Market focused climate solutions ignore the root cause – racial capitalism – and allow for its sustenance through difference.

Liberalism: always too late, or capitalism’s colonial and enslaving proactivity? In the IPCC reports, time as a linear human orientation is placed in the context of timescales of forces requiring human intervention but out of human control: climate change. The recent SRl.5 (IPCC, Citation2018), ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’, representing the ‘newer instalment of the scientisation of climate change’, situates ‘the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC’, and inscribes it as an emergency (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 1). The report suggests ‘climate change is moving faster than we are’ (Masson-Delmotte et al., Citation2018, p. v), and its urgency demands our intervention. However, the moral and ethical articulation of the climate as a linear temporal ‘urgency’ does not allow us to understand ecological shifts or even climate change in a larger trajectory, including human conquest, property relations, and competition. Rather, the report’s ‘foreshortened timeframe’ speaks to the urgent need of global concerted efforts to mitigate climate change and signals how temporary responses and procrastination are not going to do the trick (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 2). John Mecklin, Editor of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, similarly reminds us that time is running out: Faced with this daunting threat landscape and a new willingness of political leaders to reject the negotiations and institutions that can protect civilization over the long term, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today moves the Doomsday Clock 20 s closer to midnight - closer to apocalypse than ever. (Mecklin, Citation2020) The moving of the clock makes the ‘climate emergency’ public, especially for those proponents of liberalism whose ‘macroscopic exclusion clauses’ have been written to ‘displace … unfreedom’ onto all marginalized, enslaved, and colonized peoples and those ‘primitive’ and ‘undeveloped’ sites ‘from a white male bourgeois European who was the historical agent in the narrative’ (Mann, Citation2019). Yet this moving of the clock does not address the root of the problem. It allows the positing of a secular/humanist eschatological story (Rothe, Citation2020, p. 162) whose temporal structure is one of immanent destruction, informed by an analysis of existence as being-towards-death (i.e. of the human and the planet) or catastrophe. Of course, this schematic presumes death and ecological catastrophe (collapsed into one). It represents a never-reached horizon of experience, where authentic and moral decisions must be made through a theory or ‘concept of crisis or emergency’ (Mann, Citation2019). Liberal leaders of the international political system ‘inch toward’ an implementation of a regulatory system, what Mann and Wainwright call climate Leviathan, instead of addressing the root causes of global warming. These leaders are not creative but ‘fumble … for solutions’, continuing to argue that ‘climate change’ is a ‘market failure, without considering the limiting structures of the ‘market’ itself (Osaka, Citation2019, p. 2; citing Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018). When the moment for organized challenge emerges, white hegemony rushes to squander the creative energy and reorients social relations toward its consolidation. It does so by rushing to innovate through the co-production of narratives and an emerging ecological order. The present as a fracture of notions of history and ‘historical natures’ Apocalypse is ‘the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’ (Buell, Citation1995, p. 285). As such, it deranges capital and its entanglements with ecological problems, ranging from the climate change, to the extinction of species, the loss of pollinating insects, and other ecological disasters. These challenges or this ecology of environmental concerns cannot be considered in a partitioned manner. The focus on temporality has been picked up by historians and others grappling with what the authors of the Anthropocene name a crisis and emergency. One text that speaks to the global climate change as apocalyptic temporality is Oreskes and Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. In theorizing the present and the temporal possibilities for the future otherwise, these authors open the door for us to experiment with what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun call socio­technical imaginaries (Citation2013). The book’s narrator is a Chinese historian in the year 2393. The historian says Western civilization possessed robust information about climate change and the ‘damaging events to unfold’ but was ‘unable to stop’ them (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, p. x, pp. 1-2), thus ‘condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries’ (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, pp. 59–60). A second Dark Age descended, and the Period of Penumbra began. The present ignorance, the historian says, is a result of an ‘ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets; another compartmentalization and the practice among the scientific community of demanding