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• 1 2021-03-04T18:08:11-08:00 The Capitalocene 2 A description of what Jason W. Moore calls 'The Capitalocene' and some ways in which it is visible locally, in Australia. plain 2021-03-04T18:10:35-08:00 In this image we can see parahuman life being, as Jason Moore would call it, ‘put to work’ by Capitalism. I say parahuman because it is life that lives alongside the human, running parallel to it in a sense, but remaining distinct from it in terms of agency. This life is neither superior nor inferior to human life; does not exist in a hierarchical relationship with it, but rather exists on a horizontal, rhizomatic plane of difference, as Guattari and Deleuze might describe it.
  
  But here the parahuman is not only being ‘put to work’ in the physical sense, in which its materiality is appropriated for capital value as a ‘resource’ - I mean ‘put to work’ in the ideological sense. For here parahuman life, or plant life is being used to further the growth of the Capitolcene by promoting this essentially commercial, high rise building located in Sydney as a work that is ‘environmentally friendly’ so to speak.
  
  The hypocrisy of this display of ecological symbiosis can be read through the fact that while this building received a ‘5 star Green Star – Multi-Unit Residential Design v1 Certified Rating by the Green Building Council of Australia, making it the largest multi-residential building (by net lettable area) in Australia to receive such a designation’, it nonetheless is home to such stores as Adidas, which is well known for its use of sweatshops to produce pricey footwear for privileged humans.
  
  In this way, one can see how the term Capitalocene is a useful term, in that it includes the concept of culture. For according to Jason Moore, the term Capitalocene insists that capitalism must be attacked on multiple levels - not merely on those that are immediately recognisable as ecological issues, like coal mining and pollution, but also on such crucial levels as sexism, racism, and colonialism, which legitimise the processes of capital accumulation.
  
  Therefore, this ideological process taking place on the surface of this building could be described as what Moore would call ‘The cultural fix’, or ‘the hegemonic and ideological processes that legitimate the long term reproduction of the social relations of production’. But one key political body that has also legitimised the social relations of production in this ideological display is the Australian government. As it says on Wikipedia, the building pictured was brought into being because:  
  
  ‘the state government was granted approval authority over local councils for developments deemed "state significant projects".[8] Therefore, in 2009 it was the state government of New South Wales that provided approval of an enhanced master scheme of Central Park that was put forth by London based architectural firm Foster and Partners.’ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Central_Park
  
  This image therefore highlights how the state is, as Moore says in ‘Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism’,  central to the ecological devastation of the earth through the way that it territorialises the surface of the earth and then delivers both human (like the sweatshops of Adidas) and parahuman (the parahuman entities that go into the making of Adidas shoes and the plant life used to ideologically support such practices) life to capital in the form of capital value, or what he calls ‘Cheap Nature’.
  
  The term ‘Nature’ therefore, in the sense of the Capitalocene, does not exclude human beings, and the destruction of nature does not exclude the destruction of human lives as well as parahuman lives. For human lives are no more or less nature than the parahuman lives of plants, animals, rivers and soil, all of which the Capitalocene ‘puts to work’ in service of capital accumulation.
  
  (To watch a short video of Jason Moore describing what the Capitalocene is click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1YZym_abPU)
  
  (To read a news article in which a reporter talks to Jason Moore himself about the Capitalocene, click here: https://www.wired.com/story/capitalocene/)
  
  Greyhounds are ‘put to work’ for capital accumulation in ways that are particularly cruel not only to the greyhounds themselves, but also to the other parahuman beings that are used for live baiting such as piglets, rabbits and possums.
  
  Despite this cruelty being exposed by the program Four Corners, which led to Greyhound racing being banned in the ACT, the NSW government nonetheless handed over a total of $1.2 million to the greyhound racing industry so that they could continue to practice outside the ACT border.
  Apart from the territorial aspect of this state power in allowing racecourses to be built in Australia in the first place, the geopower of the Australian government is also exercised through money that allows the practice to spread across the surface of the earth.
  
  Capitalism is therefore not merely a matter of economy but also a matter of culture. It is a system that breeds and was bred out of a certain culture that, as Moore says in the short minute video, excludes most living beings from the protective shell that the word ‘Culture’ provides and relegates them instead to ‘Nature’ as a resource in service of capital accumulation. The term Capitalocene seeks to break down this binary between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ by replacing humans with capitalism as the devastating geological force that it is, and therefore re-placing humans back in the term ‘Nature’ as one of the many forms of life that the Capitalocene ‘puts to work’ in painful and often fatal ways.
  
