Conclusion

Our cheap things didn’t magically make themselves. They emerged through a violent alchemy of ideas, conquest, and commerce in the modern world. At its heart has been a series of binaries that entwined with each other from the beginning: Society and Nature, colonizer and colonized, man and woman, the West and the Rest, white and not-white, capitalist and worker. Each of these dualisms has not merely worked to describe and categorize the world but served practically to dominate and cheapen the lives of nearly all humans and the rest of nature. Understanding capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital, and nature helps us see how deeply each half of these is embedded in the other, how mightily the powerful have worked to police the sharp boundaries between them, and how forcefully those boundaries have been contested.

Slaves, Indigenous People, women, and workers—not exclusive categories, as we’ve seen—have experienced and resisted those always connected binaries from the beginning. Even at capitalism’s dawn there was trouble at the frontier, as free and slave workers fraternized and resisted in Madeira. Their lives were cheapened, they lived the contempt of their masters and employers, and they fought back. The refusal of many Indigenous People and workers—then and now—to fold into capitalism’s ecology prompted responses from governments and a search by investors for new terrains to seed and new models of order, profit, and extraction.

Humans’ experiences of and responses to capitalist strategies don’t come with transcendent instructions for success—for there are none. We make our politics from the ideas of our times. We are creatures of capitalism’s ecology and thus, as we argued in the introduction, we’re ill prepared to deal with the state shift that this ecology has produced through us. Take, for instance, contemporary attempts to address the problem of cheap nature. If you want to see a modern meld of Cartesian and capitalist thinking, here’s an exercise: jump online, find an ecological footprint calculator, and answer its questions. You’ll be told how many planets would be required if everyone lived the same way you do. (The average of our footprints is four planets: we’re not proud.) Progressive environmentalists use the ecological footprint to highlight the human overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity, because since the 1960s they have measured overpopulation by “not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities.” Overpopulation is, in other words, defined by a calculation of carrying capacity. To take these carrying capacities for granted is to blame future environmental destruction on the poor and working classes in the Global North and Global South as they struggle for some sort of parity with those who program the footprint calculator. Such Malthusian thinking makes despair inevitable, and inevitably racist.

The limits of production, consumption, and reproduction are fixed only by the system in which we find ourselves. Such limits are neither outside nor inside but both, knitted together by capitalism’s ecology of power, production, and nature. The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by “lifestyle choices” rather than socially enforced logics. If you have been gentrified out of your old neighborhood and need to commute an hour to your job, your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. Worse yet, footprint thinking teaches us to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of “people” and “consumption” rather than in systemic dynamics of capitalism and empire. Recall that in the thirteenth century, on the eve of famine, epidemic disease, and feudal crisis, French peasants in Normandy might have produced substantially more food if their feudal seigneurs had granted them autonomy. Today’s peasants make similar claims and have good evidence to suggest that agroecological farming can yield more, and sequester more carbon, than industrial agriculture. Any number of women’s movements have fought for women’s autonomy over their own bodies (with lower fertility rates one of many consequences). Yet neither peasant autonomy nor feminism features as an option in the individuating operations of carbon calculation. The ecological footprint, like so many environmentalist concepts these days, performs the very separation—of Nature from Society—that accompanied the rise of capitalism. Remember our exhibit A: the Anthropocene.

In defense of the footprint calculator, we might ask: does it not acknowledge the reality of our times, of planetary crisis, epochal climate shifts, mass extinction? Yes, but these modes of thought explain our present, disastrous state of affairs by consistently and significantly underestimating how the present is the product of a long past, of a bloody history of power, capital, and class, entwined in the web of life. At stake is how we understand population, nature, and limits. As the Berkeley geographer Nathan Sayre explains,

That the concept of carrying capacity has limits does not mean that the limits it purports to specify are nonexistent or meaningless—far from it. The point, rather, is that such limits are rarely static or quantifiable, let alone predictable and controllable. One can liken the world to a ship, but that does not make the world like a ship. To conceive of environmental limits in abstraction from time and history—as somehow intrinsic to an idealized nature—is to mistake the model of reality for reality itself. . . . It is unclear whether the concept of carrying capacity has any content at all without the idealism, stasis, and numerical expression that have clung to it throughout its history. What is clear is that it is a very dull tool for understanding.

Fortunately, there are movements that have sharper tools for understanding how our relations in the web of life might be different, movements that are well placed to develop a postcapitalist counterhegemony.

For instance, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina knows the importance of climate change and a transformative respect for nature and human life. Many of its members understand the practices of agroecology and “an end to all forms of violence against women” but also the need for stability—access to credit, grain storage, energy, and extension services, ways of bridging the gap between the city and the country.

In the settler colony of the United States, the Movement for Black Lives has policy briefs on everything from fossil fuel to community finance to militarization to—vitally—reparations. The disability rights movement has offered a critique not just of built public space but of race, gender, and class. Indigenous women in the Americas, whose bodies have been on the front line of capitalism’s ecology for the better part of six centuries, are calling attention to and making visible that violence. Idle No More protests in Canada and the protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota are committed to decolonization and confronting the coloniality of power. The Argentine socialist feminist movement Pan y Rosas (Bread and roses) is organizing against femicide. And proposals for a climate change exit strategy are proving points of organization and convergence across a range of thinkers and activists who are considering the dramatic redistribution of resources that a movement beyond capitalism will require.

At capitalism’s frontiers, communities not only experience the multiple fronts of accumulation but are both resisting and developing complex and systemic responses. John Jordan, an activist and cofounder of the United Kingdom’s Reclaim the Streets movement, argues that resistance and alternatives are “the twin strands of the DNA of social change.” That change will need resources and space to develop. There is no road map for a class struggle that simultaneously reinvents humans’ relations with and within the web of life. If we are made by capitalism’s ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations.

To contribute to that effort, we submit some ideas to supplement the vital organizing currently under way, ideas that can help to sense both the past and the present differently—at a scale, with an acknowledgment of life, and over time spans that cannot fit the Capitalocene. While we might despair of ever seeing systemic change, the history of revolutions is the history of the unexpected, and the impossible, happening. The great promise is that humans—and what humans become—can thrive with the rest of the planet after the Capitalocene. Let’s call it reparation ecology. It’s an idea that doesn’t translate well—French, for instance, has réparation du préjudice écologique, which refers to a restoration of the environment after humans have damaged it. But that’s a flawed path, because the idea of a nature that can be restored is both backward looking and rests on a vision of pristine nature that developed through genocide and conquest.

We’re thinking bigger and differently here, using reparation as a way of remembering how capitalism’s ecology has made the world—and our capacity to think and act—and of learning to interact with the web of life differently. Emphatically, we do not think of reparation exclusively in monetary terms. This is not a search for damages nor a quest for the person in the world who most suffers as a result of capitalism’s ecology. But knowing that there is someone whose only fault is to be born now, likely a woman, Indigenous, harmed by climate change and pollution, and whose life will be rendered demonstrably worse by the cumulative actions of everyone able to read this sentence, how might we live differently?

The outlines of such a program must include recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation.

RECOGNITION

To understand world-ecology is to face history and the future. It is to recognize that the way we live and the very categories of thought that separate humans and the natural world are historical—not eternal—realities. Capitalism’s binary code works, moreover, not just as description but as a normative program for ordering—and cheapening—humans and the rest of nature. The recognition we call for is not individual-therapeutic but institutional and systemic. Recognizing the relationship between humans and what humans have wrought, at the level of social institutions—from government to business to social change organizations—is both necessary and dangerous. Those institutions have often been studied as if, to borrow a metaphor from chapter 4, they were fish out of the water; the fundamental link to environments and environment making has too often been dropped from the frame. States have, in the process of recognition, betrayed the very groups they purported to recognize. One need only look to contemporary relations between states and Indigenous People, everywhere, to see this in play. Glen Sean Coulthart’s lessons, drawn from aboriginal struggles in Canada, suggest that engagements with the state must be limited if attempts to live beyond it are to succeed. Yet seeing capitalism’s ecology is not enough. It needs to be changed. Hence reparation.

REPARATION

There’s no easy calculus for the computation of suffering and repayment. To search for one is to suppose that the Book of the Dead is a subgenre of accountancy, kept with a double entry—one for the loss and one for the restitution. Reparation is neither so easy nor ever final. Consider the case of Guatemala. Diane Nelson’s helpfully titled Reckoning charts the attempt to compass and account for the long war sparked by the United Fruit Company’s reign over cheap bananas in Guatemala and the company’s response to a crisis of land reform that precipitated a CIA coup. Nelson follows the long-fought demands for accountability and reparations, which finally resulted in the payment of a debt for war crimes that became, in part, a fund for planting trees. Of one of her informants, she reports, “In Joyabaj, Doña Miguela’s husband has received some money but hasn’t planted anything. She’s incensed because he spent it on another woman instead of helping their youngest son get to the United States.” In other hands, this might be evidence of the futility of reparations, of the hopelessness of changing one thing when everything must change. Nelson instead offers it as a demonstration of a victorious political effort, one that the state spent decades trying to smash. That the reparation was spent in ways contrary to its purpose is a much better problem to have than not to have any funds at all.

