Joerg Rieger, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class and Solidarity

Catherine Keller

September 14, 2022

Joerg Rieger does not write just to make points, arguments, books, but to make a difference. And so the logos of his theology is already always in practice — at least in theory! As the difference he makes is being made primarily through its arguments with other scholars, I am glad for the opportunity to engage key gestures of Theology in the Capitalocene, hoping of course that by doing so my own verbiage becomes less wasteful, impractical. For if any U.S. theologian ultimately makes a significant difference in the conjunction of “ecology, identity, class, and solidarity”— in most of what matters, in other words — I pray it be Rieger. For those matters are materializing so precariously now as to threaten the very temporality, so long term and slow, of books.

So this book gets right to the point: due to climate change we are now at a point where ecological crisis engulfs the planet’s populations human and nonhuman. “We now understand that where the goal of production is the generation of profits — the categorical imperative of the Capitalocene — production must drive consumption, evolving in a vicious cycle that results in ecological destruction and climate change.” So global warming and the means of production that drive it have exercised an earth-wide influence that can only, and, who knows, actually might, be answered — by a global response of resistance and transformation. Rieger finds hope for this answer especially in the “power of productive (and reproductive) labor as a revolutionary force,” a force expressing itself, “in an emerging worker cooperative movement that is global and highly diverse…”[40f]. And as he links the agency of labor to the global 99%, not to a more standard and limited sense of the working class, let alone to a particular coop movement, the odds may not be quite as nasty as one fears.

I find myself quite straightforwardly affirming the insistent constellation of key concepts summoned by Rieger’s work before and in this text. As I read it, his idea of “deep solidarity” now unfolds as a materialization of the intersectionality across multiple social issues of a radical relationality, in particular a fresh relationality of class. It demands close attention to the modes of production that drive neoliberal capitalism and therewith the approaching demise of the habitable planet. And we find a deep ecology here grounding — in the material ground of the Earth and all earthlings — the deep solidarity. The goal is particularly well named as “economic democracy.” Especially well named, I want to stress, inasmuch as we — we the demos — can keep in play the double oikos: the nonseparable ‘home’ of ecology and its economic ‘household.’

Rieger has surfaced and strengthened the transformative potential of that difficult doubling. This book’s environmental materialization is all the more impressive, as he had not in prior works engaged in much analysis of the interlace of the nonhuman ecology to economic production. It will challenge me and I suspect many to keep articulating the role of production, not merely of consumption, in our critiques of the current global economy. And it does this all the more effectively by stressing the productive labor of nonhuman nature upon which our every moment of existence depends and which is being exploited to the ends of profit and unto the end of the sustainable earth. The take-away here is the strict analogy between the systemic misuse of human and of nonhuman labor.

Crucial in Rieger’s strategy in this book is a move that I often make myself: to make explicit the expandability of Kimberle Crenshaw’s black womanist initiation of “intersectionality” between race, gender, and class to multiple planetary contexts, including that of the planet itself. Indeed he is at pains throughout the book to avoid any zero-sum game of identitarian priorities — which avoidance is also Crenshaw’s original point. He deftly weaves further the relation of labor to matters of race, careful not to “subordinate” race to class but to show the important interlinkage, i.e, neither to “neglect identities tied to class and class consciousness” nor to give up “appreciation for different identities tied to gender and race,” which can function “for good and for ill” depending upon their formation by and resistance to domination [180].

I find particularly illumining how intersectionality helps him to insist that we look at class in terms not of “stratification” but of “relation.” Undoing the implied ontological hierarchy of strata already liberates the energies of class to work against their own exploitation. Valuable also is his demonstration that intersectionality as relationality frees radical critique of capitalism from the onus, often based on stereotype, of a single-issue, deterministic, and of course Eurocentric Marxism. Rieger’s Marxism does not lack its orthodox moments, but works always ultimately to serve the deepening of solidarity — without which the broadening can only fail. In support of that deepening, I do want to raise a few questions.

