This is not just about carbon. Not just about the polar bears or the ice shelf cracking like a knuckle. Not even about “the planet,” as if it were a single, coherent thing in peril. What we’re living through isn’t a “climate crisis”—it’s a death system. An industrialized, monetized, and increasingly automated arrangement of extinction.
Call it the Capitalocene—not the Anthropocene, which too generously blames “humanity” in the abstract. The Capitalocene, a term sharpened by environmental historian Jason W. Moore, insists on naming the real culprit: a world system organized by capital accumulation, racialized disposability, and fossil-fueled extraction. It’s not a glitch. It’s the logic.
But to understand the full scope of this logic, we need to expand our lexicon. Climate change, yes—but also necropolitics, the management of who gets to live and who is allowed (or forced) to die. Necroeconomy, too: the market logic that turns death itself into a resource. These aren’t metaphors. They are blueprints.
Let’s follow the bodies.
Dead Labor: The Ghost in the Supply Chain
Marx wrote of “dead labor”—the sedimented time of workers embedded in every commodity. The shirt you’re wearing? Ghosted with Bangladeshi sweat. Your phone? A haunted object, blinking with the exhaustion of Congolese child miners and Chinese factory suicides.
Under the Capitalocene, the conversion of living labor into dead value intensifies. Work doesn’t just exploit life—it metabolizes it. Think of Amazon warehouses designed with gamified tracking and “time off task” metrics. Algorithms don’t crack whips, but they do issue kill commands: slower workers fall behind, gig workers burn out, truckers die at the wheel.
Silvia Federici’s work on reproductive labor reminds us that even care work—mothering, cooking, cleaning—gets extracted for profit. But in the Capitalocene, even care is lethal. Nurses collapsed during COVID while hospital CEOs got bonuses. Fast fashion seamstresses passed out at sewing machines while brands flaunted “sustainable” lines. Behind every “cheap” good is a ledger of vanishing life.
Dead Bodies: Necropolitics as Governance
Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to describe how modern power operates not by fostering life (as Foucault’s “biopolitics” suggested), but by curating death. Nation-states, corporations, and infrastructures now determine which populations are exposed to slow or sudden extinction. The “essential worker” was never meant to be eternal.
Necropolitics doesn’t always look like overt killing. Sometimes it’s passive, bureaucratic, even polite. Border policies that let migrants drown. Urban “redevelopment” that poisons water. Medical systems that ration insulin by income. In the Capitalocene, death isn’t just permitted—it’s optimized.
The pandemic crystallized this. “Reopen the economy” meant: let the elderly, the poor, the immunocompromised die. It was a collective shrug in the face of mortality. Not everyone’s mortality, of course—just those deemed inefficient. Disposable. Already priced out of the future.
Dead Earth: Extraction as Extinction
Environmentalism often talks about “saving the planet,” but the Capitalocene frames nature as a mine, a dump, a dead zone waiting to be monetized. Trees become timber. Rivers become hydroelectric data points. Mountains become lithium. The Earth is not dying—it’s being murdered for parts.
And not equally. Capitalism doesn’t extract evenly. It racializes extraction. The Global South is sacrifice-zoned: flooded, fracked, strip-mined. Indigenous land is “developed.” Island nations drown. Disaster capitalism kicks in to rebuild—on investor terms. Naomi Klein had it right: first comes the disaster, then comes the profit model.
Jason Moore reminds us that capitalism doesn’t just depend on nature—it produces it. It invents what counts as “natural” in the first place: cheap labor, cheap food, cheap energy. But that cheapness is subsidized by death. Ecological death. Species death. Cultural death. To keep going, capital must keep killing.
Living in the Necroeconomy
What we’re describing here isn’t just a political order—it’s an economic one. A necroeconomy: a system where value is extracted from death itself. Insurance companies profit when people die earlier than expected. Pharmaceutical firms depend on chronic illness. Private prisons make money off caged time. Carbon offsets let corporations kill a forest here as long as they promise to plant a sapling there.
Even grief is monetized. Funerals, memorial NFTs, AI bots that mimic the dead—mourning is a market. The line between death and data thins. Capital wants everything, even your afterlife.
And Yet—What Now?
It’s easy to feel paralyzed. To scroll past another fire, another war, another species gone and think: nothing can be done. That’s part of the necrospell—convincing us that life has no alternative. That survival is just another form of consumption.
But there are cracks. Mutual aid networks. Indigenous land defense. Strikes, occupations, refusals. Not just resistance—but reclamation. Of life, of land, of labor that isn’t undead.
If the Capitalocene is a death cult, maybe it’s time for a counter-ritual. Not to mourn endlessly—but to live otherwise.
See also: The meaning of Capitalocene / necropolitics / necroeconomy — explained
