Abstract
Naming something is a fraught activity, mixing as it does an expression of communicative action, the manifestation of operational power, and, hopefully, commitments to precision, practicality, and aesthetics even as words, once used, escape human control. We want our new words to be useful, potent, clear, distinct, and maybe even beautiful as they point to the things we’re using them to name. And once uttered, names can still escape our control, being capable of reinforcing or undermining any of the values that drove their creation.
Witness the term ‘Anthropocene’. Promoted (if not invented) by chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to name a new geological epoch within the Quaternary Age, it refers to the ability of human beings to impact the earth through their actions that would be visible in global stratigraphic levels. The term took off as shorthand for naming, all at once, a time marker to capture the advent of nuclear technology, the proliferation of plastics, the catastrophic collapse of biodiversity, and the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. And now it is used in diverse disciplines to get at, variously, a way of marking physical changes to the earth's crust, the unequaled power of Homo sapiens to drive change and impact other species, a point during which human social imaginaries are in flux, a framing term for moral concerns about the future of life on earth, and even the age that comes after modernity since ‘postmodern’ has lost cachet. In 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences—which is the body that names geological eras—rejected the term Anthropocene, at least for its official purposes. But the term had long since escaped their control, as potent words always do, becoming a ‘charismatic meta-category’ (Elizabeth Reddy, ‘What Does it Mean to do Anthropology in the Anthropocene?’ Platypus (8 April 2014) available at https://blog.castac.org/2014/04/what-does-it-mean-to-do-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/).
If the term was intended to highlight the power of human beings to bring about change at geologic levels, critics have been fierce to point out that it isn't human beings, per se, but particular human beings with vast resources, powers, and purposes that are driving such change. Blending conceptual concerns about semantic clarity with moral concerns about human and/or species flourishing in the face of climate change, scholars like Donna Haraway and Jason Moore have advocated for different terms. Joerg Rieger picks up Moore's use of the term ‘Capitalocene’ to suggest that capitalism—particularly of the sort that is manifest in North Atlantic countries—is the force that has created the environmental (and cultural, economic, and political) crises we now face. (Haraway has suggested the term ‘Chthulucence’, to express the agency of many species rather than the privileging of one.) The term not only names the book; it centers the book's contents.
Rieger uses the term ‘Capitalocene’ as shorthand for his critique of capitalism, and Theology in the Capitalocene extends that critique with his own brand of theological and moral reflection. Those familiar with Rieger's earlier work will pick up continuities between that work and this one: The attention to empire and colonialism and their impacts; the focus on labor; the convictions about the power of bottom-up organizing and movement activism; the centrality of materialism and material concerns; the expansive range of resources from which this capable scholar draws in order to emphasize the intersectional character of his work even as he advocates for greater attention to the concerns of class structures among the intersections.
In what follows, I turn to some questions about naming as I summarize the book.
After a short introductory chapter, Rieger begins the heavy lifting of the book in chapter 1 by exploring the state of the world in a time of climate crises. He helpfully lays out not only a primary material cause for climate change (‘The role neoliberal capitalism has played in climate change is hard to dispute. At present, 71 percent of CO2 emissions are linked to only one hundred fossil fuel producers’, p. 22), but a range of sociocultural ones, including religion. The center of the chapter is Rieger’s insistence that environmental questions and economic ones need to be much more closely linked—and that as such linkings emerge, theological reflection, especially of a liberatory sort, can play an important role. One role that such reflection can play is to expand notions of agency in order to recognize the agency of non-humans as a way of offering a much-needed corrective to current economic frames that under-regard the importance of the sheer range of forces of production and reproduction in capitalism; that ‘capitalist production is never purely about capital itself but about a fundamental production and reproduction of relationships among wealth, power, and non-human nature’ (p. 41). This raises a first question of naming: if matters of agency need to ground a focus on production and reproduction of such relationships, and if ‘only one hundred fossil fuel producers’ create 71 percent of CO2 emissions, why name capitalism as the fundamental problem shaping environmental crises, rather than specifying in much more finely grained detail which agents in a capitalist system most need to be challenged?
Chapter 2 constructs a set of theological-moral reflections on new materialisms in light of the concepts of immanence and transcendence. One of the ideas grounding the chapter is that transcendence ought to be defined ‘not in opposition to immanence but as transcending one kind of immanence in favor of another’ (p. 79). New materialisms—that is, new ways of paying closer attention not only to the material conditions of living but to the value of material stuff itself—have the potential to undermine the capitalist temptation towards abstraction (‘the market’, ‘valuation,’ etc.) that helps drive environmental destruction and injustice. Such understandings of immanence and transcendence and materialism help us get a better grip on the way that an emerging economic democracy might first see and then attend to the range of forces whose productive and reproductive labor make our lives possible, especially where such forces—including ‘politics, religious practice, and even the nonhuman environment’ (p. 75)—are hidden behind the capitalist approach to valuing things according only to the market forces of commodification. A second naming question: if ‘democracy’ might be understood not only as a species of polity but as a range of practices that agents within that polity engage, what kinds of practices constitute an ‘economic democracy’ when the range of its agents is so great? What political practices are common to a day laborer in a lithium mine, a beaver building a dam, and the earth as it spins?
