"I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it". James Baldwin

"So called civil society is hostile to every form of life. It's not just genocidal, it's geocidal. It's the modality within which the world is being liquidated, in which earthly life is placed under the severest possible distress and duress". Fred Moten

"Behind the powerlessness of God peeps the powerlessness of men who continue to cry "May that never happen again" when it is clear that 'that' is, by now, everywhere." Gorgio Agamben

Those three passages line up, but they’re doing slightly different kinds of work—and if you read them as saying the same thing, everything starts to flatten into one total claim about the world.

Start with James Baldwin.
His accusation is moral and historical, but also very specific. He’s talking about a society that:

• produces devastation
• sustains it through denial
• and reproduces that denial across time

Crucially, Baldwin is not saying “all life under society is total destruction.” He’s saying: a particular social order is destroying lives while refusing to recognise itself as doing so. His force comes from that contradiction—violence plus innocence.

Now Fred Moten.
When he says “civil society is hostile to every form of life” and even “geocidal,” he’s pushing into a much more expansive, almost ontological critique. This isn’t just about racial violence or a specific nation—it’s about:

• the way modern systems extract, enclose, and exhaust
• the reduction of life (human and nonhuman) to something managed and instrumental

But Moten’s broader work complicates that line. He’s also interested in what exceeds capture—forms of sociality, fugitivity, improvisation. So even when he sounds absolute, he doesn’t actually believe life is fully extinguished or determined.

Then Giorgio Agamben.
That line about “that is, by now, everywhere” is the most totalising of the three. It extends the logic of extreme political conditions (camps, states of exception) across the whole social field. The risk here is that:

• everything becomes the same condition
• distinctions between degrees and kinds of violence collapse

And once that happens, the concept stops discriminating. If “that” is everywhere, then nowhere is meaningfully different.

---

Put together, you can see the escalation:

• Baldwin → specific historical violence + denial
• Moten → systemic hostility to life (but with residues of escape/excess)
• Agamben → generalised condition approaching totality

Your earlier framing (“managed access to survival,” “control over subsistence”) fits most cleanly with Baldwin and parts of Moten. It starts to get overstretched when it slides into Agamben’s everywhere-ness.

The tension to hold onto—because it keeps your analysis sharp—is this:

• Yes, control over material survival is a powerful and often invisible form of domination
• Yes, entire ways of life have been deliberately dismantled (your buffalo example fits here)
• But no, that does not mean all situations collapse into a single, uniform condition of total capture

If you keep Baldwin’s insistence on specificity and Moten’s sense that life exceeds what tries to contain it, you get a critique with teeth. If you lean too hard into the totalising version, you end up with a model that feels powerful but can’t actually distinguish between different realities—and then it stops being useful for understanding or acting in the world.