Marx and the Climate Crisis #3: Marx and Climate Change by Sean O’Brien
Lecture 3: Marx and Climate Change
Hello and welcome back for part three of this lecture series on Marx and the Climate Crisis. In the first lecture we looked at Marx’s writings on societal nature relations, and the way in which, under capital, those relations are not only compromised but inverted. To understand this inversion, we looked at two key ideas in Marx’s mature critique of political economy: first, that the capitalist value-form is not something natural but is rather ‘purely social’ (1990: 149), and second, that this historically specific social form necessarily assumes fetishized appearance as a ‘second nature’. In considering what a Marxian critical theory of nature might look like, we turned to the work of Alfred Schmidt, a student of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and one of a number of second-generation Frankfurt School thinkers to explicitly argue against the reading of Marx advanced after his death by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, in which human development mirrors that of the natural world and unfolds in a process of becoming according to natural laws. This conception of human social development, we saw, laid the foundations for traditional Marxism’s philosophy of history and its transhistorical conception of the commodity. We noted, then, that the critical theory of nature initially advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer and later formulated in detail by Schmidt forms the basis of a lineage of Marxian ecological thought relatively distinct from the ‘metabolic rift’ school of analysis associated with figures such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, the ‘production of space’ paradigm developed primarily by Marxist geographers Neil Smith and David Harvey, which are arguably the predominant forms of ecological Marxism operating today.
Schmidt takes aim specifically at an unfinished work comprising a series of notes and fragments Engels wrote between the early 1870s and mid-1880s on developments in science and technology in the period. These manuscripts were published posthumously as Dialectics of Nature in 1925. The work aims to expand on a number of ideas about natural law and human social development first formulated in Anti-Dühring, a book that had an outsized influence on traditional Marxism. Schmidt takes particular issue with Engels’ theory of dialectical materialism, which posited a system of dialectical ‘laws’ that exist in nature and unfold independent of human social development, in what Engels describes as a kind of ‘matter in motion’ (29). Engels opens his manuscript on dialectics by listing three laws: 1) the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; 2) the law of the interpenetration of opposites; and 3) the law of the negation of the negation. In his account, while ‘all three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought’, these ‘dialectical laws are really laws of [the] development of nature’ (62). These apparently objective, natural laws form the basis of the doctrine of dialectical materialism, which views human history and its social forms of development as determinate expressions of revolutionary processes unfolding in nature, with purposive labour playing the distinctive role in mastering the environment in ‘the transition from ape to man’ (170), as Engels puts it.
For Schmidt, this dialectical materialist theory of nature is a kind of ‘dogmatic metaphysic’ that emerges in Engels’s work whenever he attempts to go ‘beyond Marx’s conception of the relation between nature and social history’ (51). In Engels’ hands, Schmidt claims, developments in societal nature relations become the iron laws of history that ground the official dogmas of Soviet Marxism. According to Schmidt, ‘Stalin himself and Stalinism as a whole drew from this the dogma of the absolute objectivity of historical laws, which act independently of man’s will and differ in no respect from the laws of nature’ (192). Part of what is at stake for Schmidt, then, is tracing a genealogy of this particular line of Marxist theory—which he argues culminates in Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938)—and subjecting it to critique based on Marx’s mature work. In Schmidt’s account:
Engels reduced history to the special area of application of nature’s general laws of motion and development. In this way he cleared the way for the institutionalized division of theory into dialectical and historical materialism, which is characteristic of Stalinist ideology but meaningless from the Marxist point of view. (191)
Meaningless from a Marxist point of view because, for Marx, dialectics are characteristic only of human social practice. We might recall here that Schmidt argues a schism or fissure exists between society and nature even in socialism, something for which his work has been subject to critique by figures such as Paul Burkett. In the first lecture, we saw that the distinction in Marx, so crucial to the eco-Marxist school of ‘metabolic rift’ analysis, between the labour process in general and the labour process under capitalism—or the valorisation process—arguably collapse in Schmidt’s concept of metabolism, such that any form of human social labour participates in the domination of nature.
Burkett goes so far as to suggest that Schmidt ‘lapses into an uncritical determinism similar to that of official (Stalinist) Marxism’ (164). As Carl Cassegård has argued, however, while Schmidt does tend to equate socialism as such with the rationalised domination of nature, the ‘socio-historical conception of nature’ Schmidt develops in The Concept of Nature in Marx ‘goes against the grain of any objectivistic dialectics of nature as exemplified by Engels or official Soviet-style Marxism’ (89). Paramount for Schmidt is the non-identity of society and nature, an Adornian resistance of the material object to the concept, or what Cassegård describes in his reading of Schmidt as ‘the irreducible element of objectivity in nature that can never be assimilated to the categories of the subject’(81). Here we might recall arguments from Søren Mau and Alexander Stoner that I mentioned in previous lectures, both of whom reject any original identity in societal-nature relations. Mau posits an ‘original cleavage between humans and the rest of nature’ (102), a fissure into which capital inserts itself as mediator in what he calls ‘metabolic domination’ (104). Stoner argues that ‘The fact that the original identity of humanity and nature can be and has been projected backward onto all of human history is itself reflective of capital’s specific historical logic – namely, its abstract generality’ (96). Both claims clearly align with the non-identity of Smith’s critical theory of nature.
Schmidt’s insistence on the non-identical, then, should be understood as a critique both of Engels’s work and of Soviet Marxism’s tendency to reproduce the reified categories of a fetishized second nature, as Schmidt makes explicit in the following passage, where writes that:
when Marx wrote of the ‘natural laws’ of society, of the critique of political economy’s conception of the development of social formations as a ‘process of natural history’ in which persons have become the ‘personification of economic categories’, this had the critical meaning that men are subjected to a system of material conditions which is outside their control and triumphs over them as a ‘second’ nature. (191)
Not nature, but ‘second’ nature. In Volume I of Capital, Marx writes, ‘in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labor time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature’. Commodity exchange has internal laws akin to ‘the law of gravity’, which ‘asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him’ (168). Schmidt’s criticism, then, is that, ‘While Marx wanted these laws to vanish through being dissolved by the rational actions of liberated individuals, Engels naturalistically identified the laws of man with those of physical nature, which can of course only be applied and controlled’(191-2).
The concept of second nature, as we saw in lecture 1, is pivotal to the critique of political economy because it allows Marx to distinguish between the ‘natural form’ and the ‘value form’ of a commodity. Schmidt too was at pains to demonstrate that, because the act of exchange abstracts from the useful, concrete, material properties of the commodity, value ‘is indifferent towards the stuff of nature’ (74). Exchange-value, Schmidt insists, which expresses the magnitude of value as a determinant amount of socially necessary labour time, has nothing whatsoever to do with nature. As values, Schmidt writes, commodities ‘no longer incorporate the living interaction between men and nature, but emerge as a dead and thing-like reality, as an objective necessity by which human life is ruled, as by a blind fate’ (68). However, because of the fetish character of the commodity, Schmidt argues, ‘the natural determination of the commodity appears as social’, while ‘its social determination appears as an inherent natural determination’ (68). In this way, he continues, ‘the use-value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man and nature, takes on an existence ... cut loose from any connection with its natural existence’ (93).
In the second lecture, we extended this line of inquiry into societal-nature relations to address the question of energy. Drawing on work in the Energy Humanities, we took a detailed look at concepts such as energy deepening, energy transition, and energy impasse. We noted that the Marxist critique of energy attends to the way energy and its use have been shaped by the valorisation of value, as well as how energy itself is form-giving, shaping as well as fuelling the accumulation of capital, even as value remains relatively indifferent to the materiality of energy sources. Our focus was on the role that energy plays not only in the climate crisis, but also in the reproduction of capital, and the question of why it has been overlooked or underplayed in historical accounts of capitalist modernity. Reading energy into the history of capitalism, we saw, is not simply about accounting for the fact that burning dirty fuel sources in factories spews catastrophic amounts of CO2 into the air, or that oil has been at the heart of conflicts in geopolitical economy for decades.