  (Guardian article explaining how the NSW government supplied two payments, one of $500,000 and one of $700,000 to ACT greyhound racers to help them continue the practice outside the border after it was banned there: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/aug/24/nsw-gives-700000-to-greyhound-industry-two-years-after-aborted-ban?fbclid=IwAR1DAA3OIYk3JvdDDqDEuOJ4t1TmKUTR9E8noApEpOK49G1lXFfl3BfpU_M)
  
  (ABC article explaining how the original ban on greyhound racing came about after a Four Corners report on systemic animal cruelty within the practice including ‘live baiting’, ‘blooding’ and euthanising greyhounds for not being competitive enough: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-20/greyhound-racing-ban-nsw-explained/7622052)
  
  By Claire – z3393668.
• 1 2021-03-05T14:22:51-08:00 Capitalobscenery 1 Econcept 1 of 2 plain 2021-03-05T14:22:51-08:00 Sometimes what are images of the Capitalocene are festooned in swathes of obnoxious greenery; statements of apparent symbihonesty about how the forces of capitalism work with and for the many lives, human and parahuman that it puts to work in service of the hypergrowth that is its mantra. Here a high-rise building is dipped in dripping leaves in the heart of Sydney’s CBD like some monolithic moss totem in worship of urbananity; Capitalobscenery. These are vistas of the world that seem as effortlessly abundant as they are commercial; as synthetic as they are natural; competitive as they are harmonious – Capitalism is Nature, they seem to say. And this is true. Humans are nature. Humans created Capitalism. Capitalism is nature. But what kind of nature? Capitalobscenery denies the dark underbelly of its machinations – the enslavement, the devastation, the pollution. It smiles even as it knows that you can see it all. The reflective and fur-leafed grid of glass that captures the sky in its eyeballs on this greenbellied building asks us to stroke its exposed plant world like a cat; it assures us what goes on behind it is completely natural, no matter how ugly the reality of it may be – no matter how many lives, human and parahuman were lost, degraded and/or exploited in achieving this glitteringly glass humanden.  
  
  As Rosie Braidotti says, the Capitalocene has become Post-Human, but not in a way that is life affirming. Rather, it is Post-Human in that it has realised, like god reflecting on the vastness of all his productive value for the first time, that humans and parahumans are equally worthy of its measuring, coding and quantifying in terms of capital value; equally worthy of being uprooted from lives of comfort, freedom and love, only to be displaced into lives of torture, enslavement and cruelty. Here the majesty of greyhounds in full sprint is muzzled from our eyes by the crude plumage of a money making ritual. The grass glistens like hills stretching away from the eye into the horizon of this circulaceration on our souls. We feel our fear for them chasing them onwards into the pixelatent digital scream that separates us from this race for their lives. We know those who cannot win will be shot. And yet, the Capitalobscenery that this image propagates in our minds is that the greyhounds were running this race all along – it is not humans that chase them with the threat of death, but Nature. Survival of fastest. Along their spines and skullsT the metal fence hammers into their flesh like harmless farm enclosers quilting the land into patches of gambling Eden where greyhounds are a piece of pastoral paradice rolling around the great circle of life roulette.  
  
  
  But where is the green in which we would imagine these cows? In place of obscene greenery to warm our souls in the heart of this dairy farm there is a holy light; a white in the darkness of parahuman rummaginings through the soil empaved by these humangels’s flight into nowhere they belong but everywhere as the sun can touch along the tips of heavenly gates at which the paramortals crowd. It is not for cows. Their place is in the dirt; the clay from which Adam was made they may search for the grass that eludes them like an unpresent Elysian fields to which they may return in their dreams once their lives have been offered like milk to bathe the Cleopaternal world in human rule; drench its skin in the scent of mother always there invisibly unedged forever as ever the dairy farmers may walk away from the nature they created; from the Capitalobscenery careening its neck to see what has been left behind on the other side. What we also do not see are the tubes connected like power pointments blessing their bellies breathing life into the economeeting place of natural salectivation and divine right to resources. Here we have a world where Capitalism is not just Nature, it is Divine Nature.
  
  By Claire - z3393668.