Review of Jason W. Moore\u27s Capitalocene or Anthropocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalis

Brown, Robert M.W.

English

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 15 | No. 2 Article 11
2-11-2017
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History,
and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W.
Moore
Robert M.W. Brown
York University
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Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
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Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Brown, Robert M.. "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore." The
Goose, vol. 15 , no. 2 , article 11, 2017,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/11.
World-Economy or World-Ecology? 
 
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, 
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited 
by JASON W. MOORE 
PM Press, 2016 $21.95 USD 
 
Reviewed by ROBERT BROWN 
 
For the authors included in Jasons Moore’s 
edited collection, Anthropocene or 
Capitalocene?, the new age of man 
heralded by Paul Crutzen’s Anthropocene 
harbours a concealed complicity with the 
maintenance and advancement of 
capitalism. The discourse of the 
Anthropocene has instilled a fatal calculus 
that sums the relationship between human 
action and the natural world as an 
inevitable planetary crisis to be solved by 
standard economic means (3). This 
metaphor, what Moore formalizes as 
“Green Arithmetic,” proves to be 
exceedingly telling. It says that our 
relationship with the earth is calculable—
that it can be easily quantified, reduced, 
organized by cost-benefit analysis, and 
remediated through market solutions. It 
also abstracts and generalizes an 
essentialized Humanity that shares a 
common stake, burden, or enterprise by, in 
Daniel Hartley’s words, conceptualizing an 
ahistorical crisis undifferentiated by the 
“contradictions of power and 
re/production” (155). As Justin McBrien 
phrases it, 
 
 The ‘Anthropocene’ displaces the 
 origins of the contemporary crisis 
 onto the human being as species 
 rather than as capital. It reinforces 
 what capital wants to believe of 
 itself: that human ‘nature,’ not 
 capital, has precipitated today’s 
 planetary instability. (119) 
 