an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats’ (Oreskes & Conway, Citation2014, pp. ix-x). In a sense, this future scenario tells nothing about the future and more about the ‘present’ – our moment. However, the narrator’s historical account is problematic and, as Garrard argues ‘unequivocably dangerous’, as the scenario focuses on ‘catastrophic outcomes’ (Garrard, Citation2020, p. 3). Gallard’s critique is important to our discussion of temporality. Narrating the present as a given history evades uncertainty and possibilities for the world as a project beyond global capital. In a sense, this dystopian temporality posits itself as the ‘truth’ of our reality as if punctuating a certain kind of imaginary temporal orientation – the only one about the future. This depicted history anticipates the failure of the future by drawing on assembled empirics and technologies of problem-solving as if failure and the future are not up for debate (Jasanoff, Citation2019), as if the historical codes and genre choices that assemble these dystopia future scenarios are not ‘originary’ to the familiar narratives of history which they ground. In highlighting that the Anthropocene is actually a ‘liberal managerial term’, Mann (Citation2019) suggests the ideology of liberalism distorts the multiple social reproductions of violence and strategies of failure by sublimating them through temporal means, deploying concepts such as crises, emergencies, and exceptions, and substituting adaptation for progress. We see this in scientific reports, for example, the SRl.5 and others; while they address the metabolic rifts and shifts, they still use the Anthropocene as the social contract (Mann, Citation2019). In Climate Leviathan, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue crisis, risk, and uncertainty are asymmetrical, the result of the actions of a minority of humanity, i.e. the white male bourgeois European who claims the agency and writing of the historical narrative of liberalism and imperial capitalism. The Anthropocene is a technology co-productive of temporal regimes of modernity and the planetary order: [The Anthropocene is] an explicitly future facing instrument of temporal power. Like all contracts, it restarts time on its terms. The distribution of responsibilities it represents is always also the closure of supersession of past arrangements. So, a contract that has no expiration, like a constitution or the Anthropocene, is supposed to mark the end of the past and the beginning of a new time. (Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018, p. 8) The Anthropocene is itself a technology of temporal power which orders and organizes social life. In questioning this contract, Mann and Wainwright problematize how time is used to organize global power. They question whether the idea that the Anthropocene marks the end of the past as many claim and the beginning of a new time is accurate. For them, this fetishization of the Anthropocene evades the intensifying challenges to the world. The structure of ‘transition’ of the contemporary global order and the production of history of liberalism as progress (Mann & Wainwright, Citation2018, p. 9) are problematic and do not acknowledge how such kinds of politics are co-produced with a structure of transcendental time as their major procedural technology of governance. The transformation of the world’s political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted thus need to be engaged on the register of the language of temporal power and the global order. Tsing argues the Anthropocene is entangled with the history of capitalism: ‘the most convincing Anthropocene timeline begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies’ (Tsing, Citation2015, p. 19). For Tsing, this is the time to reimagine beyond Cartesian structures: ‘without Man and Nature, all creatures can come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the strictures of a parochially imagined rationality’ (Tsing, Citation2015, p. vi). Her vision asks the reader to focus on the contemporary political reality and its contingent forms of violence, including how the material effects and the ‘time of climate change’ are themselves an extension of capitalism. Capitalism and its contingent forms of temporal power should be the focus of critique in our contemporary moment (Moore, Citation2015; Tsing, Citation2015). The Marxist radical tradition engages this critique. Some theorists examine ‘ecological rifts’ by challenging the thesis of the Anthropocene, taken for granted by writers like Oreskes and Conway. They argue the Anthropocene has attributed responsibility to humanity without accounting for racial capitalism (Robinson, Citation1983; Kelley, Citation2017; Verges, Citation2017), evading that this responsibility and indeed the crisis of social reproduction and exhaustion of nature ‘is the result of a minority of humanity’ (Hornborg, Citation2019; Mann, Citation2019). Ideas and language about depletion, acceleration, and exhaustion have recently been taken up by Jason Moore, who attempts to provide a view from the future to mobilize peoples to collectively challenge the ways we understand the historical nature of exhaustion. It is not capital or nature that is exhausted, he says, but ‘regionally specific relations of capitalization and appropriation’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 