Abstract Critical geography as a field has yet to reckon with a fundamental geographical blind spot: the historical- geographical patterns of capitalism as a whole. There has been a steady—and studied—reluctance to grapple with capitalism as a historical-geographical place. A […]
Commentary Value in the web of life, or, Why world history matters to geography
Let us begin with the question. Why is infrastructure even important? Extensive and efficient infrastructure is critical for ensuring the effective functioning of the economy, as it is an important factor determining the location of economic activity and the kinds
Financial Analysis of the Blue Economy: Sagarmala’s Case in Point
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)
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
When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with any child, but also a game for a little
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
In einem Interview zu seinem bei Verso im Jahr 2015 erschienenen Buch „Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital“ fordert Jason W. Moore dazu auf, endlich den Dualismus, der Ökonomie und Ökologie als getrennte Bereiche