The Capitalocene
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.
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Claire’s suggestions of a capitalocene over an Anthropocene, because it is inclusive in its attacks on the things that legitimise capitalism, such as colonialism, is inspiring. However, I would disagree with her notion to place humans into nature, because like animals and plants, they are something the capitalocene puts to work, as this creates a binary of humans either as a geological force causing the climate crisis, or a part of nature being put into a crisis. Intra-action allows for a co-existence, in that we can be both the geological force that the Anthropocene/capitalocene has been described as, and also be placed in nature. Timothy Clark's chapter on liberalism and ecocriticism raises the point that if every human was to live to the standard of an American, we would require the resources of three planets (106). Therefore, it would we impossible to part the human experience from capitalism without causing unrest to liberal values that many would argue are essential to being human. For me, this raises the question that, before we can answer whether the climate crisis should be an Anthropocene or a capitalocene, we need to look at the role of the individuals in natureculture, and we need to question what impacts we have as individuals to unlock a new liberalism where there is no separation of our involvements in nature or capitalism.
This image invokes the green moralism that Timothy Clark questions. While it is evidently good to recycle, the image is intrusive as it does not consider the barriers to entry to recycling. There are plenty reasons why people might not be recycling, particularly if we consider for example the impact COVID has had on our dependency of single use plastics such as face-masks. But this does not mean the individual cannot have a liberalist agency, they can use their voice to compel change. Part of being human and having an infinite capacity in the liberalist sense is to be able to invoke change beyond our necessities, and this is something that will have to be considered.
This video explores the green new deal (GND) and entails what will happen to individuals as a consequence of changes to mitigate climate change. It also portrays the counter arguments – that it is expensive, or socialist. This video made me consider why the capitalocene is not a good term – as it is divisive, and will play into the hands of those against the GND because it has a "political agenda". Therefore, the video's most compelling moment was displaying what the GDR meant to individuals, as it allows us to imagine our role in what lies ahead.
Works cited:
“Liberalism and Green Moralism.” The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, by Timothy Clark, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 102–110. Cambridge Introductions to Literature.