Centring energy in the history of capitalism, we noted, is rather to recast modernity as ‘petromodernity’, a term Stephanie LeMenager uses to describe ‘a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum’ (60), and thus to understand modern subjects as ‘petrosubjects’ who, as Jeff Diamanti and Imre Szeman argue, ‘inhabit a petroculture of quickened time and expanded space that requires oil to make it flow’ (143). To understand this concept of ‘petroculture’, we turned to the work of the Petrocultures Research Group, who write:
We use this term to emphasize the ways in which post-industrial society today is an oil society through and through. It is shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments. Even more significantly, fossil fuels have also shaped our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings. These latter can be difficult to parse. It might be easy to point to a highway interchange and understand its relationship to our oil culture, but it is much harder to name and isolate the ideals of autonomy and mobility, for instance, that are just as strongly linked to the historical conditions of a fossil fuel society. In a very real way, these values are fuelled by fossil fuels, as are so many of the other values and aspirations that we have come to associate with the freedoms and capacities of modern life. It is in this sense that we are a petroculture; and it is for this reason, too, that transitioning from fossil fuels to other sources of energy will require more than new energy technologies. We will need to transform and transition our cultural and social values at the same time. (9-10)
We traced the historical formation of our modern petroculture through the concepts of energy transition, which names both the emergence of what Andres Malm calls ‘fossil capital’ and the aspirational horizon of a post-carbon future; energy deepening, which describes a rise in the ratio of energy inputs relative to human labour; and energy impasse, which names the absence of any given path out of the climate emergency, and therefore invites us to reconsider not only what a transition from fossil fuels might look like but also by extension how human society might be reimagined.
Lecture three now moves to confront what is arguably the greatest issue of our age, the product of a carbon-soaked capitalism, and the terrain on which struggles over energy transition play out: climate change. We’ll begin with a critical account of recent theoretical developments on the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, a name coined by environmental scientists to describe a new geological era in which human activity has come to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. We’ll then turn to Marxian counter proposals from environmental geographer Jason W. Moore and ecofeminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway, who suggest we might more accurately name this geological period the ‘capitalocene’, a conceptual intervention that reconceives of capital accumulation as a way of organizing nature as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology. Building on these insights, this lecture concludes by asking where our warming world is headed. What will the political and economic consequences be if we fail to reduce rates of carbon emissions sufficiently to keep future heating levels below the critical 2°C threshold? Turning briefly to the work of Mike Davis on global climate patterns and the political economy of famine in the global south, we will close by considering the related and increasingly pressing issue of climate refugees through Marx’s category of relative surplus population.
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By most accounts, 2023 is now officially the hottest year on record. According to data from the World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission’s Copernicus Earth Observation Program, last July produced the warmest three weeks, the three hottest days, and the highest ocean temperatures ever documented, prompting United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres to proclaim that ‘the era of global warming has ended’ and that ‘the era of global boiling has arrived’. Italy, Spain, and Portugal were devastated by wildfires. Large parts of Greece, including the islands of Rhodes and Corfu, were reduced to ash. Fires in Lahaina left the original capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom in ruins. The Canadian cities of Yellowknife and Kelowna were under evacuation notice for days as wildfires in the region burned out of control. Cities across the US were smothered in thick smoke from the forest fires raging to the north. It was a summer consumed by heat and by fire. But for many it was also the wettest year in memory. Images of flash flooding from Mallorca, Hong Kong, and Ibiza filled newsfeeds throughout the summer as holiday makers fled the deluges. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Slovenia were battered by torrential downpours. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, communities still recovering from unprecedented wildfires in June suffered catastrophic and deadly flash flooding in July. In Libya, the death toll from flash flooding in one city alone stands at more than 10,000, after torrential downpours in Derna caused two dams and four bridges to collapse. For Danny Blair, co-director of the Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg, the frequency and severity of extreme weather events around the globe indicate an intensification and acceleration of climate change at rates faster than most scientists expected.Meanwhile, CO2 emissions rates continue to soar, fossil fuel subsidies are at an all-time high, and energy companies are raking in record profits.