The Anthropocene must be forced to say 
what it is. This is not the age of man; it is 
the age of capital or the Capitalocene.  
With the first section, “The 
Anthropocene and Its Discontents,” the text 
presents a critique of the Anthropocene 
through two well-known reprints. Affirming 
some of the most trenchant aspects of the 
Frankfurt School, Eileen Crist’s “On the 
Poverty of Our Nomenclature” argues that 
by normalizing standard models of 
population and economic growth while 
embracing technological fixes, what has 
emerged as the good or modernist 
Anthropocene has excluded “the possibility 
of challenging human rule” (15). As the age 
of man, the Anthropocene confirms itself 
through a totalizing narrative of mastery 
and domination thus blocking other 
existential and political narratives by 
concealing the power and freedom to 
choose otherwise. It is a similar thread 
developed by Donna Haraway’s “Staying 
with the Trouble: Anthropocene, 
Capitalocene, Chthulucene” and her 
insistence on thinking-with matters. 
Building from both Crist’s critique and 
Moore’s articulation of the Capitalocene, 
Haraway stresses the method of 
naturecultures in the production of new 
narratives, while foregrounding the terms 
of this engagement. 
Oppositional refrains like the 
Capitalocene could too easily become 
something like an anti-Anthropocene 
predicated on enmity, warfare, and the 
return to dualistic distinctions. Haraway 
wants something more militant or 
parasitical. She wants stories that trouble 
the purity and normative right that often 
rampart privileged positions of opposition. 
1
Brown: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017
The cause may be good and right and just, 
but that does not mean that by destabilizing 
the systems of capitalism we won’t have to 
live and work through the violence of this 
system and the consequences of our own 
actions. “The Capitalocene was relationally 
made . . . the Capitalocene must be 
relationally unmade” (54).  
Having outlined the agenda 
concealed by the discourse of the 
Anthropocene, the second and third 
sections, “Histories of the Capitalocene” 
and “Cultures, States and Environment-
Making,” posit a modified version of 
historical materialism, what Moore terms as 
world-ecology, to describe the multispecies 
histories of the Capitalocene while detailing 
the cultural and political significance of this 
shift.  
Each of the essays in these sections 
make for compelling reading. For instance, 
with “Accumulating Extinction,” McBrien 
makes an evocative correlation between 
deep ecology and the American military 
industrial complex by suggesting that their 
shared commitment to catastrophism has 
naturalized the logic of extinction. Or, 
arguing for a practice that opposes existing 
power structures through occupation and 
reorientation, Christian Parenti’s 
“Environment Making in the Capitalocene” 
argues for the maintenance of the state as 
means for altering how nonhumans are 
managed, mediated, produced and 
delivered into capitalism (182).  
Yet, despite their individual merits, 
all the essays in the second and third 
section are also largely committed to 
working through and expanding the 
intricacies of Moore’s presentation of 
world-ecology and the Capitalocene. In this 
regard, it could prove difficult moving 
through the text without having worked 
through the reticulation of labour, capital, 
and ecology set out by Moore in “The Rise 
of Cheap Nature.” 
For Moore, the trick of capitalism is 
to make the abstract difference between 
nature and capital a reality. Capitalism, 
echoing the language of early 
environmental thought, organizes first and 
second nature as a Cartesian dualism, thus 
advocating materialism as a means of 
domination (84). Once both “Humanity” 
and “Nature” have been divided and 
essentialized, capitalism can prodigiously 
"cheapen" anything conceptualized as 
Nature through a process of externalization, 
commodification, and appropriation. “The 
genius of capitalism . . . has been to treat 
nature as ‘free gift’ . . . to make the whole 
of nature work on the cheap” (112). Nor is 
this practice limited to the non-human. 
Cheap Nature is easily translated as cheap 
labour, that in turn naturalizes the 
inequality forced upon women, people of 
colour, and those living under colonial 
states (91).  
Breaking with the standards of 
green Marxism, Moore prioritizes Marx’s 
value theory by making the organization of 
labour and matter primary, and markets, 
prices, and money secondary (85). “What 
Marx understood better than most Marxists 
is that capitalism ‘works’ because it 
organizes work as a multispecies process” 
(93). Capitalism delineates “a new way of 
organizing nature, and therefore a new way 
of organizing the relations between work, 
reproduction and the conditions of life” 
(85). Capitalism, says Moore, moves from 
being “world-economy” to a “world-
ecology” defined by the commodification of 
human labour, the enclosure of commons, 
and the creation of a worldview grounded 
on alienation and scientism (85-86).  
Moore’s shift to the language of 
world-ecology is both moving and 
2
The Goose, Vol. 15, No. 2 [2017], Art. 11
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/11
unsettling. World-ecology won’t allow 
environmentalism to be the antithesis of 
capitalism. Because capitalism is in the 
business of organizing nature and 
constructing environmentality, capitalism 
has always been “green.” This also suggests 
that there is no means of escaping 
capitalism if capitalism is understood as 
something that can be escaped rather than 
the multispecies process that it is. At the 
same time, while world-ecology may greatly 
expand the nature-history of capital, it will 
not permit the fatalism and misanthropy of 
the Anthropocene. “The problem today,” 
writes Moore, “is the end of the 
Capitalocene, not the march of the 
Anthropocene. The reality is not one of 
humanity ‘overwhelming the great forces of 
nature,’ but rather the exhaustion of its 
Cheap Nature strategy” (113).  
World-ecology does not provide a 
clear line in the sand and it will not promise 
liberation and a return to untouched 
nature. World-ecology, does however, 
provide a practical strategy for challenging 
the rule of capital by disrupting the labour 
practices that sustain it as a means of 
emancipating “all life” (114).  Moreover, the 
Anthropocene does not encapsulate the 
essence of human/nature, but rather, the 
appropriation of human/nature and its 
exploitation under the Capitalocene. While 
the text is not without several internal 
difficulties inherited from Moore’s 
presentation of world ecology—his use of 
the Cartesian dualism is under-developed 
and the arguments against radical “greens” 
are often vague, reliant on soft-targets, and 
drawn from sources decades old—none of 
this is fatal. If anything, the points of 
weakness in Moore’s world-ecology should 
be viewed as spaces for expansion and 
collaboration. The authors represented in 
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? have 
offered a reading of capitalism that 
effectively disrupts the paralysis and 
misanthropy of the Anthropocene while 
affirming the end of the Capitalocene 
though tangible, practical, and inclusive 
actions. The environmental humanities 
should take note.  
 
