One of the most obvious and worthy criticisms of the concept of the Anthropocene is that humanity cannot be held responsible for the alteration of the earth as a living system, and that it is the capitalist form of human existence that needs to be identified with the “golden spike” of the Anthropocene. The 21st century, despite ongoing climate change denial, evidences the extent to which capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient term for explaining what I will refer to as the “end of the world.” Even though one might think of accelerated planetary destruction as fully compatible with capitalism, one also needs to account for the rigid attachments to a certain mode of human life that renders capitalism suicidal and psychotic (rather than Freud’s postulation that civilization was neurotic). Rather than say it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is more accurate to say that the end of capitalism is deemed to be the end of the world, and this is because there can only be one world. Anything other than “anthropos” is without world or poor in world.

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is What Would You Do (and Who Would You Kill) to Save the World? (Taylor and Francis 2022).

What are the prospects for human equality in an age of biocapitalist commodification of life itself? In this presentation, I use the term “biocapitalism” to refer to the production, circulation, and consumption of diverse bio-materials within circuits of capital accumulation. Nick Bostrom’s Transhumanist Declaration (1998) was perhaps the first cogent articulation of the world-changing stakes of new technologies of biocapitalism, but with the advent of genetic engineering technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, the potential extension of biocapitalism onto the cellular and genetic level in human bodies and other non-human living beings has been magnified dramatically. What is the place of the human in the age of biocapitalism, and what are the prospects for a radical democratic humanism? Are enduring influential academic theories of posthumanism a boon or a barrier to struggles for liberation? In the course of the presentation I will analyze Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium (2013), a biopunk and ecopunk text that limns the dystopian possibilities of biocapitalism. I also return to Donna Haraway’s classic essay on the cyborg, asking how its intervention should be regarded in a moment of increasingly sophisticated and accessible technologies of genetic engineering, of environmental crisis and manipulation, and of surveillance capitalism and AI. I conclude by exploring alternatives to the grim future imagined in Elysium, looking at Paul Mason’s recent arguments for a radical humanism, as well as at how recent proposals from the British think tank Common Wealth for the treatment of data as a commons might be extended to the realm of biocapitalism more broadly.

Ashley Dawson is professor of postcolonial studies in the English department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R Books, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso Books, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Books, 2016). An anti-pipeline activist with the No North Brooklyn Pipeline campaign, a member of Public Power NY, and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. He is currently at work on a book titled Environmentalism from Below, and is co-editing a volume called Decolonize Conservation!

The question of solidarity — what it is, and what its conditions of possibility might be — has never been more urgent, as systems of care and mutual support crack and crumble under the strain of a pandemic that has capped off four decades of neoliberal violence. “Solidarity,” although rarely precisely defined, has often been understood as the radical or progressive value par excellence, a guarantee against the twin risks of oppressive hierarchy and anomic social dissolution, the thing that must be preserved in the face of modernity’s tendency to dissolve all kinds of bonds. The ethical basis of humanism in its simplest form might be understood as an ideal of universal human solidarity, while even the most rigorously antihumanist strands of Marxism have appealed to some notion of universal human emancipation to be achieved through the practice of working-class solidarity. Now the age of ecological collapse presents us with the question of what it would mean to conceptualize solidarity in even wider terms that those assumed by liberal humanism, universalist religious traditions, or the most capacious forms of Marxism: if our interests are directly shared with an entire ecosystem, can awareness of that fact only find political expression in a more-than-human concept of solidarity, or would such a notion merely be emptied of all meaningful content? Is the concept of the human still a necessary normative anchoring point for an otherwise amorphous notion of infinitely expansive relationality and solidarity, or the last stumbling block on the way to understanding solidarity in terms that are truly adequate to our times?

Jeremy Gilbert is professor of cultural and political theory in the Department of Music, Writing, and Performance in the School of Arts and Creative Industries, University of East London. His most recent publications include Twenty-First-Century Socialism (Polity, 2020), a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Experimental Politics (MIT Press, 2017), and the book Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto Press, 2013). His next book, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World, co-authored with Alex Williams, will be published in 2022. He writes regularly for the British press and for think tanks such as IPPR and Compass and maintains a lifelong commitment to public education outside the academy, currently hosting Culture, Power, Politics, a regular series of free open seminars and lectures.

Liberal humanism’s concept of the “individual” is infamously anti-gestational in its very definition — i.e., gestating persons cannot be humans. Yet today the liberal feminist defense of abortion is still attempting to ground its case philosophically in this (definitionally non-pregnant) individual and her “right to choose.” Meanwhile, the defenders of forced gestation are successfully affirming “fetal personhood” in law. How do more-than-human lenses on the labor of making and unmaking fetuses (“gestational labor”) potentially transform the euphemistic politics of pro-abortion — especially when inflected with an antiwork lens? Besides reproductive choice, what alternative (non-reproductive, anti-productive …) rights and freedoms might gestators seize?

Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019) and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso Book, 2022). She studied English (B.A.) and environment (M.Sc.) at Oxford University, followed by politics (M.A.) at the New School for Social Research, and geography (Ph.D.) at the University of Manchester. Her theorizing and cultural criticism appears in venues ranging from n+1 and the LRB to Feminist Theory. She teaches courses on critical theory as a faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and also holds the title of visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. She is, primarily, a freelance writer.

Lost in our contemporary resurrection of post-1968 Black radical traditions is the deep skepticism that thinkers like Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, James Boggs, Audre Lorde, and others had about the inherently authoritarian nature of technology innovation. This talk will revisit their writings with a particular focus on Boggs, who, I argue, devoted a significant amount of his writing during the long ’70s to developing a theory of racial capitalism that centers the implications of computerized systems on labor production, management, and their impact on notions of race and the specter of totalitarianism and liberation in the United States. I see Boggs’ effort to push Black cultural politics away from a “worker”-centered humanism into ideas of “community” and “citizenship” as anticipating the work of a range of thinkers from Cedric Robinson to Sheldon Wolin. Boggs’ inquiry into what constitutes citizenship during the emergence of contemporary late-stage techocapitalism simultaneously challenges and resuscitates conventional ideas of the liberal subject that, my talk will suggest, are still worth contemplating today.

Richard Purcell is associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. His research, teaching, and writing center on media and visual studies, Black literature, poetry, music, and other forms of Black performance and art. Secondary areas of interest are in aesthetic theory, Black studies, as well as Marxist and post-Marxist thought. He is currently pursuing two interconnected book projects. The first investigates the intertwined histories of independent/experimental cinema and graffiti writing culture in New York City to talk about public art and the legacies of radical politics, the cultural and political economies of “watching,” the rise of corporate telecommunications networks, and the surveillance state during the long ’70s. The other book looks at how the social and economic discourses of neoliberalism and finance capital influence the way Black musicians, novelists, and performance artists think about the ontological status of the “work” of art as well as their own status as art workers from the late-1980s into the Great Recession.

In volume three of Capital, in a striking but somewhat uncharacteristic formula, Marx argues that the labor relation is the “hidden basis” of the entire social edifice including the state and politics. As an attempt to clarify and develop this insight I examine the dual nature of labor as both abstract and concrete, arguing that the two sides of labor correspond to not just two sides of the commodity, but two different constitutions and alienations of humanity. Abstract labor and concrete labor are the conditions of our ideal of an ethic of labor, the first imposing the general necessity to work, the latter the specific ideals of this or that division of labor. At the same time, abstract and concrete labor constitute the basis for two different alienations of humanity. Abstract labor imposes an ideal of productivity that is indifferent to the limitations of a specific individual, while concrete labor, and its corresponding division of labor, reduces a given individual to a specific task. If labor is the hidden basis of the social edifice, it is perhaps because it creates and destroys the image and ideal of humanity upon which it rests.

Jason Read is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY Press, 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015/Haymarket Books, 2016) and a collection of essays, The Production of Subjectivity: Between Marxism and Philosophy, coming out this June in the Historical Materialism books series. He also has a book, The Double Shift: Marx and Spinoza on the Politics and Ideology of Work, coming out next year from Verso Books. He blogs on popular culture, philosophy, and politics at unemployednegativity.com.

Although capitalism speaks an inclusivist language of horizontal affect, of which post-truth is epistemologically symptomatic — person and idea alike being enjoined from making tyrannical claims of superiority over any other — it nevertheless continues to practice what Peruvian world systems thinker Aníbal Quijano called “coloniality of power,” with white capital turning a profit on nonwhite death, in a vertical arrangement so vertiginously exclusionary that eight white men own half the resources of an increasingly majority-nonwhite world often represented as female. What are the prospects for human futurity and knowledge when “homo economicus” disregards the lives of others with the same passionate conviction that he disavows facts?

Dierdra Reber is associate professor of Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky. She is author of Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture (Columbia University Press, 2016), and has two manuscripts in progress: Alfonso Cuarón: Global Mexico, Greater Humanity (under contract, University of Illinois Press Contemporary Film Directors Series), and Losing Our Minds, Racializing Our Feelings: The Persistence of Coloniality in Post-Truth Affect.

The human might appear as the subjective figure of capitalism that binds political subjectivity to the juridical end games of liberal representation and impossibility, but its grounding in the inhuman-inhumane subjugation of colonialism releases a different specter into the scene: that of lithic subjectivity. This talk addresses how a lithic, rather than political or economic, account of the subject might open new considerations of the site of the politics and address the tight bonds between subjection and extraction. Historically, if political subjectivity is considered stratal — that is, defined by a stratigraphical hierarchical imagination of the human and earth — then the place of politics might be differently understood. The emergence of geosocial forms not governed by the skewed arrangements of political subjectivity as defined through liberal humanism is a reorientation of collectives and the possibility of nonlethal conditions.

Kathryn Yusoff is professor of inhuman geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Most recently, she is author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a special issue on “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” (with Nigel Clark) in Theory, Culture & Society, “Epochal Aesthetics” and “Mine as paradigm” in E-flux, and “Geologic Realism” in SocialText. Her most recent book project is Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (forthcoming). She is recipient of the 2022 Association of American Geographers Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography.