Archive of Capitalism in the Web of Life

A reading list around how different theories of the climate crisis shape our understanding of what must be done.

Books that identify our economic system as the key obstacle in our fight for liberation.

A hope for a livable future and just systems of care lies in our ability to mobilize and organize. 

The scale of the impending climate crisis is now apparent to more or less everyone. Yet, whilst it's been the left that has taken the lead in reponding to climate change for several generations, it is increasingly the far-right who are developing political responses to catastrophe. This has been reflected in the growing eco-fascist movement, a movement who were parachuted to global prominence on the 15th March this year when one of their number murdered fifty people in two Christchurch mosques. In this article, Eleanor Penny analyses eco-fascism and asks what it will take the left to deal with the scale of the climate crisis.

If biopower is the power to make live and let live, then what is geopower? What if the power that lay at the boundary between life and nonlife was becoming more important in the Anthropocene? McKenzie Wark approaches this question through a reading of recent work by Elizabeth Povinelli. 

What happens when the Anthropocene meets critical race studies? One answer might be that you get Kathryn Yusoff’s provocative small book A Billion Black Anthropocenes, (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). If geologists are going to name a geological epoch after ‘Anthropos,’ then it might be an idea to put that in contact with one of the deepest critiques of the whole category.