Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Westernocene? On the Ideological Foundations of the Current Climate Crisis

ABSTRACT

In the current debate on the causes, consequences and solutions for the climate crisis, it will be argued that the hegemonic discourse of the Anthropocene implies a problematic anthropological, ecological, historical and scientific perspective, as, by reproducing a Cartesian dualist view, it replicates the ideological schemes that are at the origin of the crisis. Therefore, after exposing the main assumptions of the Anthropocene, a critique is proposed by conversing with alternative perspectives. As it will be pointed out, these tend to focus on single elements only gaining importance because of the role they play within the world-ecological capitalist structure, which requires assuming a broader historical and structural proposal: the Capitalocene perspective. In this study, while interrogating the constitutive pillars of the Capitalocene, the aim is to analyze at an even deeper level to highlight that capitalism itself is a material structure built on the ideological foundations of Western thought, whose approach to the predation of nature precedes Cartesian dualism. The objective of this paper will then be to discuss these issues and conclude that it will not be the anthropos that leads us to a new geological period, but capitalism through its Western intellectual foundation: the Capitalocene as a Westernocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalocene
• Antropocene
• world-ecology
• climate change
• capitalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this respect the Capitalocene perspective is thus clearly indebted to historical materialism, assuming that Descartes could not have thought what he thought, nor written what he wrote, but for the fact that he lived between 1629 and 1649 in the Dutch Republic, the “model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century” (2015a, 20).