Would it not strengthen Rieger’s intersectionality, particularity in the ecological breadth he now seriously embraces, to recognize a certain material ecology of intersectionality itself? In other words, why not acknowledge the texture of the earth, of its bodies, of the universe itself, of what theology calls the creation — as intersectional? Here is where for me a theology of radical relation has long been at work: in describing all bodies as social, as constitutively related to their worlds, as embodying what has been. And in their becoming, indeed their labor, those bodies are altering their worlds. For good or ill. But I am aware of making here a cosmological proposition, indeed to be dipping into process theology. And I suspect that any such generalizations about the cosmos irritate our author, who mocks “Big Ideas” [except perhaps those of Marx].

Yet he refers respectfully, if in passing, to panentheism, another term for process theology, and to John Cobb, the major process theologian.[43] But he merely gestures at Cobb’s multi-volumed labor against neoliberal capitalism and its destruction of human life and its ecologies. True, it does not claim a Marxist analysis, but may be therefore all the more precise in its targeting of this epoch’s capitalist machine of destruction. Also Cobb at 97 persists in vigorous activism, influential in truly intersectional (often internet) manifestations [e.g. https://cobb.institute/about/] . And frankly there will have been no stronger contribution to the rethinking of the human person as other than the substantial and separate individual of western (and certainly capitalist) self-delusion than that of process thought, as it as flowed into multiple, particularly perhaps feminist, womanist and ecologically tuned Christian social movements. Its strengthening of religious pluralism and so of deep democratic solidarities of difference is perhaps of little interest to Rieger, but perhaps important to the aspirational practice of intersectionalism we share. And the background Whiteheadian cosmology of relation, with its rigorous alternative to human supremacism, may be indispensable to what Donna Haraway calls “multi-species thriving.” [Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.] In the Anthropocene, Capitolocene, or Chthulucene, the point of these anti-anthropocentric cosmological ideas is not to be Big, but to embrace the material universe precisely in its relations, not its stratifications.

If we academics, let alone theologians, want to contribute to the deep solidarity at stake, we need mutual challenge and illumination. This concern has relevance also for the titular Capitalocene. I celebrate Rieger’s grounds for embracing this term of Jason Moore’s. But why must it be posed as the righteous alternative to the Anthropocene, which is now not going away? At this point why insist that the latter term blames “humanity as a whole for climate change and ecological destruction”[27]? It can be misused of course (unlike “capitalocene”?). But (as I read it and use it) its point is that in terms of geological epochs, one species stands out as having an unprecedented degree of impact and destruction on all the others. Different classes do not make us into different species — though it seems close to that sometimes! That anthropo-species happens to be organized into precisely the sort of economic relations that Rieger rightly describes and decries. But certainly the whole species is thus formed and forced into dependence upon that economy and thus mainly (99%) indirect collusion with — not the same as blame for — its modes of production and destruction.

I was intrigued at the rhythmic iteration of reproduction along with production, though the former never gets much of an analysis. It does, however, keep the door open to richer solidarities with feminist/womanist thought, in which the matter of reproductive freedom has always been germane. But now, just after the publication of this book, we find ourselves suddenly and unthinkably post-Roe v. Wade. If right-wing politics have long centered their heterosexism in abortion politics, this SCOTUS win assures that the near future of progressive politics will need to bind matters of justice in reproduction and in production more effectively together. Rieger’s theology will help Christians rise to that occasion. But I will also say that such Trumpist effects as that and other trends have and will demonstrate lead me to draw upon William Connolly’s notion of “aspirational fascism.” [Climate Desires, Fascist Drives and Truth; etc.] He lends a needed perspective on political power that does not simply cash into economics. But it must be read as an effect of what Connolly calls the “capitalist-evangelical resonance machine” — which does meaningfully resonate with the Capitolocene. That machine of course operates with deep levels of oblivion as to its own motives and effects.