We live in an age defined by radical changes in the metabolism of societal nature relations, so much so that scientists have proposed we now inhabit a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, a period of natural history in which human activity has become a driving force in the transformation of the earth’s planetary cycles and systems. Popularized by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in an essay from 2000, the term has become fashionable far beyond the natural sciences, appearing in humanities and social science scholarship, popular media, and environmental activist literatures. In the Age of Man, or Anthropos, traces of human activity become visible in the geological record. It is on such stratigraphic ground that Crutzen and Stoermer—and, more recently, the Anthropocene Working Group—propose the Anthropocene as a new unit of geological time to be added to the Geological Time Scale, using atmospheric indicators retrieved from glacial ice cores such as carbon dioxide to mark a periodizing break with the Holocene, which dates to the end of the last glacial age and glacial retreat 12,000 years ago and is characterised by an unusually stable climate, providing conditions favourable for human social advances in agricultural practice and urban development. All of recorded human history has taken place within this period of relative stability and warmth. With the advent of the Anthropocene, the geophysical properties of the earth, the landscapes and ecosystems of the biosphere and the cryosphere, the chemical cycles of the atmosphere and its meteorological climate patterns all undergo transformations that are relatively rapid in relation to the established patterns of natural history and profound in their scope and scale. The resulting instability in the earth’s climate has produced a new set of conditions in its habitable zones that are increasingly less favourable to human social development, and indeed to life as such: desertification, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, biodiversity collapse, mass extinction, and extreme weather events.
When did the Holocene end and the Anthropocene begin? Well, it depends on who you ask. In Crutzen and Stoermer’s essay, they date the transition from the Holocene to theAnthropocene to the period of the industrial revolution. They write:
To assign a more specific date to the onset of the “Anthropocene” seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene). However, we choose this date because, during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several ‘greenhouse gases’, in particularCO2 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784. About at that time, biotic assemblages in most lakes began to show large changes. (20-21)
Crutzen and Stoermer are not only interested in greenhouse gas emissions, however. Alongside fossil fuel consumption and rising rates of methane emissions from farmed cattle, they also note the explosion of the human population over this period, the skyrocketing amounts of nitrogen fertilizers used in agriculture, the disappearance of rainforest and the depletion of fresh water reserves. All these indicators, they argue, index the increasing impact of human activities on the environment. In the passage quoted above, Crutzen and Stoermer note that other scientists have made alternative proposals for dating the start of the Anthropocene that stretch back thousands of years. The Neolithic Revolution in particular has been cited numerous times as a possible start date. The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis, as it is known, was first proposed by William Ruddiman back in 2003. Ruddiman argues that anomalous gas trends occur much earlier in the Holocene than the industrial revolution, and that ice core deposits of CO2 and CH4 can be traced to changes in agricultural practices that took place around 8,000 years ago, after which greenhouse gas concentrations stop following the periodic rise and fall that had previously characterized their long-term behaviour.
A competing periodization for the Anthropocene dates its beginnings to a more recent moment. In 2019, members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) proposed a start date in the mid-20th century, a moment marked by rapid increases in population and industrial production, the use of agricultural chemicals and so on, but also, crucially, the first atomic bomb explosions, which scattered radioactive debris across the planet. That fallout then became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, forming part of the geologic record. An official start-date was thus proposed by the panel to coincide with the radionuclides released into the atmosphere from bomb detonations in 1945.This moment at mid-century has come to be known as the ‘Great Acceleration,’ a term that names the profound surge in human activities and their ramifications on our planet’s systems after the Second World War. On or around 1945, there was a notable uptick in various metrics that measure human impact on Earth Systems: population explosion, skyrocketing energy consumption, rampant carbon dioxide emissions, voracious water use, and a range of other indicators. These metrics weren’t just rising steadily; they were accelerating at an unprecedented pace. The post-World War II period was a time of rapid industrialization and globalization. As economies became more interconnected and technology advanced, the collective footprint on the planet grew exponentially. The Great Acceleration isn’t just about numbers, though, nor is it solely about the climate. According to Will Steffan and other members of the AWG, ‘the term “Great Acceleration” aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System, encompassing far more than climate change’ (82).
