A friend of mine encouraged to speak at the World Ecology Research Network conference in San Fransisco earlier this year, and I’m glad he did. The WERN crowd tilts to the eclectic, with a strong anthropological bent, but remains solidly Marxist, and this makes for a pretty interesting mix. Besides, Kim Stanley Robinson gave the keynote!
Personally, I have limited interest in talking about the Capitalocene — the echo with “Anthropocene” is of course deliberate, as is the implication, that we’re fish swimming in capitalist water. Not that this lens isn’t fun and interesting, it’s both, but the “varieties of capitalism” debate — which stresses differences rather than ubiquity — is more likely to lead to useful insights, to help us think strategically. We are, after all, either going to make it within a capitalist social formation or we’re not going to make it at all.
My talk, I think, reflects my prejudices. I called it Climate Emergency and the New Age of Inequality, and this is indeed what it’s about. It was on June 1st, 2019. Here’s the video . . .