Social ecology and world-ecology are two prominent streams of radical ecological thought and praxis today. Yet despite significant thematic overlap and potential complementarity, the traditions have rarely converged. This fact invites us to explore areas where each might shed light on and strengthen the other, and in so doing benefit our overall understanding of the climate crisis, its origins, and how to respond to it meaningfully and effectively. This paper explores these questions, adopting as a guiding theme Einstein’s crucial observation that it is impossible to solve problems using the thinking that created them, as doing so tends to involve reproducing that which we claim to oppose.
I will suggest that social ecology and world-ecology can complement and strengthen one another by enhancing their respective praxis; social ecology, in terms of its theoretical and analytical foundation, and world-ecology in terms of building on the practical implications of its theoretical and analytical insights. This entails taking seriously world-ecology’s understanding of the “Capitalocene” as a historical epoch dominated by capital. This is of direct relevance to the inherently predatory character of capitalism to exploit workers, women, peoples of the global South, the flora and fauna and ultimately the planet itself as objects whose sole value is exploitation for profit, treating the Earth and its inhabitants as an infinite resource and garbage dump.
To the above ends, the text examines social ecology’s insights into current scientific narratives around the Anthropocene, and how they dovetail with similar commentary on the historical origins of the climate crisis advanced by world-ecology. I will focus in particular on the historical phenomenon of primitive accumulation and its decisive role in creating the “metabolic rift” behind the existential crisis we face today. I will conclude by examining the implications of these commonalties in addressing the climate crisis, by way of Einstein’s aforementioned maxim.
Social Ecology and Social Relations of Production
According to founding thinker Murray Bookchin, social ecology seeks to address the underlying root causes of the emerging climate crisis in the antisocial and destructive social relations of hierarchy in general and capitalism in particular. By his own account, Bookchin developed social ecology in direct response to attempts to address the ecological crisis through reformist strategies which he believed were doomed as they amounted to treating cancer with a bandage.[1] Not a small part of the problem of this kind of approach is the propensity to treat ecological problems as just another item on a shopping list of apparently disparate progressive causes, or rather as a single issue in isolation from all the others as in mainstream environmentalism. Bookchin took pains to differentiate ecology and environmentalism, arguing that the latter term denotes a:
mechanistic, instrumental outlook that sees nature as a passive habitat composed of ‘objects’ such as animals, plants, minerals and the like that must merely be rendered more serviceable to human use . . . environmentalism tends to reduce nature to a storage bin of ‘natural resources’ or ‘raw materials’ . . . Within this context, very little of social nature is spared from the environmentalist’s vocabulary; cities become ‘urban resources’ and their inhabitants ‘human resources.’ If the word resources leaps out so frequently from environmentalistic discussions of nature, cities and people, an issue more important than mere word play is at stake.[2]
Social ecology’s political strategy of libertarian municipalism therefore seeks to address ecological and social crisis without replicating the hierarchical modalities that produced it.[3] Bookchin goes on to talk about the form of environmental harmony prevailing under this kind of instrumentalist logic as one in which new techniques for plundering the natural world can be developed “with minimal disruption to the human ‘habitat.’”[4] In contrast to this kind of vulgar harmony, social ecology offers ecological thinking based on the “dynamic balance of nature,” a primary feature of which is the “interdependence of living and nonliving things.” Social ecology therefore seeks to develop cooperative modalities via non-hierarchical forms of production and distribution that transcend the objectification and instrumentality at the core of capitalist social relations.[5] But overcoming this split between human societies and nature requires not only the abolition of capitalism, but of hierarchy in all forms, as well as the myriad forms of social privilege that give rise to them. Not only would there be no jobs on a dead planet, there would be no social or class privilege either.
As we will see, this framework has clear affinities with world-ecological thinking. Yet it also highlights areas where these schools of thought differ, or where they might complement each other. For example, while social ecology offers a general description of the emergence of class hierarchies from out of the Neolithic period, it tends to lack more specific discussion as to how the climate crisis emerged from out of class hierarchy and the role of primitive accumulation. To better clarify some of these issues, we must turn our sights to the question of the relationship between the historical form of class hierarchy as it evolved in the modern era and the historical origins of the climate crisis. This line of inquiry begins with what is now known as the Anthropocene.