A number of scholars have adopted this periodization of the Anthropocene. In The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945, for example, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke note that, ‘since the mid twentieth century human action (unintentionally) has become the most important factor governing crucial biogeochemical cycles’, or what they describe as a ‘set of interlocking global-scale processes’ that form what is regularly called the Earth System,which includes ‘the carbon cycle, the sulfur cycle, and the nitrogen cycle’ (4). Mapping dramatic increases not only in earth system indicators but also in socio-economic trends—including economic growth, population growth, energy consumption, urbanization and rapid technological advancements across information technology, transportation, and healthcare sectors—McNeill and Engelke also note that, in the same period, ‘the human impact on the Earth and the biosphere, measured and judged in several different ways, has escalated’ (4). It is precisely the speed of this escalation since 1945 that gives the period its name:
Within the last three human generations, three-quarters of the human-caused loading of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide took place. The number of motor vehicles on Earth increased from 40 million to 850 million. The number of people nearly tripled, and the number of city dwellers rose from about 700 million to 3.7 billion. In 1950 the world produced about 1 million tons of plastics but by 2015 that rose to nearly 300 million tons. In the same time span, the quantities of nitrogen synthesized (mainly for fertilizers) climbed from under 4 million tons to more than 85 million tons. (4)
Following the adoption in 2019 of the ‘Great Acceleration’ as the historical point of departure from the Holocene, the Anthropocene Working Group still needed an exemplar, or ‘golden spike’, a geologic marker created by a global event that leads to long lasting global changes recorded in the geologic record that can be used to indicate a change in geologic time. In 2023, the group nominated muds in Canada’s Crawford Lake, the bed of which holds the sedimented debris of humanity’s fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout from the 1950s onwards. Some members of the AWG dissented from the 2019 vote over the question of origins. ‘The stratigraphic evidence overwhelmingly indicates a time-transgressive Anthropocene with multiple beginnings rather than a single moment of origin’, says Matt Edgeworth, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester and a member of the AWG. Naming a new epoch on the basis of the radionuclide signal alone, Edgeworth suggests, ‘impedes rather than facilitates scientific understanding of human involvement in Earth system change’. Fair enough.
Geographers Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis have a very different perspective on the question. In their view, the start of the Anthropocene should be dated to European colonization, black chattel slavery and indigenous genocide, and we should understand racism and the climate emergency to share common causes. Their intervention is as follows:
Our planetary impacts have increased since our earliest ancestors stepped down from the trees, at first by hunting some animal species to extinction. Much later, following the development of farming and agricultural societies, we started to change the climate. Yet Earth only truly became a “human planet” with the emergence of something quite different. This was capitalism, which itself grew out of European expansion in the 15th and 16th century and the era of colonisation and subjugation of indigenous peoples all around the world. In the Americas, just 100 years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas in 1492, 56 million indigenous Americans were dead, mainly in South and Central America. This was 90% of the population. Most were killed by diseases brought across the Atlantic by Europeans, which had never been seen before in the Americas: measles, smallpox, influenza, the bubonic plague. War, slavery and wave after wave of disease combined to cause this “great dying”, something the world had never seen before, or since. In North America the population decline was slower but no less dramatic due to slower colonisation by Europeans. US census data suggest the Native American population may have been as low as 250,000 people by 1900 from a pre-Columbus level of 5 million, a 95% decline. (2020)
This is an historical and political argument, of course, but it is also a scientific one. They continue:
One further impact of the great dying was that there were at first very few farmers left to manage the fields and forests. Our image of the Native American hunting buffalo on horseback is false – those who adopted this new lifestyle only did so because they had been forced off their land by the European invaders, who also brought with them the horse. Most pre-Columbus indigenous Americans were farmers. In their absence, previously managed landscapes returned to their natural states, with new trees absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. So large was this carbon uptake that there is a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice cores, centred around the year 1610. The deadly diseases hitched a ride on new shipping routes, as did many other plants and animals. This reconnecting of the continents and ocean basins for the first time in 200 million years has set Earth on a new developmental trajectory. The ongoing mixing and re-ordering of life on Earth will be seen in future rocks millions of years in the future. The drop in carbon dioxide at 1610 provides a first marker in a geological sediment associated with this new global, more homogeneous, ecology, and so provides a sensible start date for the new Anthropocene epoch. (2020)
So, we have a number of competing periodizing frameworks for dating the emergence of the new geological epoch scientists call the Anthropocene: the industrial revolution, the Great Acceleration, the neolithic revolution, European colonisation.Each proposed start date offers a different way of thinking about the origins of our current era, and a distinct set of political questions follow from each argument.