ROBERT BROWN is Ph.D. student in the 
Department of Humanities, York University. 
His research investigates the cultural 
translation of German Idealism and 
Romanticism through the intellectual 
history of environmental thought.
 
3
Brown: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017


Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 15 | No. 2 Article 112-11-2017Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History,and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W.MooreRobert M.W. BrownYork UniversityPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeBrown, Robert M.. "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore." TheGoose, vol. 15 , no. 2 , article 11, 2017,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/11.World-Economy or World-Ecology?  Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by JASON W. MOORE PM Press, 2016 $21.95 USD  Reviewed by ROBERT BROWN  For the authors included in Jasons Moore’s edited collection, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, the new age of man heralded by Paul Crutzen’s Anthropocene harbours a concealed complicity with the maintenance and advancement of capitalism. The discourse of the Anthropocene has instilled a fatal calculus that sums the relationship between human action and the natural world as an inevitable planetary crisis to be solved by standard economic means (3). This metaphor, what Moore formalizes as “Green Arithmetic,” proves to be exceedingly telling. It says that our relationship with the earth is calculable—that it can be easily quantified, reduced, organized by cost-benefit analysis, and remediated through market solutions. It also abstracts and generalizes an essentialized Humanity that shares a common stake, burden, or enterprise by, in Daniel Hartley’s words, conceptualizing an ahistorical crisis undifferentiated by the “contradictions of power and re/production” (155). As Justin McBrien phrases it,   The ‘Anthropocene’ displaces the  origins of the contemporary crisis  onto the human being as species  rather than as capital. It reinforces  what capital wants to believe of  itself: that human ‘nature,’ not  capital, has precipitated today’s  planetary instability. (119)  The Anthropocene must be forced to say what it is. This is not the age of man; it is the age of capital or the Capitalocene.  With the first section, “The Anthropocene and Its Discontents,” the text presents a critique of the Anthropocene through two well-known reprints. Affirming some of the most trenchant aspects of the Frankfurt School, Eileen Crist’s “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature” argues that by normalizing standard models of population and economic growth while embracing technological fixes, what has emerged as the good or modernist Anthropocene has excluded “the possibility of challenging human rule” (15). As the age of man, the Anthropocene confirms itself through a totalizing narrative of mastery and domination thus blocking other existential and political narratives by concealing the power and freedom to choose otherwise. It is a similar thread developed by Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” and her insistence on thinking-with matters. Building from both Crist’s critique and Moore’s articulation of the Capitalocene, Haraway stresses the method of naturecultures in the production of new narratives, while foregrounding the terms of this engagement. Oppositional refrains like the Capitalocene could too easily become something like an anti-Anthropocene predicated on enmity, warfare, and the return to dualistic distinctions. Haraway wants something more militant or parasitical. She wants stories that trouble the purity and normative right that often rampart privileged positions of opposition. 1Brown: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. MoorePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017The cause may be good and right and just, but that does not mean that by destabilizing the systems of capitalism we won’t have to live and work through the violence of this system and the consequences of our own actions. “The Capitalocene was relationally made . . . the Capitalocene must be relationally unmade” (54).  Having outlined the agenda concealed by the discourse of the Anthropocene, the second and third sections, “Histories of the Capitalocene” and “Cultures, States and Environment-Making,” posit a modified version of historical materialism, what Moore terms as world-ecology, to describe the multispecies histories of the Capitalocene while detailing the cultural and political significance of this shift.  Each of the essays in these sections make for compelling reading. For instance, with “Accumulating Extinction,” McBrien makes an evocative correlation between deep ecology and the American military industrial complex by suggesting that their shared commitment to catastrophism has naturalized the logic of extinction. Or, arguing for a practice that opposes existing power structures through occupation and reorientation, Christian Parenti’s “Environment Making in the Capitalocene” argues for the maintenance of the state as means for altering how nonhumans are managed, mediated, produced and delivered into capitalism (182).  