“What happens when capital no longer seeks to dominate nature, but identifies itself with it?”
“The limits of the perpetuation of life as we know it today appear globally as so many concrete barriers to the expansion and maintenance of the civilization of capital”
“The production and reproduction of capital has become intrinsically intertwined with the possibilities of the survival of our species. In pursuing the satisfaction of our desires, human beings have exceeded the material capacities of the planet”
“In the near future, capital will no longer be able to track down sufficient resources, cheap labor and energy, nor any new frontiers to exploit in order to renew itself, since it has already colonized the entire planet. Having drawn its substance from a world that does not expand as fast as it does, it now confronts the abyss of its own collapse”
“Yet just as climate change does not threaten life as such but rather life as human beings know it and partake in it, could we not also envisage a continuation of the valorization process beyond this life that we experience?”
“In other words, is the disaster that presents itself as the announcement of the apocalypse reducible only to a destruction of the world? Couldn’t it also take the form of a radically different renewal of the civilization of capital? Can’t capital bifurcate too?”
“Ecology reifies the consequences of capital (or the modern techniques of production) in order to differentiate itself from it in an abstract way, yet without ever questioning either its origins or the possibility that the processes of valorization it set in motion could be reborn anew”
“To limit our understanding of capital solely to its enterprise of destructively dominating the biosphere is to limit its horizon of struggles, thereby cutting us off from a real offensivity and facilitating an ever more integral management of the living being that one claims to want to save”
“the civilization of capital presupposes a particular “cosmotechnics”2 whose development (or “technical tendency,” i.e., its tendency to persevere in its specificity, to speak like Leroi-Gourhan3) entails an ever-greater destruction of the living”
“Western cosmotechnics, which has today become planetary4, articulates the separation of the divine from the human, of the subject from the object, of the species from its environment, etc., always with a hierarchical primacy of the subjective pole. The rejection of animality and the glorification of logos or rational thought are illustrations of this tendency, which helped give rise to an ideology of the domination of man over nature”
“to consider the possibility of capital escaping the destruction announced by the realization of its substantification implies that it has managed, in one way or another, to curtail the original incoherence on which it was nevertheless built”
“Such a possibility implies a change of cosmotechnics on the part of capital, a metaphysical revolution. It is thus a question of thinking a revolutionary capital, not merely because it would have succeeded in escaping the old contradiction between labor and capital, but because it now struggles to escape the contradiction between nature and culture”
“capital would no longer produce ways of life as consequences of its domination, but would dominate precisely through the production of new ways of life”
“The error of political ecology consists in claiming that the resolution of this disjunction through the realization of an identity between a new cosmology and a new morality would make it possible to establish technical relations coherent with the future of the world, and in this way, to prevent the disaster”
“Ernst Bloch proposes a distinction between two modes of possibility: objective possibility and real possibility”
“Objectively possible is everything that science has the right to hope for, or at least not to exclude, on the basis of the mere partial knowledge of its existing conditions”
“really possible is all that whose conditions are not yet completely gathered in the sphere of the object itself; either because they still have yet to ripen, or else especially, because new conditions — mediated by the already existing conditions — that necessary to the birth of a new real, have hatched”
“Today, in our common representations — our common sense — “ecology” still appears as something separate and distinct from the economy”
“emerges foritself out of the harmful consequences the modern economy delivers unto the world in which value substantiates itself, while it appears for the economy, in itself, as a brake on this substantification”
“However, ecology is not born historically for itself as “ecology,” but first of all in itself as a multiplicity of relations to the world sabotaged by a process of valorization that depends upon the domination of nature, whereas these relations appear for theeconomy as so many obstacles to its expansion.”
“Can we not then suppose that, through a dialectical movement, the two might one day each become constitutive moments of a future identity?”
