Gene Ray

Capitalist modernity has ended the Holocene. The epoch of planetary heating and climate chaos has begun. Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Alternatives exist, but the capitalist classes are blocking them. This book argues that one such alternative, commoning, offers first steps on a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. As the mutualist and more-than-human association of direct producers, commons ecologies will be a necessary and buildable factor in the strategic struggle to disarm, power down and abolish capitalism.

These twelve interconnected essays probe the dense historical knots binding terror, power, and the aesthetic sublime, and trace transformations in art and critical theory in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2nd edition)