On Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Necrocene, Chthulucene — what should we call the current geological era? Every contributor here pushes back on “Anthropocene,” and they are nearly united in seeing it as a reinforcement of human hubris, the mind insisting on its separation from nature. In its place they offer a few alternatives, and the essays are somewhat inconsistent.

The first and most frequent is the “Capitalocene.” The idea is that Capital, as a system, isn’t merely “economics” — not just markets or trade or finance — but that the emergence of capitalism coincided with, and is responsible for, our attempt to divide “nature” from “society.” Several authors make the compelling case that this doesn’t start with industrialization, as we tend to assume; the same logic drove “the four cheaps” of the Early Modern period — cheap labor (that is, slavery), cheap food, cheap energy (wood, coal), and cheap raw materials. Jason Moore brings evidence that the total deforestation of the European continent began in the long sixteenth century, and that the British leaned heavily on coal well before the steam engine. They rightly see Capital as a coherent system, caused and driven by humans but running on its own logics, so that “anthropos” isn’t quite the right word: it was not, and is not, all of humanity driving these seismic shifts — it’s those with access to capital.

The second formulation, the necrocene, I find much less compelling. Justin McBrien devotes much of his essay to it, tying it to extinction. It’s true that we are living in — and driving — the Sixth Great Extinction. But the term removes our responsibility: fine, we’re in the epoch of necros, yet that says nothing about who is doing the killing, and it lets our extinction be conflated with the Permian or the end of the Jurassic. That conflation is exactly what we are trying to avoid.

The third, the Chthulucene, is interesting — this is Donna Haraway doing the sort of thing Haraway always does: sophisticated, playful, smart. The term obviously comes from the Lovecraft mythos, but she unpacks it. Chthulu’s name nods to the Greek chthonic gods, the gods of the land: rather than anthropos looking up to Olympus, she has us look back down at terra, at Gaia, and tend to what we have. She plays, too, with the tentacle, so pervasive in Lovecraftian fiction — I hadn’t known “tentacle” comes from the Latin tentāre, to feel, to hold, to touch. She urges us to break bread with (cum pānis) our companion species, to care for one another and live together, recognizing how embedded in each other we are. At least, that’s what I take her to mean. She develops the argument further in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, though I’m not sure I fully got it. For all that I enjoyed the wordplay and the insistence on a thoroughly intertwined more-than-human world, I’m not sure “Chthulucene” is a good name for an epoch best understood as humans pushing the planet to its limits, destroying everything that can’t be sold at a profit.

So I’m most persuaded by the capitalocene. It strikes me as far more suitable than the “Anthropocene” — though I’m not wholly against the latter either, since it does let us hold ourselves responsible for what we’re doing. Still, it’s also true that “Anthropocene” issues from the same logic that lets us imagine ourselves separate from nature in the first place.

It’s a short book, and every contributor has something worth saying. For anyone interested in science and technology in society, in radical politics, in our present moment, it’s worth a look — even if I don’t think it will stick with me the way some other books have.