Social Ecology and the Limits of the Anthropocene
Taking their lead from Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, an increasing number of scientists now argue that the geological period following the end of the Holocene epoch that began over 11,000 years ago is best described as the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment.[6] Many of these scholars identify the Industrial Revolution as the point where the effects of human activity began to make their epoch-defining impacts on the natural environment.[7] The Anthropocene concept underscores the profound changes to the natural environment as a direct result of human activity, especially burning fossil fuels, and therefore of the dire existential threat the climate crisis poses to all life on Earth.
How much then can the Anthropocene tell us about the origins of the climate crisis? If this is the end of the story, the conclusion seems to be that human nature is by definition evil and that human society was doomed from its earliest moments to fall victim to avarice and myopia. Not only is this an unsatisfactory explanation for complex historical phenomena spanning hundreds of years, it also places equal culpability for the climate crisis on extractivist European colonialists and their racialized victims, on Bangladeshi peasants and the executive boards of multinational petroleum conglomerates.[8] Bookchin made the same point in his 1991 debate with Earth First! Founder Dave Foreman:
All too often we are told by liberal environmentalists, and not a few deep ecologists, that it is “we” as a species or, at least, “we” as an amalgam of “anthropocentric” individuals that are responsible for the breakdown of the web of life … One of the problems with this asocial, “species-centered” way of thinking, of course, is that it blames the victim. Let’s face it, when you say a black kid in Harlem is as much to blame for the ecological crisis as the President of Exxon, you are letting one off the hook and slandering the other…Oppressed people know that humanity is hierarchically organized around complicated divisions that are ignored only at their peril.[9]
For this reason, social ecology has consistently arguing that ecological problems like climate change are not the result of generalized “human activity,” but rather the specific social relations fostered by hierarchy and the capitalist mode of production.[10]
As Swedish geographer Andreas Malm has pointed out, one of the major reasons why early industrialists opted for steam power instead of water-driven cotton mills in rural settings close to rivers was because of the proximity to urban centers with large populations of surplus labor. By concentrating workers in large urban centers where a mass of unemployed would tilt the balance of power between capital and labor ever more heavily in favor of the former, Malm describes how industrialists could break the class power of organized mill workers and impose ever more autocratic labor discipline to increase their own class power.[11] Malm argues this process made fossil fuels crucial to the rise of industrial capitalism. Today the single greatest consumer of fossil fuels and contributor to global warming today is the U.S. military, which primarily defends the interests of capital.[12] In reflecting on the role of imperialist U.S. military aggression around the world over the last century, the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and what Madison referred to as the defense of “the minority of the opulent against the majority” is not especially hard to decipher.[13]
The fact that the Anthropocene has developed within the historical context of a class-divided world exposes the limitations of blaming an abstract humanity for the actions of industrial capitalists. In putting the question of the climate crisis on a more solid historical foundation, we immediately have much greater hope of identifying the thinking that produced it, and so strategies for rising above that thinking.
Bringing Class into Environmental History
The limitations of Anthropocenic thinking illustrated by social ecology demonstrates the importance of class in understanding the origins of the climate crisis. While we can certainly trace our collective fossil fuel addiction to the Industrial Revolution and the lead taken by industrial elites in adopting it as a means of cementing their class power, these developments did not fall out of the sky. World-ecology’s account of the historical context for the Industrial Revolution offers the necessary background context for properly appreciating the specificity and significance of later developments.
To understand the relationship between the origins of the Industrial Revolution and the climate crisis, we must understand it as the historical moment when the process of private accumulation began to move under its own momentum—something that had not always been the case. Any new business venture must source start-up capital; this is also true where the system of private accumulation as such was concerned. Historically, the process by which the means of production were privatized and those excluded turned into wage laborers—a necessity to launch the capitalist system—is known as primitive accumulation. This takes a variety of forms such as land enclosures, colonialism, war, slavery.[14] Thus, the history of capitalism has been characterized by brutal wars of conquest, land theft, resource theft, slavery and innumerable other human rights violations. This is why Marx remarked that “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre . . . These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.[15]
In providing impetus to the forces that bequeathed the Industrial revolution, a capitalism addicted since birth to fossil fuels, and the resulting climate crisis, primitive accumulation in turn begs the question as to its own origins. Here we are inevitably drawn to the work of feminist historian Silvia Federici, whose seminal study Caliban and the Witch points to the function of the European witch hunts as a means of suppressing a rebellious peasantry lately freed from feudal bonds.
