Climate Crisis and the Kleptocene: On the Commodification of Sentience

In Climate Crisis and the Kleptocene: On The Commodification of Sentience the author argues that capitalism is not merely a system of economic exchange, but an ideology of value that, in virtue of the existential demand for permanent growth, must reduce other forms of value—moral, civic, and aesthetic—to exchange value. The ontology of capital accumulation can neither afford nor accede to any exemption to its fundamentally kleptocratic logic of commodification. Thus, among its most significant originary acts is to nullify the value of sentience as an obstacle to commodification. A number of well-known environmental writers including David Wallace-Wells, Michael Mann, Gary Francione, and Jason Moore, however, miss this critical element of the ontology of capital and thereby end up either defending reformist incarnations of capital conquest or, as Andreas Malm puts it, offering “hybridist” and ultimately self-defeating accounts of the history of capitalism. Malm’s own realist account, however, does not go quite far enough to see beyond human chauvinism, down to the roots of the logic of commodification—namely, that nothing sentient or non-sentient, living or nonliving, organic or inorganic is irreducible to the exchange value of an ideology whose essence is “grow or die.”