#capitalocene

Les Rouages (Secrets) des Ultras Riches pour Exploiter la Planète - Moni...

Effective ideologies blur the lines between empirical realities and political interpretation. Some members of the human species are indeed driving planetary life into the planetary inferno. This geological and geohistorical transition is often narrated as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. Major corporate news platforms – like The New York Times and The Economist – are very happy with that formula, Age of Man. It supports an ideological claim – the idea of Man as a collective actor, the “human enterprise” – with another: Good Science. It’s not a new trick. Invoking natural law is ancient sport in capitalism. Malthus did it. The eugenicists did it. Paul Ehrlich and neo-Malthusians did it again after 1968. In every case, it’s a means of erasing capitalist webs of power, profit and life behind the planetary crisis. It is a way of short-circuiting the possibility that working classes will grasp the climate crisis as capital-induced rather than human-induced: as the result of capitalogenic rather than anthropogenic forcing.

The Black ecological practices highlighted in this essay offer guidance for constructing an ethico‐political vision that addresses the multiple global crises of the plantation present. These practices are founded upon a basic understanding that ecological care, multispecies kinship, and social justice are fundamental to the development of a human praxis that promotes well‐being. As such, they go beyond theorization and provide some of the “how to's” for realizing this vision. As outlined by authors in Black studies, these practices illuminate the critical role of racial struggle, borne on colonial plantations, in producing a more relational world. Hence, we are dissatisfied with theorizations of the Plantationocene that minimize the ways in which racial politics structure plantation life (both human and nonhuman). Such approaches limit a more nuanced and grounded understanding of the ways that the plantation inflicts socioecological violence as it simultaneously prompts differentiated, multifaceted, and relational ways of being. Sustained attention to race in Plantationocene scholarship is therefore crucial to the conception and practice of socioecological justice and multispecies kinship.

The Ideology of Human Supremacy

"I would not focus on rebelling against extinction. Can one even rebel against extinction? I don’t think so. You can deal with extinction. You have to deal with extinction. Extinction, by the way, is not the worst thing that one can imagine for the future. The worst thing imaginable is the war that will lead to extinction—not death, but the long-lasting agony that financial capitalism has prepared for humankind. This is the real danger. Extinction is not so bad, if we compare it to capitalism."