Indeed what will stay with me in this struggle for economic democracy is a new mindfulness of what Rieger brilliantly calls “the economic unconscious” [129]. First of all my own and that of the progressive theology that holds me in difference and in proximity to Rieger’s theology in the capitolocene — and all of its relational scenes. So as is evident that with my questions I am only shoring up more solidarity for Joerg Rieger’s brilliant labor.

Catherine Keller practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. As the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University, she teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. Within and beyond Christian conversation, she has all along mobilized the transdisciplinary potential of feminist, philosophical, and pluralist intersections with religion.

Her most recent books invite at once contemplative and social embodiments of our entangled difference: Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (Forthcoming April 2021); Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (2018); Intercarnations: On the Possibility of Theology (2017); and Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2014). Keller’s other books include On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (2008); God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (2005); Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003); Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (1996); and From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (1986).

Theology Beyond the Capitalist Mode of Extinction

Filipe Maia

September 14, 2022

Joerg Rieger has been tracking the movement of power for more than three decades now. With his latest book, he has come to the Capitalocene. No trajectory is devoid of ruptures and transposition but it would be a mistake to read this book outside of the path that Rieger has carved out over these years. This book is fundamentally a contribution to the task of liberation theology, in particular to the understanding of how class power has shaped ourselves, our views of God, and indeed an entire geological age. Rieger is helping us in tracing how theology ought to enter — and hopefully, help us in leaving — the Capitalocene.

The situation described by Theology in the Capitalocene is grim but when hopelessness appears as the only option available, Rieger demands us to pause and look deep below. As he has been doing for years, he is not happy to end with a gloomy analysis. What matters is the alternative. And in the book, Rieger offers important alternatives to what I’m inclined to call the capitalist mode of extinction. We read about “treadmill of production” (ToP) analyses that connect ecological destruction to capitalist production (28-42), we read about worker coops (48-54), intersectionality and deep solidarity (chapter 4), reparations (Conclusions), among other things. These alternatives emerge from the deep of capitalist exploitation, from the bottom-up, where the pressure imposed by capitalism is most keenly felt. Rieger reiterates that these situations must be part of theological discourse. More: that they in fact shape our God-talk and that it matters where the theologian stands vis-à-vis these challenges.

The benefit of having a geological perspective, such as the one offered by the concept of the Capitalocene, is to show how capitalism has so ferociously extracted and exploited the planet. It has the additional benefit of opening up some lines of inquiry into the planetary dimension of capitalism. Consider a quick history of how bees participate in the formation of modern political economy. In 1714, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees set the stage of the debate with its satirical account of the perception of how a society immersed in vices could hope to aspire for good social outcomes. Adam Smith picked up on the analogy, only to invert the satire: under a market economy, so he argued, even our most crude vices turn out to produce good social outcomes. And Marx also wrote about bees in Capital to suggest that human beings are creatures of labor that differ from bees in the fact that they design the product of their labor before doing it (284). From Capital to the Capitalocene, however, bees have gone missing as the geological age endangered by capital has indeed put the lives of bees in peril. With it, many other lives — human, plant, animal, mineral — are in peril. As Rieger insists, biological life has evolved not so much through the “survival of the fittest” but through bio-environmental collaborations (See 44). As for bees, what is their work if not the labor of cross-pollination, a true form of interspecies solidarity? (Incidentally, liberation theologian Claudio Carvalhaes has recently delivered a moving sermon on the importance of minding the bees.)

One would do well to stay a little while in the company of bees, at least the ones buzzing in Marx’s writings. In a recent study, political economist Kohei Saito has pursued Marx’s concern for the environment to suggest that a certain ecological sensibility was central to the Marxian critique to capitalism. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows that Marx’s manuscripts on natural science reveal that he came to understand that ecological crises are the fundamental contradiction in capitalism (13). In Marx’s theory of metabolism, nature is portrayed as standing against capitalist productivism insofar as “capital cannot subsume nature for the sake of its maximum valorization” (20). To the contrary, the attempt to subsume nature produces the exhaustion of the material conditions necessary for human development. That is a contradiction that may lead to the overcoming of capitalism. Saito offers this illuminating conclusion: “[Marx’s] theory of metabolism emphasizes the strategic importance of restraining the reified power of capital and transforming the relationship between humans and nature so as to ensure a more sustainable social metabolism” (21). For readers of Rieger’s work, Saito offers an important insight: the whole of nature is a site of resistance to capitalist extraction.

