This essay argues for an understanding of the Anthropocene as both historical impasse and historical transition. It is an impasse insofar as there is a conceptual and practical gap between human history and planetary history, or politics and ecology. It is a transition insofar as it marks the passage from one geological epoch to another and from one dominant social formation (capitalism) and the possibility of another. The author makes the case that ecopoetry and ecological Marxism operate a dialectical reversal from historical impasse to transition by mediating between ecology and politics. The author reads a poem by Stephanie Burt, “Advice from Rock Creek Park,” as an instrument for sensing and conceptualizing the present as a complex coordination of contradictory social and ecological temporalities. The author then looks to ecological Marxism for how it historicizes capitalism as a transformation of human and nonhuman natures. Marxism and Karl Marx's writing contain insightful meditations on the historical realities of the human species, the social production of subsistence, and the metabolism between society and nature. Marxism offers a rich conceptual apparatus for historicizing the climate crisis as the transition to a new epoch—one that may yet hold a place for human civilization.
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January 2025
Research Article|
January 01 2025
The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present
South Atlantic Quarterly (2025) 124 (1): 95–112.
Citation
Christian Haines; The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2025; 124 (1): 95–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557825
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