capitalocene

is an alternative anthropocene which suggests a longer history and is interested more in the key transition of slave agriculture rather than coal, fossil fuels and steam engines.

Andreas Malm, who was graduate student at Lund, first proposed the concept of the Capitalocene (Malm & Hornborg 2014), and Jason Moore, who was there when it happened, picked it up, and used it to reread Marx in a multispecies kind of way (Moore 2014a... 2014b). What I think the term Capitalocene does that the term Anthropocene does not do, and cannot do, is to insist that it is an historically situated complex of metabolisms and assemblages. The people that I know who use Anthropocene tend to emphasize the history from the mid-eighteenth century forward, and tend to take the use of fossil fuel as the key historical moment. The Capitalocene suggests a longer history. I think we are looking at slave agriculture, not coal, frankly, as a key transition.

is an alternative to anthropocene which ascribes responsibility to those individuals and that institution responsible for it.

The 'anthropos' ofthe Anthropocene is not exactly any body, it is made of highly localised networks of some individual bodies whose responsibility is staggering. As Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski write: 'We have your names and your telephone number' (this is from a remarkable book, edited by Emilie Hache, on whatthe Anthropocene does to anthropology). Such an attribution of responsibility and this dispersion ofthe 'anthropos' into specific historical and local networks, actually gives a lot of weightto the other candidate for naming the same period of geohistory,that of 'capitalocene', a swift way to ascribe this responsibility to whom and to where it belongs. (Latour 2014 AAA Distinguished lecture)

capitalocene, n.Definitions

capitalocene