Exit, social Darwinism. Enter, interspecies solidarity.

As Rieger emphasizes in Theology in the Capitalocene, solidarity is a labor-intensive endeavor (141). It is even more so when we come to think of it beyond the realm of human solidarity. How does one think of work in planetary terms? In what sense do bees “work”? At stake here is the obvious fear of anthropomorphism or, even worse, of a form of capitalmorphism, as the imposition of our alienated understanding of labor to the non-human world. That would be catastrophic. Perhaps the alternative would be animalizing labor, of rendering human labor strange to the capital form it has taken over the last three centuries. That indeed seems to be a direction opened up by Rieger—one that might demand some further attention.

As we exit the most direct effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, media buzz points in the direction of different forms of work arrangement. Capitalism will act fast, indeed it has done so already, to intensify the exploitation of labor for the sake of profit. But some of the brief moments of pause created by the pandemic might have exposed some of the tricks of capitalism, for instance, in showcasing to public attention that “essential” workers are often the most exploited ones. It is time for robust coalitions, both within and beyond human workers. Theologian Catherine Keller once nicknamed that a “democracy of fellow creatures.”

If it is true that capitalist exploitation makes cross-pollination difficult, the alternatives that Rieger demands that we embrace require deep solidarity of the interspecies type. After insisting on the intersectional nature of deep solidarity, Rieger shows in compelling ways that the most diverse force in the United States is indeed the labor force. Those who wish for more diverse and plural societies ought to pay closer attention to the labor movement, where concerns for race and gender meet the extraordinary forces of class exploitation.

In the geological age wrought by capitalism, it turns out that a vast and diverse coalition of the human type offers us the best chance of an equally diverse coalition of animal, plant, and mineral life. The alternative to the capitalist mode of extinction will require a coalition of such forces.

Filipe Maia’s research and teaching focus on liberation theologies and philosophies, theology and economics, and the Christian eschatological imagination. His scholarship pays special attention to the ways in which imaginaries about the future shape politics, economics, cultural patterns, and religious practices. Employing sources in Marxist and continental philosophies, Dr. Maia’s current book project offers an analysis of the debate in critical theory addressing the “financialization” of capitalism to show how future-talk is ubiquitous to financial discourse and how contemporary finance engenders a particular mode of temporality. In this context, Dr. Maia suggests that the language of hope, as approached by Latinx liberation theologians, is a subversive social force that can continuously question and resist the hopes and expectations conjured by hegemonic economic discourses.

Wired for Solidarity


The Right Rev. Dr. Carmen Lansdowne


6 October 2022

Nearly a decade ago when I started to work for an environmental legal charity in Canada, my offices were in the historic “Gastown” neighborhood of downtown Vancouver. Rugged cobblestone streets patched with little black spots of asphalt and century-old buildings harken back to a time of colonization and European settlement of lands that were once flourishing and used by the hunquamemim and squaismnisken speaking peoples — tribes we now define legally as the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Watuth. With 1%-er Chip Wilson (the founder of LuluLemon)’s newest venture “Kit & Ace” flagship store for “technical cashmere” and expensive art galleries lining the streets, the also century-old issue of poverty shows up in the precariously housed living and overdosing in single room occupancy hotels (SROs) and panhandlers, jones-ing for a fix.

