The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

TLDR

The essay argues that historical analysis of capitalism is essential to understand and address the planetary crises of the twenty‑first century. It critiques the Anthropocene by locating it within Green Thought’s hesitation to treat capitalism as natural and by highlighting its periodization that aligns with the Industrial Revolution narrative. The essay finds that early capitalism’s environment‑making revolution, far larger than any previous watershed, has been overlooked, and that environmental change since 1850 must be understood within power‑capital‑nature patterns dating back four centuries.

Abstract

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought’s uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene’s dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism’s environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.