In The Earthly Community, Achille Mbembe assesses our planetary condition. Connecting the ongoing destruction of the environment, the concentration of capital, and the technological tools that accelerate these trends, Mbembe asserts that we are pushing ourselves and our planet past our limits. He traces the current state of the world back to the division of land and systems of control over humans which characterized colonialism and the slave trade. When profit is frequently the only end, data continues to divide everything into smaller and smaller pieces, intensifying ecological and human harm. In the face of the disaster created by the combination of algorithmic instruments and capitalist colonial thinking, Mbembe takes lessons from ecology and African experience to argue for reparative alternatives. The Earthly Community calls us to defy our artificial divisions and gather as living communities to make a planetary way forward while there is still time.

Achille Mbembe is Director of the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, Johannesburg (South Africa) and Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is author of Brutalism, Necropolitics, and Critique of Black Reason and coeditor of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, all published by Duke University Press.