It was on this street that I observed a woman with some combination of mental illness and addiction – a woman I’d later come to know as Susan (name changed to protect her privacy) when I moved back into ministry with the United Church of Canada in Vancouver’s notoriously poor Downtown Eastside (DTES). She approached a man, immaculately dressed and groomed (in clothing and accessories on his person that likely exceeded her annual income), and asked him for money. Without acknowledging her request, without making eye contact, without saying sorry, without really acknowledging her existence, he walked past her in a dehumanizing move that rendered her completely invisible. He intended to simply ignore her existence. But Susan, never one to be ignored, regarded him with defiance and yelled after him down the street: “Hey buddy! You owe a debt to society – and you can start by paying yours to me!!!”

In so many ways she wasn’t wrong. In the DTES, Canada’s poorest urban postal code, the evidence of the imbalance of our economic and social systems are on display everywhere. The media perpetuates a stereotype that sees mental health & addiction as some kind of personal moral failing, and the situations of folks in the neighborhood as intractable and unchanging. After years of working alongside this vibrant community, I see the evidence: people get housed, get healthy, people recover, people die … the neighborhood is anything but static. So why does the situation appear to get only worse, never better?

I believe that there is a constant pipeline of human misery that ends up in this alleged “dead end” neighborhood that is more driven by economic and social factors that we are willing to realize. There are failures in our healthcare system (namely, the inability to adequately address mental health & addiction as health issues), housing affordability, equity for people from marginalized communities, and most importantly extractivist forms of capitalism. Public policy fails to address these failures and humans who face one or more traumas (personal, physical, racial, economic, family, etc.) could be pushed over the edge, into a space where our so called “social safety nets” do not catch them.

Rieger’s wrestling with whether to reform or overturn capitalist structures offers a critical look into the ways economic thought is rooted in colonialism. The ways in which economic thought has interwoven itself is not only rooted in colonialism and neocolonialism. The oversimplified bases upon which economic modeling, and thus political and financial and social decisions, are made are deeply rooted in euro-Christian thinking that rests on binary dualisms, the mind-body divide, and individualism over collectivism. These epistemological hegemonies result in a disciplinary ease by which oversimplified models rest on justified truth claims that are confined to a singular way of understanding and being in the world. It is through this epistemological hegemony that it becomes both easy and normalized to ‘externalize’ the things that are simply too difficult to measure in the most basic of economic arguments.

Rieger argues that “economics can be reconstructed from the ground up, in touch with the ecological, sociological, and political dynamics described in this chapter.” And maybe that’s true, but it also assumes a high degree of knowledge about sources of material, supply chains, reliance on regulated goods and trade. Is it really possible to start from the ground up? What does solidarity really look like in this case? It must be vaster, and more open to transformation, than has been evidenced so far. Rieger rightly critiques that the primary issue is not consumerism (symptom) but the over-production of goods (cause) and then creation of a desire manufactured to consume that which is produced. His arguments are also grounded in labor, but what of those who are not included in the ability to or experience of labor? Often the people facing the biggest marginalization are people whose inherent/intrinsic value is not counted as having any value.

What I do know is that in the streets of the DTES, we never go wrong when we start from a place of human-centred design – a fancy way of saying solidarity – in how we respond to the needs of the community around us. The people who best understand how they ended up on the underside of society are also best placed to tell us what they need. And that will likely come as a cost to society – but isn’t that what we are called to - costly solidarity?

The good news, if Dutch historian Rutger Bregman is to believed in Humankind: A Hopeful History, is that humans are hardwired for solidarity – it’s what makes violence so difficult. That violence isn’t limited to physical violence, but also economic, racial, spiritual, and emotional violence. Throughout his hopeful history, Bregman builds a case for solidarity building on evidence that we are, in fact, hardwired for solidarity. This is good news for creating a world with a new, more sustainable, and humane economic order that seeks to co-create the world we believe we’re called to as people of faith: one where we have life, and have it in abundance.

