Capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid

Heron, K. (2024) Capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid. Geoforum, 153: 103874. ISSN 0016-7185

Abstract

In September 2020 Deutsche Bank published a report entitled “The Age of Disorder.” Fronted dramatically by the image of a volcano and volley of lightning across a brooding sky, the report warned that the global economy was on the precipice of a phase shift from neo-liberal quasi-stability to an era characterized by dramatic social, economic, and ecological upheavals. Deutsche Bank’s researchers call this new period “the age of disorder”. This paper proposes Deutsche Bank’s appraisal is part of a broader condition that it calls capitalist catastrophism and an emerging regime of eco-apartheid. Taking as its point of departure Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s call for geographers to construct concepts that might help navigate a hotter planet, the paper introduces capitalist catastrophism as a concept that names and theorizes the effects of a dramatic and asymmetrically catastrophic reconfiguration of the capitalist world-system. Capitalist catastrophism has three characteristics. First, a newfound ability for social movements and theorists to imagine post-capitalist futures combined with an inability to realize them. Second, cascading and mutually amplifying social and ecological crises that outrun the capacities of states and capital to contain them. Third, an unevenly distributed cancellation of human and non-human futures. Drawing on Marxist political economy and Nyasha Mboti’s theorization of apartheid, the paper concludes that capitalist catastrophism is resolving itself into a global system of eco-apartheid in which a green transition for some is secured by putting the exploited and oppressed majority in harm’s way.