Racial capitalism is terminally unsustainable and reaching its fascist tipping point leading to global instability, ecological devastation, and systematic collapse – the question to avoid extinction is not how to “slow down”, but how to move on

Arun Saldanha, “A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 5 September 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819871964

Another option presents itself: simply continue using “Anthropocene” in an informal and capacious manner and accept there are many environmental and sociological markers which together point to North England at the end of the 18th century as its beginning. Between earth science and other practices, we can inhabit the impasse instead of ignoring it. If it turns out the Anthropocene officially starts in 1964, those outside earth science will have to accept that conclusion. But explaining the radioactive stratum will still require explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, industrial technology, and empire, and these have their roots in the racializing capitalisms of early modernity. What after all is the Great Acceleration an acceleration of? The destructive apparatuses of the World Wars and then the Cold War are culminations of geopolitical, technological, and legal processes which first took form much earlier (think of the papally backed Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain of 1498 dividing the world for colonization). But this essay has argued it is the transition to an economy of perpetual speeding-up that is definitive, more than either the beginnings of colonial arrogance or the mad resort to nuclear arsenals. The military–industrial complex has been spectacularly wasteful and dangerous, but it is instigated by the growth imperative, by the “miracle” of the conjoining of primitive accumulation, gendered wage-labor, and commodification in little North English towns (compare Alliez and Lazzarato, 2018; Jones, 1981). The political upshot is that to avoid this system’s catastrophic exponentialities, it will not be possible to simply slow it down.

Concluding thoughts: Life through the Trumpocene

Since their inception in the Enlightenment, both the humanities and left politics have a lot to offer the science of nonhuman processes insofar as all three study the conditions of possibility of human life itself. The anthropos has always been an open question, a site of fundamental antagonism not a monolithic agent, defined by multi-layered and conflicting temporalities. The most promising premise of the Anthropocene concept is that it comes from such unlikely allies of the left, not just ecologists and epidemiologists but geochemists, paleontologists, oceanographers, astrobiologists, and complexity mathematicians. Few scientists, environmentalists, or diplomats follow a simplistic neo-Malthusian line for which it is overpopulation as such that is responsible for ecological devastation (Angus, 2016). Unwittingly, earth scientists in fact provide the Marxian, decolonial, and feminist critiques their most rigorous and affective impetus ever. Critical theorists have an opportunity for pushing scientists and laypeople further to acknowledging racial capitalism as what explains the Anthropocene and its stark inequalities and technologies of mass destruction. That can be done by co-claiming the term while respecting that the scientific rules governing its definitional procedure have their own consistency. It is true that as part of their habitus most physical scientists are unwilling to interrogate their ideological presumptions, but it also behooves the humanities and activists to be alert to the sharp and reasoned disagreements within science. In any case, stratigraphy can no longer proceed without intervention from the humanities, because the strata discussed can only be fully explained and responded to through the concepts the humanities have so long argued over. Just like with previous debates about human destiny, but unlike with most other geological periodizations, the Anthropocene debate has immediate political implications.

Let us recapitulate the argument about race and capital. This essay has argued globalization is based on racial capitalism as brought about by slavery and genocide, but partially overcoming them through the Industrial Revolution. If colonization was essential to the emergence of capitalism, today’s retrospection allows us to identify a “proto-racist” sense of privilege to others’ ecosystems and cultures that inflected the colonial projects (Saldanha, 2013). Liberal and conservative historians argue it was mutual competition, supposedly an inevitable fact amongst all human groups, that drove Western European powers to expand (Crosby, 1986; Jones, 1981). The discords of early modernity are undeniable, of course, but the question is how Europeans could transpose their conflicts anywhere they wanted on the globe, starting with the Crusades and the Treaty of Tordesillas. One can only imagine if competition between China, Japan, and India were to be played out by carving out Europe as Europe did Africa. The aggressive usurpation of land, labor, and resources that colonial capitalism necessarily consists of corresponds with annihilating anthropogenic ecologies that had developed over generations. Following critical race scholars (Wynter, 2013), such annihilation cannot but be termed racist, as it was and is based on the certainty that some people, somehow, have a divine, legal, or rational “right” to appropriate other social formations and landscapes for the enrichment of their fatherland.

Public discourse is changing. Carbon inequality and climate justice are becoming mainstream progressive terms. Even lifestyle magazines like Essence now decry the structural racism inherent in the climate denialism of tycoons like Donald Trump (Sanders, 2017). Indeed, Trump embodies, in however contradictory a fashion, the coming-together of reactionary forces that had been accruing for decades, or rather centuries. As evinced by the spread of the word “Trumpocene,” the president’s cynical selfishness is likely to become more prevalent in the Anthropocene than humanitarian interventionism and the erstwhile calls for universal human rights and cooperation (see Kaplan, 2016; Myer, 2016). When Trump designates countries in the Global South as “shitholes,” attacks brown and black Congresswomen, and refuses to criticize white fascists, he provides a lucid formulation of the logic of racial capitalism: the material positionality of a power elite obsessed with self-enrichment, a denial about the US’s own catastrophic levels of gun violence and plutocracy, and a paranoia about immigration from the areas of poverty this elite causes elsewhere, as a kind of excrement of the capitalist system. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Trumpism has been replicated in Brazil, its president openly imagining exterminating Indigenous Amazonians to make room for export beef. From Europe’s far-right parties to corrupt elites in the Global South, the global growth of Trumpism will no doubt deepen the racialized dimensions of capitalism.

One should not be blinded, however, by the abrasiveness of authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro: they are the condensation of a liberal-democratic order in crisis. An irony of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is that just when the most openly racist and sexist US president ever comes to lead the last white-supremacist empire—which, though crumbling, or perhaps because of that, has been most responsible for the world’s catastrophic state—he accelerates that empire’s decline and nefarious effects with as much bravado as ineptitude. The desperate anti-environmentalism and heteronormativity of the US Republicans and Bolsonaro must be seen as part and parcel of a fascist turn which, as history show, accompanies states of profound collective malaise. With the Industrial Revolution, the formal abolition of slavery, the welfare state, mass consumption, neoliberalism, and now a crypto-fascist turn, capital requires drastic axiomatic transformations for its own survival. Trump and Bolsonaro show that Nick Mirzoeff (2016) has a point in calling the Anthropocene “the White-Supremacy-Scene,” but racial capitalism operates through more than violence, and its start date is the late 18th century not the 16th.

The global system of race constantly has to restabilize itself across the centuries and across locations and scales. This article revisited processes whereby capital aggressively remade the earth in its own image and hence posited the white bourgeoisie as explicit standard for the entire species. But capital is a force uncontainable by any one racial or ruling class. If by the year 2120 on a viciously hot planet China turns out to be the dominant superpower, Arab city-states have successfully navigated peak oil, Europe is riven with separatist warfare, and US cities are burnt-out and flooded wastelands, inequalities in life expectancy will most probably still be indexed on phenotypical differences. Sinocentric or Arab-centric versions of structural racism and ecological destruction might be less genocidal than the white-supremacist ones—indeed, the truculent policies of the “emerging economies” often justify themselves as different from Europe’s arrogance even while they import the same methods—but that could render them more effective. Even if in this scenario white supremacy is superseded, it is certain the inhuman vortex of capital would continue to wreak havoc on racialized others, animals, and ecosystems. As a broadening coalition of activists, theorists, and scientists is showing, the time is now for conceiving and struggling for an Anthropocene freed from capital’s axiomatic of growth. Whenever the Anthropocene started, whether it engenders collapse, slow degradation, or a different system altogether is a political question of unprecedented magnitude