The Capitalocene designates an era of destructive environmental practices in which the main culprits are capital and capitalism. As a term, Capitalocene thus redirects the accusatory finger of the Anthropos on to “capital” so as to lay bare a more specific chain of causality that the term Anthropocene elides. According to Jason W. Moore, while “Anthropocene is a worthy point of departure,”1 it is important to make clear that “the Anthropocene argument poses questions that it cannot answer.”2 Not only does the Anthropocene potentially redirect earlier historical responsibility for planetary environmental destruction from the Global North on to all of humanity; it also fails to address the ills caused by a system that would over time migrate from its origins in Europe and on to the rest of the world, including the Global South. Finally, “it perpetuates the ontological dichotomy between humans and nature in which human agency is treated as a force acting upon rather than in or as a part of nature,” just as it potentially exacerbates the anthropocentric conviction “that humans can shape the planet and re-create it in their image.”3

Though the concept has earned considerable traction in environmental humanities and social sciences, some argue that capitalism is not the only force of environmental destruction. Timothy Morton thus suggests that “capital and capitalism are symptoms of the problem, not its direct causes. If the cause were capitalism, then Soviet and Chinese carbon emissions would have added nothing to global warming.”4 Yet, although it is certainly possible to trace the human impact on ecology further back in time, to eras before the rise of capitalism, as to anticapitalist modes of political and financial systems contemporaneous with capitalism, it is inarguable that capitalism has proven to be the most destructively efficient, wide-ranging, and persistent “way of organizing nature”5 and one that has by now far outstripped, for instance, communism. Indeed, as a much-repeated quote of (supposedly) Fredric Jameson goes, capitalism has been so ruthlessly efficient at taking on opposing financial systems and ideologic formations that we may have reached a point at which “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”6 Or alternatively, while it may become increasingly obvious that “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point,”7 very little action is being taken to revert or even slow down this trajectory toward a potential cataclysmic collapse.

In suggesting that we replace Anthropocene with Capitalocene, proponents of the latter term are often despairing, but sometimes also hopeful. Despair may seem only natural in a world in which capitalism is so ubiquitous and so ubiquitously destructive. Yet, to some, the destructive nature of capitalism is also hopeful precisely because the apocalyptic nature of a system reliant on an ever-continuous drive for profit and progress that knows no limit cannot but dismantle itself. As the writers of “Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto” phrase it, “we do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be.”8 While such statements are certainly “dark” in that “not being fine” may lead to the deaths of millions and perhaps billions of humans if the process of “uncivilization” called for in the manifesto is indeed made manifest, advocates of such a philosophy should find encouragement in the fact that the world as we now know it is not worth living in: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find hope beyond hope.”9

The essays included in this part reflect the sentiments outlined in the preceding paragraphs in that they challenge an “Anthropocene discourse [which] veers away from environmentalism’s dark idiom of destruction, depradation, rape, loss, devastation, deterioration and so forth of the natural world into the tame vocabulary that humans are changing, shaping, transforming or altering the biosphere.”10 Rebecca Duncan’s chapter “Gothic in the Capitalocene: World-Ecological Crisis, Decolonial Horror, and the South African Postcolony,” for instance, insists that we look at the colonial legacy of the Capitalocene. As she tackles the erasure of the Global North and Global South divide of the universalizing tendencies of the “Anthropocene” from a South African perspective, Duncan challenges us to reckon with uncomfortable aspects of imperialism and capitalism to which an approach based solely on the impact of the Anthropos may be blind. Reading Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018), Duncan argues that the short story collection is not most fruitfully read as the actions of a collective humanity. Rather, Duncan suggests, seeing as it is the violent and racialized regimes of capital that have configured the South African locality, a Capitalocene rather than Anthropocene approach will unearth both systemic and historically specific exploitation by capital that a more broadly universalist anthropocentric approach may miss.

Similarly, Timothy Clark’s chapter “Overpopulation: The Human as Inhuman” questions the blanket assumptions following in the wake of (often un)critical discussions of overpopulation from Thomas Malthus up to and including the present day. As Clark points out in a discussion of what he terms “overpopulation gothic,” if we reduce our current predicament simply to a rise in human numbers, then we become blind to a range of other, more important aspects. For instance, although there may be far fewer people in the Global North, people of the Global North tend to consume and pollute many times more than the inhabitants of the Global South, and a focus on numbers alone constitutes a shifting of blame onto people who have in fact done very little of the actual consumption and pollution that a drop in world population is supposed to mitigate.

Barry Murnane’s chapter “Digging Up Dirt: Reading the Anthropocene through German Romanticism” examines capitalist mining practices in early nineteenth-century Northern Europe, but ultimately also traces the redistribution of such localized extraction of minerals in a global context. In an age long before oil and the combustion engine would lead to the revolution in transportation of goods and people that we today tend to think of when we envisage global capitalism, Murnane makes clear that the beginnings of the Capitalocene stretch back not only hundreds of years but also deep underground. Finally, in the chapter “Got a Light? The Dark Currents of Energy in Twin Peaks: The Return,” Timothy Morton and Rune Graulund explore the destructive force of energy unleashed by the very shift to oil and the discovery of nuclear power in the twentieth century that would allow capitalism to become as dominant as it is today, not only through what Andreas Malm has termed “fossil capital”11 but also through a nuclear arms race won over communism via sheer financial dominance.

These chapters underscore the destructive environmental practices of capitalism. But they also deal with topics that precede capitalist modes of production. In his reading of the practice of mining, Murnane’s chapter, for instance, engages not only with human behavior preceding capitalism by millennia but also with stone and minerals preceding the human itself by millions of years, hence returning us to the questions and concerns of geology and deep (prehistoric and certainly also precapitalist) time from which the term Anthropocene was originally coined. Similarly, Morton and Graulund’s essay on energy, while focusing on twentieth-century practices of fossil capital as well as the success of a capitalist system in creating the first atomic bomb, point to tendencies of human behaviors of cruelty and aggression that are primal, bestial, and prehistoric.