Capitalocene: naming the crisis by its engine
The term Anthropocene suggests that “humanity” as a whole is responsible for planetary destruction. Capitalocene, however, shifts the blame from humanity in general to the specific system of capitalism — the global organization of production, consumption, and exploitation that has driven ecological collapse. The political ecologist Jason W. Moore and theorist Donna Haraway use the term to describe how capitalism operates as a “world-ecology”: a system that thrives on extracting “cheap nature” — cheap labor, cheap energy, cheap raw materials — while externalizing the social and environmental costs.
In this view, the crisis is not geological but systemic. Capitalism doesn’t just use nature; it organizes the entire relationship between human and nonhuman life through profit, competition, and endless growth. Some thinkers even date the Capitalocene back to the early modern period — to colonization, plantation agriculture, and the slave trade — where the global metabolism of capital first took shape.
Necropolitics: the power to decide who must die
The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe coined necropolitics to describe a darker extension of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. While biopower governs life — promoting health, reproduction, and productivity — necropolitics governs death. It’s the political capacity to decide who may live and who must die.
Necropolitics highlights how modern power often manifests not through explicit killing but through exposure — leaving certain populations to die slowly, by poverty, environmental destruction, or neglect. These “death-worlds” are spaces where life is reduced to bare survival: refugee camps, occupied territories, prisons, or toxic neighborhoods. In modern democracies, too, Mbembe argues that racial capitalism and militarized borders continue to determine which lives are protected and which are disposable.
Necroeconomy / Necroeconomics: when death becomes profitable
The term necroeconomy has two distinct uses.
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In economics, Levan Papava used necroeconomics to describe “dead sectors” — unproductive industries sustained by subsidies and inertia in post-Soviet economies. These are parts of the economy that should have died but continue to exist artificially.
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In critical theory, however, the term takes on a much grimmer meaning. Drawing on Mbembe’s necropolitics, scholars use necroeconomy or necrocapitalism to describe profit systems built upon disposability — industries that depend on suffering, precarity, or slow death. Examples include extractive mining zones that poison local communities, privatized detention centers, or economies of war and surveillance.
The Mexican theorist Sayak Valencia calls this “gore capitalism” — an economy in which extreme violence itself becomes a market logic. In such contexts, death is not an accident of capitalism but one of its operating costs, even a source of value.
How the three ideas connect
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Scale: Capitalocene diagnoses the macro-system — capitalism as the planetary driver of ecological and social breakdown. Necropolitics describes how that system distributes death and vulnerability. Necroeconomy analyzes how these logics become profitable and institutionalized.
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Agency: Together they reveal how power and profit operate not simply through production, but through abandonment — through deciding which lives can be wasted for the system’s continuation.
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Ethics: The trio of ideas forces us to ask moral and political questions beyond individual responsibility: how do we design economies that refuse to treat death as collateral, and how do we create governance structures that make life, not profit, the central measure of value?