As a 300-year-long campaign of theocratic terror, the European witch-hunts represented what would eventually become an archetypal form of crisis management in class-divided societies—the challenge to class control in this instance being the decline of Feudalism, precipitated in no small part by the Black Death and the dramatic shift in class power resulting from the decimation of the European peasant workforce. As Federici demonstrates, the European witch-hunts enabled elites to salvage their class power through the age-old strategy of divide-and-conquer—in this instance, on the basis of a patriarchal mythology based on the allegedly wanton nature of female sexuality. Such was the basis for the misogynist conspiracy theory revolving around “Brides of Satan” who had been tempted into sin by the Deceiver, allegedly precipitating their recruitment at the hand of their diabolical pimp into well-poisoning, crop destruction and the theft of male libido. That this conspiracy theory also included Jews as alleged well-poisoners would provide grist to the mill for the frothing anti-Semitism of figures like Martin Luther, whose pathological hate would eventually seep down into the hands of National Socialism.[16]
As Federici notes, the witchcraft conspiracy theory driving the witch-hunts cast the environmental chaos of the Black Death—for which no religious explanation was otherwise readily apparent—as part of God’s plan, and the attendant sufferings divine punishments for sin defined in terms of rebelliousness or lack of deference to theocratic authority (Federici 2005). As an archetypal scapegoating mechanism associated with a tangible drive to reclaim class control during crisis, the witch-hunts lead directly into the origins of colonialism in terms of crisis management within the paradigm of class hierarchy—effected in this instance by demonizing a socially vulnerable group as a vilified and stereotyped “Other.”[17]
Federici examines the othering implicit in the witchcraft conspiracy theory by comparing it to the portrayal of indigenous peoples in countries targeted for colonial exploitation as “savages” and “heathens” in need of civilizing by Christian Europeans. She suggests, “It is no exaggeration to say that women were treated with the same hostility and sense of estrangement accorded ‘Indian savages.’” She notes:
The parallel is not casual. In both cases literary and cultural denigration was at the service of a project of expropriation . . . the demonization of the American indigenous people served to justify their enslavement and the plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the appropriation of their labour and the criminalisation of their control over reproduction. Always, the price of resistance was extermination. None of the tactics deployed against European women and colonial subjects would have succeeded if they had not been sustained by a campaign of terror. In the case of European women, it was the witch-hunt that played the main role in the construction of their new social function, and the degradation of their social identity.[18]
The witch-hunt invoked and normalized a false dichotomy between society on one side, represented by the established social order, and on the other, nature depicted represented as wild, menacing forces of evil that required control. This project of othering—whether witches, indigenous, or the “Oriental”—ultimately amounted to, in the words of Jason Moore, a project of “remaking the world in the image of capital.”[19]
Federici’s work aligns with Said’s seminal study of Orientalist representations of the other as a legitimizing narrative for colonialism— “Othering” in this case a technique for imposing the incipient global system that would eventually spawn the climate crisis.[20] Orientalism, Said argued, referred to the paternalistic frame of reference for subjugated peoples used to rationalize colonial extractivism as “civilizing the savages”—a mentality with roots in the Roman propensity to view everyone not under their control as “barbarians” until they were “civilized.”[21] As Federici’s contribution demonstrates, the Orientalist mentality is also adaptable to gender. As women folk healers from the European peasantry were demonized and othered as witches on the basis of the challenge they presented to theocratic patriarchy, so too were indigenous peoples in colonized lands othered as savages for obstructing the primitive accumulation of land and resources. In this manner, Orientalism, racism, and misogyny became inextricably tied into the origins of the climate crisis—foremost as legitimizing narratives for colonialist oppression and primitive accumulation.
In this way then, the nature of class as a feature of environmental history leads inevitably into an exploration of the role of racism, misogyny and other forms of othering in enabling the predatory, objectifying mentality at the core of capitalist social relations. In highlighting the relationship between class hierarchy and global warming, the mechanics of othering represent a key facet of the problem. If this follows, then it begs the question as to what this means in terms of avoiding the pitfall identified by Einstein of trying to solve problems using the same thinking that created them. To take this question further, we must turn to world-ecology.