123). For him, ‘exhaustion happens when particular natures–crystallised in specific re/production complexes–can no longer deliver more and more work/energy’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 124). Maria Mies has spoken extensively about the exploitation at the centre of the global structure of capitalism. For Mies, women, nature, and colonies are penetrated, expropriated, and even obliterated through the co-production of primitive accumulation and the modern ecological-capitalist order (Mies, Citation1986, p. 77). Ahead of her time, Mies argues the history of capitalism was always globally ecological; it did not begin with Europe but was co-produced with colonization, nature and patriarchy on a world scale. Her analytics anticipate recent debates about the Anthropocene and how this patriarchal homosocial contract has not reckoned with the ways exploitation structures the uneven distribution of climate shifts and their catastrophic effects. In Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm examines the accelerating exhaustion of nature by an indifferent capitalism. This process, Malm argues, is spiral; the ‘more biophysical resources [capitalism] has withdrawn for profit-making, the more it is able to withdraw in the following round’ (Citation2018, p. 284). Moreover, ‘dissipation is not castigated or checked, but positively rewarded. The more the capitalist successfully exploits and wastes, the more he will be able to continue to do so – capitalist growth has ecological crisis wired into its DNA’ (Malm, Citation2018, p. 284, cited in Toscano, Citation2018, p. 13). As Alberto Toscano notes, Malm and Moore are concerned about the accelerated exhaustion of nature but approach the topic differently: The problem of exhaustion is for both an occasion to revisit the question of agency — Moore opting for a broadly ‘monist’ take on the ‘co-production’ of historical natures by capitalism through the ‘web of life,’ Malm a ‘dualist’ vision in which the impact of capital on nature is to be understood through the internal class antagonism sundering any putative ‘humanity’. (Toscano Citation2018, pp. 13-14) While the authors differ in their theoretical and methodological approaches, Toscano argues their interventions can be reconciled. Nature is ‘an internal limit to (the reproduction of) capital and capital .. . an internal limit to (the reproduction of) nature’ (Toscano, Citation2018, p. 131). Moore recently incorporated the concept of metabolic rift into a theoretical model of the longue durée of capitalism. Building on Fernard Braudel'sFootnote5 work and Wallersteinian world-systems theory, which conceptualize the macro-historical emergence of the conditions of metabolic rift in the rise of global markets, he advances the concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation punctuating the long-term development of capitalism, calling the metabolic rift the product of a ‘series of successive historical breaks in nutrient cycling’ (Moore, Citation2000, p. 127). This notion, he says, allows us to understand the emergence of ecological crises in the twenty-first century. Moving away from technology or imperialism as cause and effect, he articulates the reorganization of global ecology in terms of the logic of accumulation regimes of capital. Adopting a world-systems perspective, Moore points to how arguments of our long-term socio-spatial change depend on the growth of capitalism predicated centuries earlier on a crisis of feudalism. Upon confronting limits to extraction, feudal systems expanded outward. The imperialist Atlantic slavery and colonial expansion created the core–periphery dependency. The peripheries provided grain and raw materials to core regions, facilitating the conversion of agricultural lands, freeing an urban labour supply, and fueling industrialization. Global expansion gave rise to an enduring ecological inequality under a new extractive global division of labour and creating a metabolic rift in the form of diminished human relations and disturbed processes and cycles of nature (Malm, Citation2018). Moore argues primitive accumulation, or the dispossession of property under colonialism, can be conceptualized as multi­scalar. Colonial land consolidation and the separation of producers from their means of production enabled the emergence of capitalism at multiple organizational registers, including individual farms and national balances of trade and debt. An analysis of Moore’s theory and language of time would take more than this article. For now, I will simply focus on his articulation of time and his critique of Cartesian dualism. Moore speaks of ‘history as present’, arguing ‘human history is understood as an ‘unbroken circle’ of being, knowing, and doing’ (Citation2015, p. 36). He brings to the fore the historical interconnections of humans with nature and nature with humans. For him, this acknowledgement of capitalism and human implications in the environment, as well as the breaking of the natural boundaries and beyond the intra-capitalist limits, could mobilize people to do something about the present. Fernand Braudel argued the discipline of history offers an incomplete record if it does not take into account both the geological and the social changes operating in the longue durée and provide the