But for many theorists, especially those working in Marxian traditions of environmental and ecological thinking, it is not simply the problem of origin that is at stake, but the linguistic implications of the concept itself, as well as the scientific discourse that surrounds it. As Jason Moore writes:
The Anthropocene has become the most important—and also the most dangerous—environmentalist concept of our times. It is dangerous not because it gets planetary crisis so wrong, but because it simultaneously clarifies ongoing “state shifts” in planetary natures while mystifying the history behind them. No phrase crystallizes this danger more than the words anthropogenic global warming. Of course this is a colossal falsification. Global warming is not the accomplishment of an abstract humanity, the Anthropos. Global warming is capital’s crowning achievement. Global warming is capitalogenic. The Anthropocene’s popularity derives from something more than impressive research. Its influence has been won on the strength of its storytelling power, and on its capacity to unify humans and the earth-system within a singular narrative. How it unifies earth-system and humanity within a singular narrative is precisely its weakness, and the source of its falsifying power. For the unification is not dialectical; it is the unity of the cyberneticist – a unity of fragments, an idealist unity that severs the constitutive historical relations that have brought the planet to its present age of extinction. (2017a: 71)
Drawing on Moore’s work, Daniel Hartley has usefully schematized the conceptual and political problems inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene. Of primary concern is the way in which the term posits an ‘ahistorical’ and ‘abstract humanity’(155), the Anthropos, a homogenous and empty signifier devoid of analytical purchase. This notion of a humanity in general, Hartley argues, traffics in what Marx describes as ‘an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the individuals’ (1975: 423). No class differences, no power differentials, no distinction between CO2 contributions from the global north and the global south, no sense of who is actually responsible for this mess we find ourselves in and how it is a product of a particular way of ordering societal nature relations. In other words, the historical specificity of our modernity, its form of appearance as second nature, in which society appears as a uniform mass of abstract and fungible individuals, is mistaken for a transhistorical and naturally given ontological fact. As Hartley writes, ‘A historical conception of humanity, by contrast, would see humans as internally differentiated and constantly developing through contradictions of power and re/production’ (157). In prioritizing conflict and difference, of course, a historical conceptual of humanity also makes room for an attention to the specific and contingent forms of solidarity and cooperation that lack the guarantees of the Anthropos.
This positing of an abstract and ahistorical humanity is only the beginning of the issue, though. Hartley notes several additional problems inherent in the discourse surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene that Marx can help us see beyond, including technological determinism, a naturalistic and teleological view of human history as a progressive process of linear succession, and an emphasis on apolitical and managerial solutions to the climate crisis. Let’s work through each of these problems one by one, keeping one eye on Marx and the other on climate change. Regarding technological determinism, Hartley writes, ‘inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-on-one billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect’, but such a technologically determinist view of history ‘is simply inadequate to the social and relational modes of historical causation’ (156). The case in point is of course the invention of the coal powered steam engine, which for Crutzen, Steffan, and many if not all the members of the AWG, marks the decisive moment humanity propelled the planet into a new geological epoch. There’s no room in this account for any sense of the steam engine as a weapon of class war, even though, asMalm has shown, it is originally developed and deployed despite being more costly and scarcer than waterpower precisely in order to increase control over workers and decrease the cost of labour power, as we saw in the previous lecture. In Marx’s words, ‘it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt’ (1990: 563), a point Hartley references to argue that technology, as it features in the discourse of the Anthropocene, is decidedly ‘not political’(156).
Hartley also identifies the problematic way in which the discourse of the Anthropocene imagines human social development to have followed the only course it could have, always inevitably moving, however incrementally, towards our own historical catastrophe. Capitalist modernity, it would seem, was always present in nascent form in the earliest of human societies. In Hartley’s words, ‘the Anthropocene can only ever think the past in its proleptic trajectory toward our present. Its specific narrative mode translates the time of initiative and praxis into the time of pure physical necessity’ (156-7). In what is effectively a teleological philosophy of history, the discourse of the Anthropocene evacuates historical change of its contingent and contradictory moments. Relatedly, this view of history not only naturalizes the trajectory of human social development but reproduces the liberal view of history as one of ‘progress and enlightenment’ (157). Crutzen and Stoermer should read Adorno and Horkheimer, it would seem. That they haven’t, or perhaps didn’t understand what they were reading, has led them to propose technological and managerial solutions to the climate crisis. The Dialectic of Enlightenment would have helped them to see that the calamities of our age are as much the result of technocratic administration as they are of farming or oil.
