Capitalism's FAFO Moment

This week a major insurer warned that climate change was endangering capitalism as we know it. But what if it's already dead?

“Fuck around and find out”: what a wonderful phrase. The Hakuna Matata of the terminally online, FAFO describes the relationship between intended action and unintended consequence. It does so with a seductive combination of laziness and wit that can be flung at any individual unfortunate enough to be reaping, in real time, what they sowed.

Unfortunately, FAFO is also the glib philosophy upon which our dominant mode of economics has been built. Modern civilization has been powered by a machine that regards Earth "as if it were a business in liquidation", as the ecological economist Herman Daly put it. The result? A polycrisis that is heating the atmosphere, punching through planetary boundaries, accelerating inequality and contributing to state repression everywhere we look. As Fire Weather author John Vaillant told me, “it's like we're just waking up from a 150-year coke binge.” We've effed around, and now we're effing out. 

Acknowledging this, a senior executive at Allianz this week warned that climate change is in danger of killing capitalism. In many ways this is an odd claim—not least because, in the view of some scholars, climate change is explicitly the product of capitalism. This is why environmental historian Jason W. Moore says we're wrong to call this era the Anthropocene: Moore points out that, far from being caused by the human species per se, rapid global warming has been brought about by our economic activity—and in particular the activity of colonialist powers. Which is why he terms our climate moment the Capitalocene.

If we accept Moore's argument, it leads us to the obvious conclusion that it is in fact capitalism that threatens to kill capitalism. But right now it's going to need to get in line, because it turns out there are other hitmen in town.