Capitalocene

Abstract

Capitalocene refers to a conceptual framework for interpreting the climate crisis that attributes planetary disruption not to “humanity” in general but to capitalism as a historically specific way of organizing socio-ecological life. Developed in critical dialogue with the Anthropocene narrative, the term highlights how explanations that treat humans as a single geological agent can obscure major historical and political asymmetries in responsibility and vulnerability. Capitalocene approaches climate change as the outcome of a global regime of accumulation that has reorganized relations between human and extra-human natures on a planetary scale. Within this framework, capitalism is understood as a world-ecology, in which economic expansion, power, and ecological transformation are inseparable, and capitalist development depends on exploitation of waged labor as well as the appropriation of unpaid work and energies from the “web of life,” including soils, forests, water, fossil energy, and reproductive labor. A central concept is the production of “cheap nature,” the historical processes through which labor, energy, food, and raw materials are made abundant and low-cost through conquest, enclosure, colonial extraction, technological innovation, and legal and property regimes that shift ecological and social costs elsewhere. Capitalocene accounts also stress the role of frontier-making, through which capitalism repeatedly expands into new territories, energy sources, and domains of life to secure fresh reservoirs of cheapness. Over time, the accumulation of unaccounted ecological harm produces escalating biophysical instability, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and widespread toxicity. The concept has generated debate within political ecology and ecological Marxism, particularly over questions of causality, agency, and the role of fossil energy versus broader systemic dynamics.