Yet, despite their individual merits, all the essays in the second and third section are also largely committed to working through and expanding the intricacies of Moore’s presentation of world-ecology and the Capitalocene. In this regard, it could prove difficult moving through the text without having worked through the reticulation of labour, capital, and ecology set out by Moore in “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” For Moore, the trick of capitalism is to make the abstract difference between nature and capital a reality. Capitalism, echoing the language of early environmental thought, organizes first and second nature as a Cartesian dualism, thus advocating materialism as a means of domination (84). Once both “Humanity” and “Nature” have been divided and essentialized, capitalism can prodigiously "cheapen" anything conceptualized as Nature through a process of externalization, commodification, and appropriation. “The genius of capitalism . . . has been to treat nature as ‘free gift’ . . . to make the whole of nature work on the cheap” (112). Nor is this practice limited to the non-human. Cheap Nature is easily translated as cheap labour, that in turn naturalizes the inequality forced upon women, people of colour, and those living under colonial states (91).  Breaking with the standards of green Marxism, Moore prioritizes Marx’s value theory by making the organization of labour and matter primary, and markets, prices, and money secondary (85). “What Marx understood better than most Marxists is that capitalism ‘works’ because it organizes work as a multispecies process” (93). Capitalism delineates “a new way of organizing nature, and therefore a new way of organizing the relations between work, reproduction and the conditions of life” (85). Capitalism, says Moore, moves from being “world-economy” to a “world-ecology” defined by the commodification of human labour, the enclosure of commons, and the creation of a worldview grounded on alienation and scientism (85-86).  Moore’s shift to the language of world-ecology is both moving and 2The Goose, Vol. 15, No. 2 [2017], Art. 11https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/11unsettling. World-ecology won’t allow environmentalism to be the antithesis of capitalism. Because capitalism is in the business of organizing nature and constructing environmentality, capitalism has always been “green.” This also suggests that there is no means of escaping capitalism if capitalism is understood as something that can be escaped rather than the multispecies process that it is. At the same time, while world-ecology may greatly expand the nature-history of capital, it will not permit the fatalism and misanthropy of the Anthropocene. “The problem today,” writes Moore, “is the end of the Capitalocene, not the march of the Anthropocene. The reality is not one of humanity ‘overwhelming the great forces of nature,’ but rather the exhaustion of its Cheap Nature strategy” (113).  World-ecology does not provide a clear line in the sand and it will not promise liberation and a return to untouched nature. World-ecology, does however, provide a practical strategy for challenging the rule of capital by disrupting the labour practices that sustain it as a means of emancipating “all life” (114).  Moreover, the Anthropocene does not encapsulate the essence of human/nature, but rather, the appropriation of human/nature and its exploitation under the Capitalocene. While the text is not without several internal difficulties inherited from Moore’s presentation of world ecology—his use of the Cartesian dualism is under-developed and the arguments against radical “greens” are often vague, reliant on soft-targets, and drawn from sources decades old—none of this is fatal. If anything, the points of weakness in Moore’s world-ecology should be viewed as spaces for expansion and collaboration. The authors represented in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? have offered a reading of capitalism that effectively disrupts the paralysis and misanthropy of the Anthropocene while affirming the end of the Capitalocene though tangible, practical, and inclusive actions. The environmental humanities should take note.   ROBERT BROWN is Ph.D. student in the Department of Humanities, York University. His research investigates the cultural translation of German Idealism and Romanticism through the intellectual history of environmental thought. 3Brown: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. MoorePublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017

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Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore

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