Rieger’s third chapter is the beating heart of the book, linking Rieger's longstanding focus on class and labor with his growing attention to ecology. Class, he reminds us, shouldn't be understood primarily in terms of socioeconomic strata but, instead, as complex systems of relationships characterized by a variety of inequitably distributed forms of power. And underlying class relationships are labor relationships: ‘labor relations determine class relations’ (p. 106). Turning a critical eye towards his own guild, Rieger emphasizes the failure of scholars of religion to recognize this fundamentally relational, power-focused, and labor-based understanding of class (when they give any attention to class at all): ‘labor relations appear to have a profound significance to life as a whole, which the study of theology has almost completely missed’ (p. 101). Where, Rieger asks, might scholars of religion look to discover a better understanding of class and its significance for life on earth? His response: Towards the Gramscian subaltern and the wisdom of liberation theologies that emerge from the bottom up. And why look there? Because not only any critical engagement with the forces of capitalism but any constructive response towards the promotion of creaturely flourishing needs to understand class, relationship, power, and labor. So, a third naming question: Why prioritize subaltern voices in a chapter that doesn’t name those voices or begin with them? The chapter is theory-rich and stacked with scholars across a range of guilds who write on labor, many from a Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective. It is hard, though, to find anyone referenced in the footnotes who is not long dead (Adam Smith, Karl Marx) or doesn’t have a PhD after their name. Globally, workers—including migrants and indigenous communities—are organizing and pursuing a wide range of initiatives to improve the conditions within which they labor. Many are supported by organizations like Global Labor Justice, the AFL-CIO, ITUC, and USAID. The work of such organizations may not always align with Rieger’s vision (and most of these organizations largely disregard the non-human natural world except when it intersects with workers’ concerns), but they are on the ground, funding the work of the very subaltern that Rieger emphasizes in his work. And whatever their limits, they would certainly seem to be allies in his fight against neoliberal capitalism.
Rieger’s response to my question of naming in his third chapter will happen, if anywhere, in his fourth chapter, in which he advances the idea of ‘deep solidarity’. Deep solidarity is manifest in a political left that distinguishes itself from a solidarity of the right by promoting connection and diversity simultaneously as a way of escaping both the ‘divide and conquer’ and ‘unite and conquer’ projects of proponents/beneficiaries of neoliberal capitalism: ‘In sum, deep solidarity accomplishes two unexpected things: not only is it built on a challenge of privilege and genuine appreciation of difference, but it also manages to employ differences for the common good and the power of resistance’ (p. 175). Attention to the history of the Christian Left in the United States reveals how powerful deep solidarity can be: it is intersectional, more attentive to interests than ideals as a foundation upon which to build movement action, and alert to the distinction between privilege and power (‘systemic privilege does not always translate into power, which is also systemic’, p. 164), even while critical of the way both privilege and power are employed in defense of injustice. It is helpful—especially, perhaps, for theologians and scholars of religion in the present moment—to be reminded by Rieger that our regular preoccupation with a kind of identity politics that disregards labor relations is susceptible to cooptation because it lets the Right set the terms of a (misplaced) debate over how to distribute the benefits of the current economic system instead of joining together to challenge that system. The chapter does surface a new question of naming, though: What does ‘deep solidarity’ mean in a book that includes ‘ecology’ in its subtitle and in which Rieger reminds us (at least earlier in the book) that members of the non-human natural world participate in the labors of production and reproduction? The chapter is not only anthropocentric; it is anthropo-exclusive. How might solidarity across diversity include non-human species and their own distinct vocations? Or is there a difference in kind between the labor of human beings and the labor of everything else such that the latter can be ignored as agents of deep solidarity?
I should note here that Rieger’s brief concluding chapter continues to shrink its focus towards human beings in North America as it takes up important questions of reparative justice but only within the context of reparations for slavery in the United States. It ignores the work of those arguing for obligations to pursue climate reparations in, e.g., low-lying island nations, let alone the idea that repair for environmental harms driven by climate change would have to happen at ecosystem levels, not just socio-cultural ones.
All of which arrives at a final, big, naming question. Debates about the term ‘Anthropocene’ are grounded in the idea that the earth is leaving one epoch and entering a new one. Yet the Capitalocene that Rieger describes seems to be grounded in the ideas, debates, and practices of the present age. Rieger explores important questions and offers provocative solutions in this book. But what if these are the questions and solutions of an age that we are leaving, rather than one we are entering?