These various shortcomings and blind spots have prompted a number of theorists to propose alternative concepts, the most popular of which is the capitalocene, a moniker apparently coined by Andreas Malm but most consistently developed by Moore. For Moore, capitalocene is not only better suited to name the culprit and ‘motive force behind this epochal shift’ than ‘humanity as an undifferentiated whole’ (2016: 81). It also allows us to escape the technological determinism of Anthropocene discourse and its blinkered historical periodization of the new geopolitical epoch, expanding the scope and scale to grasp capital as a world-ecological system with roots in the colonial era and the emerging agrarian class structures of the early modern period. Moore writes:
Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine, and we have a very different view of history—and a very different view of modernity—than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450. That transition marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature. It was greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established some four centuries earlier. From this standpoint, we may ask, Are we really living in the Anthropocene—the ‘age of man’—with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene—the ‘age of capital’—the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital? (2017b: 596)
Ours is undoubtedly the age of capital, though of course how we periodize the history of capitalist modernity is itself a matter of much debate. Other theorists have made additional proposals for alternative conceptualizations of the new geological epoch. Two examples stand out for inventiveness alone. The first is the Plantationocene, a concept collectively formulated by researchers at the University of Aarhus in 2014 to name ‘the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor’ (Haraway 2015: 162n5).
The second, and perhaps most inventive of the neologisms on offer, is the Chthulucene, which has been popularised by the feminist ecologist and scholar of science and technology studies, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes this concept not as a replacement but as a supplement to the flurry of conceptual neologisms that the discourse of the Anthropocene has engendered. She writes:
we need a name for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake. Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collaborative work and play with other terrans, flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that include people will be possible. I am calling all this the Chthulucene—past, present, and to come. These real and possible timespaces are not named after SF writer H.P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference), but rather after the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A'akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus. (160)
The discourse proliferates, its messiness reflective of the difficulties in comprehending the scope and scale of the crisis. This problem of conceptualization, this theoretical and political challenge of naming our era of deepening climate crisis, is thus also a problem of representation.
How do we grasp the breadth, the depth, the causes and the consequences of contemporary climate change? Lynn Badia, Jeff Diamanti, and Marija Cetinic call this problem ‘climate realism’. They write,
climate realism names the cultural challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate crisis. Climate has traditionally referenced the weather it gathers, the mood it creates, and the settings it casts. In the era of the Anthropocene—the contemporary epoch in which geologic conditions and processes are indelibly shaped by human activity—climate indexes not only atmospheric forces but the whole of human history: the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and the possible futures we may encounter. (2020: 1-2)
We might turn once again to the work of British romantic painter, J. M. W. Turner. In 1815, a volcano called Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, then part of the Dutch East Indies, exploded in what was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history. The mountain ejected vast amounts of volcanic ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, resulting in a global climate anomaly. 1816 would become known as the “Year Without a Summer.” Turner, of course, was fascinated by the interplay of light, atmosphere, and nature in his paintings, and the eruption of Mount Tambora provided him with a dramatic new subject. The massive amounts of volcanic ash and aerosols ejected into the atmosphere by the eruption caused unusual atmospheric phenomena, including vivid sunsets and a haze that diffused light in unique ways. In Turner’s paintings from this period, including “Chichester Canal” and “The Evening of the Deluge,” one can observe the influence of these atmospheric effects. The skies are often depicted with intense colours, ranging from fiery oranges to deep purples, creating an otherworldly and almost apocalyptic atmosphere. Turner masterfully captured the surreal beauty and ominous mood created by the volcanic ash in the air. The eruption of Mount Tambora not only influenced Turner’s choice of subject matter but also revolutionized his approach to capturing light and atmosphere in his paintings. In considering the representational challenge of climate realism, we could do worse than to look at Turner’s techniques and experiments with the representation of natural phenomena.