It’s also important to remember that states are not the only bodies culpable for damage and subsequent reparation. Corporations owe debts too. Consider Dow Chemical—now the owner of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal disaster—or the corporations whose coffers have been filled with, in the words of the Movement for Black Lives, “wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized capitalism.” Yet the balance of reckoning will never level. Not because an equation for lives and suffering is incalculable, but because the process of reparation involves active historical debate. There’s no “year zero” that can serve as an accounting stand-in for the casualties of slavery, conquest, and class war. Finally, understanding the full range of damage caused by capitalism’s ecology, on whom and what that damage was inflicted, will require not just money but the imagining of nonmonetary redistribution.

We recognize that reparation ecology comes at a cost. There is trouble ahead. Suggesting an alternative to capitalism is as welcome now as it was when the unnamed Tlaxcalan witch in chapter 1 was killed more than four centuries ago. When communists in the United States did it in the 1950s, they were persecuted; when environmentalists do it today, they too become a focus of the security state. The practice of decolonization is more dangerous than simple solidarity because it’s more likely to work. Ultimately, it asks “What do you have?,” “How do you get it?,” and perhaps most seditiously, “What do you want?” Answers will involve the distribution of resources that have little to do with market capitalism. Of course, markets allot resources, but what we have in mind is a rather different form of redistribution.

REDISTRIBUTION

A look at the gendered fate of Nelson’s Guatemalan reparation points to how a cash payout for crimes is unlikely to bring justice by itself. Reparation ecology, by contrast, asks not “Who gets what?” but “Who got what, and who should pay for that?” In the case of patriarchy, the redistribution of domestic work is a central part of what we imagine reparation ecology to involve. Similarly, we hope that such redistribution would include energy to warm and cool homes and food in a diet cleaved from its capitalist imperatives, with both governed by regimes of commoning. To do that, you need land, places where humans can connect with extrahuman life, zones of engagement where humans can daily renew their relationships with the web of life. This calls for permanent reimagination.

REIMAGINATION

Decentering humans and undoing the real abstractions of Nature and Society can only be done concretely. Defensive actions against systems that enforce these abstractions—such as the Standing Rock campaign—can yield victories but are always part of a longer struggle. To decolonize “one name at a time,” one map at a time, as Biidewe’anikwetok suggests, is both a physical and a psychological task. There’s a danger of this becoming the sort of enterprise that demands far too much time on the therapist’s couch. This is not to disparage the important psychoanalytical work that emerges from climate change but to recognize that it belongs not in oak-paneled rooms but on shop floors and in fields, offices, and classrooms. This reimagination is a collective act of liberation. Never under capitalism have the majority been asked about the world we’d like to live in. To dream, and dream seditiously, is something that many humans need to practice, for we have been prevented from doing it for centuries. And the shop floors and community centers and classrooms and kitchen tables where these dreams will be shared are themselves subject to reimagination. Rather than seeing work as drudgery, restoration ecology offers joy, looking for working and living spaces to be filled with equitable chances for recreation.

RECREATION

There is currently a small boom in manifestos for the end of work, premised on the idea of robots managing the tasks that involve drudgery, thus freeing humans to have almost unlimited leisure. While there’s a danger in such analyses of forgetting the intimate and violent relations of capitalist machinery and cheap nature, we are grateful that they raise the hope that humans might find meaning and dignity outside the Protestant work ethic, itself a painful colonial legacy. This is not to argue against hard work. It is, however, to demand meaningful, pleasurable work—and a liberatory dissolution of the work-life-play relationship, emerging through workers’ struggle. Here we find the idea of contributive justice useful. Restorative justice has had some currency in the US criminal justice system as an alternative to incarceration. The logic is that restorative justice returns affairs to the status quo. But what if the status quo isn’t good enough or is downright horrible? In writing about backbreaking agroecological work, Cristian Timmermann and Georges Félix find that the application of deep knowledge to land, self-determination, and connection to the web of life offers a chance not only to engage in paid labor but to contribute to a better state of justice, to make oneself, ones’ community, and the world better. The joys of both idleness and good work are ones that we celebrate under the rubric of “reparation ecology.”

These ideas, we suggest, offer a way to think beyond a world of cheap things to imagine how we might live without the real abstractions of Nature and Society and the strategies that capitalism’s ecology has spawned. If this sounds revolutionary, so much the better.

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