conditions of possibility for the relatively short-term events and changes with which traditional history concerns itself (Brandel, Citation1992; Braudel, Citation1995). Like Braudel, Moore draws on this longue durée methodology and world systems analysis, often framed in terms of its spatial expansiveness, as it moves beyond the nation-state to consider global networks of centre and periphery. However, its temporal depth is equally integral to its accounts of longue durée economic and bioregional processes. The interdisciplinary development of ‘Big History’ takes deep time to new depths, seeking historical narratives that incorporate biological, metabolic, ecological, and geological scales. In Moore’s view, the ‘question of historical natures is a question of how the layers of historical time shape each other’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 200). Moore stretches the temporal trajectory to unseat the possibility of human historical grand narratives focusing only on capitalism. Rather, ‘historical nature operates in a double register, as the field upon which capitalism unfolds–a field whose bounds are subject to revision–and as object’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 234). He notes that ‘the drive to make the ‘time of nature’ [is] ever closer to the ‘time of capital’ (Citation2015, p. 234). This Capitalocene impulse changes nature, pointing to a clash ‘between the finite character of the biosphere and the infinite character of capital’s demands’ (Moore, Citation2015, pp. 234–235). To Moore, these impulses and processes suggest capitalism depends on a Cartesian dualism: capital would ‘go berserk in nature’ (Malm, Citation2018). Moore’s philosophy of history is inscribed with a structure of time which moves from attachments that exhaust and create antagonism to an attachment that dialectically mobilizes a planetary revolution. In Moore’s monist terms, all energy systems and human economies are ‘co-produced’ with nature. Thus, in thinking and understanding the present and the emerging futures ‘[o]nly a conception of historical nature will suffice’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 296). But if nature is confined to the utopia of capitalism and capital’s history, then ‘nature’ can only be extended as a servile representation – a mimetic mode of what is experientially felt to be violence – and so is always already trapped inside a predefined meaning of what counts as ‘materiality’ and ‘history’. If theft and exhaustion interrupt the movement towards ‘nature’, and paradoxically make speciology (or what is nature; see the ancients’ idea of water, air, fire, earth and space) irrelevant for understanding materiality and history, then ethics and politics (insofar as they are grounded on this notion of nature) cannot simply be invoked, even negatively, as a model for thinking nature and even less so for dialectics and revolution (Marriott, Citation2011). Moore resolves this puzzle by coming up with an anthropological description of the theft and exhaustion of this nature that is singular, even if the radical singularity of that description remains bound to colonialism, enslavement and primitive accumulation as lived temporalities. Of course, Moore’s focus on capitalism’s dependence on world ecology is a perversion that cannot be worked out by stretching history or read through a theory of the structure of time and perversion; no concept or epistemology can attain the value of (non-perverse) mastery, as this situation is ‘originary’ to the history of enslavement and colonialism (Niblett, Citation2019). In The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Gavin Walker shows how capital segregates the world into nation-states through the apparatus of capture and assemblage of accumulation regimes: [W]e must always treat the process of primitive accumulation as a dual process: on the one hand, it connotes the untraceable historical emergence of labor power which can be commodified, and on the other hand, it is a historical site of the Ur-AktFootnote6 that founded and ordered the world as a nomos, as a system. These two aspects are, intimately joined: the first sets in motion the paradoxical cycle of social relations called ‘capital,’ while the second organizes the ‘formation of difference’ through which the earth’s surface is recoded as a ‘forcefield’ of the order. (Walker, Citation2012, p. 118) The making of this order and its contingent social contracts is based on ‘primitive accumulation’ and its mutations (Marx, Citation1967; Agathangelou, Citation2019; Agathangelou & Ahmed, Citation2020; Sakai & Solomon, Citation2006, p. 28). Walker argues the state comes to be understood as the ‘ultimate model of the capitalist axiomatic’, thereby identifying the nation with the ‘origin’ of the rational and universal process of exchange (Walker, Citation2012, p. 122). However, this is a demented and paradoxical process caught between the logic of capital, nation-state and ‘history.’ Thus, it is not enough to point to capital’s historiography, colonial and genocidal, and its ‘teleological thrust’ (Marriott, Citation2012, p. 53). If the aim is to challenge capital’s history, then we have to contest capitalism’s colonialisms and genocides ‘in a more general description of its language of time’ (Marriott, Citation2012). The logic of capital depends on the language of retrojection as a temporal grammar to surpass its limits and to posit itself anew in the way it exploits and obliterates species and nature (Malm, Citation2018). If we do not contest these retrojective linguistic mechanisms of time, we will continue participating in the same capture and theft upon which the ecological regime of racial global capital depends. On the one hand, this moment of capture, cycles back to itself, ‘harness[ing] its hazardous flux retrospectively, to conjure itself up as if its origin were a mere testament to its necessary emergence’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 157). On the other, history or the history of the capture is a fait accompli from the vantage point of the racial capitalocene (Walker, Citation2012, p. 157). Moore acknowledges exhaustion and its acceleration are a result of ‘capital’s appropriation of unpaid work [which] transcends the Cartesian divide, encompassing both human and extra- human work as outside, but necessary to, the circuit of capital and the production of value’ (Moore, Citation2017, p. 329). However, dialectical history emerges as a question in his analysis because of the ‘metabolic shift’. The teleology seems to creep in to supervene in the situating of the ‘revolutionary ecology’ as an end. Without theorizing explicitly the structure of language of time of ecological revolution, it is not possible to invent (Fanon, Citation1967) ‘a future … that is radically unwriteable’ or a ‘tabula rasa’ which ‘opens in return a movement of temporalization that is never simply present, or timely’ (Fanon, Citation1967; Marriott, Citation2011, p. 54). An engagement with this structure and its language points to the technologies of racial capitalocene, including Cartesian dualism which is a temporal method of translating retrojectively the otherwise unsignified energies of existence. Walker argues, ‘We are always arriving on the stage of history after the fold in power has already taken place. This fold in power is constantly being renewed through its temporality, which is inherently retrospectively projected’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 152). We can formulate a more productive response to those who argue that we can imagine the end of the world but not racial capitalocene once we grapple with the relations of the structure of time to the paradoxical suspension of time or what Fanon and Marriott call the new beginnings (Fanon, Citation1967; Marriott, Citation2011). Primitive accumulation, (‘the internal energy of African slaves and Indigenous lands’ (da Silva, Citation2018)), ‘is not a period, but a cyclically reproduced logical moment’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 119) that becomes history by repeating itself every day. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of primitive accumulation as the mounting of an apparatus of capture, Walker suggests the capitalist system presupposes this violent process. In this sense, the linear notion of history that characterizes explanations of the racial capitalocene and its contingent projects is paradoxical (Deleuze & Guattari, Citation1987, p. 447). Capitalism cyclically-recursively repeats the moment of the mounting of capture apparatus within the sphere of social relations as a ‘crisis’. These acts are impossible to ‘historicize’ as ‘they are an irreparable moment of the modern condition, whose effects we are still living through … That is, we ourselves have always-already been ‘enclosed,’ and therefore the historicization of enclosure throws us back on the very limit of historicity itself’ (Walker, Citation2012, p. 102). And yet, the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences insist ‘historicizing’ through linear, eschatological narratives and dialectics (Agathangelou, Citation2016; Marriott, Citation2011). Marriott goes even further. He puts pressure on the rush to historicize in the form of dramatic narratology or dialectics. He argues that history is a colonial violent racist machinery. In his words, After all, what brings race into being as an historical concept is the European invention of Man, which also gave birth to its multiple others, whose relationship to history is necessarily one of a relegated past. So perhaps, for Fanon, in the colony, history as a discipline became, quite precisely, racist: a narrative whose redoubtable but all the more easily identified representations are the clearest example of a discursive machinery of power. If we take seriously this ‘historical’ production that depends on relegating others to the past, then a historical contextualization or dating of capitalism by highlighting how nature has been ignored or how ‘the history of capitalist origins … is also the origins of ecological crisis’ (Moore Citation2017, p. 2) cannot resolve this ‘crisis.’ It leaves untouched colonialism and ‘the description of its language of time’ (Marriott, Citation2012, p. 53) and the temporal narratives that orient us toward crisis or aporias and by extension the need for ecological revolution. For Rob Nixon, violence is an ecological question, and time and representation are entangled: ‘Slow violence occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, Citation2011, pp. 2–3). Ecological injustice revealed through the ‘slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes’ disproportionately affects people of colour and the Global South (Nixon, Citation2011, p. 2). These ‘gradual’ catastrophes challenge the linear and historical ecological crisis narratives and their notions of temporality whose cause and effect logic demand certain kinds of reparations and responses. They challenge a contemporary quick/urgent media ecology more suited to telling stories about disasters. The entanglement of time and representation is all-encompassing (Callaway, Citation2014; Clark, Citation2011). Yet we have to remember the effect of the politics of representation on the registers of grammars and logics of colonialism and global racial capitalism and its environmental expropriations and devastations as a planetary project. Simply focusing on first principles evades that colonialism and global racial capitalism have not only immured ecologies and species but have also immured the writing of ecological history, the writing of the planetary, including systems of thought such as those produced by black, postcolonial, and indigenous thinkers/activists (Marriott, Citation2011). Thus, while materials such as narratives, codes, genres, and genealogies of colonialism and enslavement block the potentiality of the colonized, they are equally able to block the recursive processes and practices that inform conversation on the postponement of the catastrophe of the planetary. Such ‘a/historical’ asymmetries can never escape the concept of history, thereby allowing racial capitalism to seize upon given differences to continue its business as usual (Marriott, Citation2012). As we think this through, we can see how, through environmental economics of growth, ecological experiments with linear, eschatological and retrojective structures of time and the temporalizing of desires and hazards, capital evades its biggest secret: capital cannot produce ecologies and life. It can enslave, colonize, engage in theft of land as property, and commodify ecologies and life into labour power and obliterate those it needs as its ‘basis for defining time’ (Rifkin, Citation2017, p. vii; Johnson, Citation2000) and for gaining coherence of its projects, but it cannot make life or beings. The enslaved, colonized, labour, and planetary power do not exist as such. They are co-produced with the language of colonial time and global colonial planetary projects. Walker comments: Labor power is called into being when its use-value, labor, is employed in the process of production. At that point, labor power is retrospectively made to have existed; in other words, its basic temporality is exactly the future anterior (‘it will have been’) .. . When capital needs to expand, it presumes the existence of frontiers and free lands and a supply of labor power but it conceals to itself the ecological hazard of securing these supplies. It posits for itself a semblance which fills the void and allows the circular logic of its cycle to smoothly continue (Walker, Citation2012, p. 187). This intervention highlights how capitalism’s logics and grammars depend on retrojection as a structuring temporal modality. In this sense, capitalism is able to sustain in place the fiction that it creates everything, even when it does not, thereby re-asserting its ineluctability. Thus, time turns into a technology of explaining away the problems that capitalism itself helps generate via ever more radical accounts of ecological catastrophes and disasters. Moore goes even further in his notion of the Capitalocene when he says capitalism is a ‘world-ecology joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and co-production of nature in a dialectical unity’ (Moore, Citation2015, p. 3). He takes the Capitalocene as his geo-poetics to describe a problem of ‘untimely ends’ by placing it within the larger world-ecology. Yet we still need to place the empirical question of an untimely ecological problem (i.e. capitalist exhaustion and acceleration) in terms of what describes the end of this problem, even if this is not the last day of the problem, that is, the instance when the problem ends (Agamben, Citation2009, p. 62). Examples disguised as facts are simply codes and genres of an epistemological model; however, by not just asking but also answering questions of what is right and wrong (Kverndokk & Bjaerke, Citation2019, p. 301), they orient us towards a certain possibility of the end of the problem. This orientation is the force that sustains the co-production of the racial ecological order and its dynamics and ‘nature’ (ecologies and enslaved lives) as zero time-and zero value. In a sense, Moore’s experimentation with this geo-poetics challenges the linear time of capital but remains within the logics and grammars of capital whose deployment of recursive time is a central structuring technology of violence. Moore’s analytics do not orient us towards the apocalypse but towards the time that lies between the announcement of the end of capitalism as the root problem of the planetary crises and a perpetually postponed end. Though not apocalyptic, this geo-poetics reinserts an idea of the ‘time of the now’ (Agamben, Citation2009, p. 61), the history of the present. But the disjointed ‘presentism’ of the subject, the market, nature and their removal from chronological time does not necessarily mean a more just relationship.