Dipesh ChakrabartyThinkers

The Anthropocene is a call for (or a description of)) a new negative human universality predicated upon common vulnerability in the face of climate crisis.

The Anthropocene subject is a new universal history of humans that flashes up and is forged by radical climate precarity, which is marked by an equality whereby ' there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged'.

The Division of labor is responsible for the creation of a uniformity, a regularity, an order, an intensity of labour. 'The overseer's book of penalties replaces the slave-driver's lash.' All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages.

Exchange-value is a way for marx to explain how the capitalist mode of production managed to extract, out of peoples and histories that were all different, a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity.

Human labor is the underlying equal factor that makes sense out of things that are unequal and different... say, for example, how many shoes are equal to a house.

Punishment is a phenomenon that has progressed with the division of labor such that the overseer's book of penalties replaces the slave-drivers lash. Punishment resolves into economic punishment.

A Singularity is that which defies the generalizing impulse of the sociological imagination.

A Subaltern past is a past that cannot enter history as belonging to the historian's own position.