The Liberal Agenda – Professor Wayne Hope: Guest Auckland University Sociology Lecture on the Anthropocene, Global Capitalism & Epochal Crises of Time

I am an enormous fan of Professor Wayne Hope, his book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures is a devastating critique of the capitalism behind global warming the true enormity of what we are dealing with.

You can not pretend to have an opinion on climate change if you have not read this book.

He argued  that there is a collision of epochs of Anthropocene and exploitative capitalism.

He calls these a crisis of time.

• Financialised capitalism and systemic failure.
• Global Capitalism and Systemic Failure.
• Humankind’s Finitude and Earth System Deterioration.

He notes the difference of ‘deep time’ which is a natural science perspective of vast time periods vs the epochs of human civilisation and the power to define epochs.

The power to define standardised chronological time is a crucial infrastructure of capitalism.

Real time connectivity is essential for instant real time capitalism and trumps clock time.

This command of time gives Capitalism enormous power.

This is at odds with the human time experience of temporality where time is experienced as in the moment and of cultural memory.

This human experience of temporal time collides with Capitalisms command and control of standardised real time immediacy of time.

This time temporality leans into the biological and natural world experience of time that are based on seasons.

These natural experiences of time, be it human or natural world, clash with capitalisms immediate command of real time.

Deep time vs exploitative capitalism that causes biological system collapse are beyond the human experience of temporality.

The last 11,700 years since the last Ice Age have seen a stability of climate generated by natural rhythms of the planet that have allowed for agriculture and civilisation creation.

That Holocene Epoch has collided with the Anthropocene Epoch which has disrupted the biosphere in a way previously beyond our capacity.

Tipping points built into the biosphere once breached will dramatically impact the temporal experience of human beings who can no longer challenge the real time Capitalism control of time as markets, financialisation and commodification of real time carbon trading eclipse the lived experience of system collapse.

You might be flooded, but markets are still trading against your misfortune of being flooded.

The environmental situation the global population finds itself in is universally blamed on everyone rather than actually place the blame on exploitative capitalism and the corporations that drive that.

Professor Hope argues that two Epochal Formations Converge.

• Global Capitalism as a fraught sociological totality.
• Earth system epochality and the Anthropocene.

He argues that social democracy has been hollowed out by transnationals and we have lost economic sovereignty.

Agribusiness dominance, exploitation of global workers, global consumerism, Transnational hegemony, these all creates a gravity to global capitalism that is unprecedented.

Māori have cultural memory of the first wave of white settler capitalist exploitation resource taking, they have the flax roots knowledge of what sustainability and environmental protection looks like, it is no wonder that international right wing think tanks always aim to attack indigenous rights first to enable the next generation of exploitative resource stripping.

Professor Hope’s conclusion is Global Capitalism and Sociological Collapse:

• Myopia of capitalist time-profit standardisation.
• Crisis of temporal progressivity
• Denials of co-evalness in crisis

Professor Wayne leaves us with this hope:

Time Principles of Eco-socialism   

1. Knowing how to build sustainable ecological communities reflects a reconciliation between the human time of global history and the deep time of Earth history.
2. Repairing ecological life for future generations entails the synchronisation of biotic, animal, bird and insect life cycles.
3. The production and consumption of safe, nutritious food for all nurtures soil-based nutrient cycles and respects the rhythms of seasonality.
4. National agricultural policies prioritise domestic farming traditions of food self-sufficiency over the fast turnover times of corporate agri food production.
5. Energy for electricity grids is naturally renewable over ecological time rather than extracted on the basis of capitalist time.
6. Green, public-urban housing complexes within mass transport networks foster long-lasting intergenerational communities.
7. A steady-state macroeconomy involving re-use and re-manufacture of materials and consumer durable avoids the accelerated turnover times of global capitalism’s value chains.
8. Ending the incessant hyper-consumption of soon-to-be-obsolete products strengthens the steady-state macroeconomy.
9. Technologically enabled reductions in the work-time of waged labour, equally distributed, expand human temporal autonomy.
10. Operating businesses guided by the public memory systems of registries, deeds, statements of account and legal judgements replaced “off-balance sheet” financial speculation.
11. Major banks and other financial institutions fund long-run strategies of renewable energy development.
12. Through monetary and fiscal policies, democratic governments coordinate and plan the steady-state economy over intergenerational time.
13. Slow eco-tourism values the journey itself and fosters cross-cultural; appreciations of time.
14. Activating these principles is a political struggle over the meaning and usage of time

I believe Wayne’s book, The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and Global Futures is one of the most important books on climate change that NZ has ever produced.

If you haven’t read it, you can’t have an opinion on climate change.

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