The Right Rev. Dr. Carmen Lansdowne
 is Moderator of the United Church of Canada. Carmen is a member of the Heiltsuk First Nation and a lifelong member of The United Church of Canada. She attended the Vancouver School of Theology (VST) in the MDiv program from 2003-2007, and after successful completion of her internship Marengo Pastoral Charge (Alsask & Loverna, SK), she was ordained to further study in 2007. She completed coursework for a ThM degree at VST in 2008, then moved to Berkeley, CA where she commenced coursework for a PhD at the Graduate Theological Union. She completed the ThM in 2011 and the PhD in 2016.

Inorganics of the Word, Unite!

On Rieger’s Heterodox Intellectualism During the Capitalocene

Santiago Slabodsky

6 October 2022

There are a series of curious letters between a young Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, his secret fiancée, daughter of a distinguished Protestant family, and eventually a cultural critic and socialist political activist. During this time Marx was under the influence of controversial theologian Bruno Bauer and while deciding his career paths he seriously considered engaging in theology. His partner, who knew him well since an early age, seems to have asked him to think twice about his next steps. “The Moor,” as the young Marx was known at the time for his dark skin and forcefully orientalized identity, may have been better suited for other explorations.

Perhaps thanks to these exchanges and other opportune interventions, Marx will eventually write the most globally influential critique of political economy to date. This is why he appears as the most cited author in Joerg Rieger’s book (supported by two heterodox followers, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci). As Rieger’s book defies the distinction between theory and praxis, putting in question the apparent neutrality of the “ivory tower," Marx — even with contextual limitations Rieger well points out — becomes an inspiration as someone who rejected a role as an armchair revolutionary. Marx will put his insights in the service of social movements and his followers will adapt, modify, and sometimes radically redirect the program to build alternatives.

Some may say, however, that we may have lost an opportunity to see what kind of theologian Marx could have become. There have been Latin American liberationists that, following Martinican Aime Cesaire’s 1950s mandate of creatively “completing" Marx’s program from the Global South, have offered striking contributions. Since the 1970s Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez (influenced by Carlos Mariategui’s original heterodoxy) famously employed his methodology replacing Marxist objectives with a radical Christian eschatology; Argentinean-Mexican Enrique Dussel has unveiled the “theological metaphors” that are already contained in Marx’s work to understand, adapt, and transform orthodox readings, and Brazilian Michael Lowy shows how Latin American social movements are a religious reflection of some of the best lesson of his heterodox followers (i.e. Benjamin). What is clear is that in the South of Abya Yala/Latin Americas and the Caribbean, attempts of creatively connecting Marxisms and religiosities have abounded for decades.

In Turtle Island/North-America, for multiple geopolitical reasons, this exploration has been more limited. The trajectory of Joerg Rieger marks one of those courageous attempts of inserting categories of class struggle and labor organization to not only “interpret” society but also “to change it.” His prolific trajectory in both academia and activism has provided a very fertile terrain for all of us. This new book, Theology in the Capitalocene both continues a trajectory but also presents new avenues of engagement. As he claims in the introduction, if one needs to read one chapter, “the (Im)Possibility of Deep Solidarity” shows how finding avenues across differences may be the most important systemic challenge. And since Catherine Keller and Filipe Maia have extraordinarily focused on narratives of catastrophe, I will explore the former promising horizon.

One of Rieger’s most insightful arguments is that the analysis of race, gender, and class is not a competitive zero-sum game. The different categories are, on the contrary, mutually constituted because today an expansive definition of labor in the US (and across the globe) will show how the populations who are most affected fall into the invisibilized cracks of multi-layered identities. Following a correct reading of intersectionality as inspired first by the black Feminist collective Combahee River Collective and structured later by Kimberlé Crenshaw, if we don’t see those who fall into the cracks and we insist in the categories as competitive silos, we finish with an understanding of reality that offers solutions that reproduce instead of breaking dominance.

In this way, “deep solidarity” becomes an alternative (and by it I mean a complete, adaptation and challenging modifications of shortcomings) of the “universal consciousness” that Westernized Marxists had reductively located in the poorly salaried working class of central geopolitical locations. This deep solidarity presumes a consciousness from below, but this consciousness does not demand abstract universality and is not even a reductive limitation to class analysis. On the contrary, it implies recognition of entangled differences within the same systemic matrix. The differences defy universal representation, but the entanglements provide the ground for common struggles without risking flattening differences with strategic essentialisms.

Theology, however, is not necessarily an ally. We live in an era of the Capitalocene, a term Rieger uses to show that the Anthropocene (humans dominating nature) is not enough to explain the fact that capital concentration and reproduction are the ultimate goal of this domination. As such, to escape accusations of being removed from the world, the academy and religious institutions reproduce the system by allying themselves with businesses, corporations, and governments exemplifying Gramsci’s model of a traditional intellectual. There is, however, an alternative. Echoing the Italian intellectual that was a threat to the Fascism of his time (when Italy has just chosen its first Fascist prime minister since the fall of Mussolini), Rieger carefully retrieves the role of an organic intellectual who has the function of recognizing hegemony, committing (if I am allowed a Latin American adaptation) to a preferential option for its subaltern communities in the attempt of find new horizons that are true alternatives to the historical block.

Following Rieger’s footsteps, I would like to push us further. The conception of the organic intellectual emerged as an alternative in a context in which institutions (from the Communist Party to Labor Unions) were true alternatives or threats to power. On the one hand, they could provide some organic stability to the struggle. On the other hand, this stability required a level of structural orthodoxy in order to keep the institutional mechanisms oiled.

Nevertheless, our Capitalocene stage followed the Cold War and Neo-Liberalism. During this period, the system has successfully undermined many of these institutions (especially in the US). New generations have opted to construct divergent networks that put into question the need for the sometimes-repressive institutional organicity. I want to ask, therefore, who would be better equipped to contribute in the building of deep solidarity: organic intellectuals that need to limit their view to institutional structures or “Inorganic” intellectuals who engage in a longstanding struggle beyond the pressures of organizational hierarchies?

The emergence of the inorganic intellectual, one with the same social commitment but suspicious of loyalty to the homogenous Westernized evolutionist party-line, may be able to account for the dynamic, heterogenous and transversal communities, networks and coalitions that emerged in the last decades. Perhaps, and only perhaps, the early 20th century European binary between traditional and organic intellectuals does not explain the whole and another option has emerged. Perhaps, and only perhaps, this is what Rieger is already envisioning retrieving heterodoxically Marxist categories. And if that is the case, the best way to honor our ancestors is to follow the Afro-Caribbean mandate and keep interpreting, adapting, and radically redirecting contributions that only the fidelity to intellectual heterodoxy can provide us.

Santiago Slabodsky holds the Florence and Robert Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and directs the Jewish Studies program in the Department of Religion at Hofstra University. and previously was assistant professor of Global Ethics and director of the program of Religion, Ethics and Society at the Claremont Graduate Consortium in California. An Argentinean-born social theorist, he explores intercultural encounters between Jewish and Global South political thought and social movements. He is the author of numerous publications including Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (2015), Living Traditions: Prospects and Challenges for Peace in Multirreligious Communities (2016) and the forthcoming Unequal Siblings: The Subalternization of non-Western Jewish Thought.

Response

Joerg Rieger

3 November 2022

That the engagements of Theology in the Capitalocene by Keller, Maia, Lansdowne, and Slabodsky get to so many of the core issues of the book is both gratifying and stimulating. It makes me hope for ongoing conversations that bring together the constructive work that each of us have been doing.

In my response, I will focus on four themes in response to the four presentations, held together by the concern for deeper and deepening solidarity that each one is addressing.

