam mechanization; and Robert Thom's industrial water supply system at Greenock (from 1824) as a cheaper alternative abandoned in favour of steam. Malm uses them to show steam's rise was not economically inevitable.

Among foundational texts, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press/Kairos, published May 2016, 240 pp.), edited by Jason W. Moore, diagnoses the problems of Anthropocene thinking and proposes the Capitalocene, 'the Age of Capital,' as the alternative. Its contributors include Moore, Eileen Crist, Donna J. Haraway, Justin McBrien, Elmar Altvater, Daniel Hartley and Christian Parenti, framing the discussion as a 'world-ecology' that joins nature, capital and power. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective, and author or editor of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press, 2016) and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). Malm is a Swedish journalist and academic, senior lecturer in human ecology and associate professor of human geography at Lund University, who describes himself as a Marxist; he obtained a PhD in social and economic geography from Lund University in 2014 with a thesis supervised by Alf Hornborg, and the reworked version, published by Verso as Fossil Capital, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2016. Since its debut the notion has been applied in architecture, literary analysis, digital studies and pedagogy.