World-Ecology and the Capitalocene
The world-ecological concept of the Capitalocene, rather than considering climate change as the result of human activity as such, complements social ecology’s insights by locating climate change historically within the development of capitalist relations of production. This innovation is significant in building on scientific arguments regarding the Anthropocene and further specifying what particular kinds of human activity most impact the natural environment. As a means of locating the origins of climate change, it is of particular relevance to social ecology as it brings its critique of class hierarchy onto firmer historical foundations.
Jason Moore, the scholar who coined the Capitalocene concept, examines the historical development of capitalist modes of production, first in Europe and then throughout the rest of the world as it was imposed globally through colonialism and imperialism.[22] Moore uses this history as context for further exploration of the relationship between capitalist social and economic relations, and their environmental consequences on the other. Rather than portraying society and nature as separate and opposed, he argues that they are one and the same, part of a “double internality” of society-in-nature and nature-in-society that helps to explain the “metabolic rift” responsible for producing the irrational outcome of global warming.[23] Metabolic rift is indicative of desperate imbalance within the “double internality” of productive life, the idea of society alienated from its surroundings as a divisible entity existing prior to nature being the essence of the problem. According to Moore:
The notion that social relations (humans without nature) can be analysed separately from ecological relations (nature without humans) is the ontological counterpoint to the real and concrete separation of the direct producers from the means of production. From this perspective, revolutions in ideas of nature and their allied scientific practices are closely bound to great waves of primitive accumulation, from early modernity’s Scientific Revolutions to neoliberalism’s genomic revolutions.[24]
This nature/society binary enables the drive to objectify, measure and quantify the web of life in its innumerable manifestations, targeting women, workers and the Earth itself, measuring their value solely in terms of their exploitability for profit, dehumanizing and othering them towards those ends, and enacting colonial and other forms of State violence to achieve them. With property and class privilege conflated with ‘society’ as an a priori, ‘nature’ becomes the ‘wild’ and ‘uncontained’ Other that needs taming and domesticating as a potential threat—the ‘natures’ of women, subject populations, territories targeted for exploitation lumped together into a common category which requires the intervention of ‘society’ for the common salvation of all involved.
In opposition to the asocial logic at the core of capitalist social relations, Moore’s double internality becomes the basis for his idea of the oikeios or “web of life,” derived from oikeios topos—a term coined by the Greek botanist Theophrastus meaning “favorable place.”[25] This “favorable place” is one in which society and nature are understood as a unitary whole; the oikeios is the “way of naming the creative, historical and dialectical relation in, between and also always within, human and extra human natures.” The manifold projects and processes of humanity-in-nature—including imperialisms and anti-imperialism, class struggles from above and below, capital accumulation in its booms and crises—are always products of the oikeios, even as they create new relations of production and power within it.[26]
World-ecology’s focus on the oikeios dovetails neatly with social ecology’s notions of the “dynamic balance of nature,” “unity in diversity,” and the “interdependence of living and nonliving things.”
Implicitly oikeios points to the existence of a “Cartesian binary” between society and nature—which as noted above was one enabling device used by European colonists to rationalize primitive accumulation. The mythologies based on this Society vs. Nature binary, Moore contends, constructed a false division between the European Self and the colonized Other against whom a double standard could be invoked. Moore points to the ideological reconstruction of the usurpation and theft of colonial territories as a service to those being usurped; painted as primitive savages compared to the colonial aggressor, they were being blessed with benefits of civilization.[27] Naomi Klein has also connected this process of othering to global warming by identifying the willingness of those responsible to construct scapegoats for their actions, passing responsibility for addressing the problem onto others and future generations.[28]
Such commentary reflects the criticism by Bookchin referred to above of the reductionism and instrumentality of capitalist thinking. With the aid of insights from world-ecology into the nature and origins of the Capitalocene, what results in the final analysis are the following understandings:
- As the historical form of class hierarchy within modernity, capitalist social relations entail a predatory gaze within which workers, women, the peoples of the global South, and ultimately the planet itself are reduced to and instrumentalized as objects whose sole value is exploitation for profit;
- That this instrumentalist and reductionistic gaze gives rise to the mentality that the Earth in an infinite resource and garbage dump;
- That processes of othering enable both that asocial mentality and the predatory gaze from which it derives, and finally
- That state violence enabled by othering has been historically and remains the necessary condition for the continued existence of class and other forms of social privilege.
All of the above depends on the domination all life, and the defense of privilege from social justice, equality, and—by now—our collective survival.