Catherine Keller notes that what I’m calling deep solidarity “now unfolds as a materialization of the intersectionality across multiple social issues of a radical relationality, in particular a fresh relationality of class.” In other words, solidarity is not merely an ideal or a moral imperative but consists of material practices that emerge in real-life struggles. Theology in the Capitalocene centers these practices in reproductive and productive labor, as nothing would exist without labor. This, I argue, is how we can reclaim and sharpen theologian Paul Tillich’s classic qualification of the “ultimate concern” that determines theology—defined as a matter of being and not-being. I am grateful to Keller for picking up the importance of reproduction and production in my project (in contrast to more common emphases on consumption and redistribution) and for drawing out lines for the implications of solidarity with the planet. In the book, this is developed in the first two chapters on ecology, via the double insight that people and planet are exploited by the same forces, but that on this basis they can also access the agency that is required to overcome exploitation and to develop true alternatives. All of this can be developed further, and I look forward to what will come of this trajectory.

That the problem with the Capitalocene is not just economic or political is picked up by Filipe Maia. This is crucial for my overall argument, which is most concerned about how the Capitalocene shapes people and planet to the core, including the formation of culture, religion, and agency. Maia’s suggestion of what he calls “interspecies solidarity” continues and expands Keller’s call for a closer look at reproductive labor, extending a discussion begun in the book. Reproductive labor, as I argue, is absolutely foundational, as nothing exists without it, including productive labor. Moreover, this kind of labor is typically relegated to women, minorities, and other-than-human flora and fauna and thus doubly and triply exploited. Maia’s proposal that such interspecies solidarity would have the potential of “rendering human labor strange to the capital form” goes to the heart of my concerns, picking up the point that human labor in the world today is the most diverse force already (nowhere is human diversity more embodied than at places of work). Maia’s notion of the “animalization of labor” points in the right direction, further developing my concern that “labor is a primary place of intersectionality where race, class, and gender come together, and it should not be too quickly separated into human and nonhuman” (103).

Carmen Lansdowne engages the question of labor from a different perspective, realizing that things are “more driven by economic and social factors than we are willing to realize.” Her challenge to labor from a Native American perspective reminds us of those who are excluded from labor for various reasons, none of them being the fault of the excluded themselves. I find her argument, which includes a reminder that human beings are “hardwired for solidarity,” in sync with what I am trying to suggest. For all of the importance of productive and reproductive labor in Theology of the Capitalocene, I’ve tried to make it clear that the diversity of labor defies notions of “ableism,” including “people with disabilities, the long-term unemployed, children, and the elderly” as well as “street vendors or casual laborers for whom work is a matter of survival” (102). All that is to say that we need to develop further the broadened notions of human and other-than-human agency that Lansdowne is suggesting, which includes alternative forms of human and other-than-human agency that are too easily ignored in both in euro-Christian thinking (Lansdowne) as well as euro-style neoliberal capitalism that has taken over the globe including many traditional cultures and religions.

I am profoundly grateful to Santiago Slabodsky for noting that deep solidarity is a real alternative to the universal consciousness promoted by parts of Western Marxism. What is needed is not the kind of solidarity (best embodied on the right today, but also an old fantasy for some on the left) that emphasizes marching-in-lockstep and homogeneity. Deep solidarity, as I keep arguing, not only tolerates difference but thrives on it, building different forms of power. Moreover, if organic intellectuals are in danger of towing some party line, or even as pursuing some overly homogeneous political or institutional projects, Slabodsky’s call for inorganic intellectuals is helpful. However, I’m less hopeful that intellectuals are the ones that will shake theology—or anything else—from its slumbers, unless they connect to real-life struggles more intentionally. This is what brings me back to the question of labor, agency, and solidarity one more time: what if the connection is not homogeneous party lines but the common struggles of all those whose productivity is being exploited or extracted in the current system (99 percent of humans have to work for a living, including most of the planet)? As a theologian, this is where I’m suggesting we rethink both humanity and the divine, including whatever intellectuals do and do not do.

I am looking forward to continued conversations about these and many other matters not only with these colleagues and friends but also with anyone who feels moved to think through ways to make it through and eventually out of the Capitalocene. At the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, we believe that another world is indeed possible.

Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.