Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. … Settled agriculture, cities, nation-states, information technology, and every […]
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Introduction)
he turbulence of the 21st century poses a serious analytical challenge: How does capitalism develop through nature, and not just act upon it? Try drawing a line around the “social” and “environmental” moments of financialization, global warming, resurgent fundamentalisms, the
Metabolisms, Marxisms, & Other Mindfields
The rise of capitalism flowed through a new praxis: not only of Cheap Labor, but of Cheap Nature. After 1450, land productivity gave way to labor productivity as the metric of wealth. It was an ingenious civilizational strategy. New value-oriented technics
Nature, Geopower, & Capitalogenic Appropriation
Humans are distinctive. No one is arguing the point. But how do we think through that distinctiveness? How do our conceptualizations lead us to highlight some relations over others, and how do those in/visibilities conform to – and challenge –
The Myth of the ‘Human Enterprise’: The Anthropos and Capitalogenic Change
The Anthropocene has become the most important – and also the most dangerous — environmentalist concept of our times. It is dangerous not because it gets planetary crisis so wrong, but because it simultaneously clarifies ongoing “state shifts” in planetary
Name the System! Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative
…That influence brought Marx’s socio-ecological imagination to a wider audience. But success came at a price. Influenced by Foster’s reading of social metabolism as a rift of “nature and society” – rather than society-in-nature – Marx’s ecological thinking came to
Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method
Is nature exploited? “Of course!” says the environmentalist. But what might this mean? And, more significantly, is it so? Might there be a better way see the relations between humans and the rest of nature? On the one hand, “exploitation”
Beyond the ‘Exploitation of Nature’? A World-Ecological Alternative
The decisive violence imposed on life by the capitalist mode of production derives from its quest for radical simplification. The dream, the fantasy, the nightmare of capital is its practical desire — practical, yet impossible — for world of interchangeable
Wasting Away: Value, Waste, and Appropriation in the Capitalist World-Ecology
Modernity’s law of value is an exceedingly peculiar way of organizing life in a civilization. Born in the midst of the rise of capitalism after 1450, the law of value enabled an unprecedented historical transition: from land productivity to labor
The Origins of Cheap Nature: From Use-Value to Abstract Social Nature
Partway through Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore provides the imperative for a complete theoretical reworking and synthesis of Marxist, environmental, and feminist thought by asserting: “I think many of us understand intuitively – even if our
Capitalism in the Web of Life: an Interview with Jason W. Moore