Primitive Accumulation Past and Present
If the Industrial Revolution was not the beginning of a process, but the end of one, then the demands of primitive accumulation as the incipient basis for capitalist social relations are to blame for the climate crisis—not “humanity.” Thus, “To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification and relentless rationalization,’ for Moore is to:
prioritize the relations of power, capital and nature that rendered fossil capitalism so deadly in the first place. Shut down a coal plant, and you can slow global warming for a day; shut down the relations that made the coal plant, and you can stop it for good.[29]
Moore’s theorization reveals not only the shortcomings of traditional liberal approaches to environmental politics, but also those of traditional socialist politics. This is particularly true regarding Moore’s elaboration of “Cheap Natures” (Cheap Food, Cheap Labor-Power, Cheap Energy and Cheap Raw Materials) as necessary components of primitive accumulation.[30] Moore notes:
Absent massive streams of unpaid work/energy from the rest of nature—including that delivered by women—the costs of production would rise, and accumulation would slow. Every act of exploitation (of commodified labour power) therefore depends on an even greater act of appropriation (of unpaid work/energy. Wage workers are exploited, everyone else, human and extra-human, is appropriated.[31]
In drawing parallels between the unpaid work of women and the unpaid work of nature in turning long-dead dinosaurs into black heroin for fossil fuel junkies, Moore combines critique of primitive accumulation with broader insights into the intersectionality of oppressions. The two are manifest side by side in phenomena as varied as the enclosure movement, the patriarchal regime of the European witch-hunts, and the expropriation of people and raw materials from colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa based on land-theft and genocide.[32] These critiques combine themes from both social ecology and world-ecology into a broader and more unified critique of the empire of capital.
Ecofascism: Crisis Management for the Capitalocene
World-ecology establishes an important new tier of theory that accounts for paid and unpaid labor in the social reproduction of capital. Conditioned by a society constructed on the thinking that created the problem, we find our own subjectivity part of the society-in-nature dialectic— acting on the world while being impacted by it in turn, our sense of self interwoven into and colonized by metabolic rift. In observing the problem, we “influence” it by bringing in our ideological baggage, confusing our role in the climate crisis as convenience and necessity dictate. We thus become the cause and cure of the same problem, proving the truth of Einstein’s observation by making the same mistakes time and time again while expecting different results.
Crisis management through panic-driven Othering and scapegoating appears to be an epochal feature of the Capitalocene. This line of reasoning is supported by the events of March 15, 2019, when global student protests against climate change took place alongside the Christchurch Massacre. The glaring contrast between two responses to environmental crisis—a global student climate strike and a gun massacre—highlighted with unusual clarity the contradictory way of conceptualizing climate change within the Capitalocene.[33] Hage explicitly links the kind of racism the Christchurch massacre symbolized to a reaction amongst elite groups to the social consequences of climate change. In so doing, he points to a tendency within late capitalism to oscillate between “savage” and “civilized’ modes”—the “savage” being that of the primitive accumulation during the early period of colonialism, and the “civilized” that associated with western liberal democracy.[34]
Hage suggests this oscillating tendency reflects the ongoing scapegoating dynamic of primitive accumulation within late capitalism. This was especially true insofar as global capitalism is plagued by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and by democratic challenges from below— in other words, crises of accumulation. Besides threatening all life on Earth, the other great problem of the climate crisis is its potential to awaken a need for profound social change in increasing parts of the world’s population. The combination of scientific fact and lived daily experience presents a clear and present danger to a world order of haves and have-nots built on colonialism for 500 years. As elites return to violence to rescue class privilege from the social and environmental consequences of maintaining class hierarchies, or from democratic upsurges from below in response to their outcomes, the mask comes off the “civilized” mode, revealing the “savage” mode of primitive accumulation. Periodic returns to the “savage” modalities that characterized the birth of capitalism become necessary as stopgaps against crisis and the prospect of its death, while populist and fascist rhetoric continues to rationalize primitive accumulation within the present.[35]
As if to demonstrate, Brendan Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto The Great Replacement referenced a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that naive liberals advocating mass migration and cultural diversity were bringing about “white genocide.” By identifying the failure to uphold cultural and racial supremacy with the destruction of white society, Tarrant reflects classic Orientalist definitions of crisis as threats, actual or perceived, to the global legacy of colonialism. The Orientalist roots of this kind of conspiratorial paranoia is supported by sociological research into moral panics, as is the documented tendency of corporate media to manufacture consent through scaremongering.[36] Tarrant’s Islamic bugbears were disseminated directly through the power of the corporate media to control the meaning of deviance and impose their definition on public discourse.