The climatic disruptions caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora also inspired literary works. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is said to have been conceived during the gloomy summer of 1816, influenced by the eerie atmosphere of the time.Indeed, the volcanic event gave rise to a range of what Fabio Camilletti describes as the apocalyptic imaginaries of the Romantic period:
In the ‘year without a summer’ all Europe seems to be crossed by apocalyptic fears, a sort of post-traumatic aftermath of Waterloo, mixing science and superstition, political metaphors, and the entire panoply of the age’s taste – from the grotesque to the sublime, and through the Gothic. Popular imagery often points to the sun as a seemingly dying star on the point of extinguishing or exploding. Rumours had spread about the planet getting colder, and between 1815 and 1816 spots had been seen on the surface of the sun. Both phenomena could be perfectly explicable: Carlo Riccati, a nobleman from Piedmont who had written a first-hand chronicle of the first two years of the Bourbon Restoration, explained through the data of the Milan observatory of Brera that temperature fluctuations and sunspots were perfectly natural. Still, the idea that the sun was extinguishing, and that a fragment of it was about to fall on earth, had run all over the continent. Rumours fixed the catastrophe for the 18th of July, and it is interesting – Riccati notes – how this whisper had been particularly welcomed in such a formerly revolutionary country as France: while travelling through France and the Brabant, in July 1816, one would have wondered – he writes – to see so many people believing in such superstitious ways among those who had lately erected temples to Reason. (2016)
Overall, the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 had far-reaching effects on global climate, agriculture, society, and culture, leaving a lasting imprint on history and influencing various aspects of human life for years to come. In the immediate aftermath of the eruption, the planet experienced a series of significant consequences that extended far beyond the immediate vicinity of the volcano, which might approximate an historical precedent for our current era of climate instability. The volcanic particles caused widespread cooling, leading to crop failures, frosts, and unusually cold temperatures across many parts of the world, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The harsh weather conditions caused by the eruption’s atmospheric effects led to widespread food shortages in regions heavily reliant on agriculture. This resulted in famine and food riots in some areas, particularly in rural farming communities. Disrupted agricultural activities, coupled with food shortages, contributed to social unrest and economic instability in various parts of the world. The adverse conditions triggered by the eruption prompted some populations to migrate in search of better living conditions and opportunities.
In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis examines the impact of El Niño-driven droughts and famines during the late-19th century. Davis argues that the famines associated with El Niño events were not solely natural disasters but were also heavily influenced by colonial policies, market forces, and political decisions. He argues that colonial powers, particularly the British Empire, exacerbated the suffering of affected populations through laissez-faire economic policies, export-oriented agriculture, and the imposition of rigid tax systems. While Davis focuses in this work on the historical context of the late Victorian era, his analysis of the intersection between environmental factors and human society sheds light on contemporary issues, including those related to climate change and displacement. In Planet of Slums, Davis argues that global capitalism, government neglect, and unequal development policies have led to the proliferation of massive slums, which are characterized by extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and social instability, and populated by figures who are exemplary of what Marx calls relative surplus population, superfluous to capital’s needs. When coupled with his analysis in Late Victorian Holocausts, an image emerges of a coming world populated increasingly by huge numbers of ‘climate refugees’.Current estimates suggest there could be well over a billion climate refugees by the middle of the twenty-first century. According to a report from the UN Human Rights Council, the climate crisis could displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050. Problematically, there is no clear definition of a climate refugee, nor are climate refugees covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which along with its 1967 Protocol, remains the cornerstone of international refugee protection.
We find ourselves at a precipice. What is to be done? An answer to this question was posed already in 1909 by the philosopher, astronomer, and council communist Anton Pannekoek. In “The Destruction of Nature”, he writes:
Capitalism is a headless economy which cannot regulate its acts by an understanding of their consequences. But its devastating character does not derive from this fact alone. Over the centuries humans have also exploited nature in a foolish way, without thinking of the future of humanity as a whole. But their power was limited. Nature was so vast and so powerful that with their feeble technical means humans could only exceptionally damage it. Capitalism, by contrast, has replaced local needs with world needs, and created modern techniques for exploiting nature. So it is now a question of enormous masses of matter being subjected to colossal means of destruction and removed by powerful means of transportation. Society under capitalism can be compared to a gigantic unintelligent body; while capitalism develops its power without limit, it is at the same time senselessly devastating more and more of the environment from which it lives. Only socialism, which can give this body consciousness and reasoned action, will at the same time replace the devastation of nature by a rational economy.
In the final lecture, we will pick up on this question of what is to be done to ask how a contemporary environmental politics might address the impediments and blockages that stand in the way of a transition from fossil fuels and the establishment of a new set of relations between human society and nature. Thanks.
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