“The first report of the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (1972), offers a perfect example: the supposed impossibility of “infinite growth in a finite world” is arrived at through the lens of the modeling tools of economic science, and the ecologism that results from it is merely an attempt to mitigate the consequences of the extractivism on which capital is based”
“A little earlier, in 1968, the photo of an “Earthrise” taken during the Apollo 8 mission illustrates the “universal awareness” of the planet as a whole. It thus reveals the common future of the entirety of living beings through the mediation of the conquest of space, itself made possible by a certain technique”
“Bruno Latour’s call for the constitution of a “party of the ecological class” whose primary aim would be to seize power through representative democratic means — a perspective equal parts statist and European — rests upon categories that not only make zero sense today, but belong in an essential way to the conditions of appearance of this “new climatic regime” we’re now entering”
“the ever-increasing consideration of the invisible and the non-human (always by the human) appears strangely like a way of restoring dignity to outdated political categories, allowing political “radicals” to forget the lie against which they once rebelled by conferring newly rediscovered “value” upon the law, representation, and all the levers of power that need to be destituted”
“the green Leninism of Andreas Malm, or the ecological socialism of Jason W. Moore constitute, with different degrees of authoritarianism, an integral management of the world that does not depart from value at all, but seeks instead to index it mysteriously to something other than the production and reproduction of capital, without any awareness that it is only a new way of recycling it”
“its scandalous presentation, there is no doubt in the mind of today’s banking class that humanity will adapt, and value along with it”
“After a long historical process in which the human being was first dissected and refashioned, before passing to the fabrication of “society,” from formal subsumption to real subsumption, and culminating in the rationalized fabrication of the cybernetic project, it is around the “nature” of being itself, no longer only as pure resource, but as the whole in which this human being exists and evolves, that the system turns”
“The real possibility of capital lies in its identification with nature, whereas its objective possibility lies in the destruction of the latter if it does not manage to realize the former in time”
“if the only analysis of capital that prevails is one that considers it only as a destructive agent, this makes the task of actually combating its process impossible, since it leaves us lagging behind the present, and we run the risk of rebooting life within an ever-increasing capitalization without first asking whether such a life is worth living”
“Camatte emphasizes that capital has become a material community — that is, a “total development of capital as a completed structure,”22 a totality. This is only possible once capital has become autonomous from its other modalities of existence, and unfolds according to presuppositions that are solely its own”
“Its form extends its domination to the entirety of what exists, even as it tends to de-substantiate itself (for example, value abandons a concrete referent: gold, it is no more than a representation detached from any materiality except that attributed by capital itself”
“Paradoxically, after having filled itself with the world, it accomplishes its total becoming only by distancing itself from it. This is only possible because the world itself, owing to its colonization and extraction by capital, is exhausting its sources of valorization”
“The totality that the material community thus constitutes rests on the subsumption of all human activity, and by a transformation of human representation by the form of capital itself: “Capital abstracts man. This means that it strips from him all his content, his materiality: labor power; all human substance is capital.””
“The process of valorization is now indexed not so much to the production of objects external to the human being (concrete goods) but to information and data that emanates not so much from the classical sphere of “work” but from daily life as a whole”
“the “richest” companies have become not those who produce energy, but those who collect the most information (GAFAM)”
“The fact that information extraction now concentrates more value than energy extraction is a sign of a shift towards something else, a sign of the real possibility of capital to escape the constraints of the production process”
“capital has escaped the constraints of the global production process as envisaged by Marx, and it has only been able to do so by becoming representation. It is this that allows it to sidestep the process of production, since it no longer needs to relate to its own materiality in order to acquire a reality”
“the concrete production of a “second nature” embodying a valorization process that is now freed from all material constraints.”
“capital, realized through representation, materializes itself not only by subsuming all human activity within its reproduction, but also by producing a single concrete world superimposed over the one in which it has substantiated itself (the latter being the product of this human activity)”
“Still in its infancy, we find such premises in the announcement of the “metaverse,” in research on the “neurolink” society, in the decentralization of the web with Web 3.0, etc.”
“The autonomized form of capital would thus replace life with its life [la vie avec sa vie], reducing more and more the difference between the two by maintaining the primacy of its form”
“capital is reformulating its process in the face of the objective impossibility of perpetuating it within life as it exists, concretely producing a life distinct (but linked) from our “biological” life, definitively separated from all other previous forms of life, an avatar”
“We could perhaps rewrite the first thesis of the Survival Manual as follows:
While the “hardest” (and most formally coherent) leftism claims a salary for all the destitution of all that destroys the living, capital nourishes the dream of its satisfaction ever less subtly: to purify itself of the pollution of production, even if it means abandoning men to the freedom to produce themselves as its containers, as pure forms filled with emptiness, energized by the same enigma: why am I here?””
“Collu, Apocalypse et révolution”
“Jacques Camatte, “This World We Must Leave” in This World We Must Leave, Autonomedia, 1995, 166”
“Jacques Camatte, “L’échappement du capital,” from his Preface to the Italian edition of a 1977 anthology of Invariance. Onlinehere”