Traditional liberal environmental politics that treat “the environment” as part of a package of causes with no bearing on one another have nothing to say about this. Likewise, for the intersectionality of relationships that produce the great variety of morbid symptoms heralding the current crisis, a situation described by Gramsci in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.’ In failing to account for the drive to exploit dirtier forms of fuel, the increasingly violent and authoritarian means of accessing resources, and the free lunch of Cheap Nature dries up and becomes increasingly toxic, liberal environmentalists increasingly resemble “neoliberals on bikes.”[37] In trying to reform rather than transcend the social relations of production that produce the crisis, the neoliberals on bikes also inadvertently defend the conditions that produce populism and fascism.[38] Treating the climate crisis as the result of the historically specific class and social relations associated with the rise of capitalism transcends misanthropic approaches that locate the source of ecological crisis in the “Anthropos” or human nature, world-ecology rises above the thinking that created the problem. As Moore asserts, “Capitalism’s great problem is historical nature (…) not “nature in general.”[39]
Furthermore, the conscious and willful class-warfare that accompanied the emergence of capitalism contrasts with commentary from the Communist Manifesto that speaks of feudal relations as “no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces” and so “burst asunder.”[40] Such claims of supposed iron laws of capitalist development have been deployed as rationales for vanguard parties and “worker’s states,” as if such maxims speak louder than history, not least of which being the disastrous history of state capitalism.[41] By contrast, social ecology’s critique of hierarchy and capitalism, working in combination with Federici’s work on the European witch-hunts and world-ecology’s concept of the Capitalocene, focuses attention on the actions of elites.
In working towards greater understanding of the climate crisis a historical outcome of the rise of capitalism, world-ecological insights pertaining to the Capitalocene offer grounds for a critique of liberal attempts to reform cancer, based on ahistorical attachment to the privileges the cancer affords them or to which they aspire to enjoy, and traditional Leninist justifications for vanguardism, based on ahistorical attachment to tradition. By contrast, world-ecology identifies a conscious and concerted campaign of class warfare to break down resistance to the dominance of global capital—enabled by racism, misogyny and other forms of Othering necessary for legitimization and scapegoating the victims.
Conclusion
There are two associated and mutually reinforcing trends within the Capitalocene through which we can zero in on the thinking that underpins the climate crisis. On the one hand, we find the mentality that regards the Earth as an endless resource and infinite garbage dump. On the other, we have the Othering necessary to maintain the legitimizing pretexts on which private accumulation was built and continues to rely upon. The two conjoin in the mentality that the Earth exists to serve global capital while anyone who finds themselves in the way has only themselves to blame. Ecological crisis then must also be understood as crises of accumulation; on the right the historical victim-blaming discussed above has been extrapolated into an overt conspiracy theory legitimating authoritarian forms of geopolitical crisis management.
With the history of the European witch-hunts as precedent, conspiracy theories of the Capitalocene must, as a matter of definition, blame those in the way of capital accumulation for existing; they must create the problems to which they then style themselves the solution. As U.S. artist Jenny Holzer has noted, private property created crime. Elite-driven narratives reflexively conflate the interests of humanity and the interests of global capital, associating those in the way with a conspiracy to undermine and destroy global society.
Returning to Einstein’s original observations regarding the impossibility of solving a problem using the thinking that created it, it is fair to conclude that the contrast between the preoccupation with conspiracy and the scientific understanding of climate crisis reflects the function of the former in constructing scapegoats for the latter. The terror inherent to atrocities like Christchurch only reflects the racialized terror from which the Western-dominated world order was born, and whose consequences condemn us to ecological Armageddon. This contrast also serves as the basis for defining what bequeathed us the climate crisis, and enables us to recognize the culpability of capitalism and its racist colonial foundations for producing climate change as a historical process.
