Capitalocene, Common Struggles and Disputes over other Terms of Interdependence in the Web of Life. Reflections from Latin America

Abstract

The reflections presented here are part of the concerns of the “Communitarian Weavings and Political Forms Research Group” at the Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Autonomous University of Puebla), in Mexico, in relation to what it means in Latin America to defend life through a wide and varied range of organizational processes and community struggles in the midst of the renewed dynamics of appropriation, dispossession, devastation and degradation of the human and non-human nature that violent accumulation logics constantly promote. This concern has led us to the task of endowing ourselves with an analytical, ecological, holistic and relational view of the notion of life, which we have been composing in dialogue with the ecology-world perspective, the Latin American political ecology tradition and some feminist traditions. In this article, based on diverse investigations in different countries of Latin America (Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia and Uruguay), we present what should be discussed when thinking about life, the Capitalocene and the struggles in defense of shared interests. The article consists of three sections. In the first, we explain what we mean by the condition of interdependence and how, from this idea, we recover the notion of “web of life” proposed by Jason W. Moore and other authors. We argue that life is a relational fact and that interdependence is an inescapable condition of all existence on planet earth. We only live thanks to the relationships of interdependence that we weave with other living beings and with the materiality that constitutes this extraordinary living being that we call Earth, capable of self-regulating through a series of complex cycles interdependent with each other. Recognizing this condition of coexistence implies, for us, assuming that life is as defined by Capra (1999), an immeasurably complex relational plot, a multidimensional network of relational networks interconnected with each other and immersed in a process of continuous evolution. 

On the basis of those considerations, in the second section, we ask ourselves about the life that the modern-capitalist project has been reproducing from the logic of domination of an anthropocentric, patriarchal and colonial character, and the ways in which it has sought to reorganize the condition of interdependence; that is, putting human and non-human natures to work to ensure the logic of accumulation. We recover in this sense the idea of Capitalocene proposed by Moore (2020), in order to emphasize that the accumulation of capital is not a mere social process with environmental consequences; rather, it is a network of internal relations spanning the totality of the conformation of life.  Therefore, it is also a way of continuously reorganizing the relations of interdependence in the web of life and historically linking human and extra-human natures to put them to work for the benefit of the generation of value. In recognizing the above, we also stress that the reorganization of the terms of interdependence posed by the processes of capitalist accumulation enters into a structural contradiction with the life cycles as a whole.  This is because at the same time life reproduction patterns are imposed for the extraction and generation of value, necrotic metabolics (the exchange of matter and energy for the accumulation of capital, not for the reproduction of life) are also generated, which fractures and degrades the self-regulatory capacities of living organisms, of their environments and of the planet as a whole, alienating and reshaping the autopoietic powers inscribed in them. An example through which we illustrate the capitalist reorganization of the relationship of interdependence and its necrotic dynamics is the capitalist management of relations of interdependence around water in neoliberal times.

Lastly in the third section, we expose our approach to social antagonism and the struggles in Latin America for the common, to defend life and to manage the relations of interdependence in contradiction with the terms of capitalist co-production. First, we clarify what we understand by the production of the common good, and we maintain that this is sustained in specific modes of organization of relations of interdependence; that is, in the establishment of particular terms of relationship with the web of life that, in a situated way, guarantees the satisfactory reproduction of life within a specific community of people, and between it and the companion species and the natural elements that constitute their environment. Secondly, we propose, in dialogue with Marx, that the unlimited need to expand the frontiers of capital on the web of life systematically finds limits and resistances within the affected social networks. Even in those territories where lives have been repeatedly subsumed and reshaped by the logic of value, the renewed and violent imposition of new forms of dispossession may encounter resistances likely to trigger organizational processes of defense and re-appropriation of previously expropriated means of existence.  This includes the production and/or regeneration of new commonalities and renewed forms of interdependence. In this sense, the social plots that produce the common are never something given or merely inherited, but are diverse and collective creations. This calls for repeated exercises aimed at disputing the terms of interdependence imposed by capitalist, patriarchal and colonial mediations, facilitating more satisfactory possibilities of organization and reproduction of life, both human and otherwise. We close the text by inviting readers to think how, in the midst of what the processes of multiple dispossession driven by capital have sought to deny, erode, fragment or alter, the defense and affirmation of life within such processes of struggle always supposes a practical and concrete exercise of regeneration and re-appropriation of political capacities.  This highlights what is altered by the metabolism of capital and leads to a reaffirmation of other terms of interdependence.

Given the dark and uncertain times we are going through, the multiplicity of struggles in defense of life in Latin America invite us to look at and intervene politically, focused on the reproduction of life conforming to a need for regeneration from the capitalist, patriarchal and colonial damage inflicted on the web of life.