My critique, and its reconstructive alternative, recognizes that Civilization (‘Society’) and Savagery (‘Nature’) do exist, but as strategies of domination and superexploitation – hence the structural recurrence of bourgeois naturalism in the geocultures of domination. (Every era of capitalism must reinvent racism, …
Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History, Part II
Of modernity’s illusions, none is so powerful—and none more fundamental to the imperialist bourgeoisie’s belief structures—than Man and Nature (Moore 2021e). I have written these words in the uppercase because they are not merely words; they are instruments of bourgeois …
How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life: Towards a World-Historical Materialism in the Web of Life
My point here is that at some level, not necessarily consciously, pareidolia reminds us of our interconnection with the world whose fractal patterns and dynamics we use in our bodies and minds to experience that same world. Pareidolia often occasions …
Steve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: I regard Neoclassical economics as not …
The best starting point for reconstructing a world-historical theory of ecological transformation under capitalism is found in Marx’s concept of metabolic rift. For Marx and Engels (1970), the theory of metabolic rift centers on the ecological moment of the antagonistic …
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES AND THE METABOLIC RIFT IN WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In 2012, global CO2 emissions were 58% higher than in 1990, causing, among other things, hurricanes to become stronger due to higher temperatures in ocean catchments and Arctic ecosystems to reach a number of tipping points. The limit at which …
How does capitalism work through the web of life? How can we begin to understand capitalism not simply as an economic system of markets and production and a social system of class and culture, but as a way of organising …
ABSTRACT Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In …
Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology
Introduction Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labour in the process of production; or …
It was E.P. Thompson who stated, in The Making of the English Working Class, that: When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as “the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle” we must be put on our guard. For …
Reconstructing the Earth Power is at the core of the geo-constructivist conception of the world. The power of humanity as a kind to reduce its status of a species to its smallest part; a power that takes place on a …