This acknowledgment means we must develop new social relations predicated on valuing the inherent worth of workers, women, people of the Global South, the flora and fauna and ultimately the planet itself. Rather than instrumentalizing them in service to the abstract tenets of economic dogma and political ideology must be jettisoned so that politics and economy serve wellbeing and life. In the final analysis, this amounts to the abolition of hierarchy in all forms, and of all forms of economic and social privilege that give rise to them in the first place. Social and world-ecology share this understanding of the roots of the climate crisis. To effectively combat it, we must avoid replicating the modalities that produced it by developing new social relations within the shell of the old.[42]
If the Capitalocene was born of the fracturing of humanity by class and social privilege through state terror, putting it back together requires a process of transcending privilege and hierarchy conducted from below. This entails prioritizing personal over economic growth, and constructing new social relations informed by the similar principles of “unity of diversity” and Oikeios that underpin social and world-ecology. The cooperative human economies and anti-statist municipalism of social ecology offer both a political vision and strategy to guide the way.
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[2] Bookchin, ibid, 21
[3] Biehl, Janet, and Murray Bookchin (1998). The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
[4] Bookchin, op cit, 22.
[5] Bookchin, ibid, 23-4.
[6] Crutzen, Paul J. & Eugene F. Stoermer (2000). ‘The “Anthropocene,”’ Global Change Newsletter, Vol. 41.
[7] Angus, Ian (2016). Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. NYU Press; Davies, Jeremy. (2016). The Birth of the Anthropocene. University of California Press.
[8] Cox, Christopher R (2015). ‘Faulty Presuppositions and False Dichotomies: The Problematic Nature of “the Anthropocene,”’ Telos, no. 172: 59-81.
[9] Bookchin, M., & Foreman, D. (1991). Defending the Earth: Debate Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman. Black Rose Books, 22.
[10] Bookchin & Foreman, ibid.
[11] Malm, Andreas (2016). Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books.
[12] Hynes, H. Patricia (2015). ‘Pentagon Pollution, 7: The military assault on global climate,’ Climate & Capitalism, 8 February, via https://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/02/08/pentagon-pollution-7-military-assault-global-climate/, accessed 14 August 2019.
[13] Madison, James (1865). Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1865; Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, ‘Madison Debates: June 29,’ The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, via http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_629.asp, accessed 13 June 2018.
[14] Marx, Karl, trans. Ben Fowkes (1976) [1867]. Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 31 ‘Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,’ London: Penguin; Perelman, Michael (2000). The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Duke University Press; Perelman, Michael (2013). ‘A Short History of Primitive Accumulation,’ Counterpunch, 16 April 2013, via https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/16/a-short-history-of-primitive-accumulation/, accessed 13 August 2019.
[15] Marx, ibid.
[16] Hsia, R. P. C. (1988). The myth of ritual murder: Jews and magic in reformation Germany. Yale University Press; Probst, C. J. (2012). Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany. Indiana University Press.
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[18] Federici, Silvia (2005). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York; Autonomedia, 102.
[19] Moore, Jason W. (2016). ed, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, PM Press, 86; Saïd, Edward (1979). Orientalism, New York: Vintage; Williams, Robert A., Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization, Macmillan, 2012.
[20] Said, ibid.
[21] Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the barbarian: Greek self-definition through tragedy; Woolf, G. (2001). Inventing empire in ancient Rome. Empires: Perspectives from archaeology and history.
[22] Moore, Jason W. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London; Verso; Moore, Jason W. (2016). ed, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, PM Press; Moore, J. W. (2017a). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594-630.; Moore, Jason W. (2017b). “The Capitalocene, Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies: 1-43; Moore, Jason & Raj Patel (2017c). A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, University of California Press; Wallerstein, Immanuel (2011). The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. University of California Press.
[23] Foster, John Bellamy (1999). “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2: 366–405; Foster, John Bellamy (2000). Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
[24] Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, ibid, 19.
[25] Moore, ibid, 35.
[26] Moore, ibid, 35.
[27] Moore, ibid.
[28] Klein, Naomi (2016). ‘Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,’ London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 11·2 June, 11-14.
[29] Moore, op cit, 174.
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[31] Moore, op cit, 54.
[32] Perelman, op cit; Federici, op cit.
[33] Klein, op cit; Debney, Ben (2017). ‘Crises Worthy and Otherwise: Terror Scare vs Climate Change,’ Counterpunch, Vol. 24, No. 2.
[34] Hage, Ghassan (2017). Is Racism an Environmental Threat? London; John Wiley & Sons.
[35] Hage, ibid.
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[39] Moore, op cit, 151
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