The Anthropocene and the production and reproduction of capital

Abstract

Regardless of the final fitting of the Anthropocene in the Geologic Time Scale, conceptualizing the Anthropocene as a human-induced ecological crisis of planetary scale linked to the capitalist mode of production allows addressing the research on the deep roots of such crisis into the fundamentals of this production mode. In this regard, a Marxian dialectical approach is pertinent to face some of the major challenges launched by the Anthropocene narrative. In particular, understanding capital as the automatic fetish that commands social production and reproduction in modern society allows not falling into mystified techno-scientific solutions for the crisis. Capital as the automatic fetish that mediates in the universal metabolism between humans and nature yields an alienated form of social metabolism that is at the base of the metabolic rift inherent to the production and reproduction of capital and that is enhanced by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.