Transcript Jason Moore, *Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times* (2011)

 Jason W. Moore, ‘Ecology, Capital, and the
Nature of Our Times: Accumulation and Crisis
in the Capitalist World-Ecology’ (2011)
 Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’ (2010)
 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History:
Four Theses’. (2009)
 “For all its dogmatic and formulaic tone, Stalin’s passage
captures an assumption perhaps common to historians of
the mid-twentieth century: man’s environment did
change but changed so slowly as to make the history of
man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and
thus not a subject of historiography at all.”
Chakrabarty (204)
 “It is clear that the heat that burns the world in Arrighi’s
narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not
from global warming.” (200)
“Capitalism as world-ecology” – Background / theoretical
context
World-systems theory – Immanuel Wallerstein / Giovanni
Arrighi
David Harvey – “all social projects are ecological projects and
vice-versa”
The “Oregon School” – John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark,
Richard York; “metabolic rift” theory
 The Emergence of the World-System Concept
 “The originator of the current world-systems perspective
is Immanuel Wallerstein, who argues in his book the
Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Econominy the Sixteenth
Century (1974), that a world-system is a multicultural
territorial division of labor in which the production and
exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary
for the everyday life of its inhabitants. It is thus by
definition composed of culturally different societies that
are vitally linked together through the exchange of food
and raw materials.” (Chase-Dunn and Grimes, 1995: 389)
 Capitalism is a world-system that is also a world system
Rise of the capitalist world-economy / world-ecology
World-economy and world-ecology represent ‘distinct angles of
vision onto a singular world-historical process’
“With the rise of capitalism, local societies were not integrated
only into a world capitalist system; more to the point, varied and
heretofore largely isolated local and regional socio-ecological
relations were incorporated into – and at the same moment
became constituting agents of – a capitalist world-ecology. Local
socio-ecologies were at once transformed by human labour power
(itself a force of nature) and brought into sustained dialogue with
each other. [. . .] Hence, the hyphen becomes appropriate: We are
talking not necessarily about the ecology of the world (although
this is in fact the case today) but rather a world-ecology.” (Moore,
“Capitalism as World-Ecology”, 2003: 447)
Raymond Williams, “We have mixed our labour with
the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be
able to draw back and separate either out”
“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature,
a process by which man, through his own actions,
mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism
between himself and nature. He confronts the materials
of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the
natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms,
legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the
materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.
Through this movement he acts upon external nature and
changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his
own nature”. Marx, Capital, p. 283
“After a certain point, the Cartesian approach that
identifies social causes and environmental consequences
obscures more than it clarifies. Yes, capitalism has done
many bad things to living creatures and the environments
in which they live. Evidence can be collected and analyzed
to document these depredations. [. . .] But so long as these
studies operate within a Cartesian frame, the active
relations of all nature in the making of the modern world
remain not just unexplored, but invisible. The impressive
documentation of environmental problems in the capitalist
era is theoretically disarmed as a consequence, unable to
locate the production of nature within the strategic
relations of modernity.” Moore, p. 117
Moore
“What would an alternative that transcends such Cartesian binaries
look like? I propose that we move from the ‘environmental history
of’ modernity, to capitalism ‘as environmental history.’”
The oikeios (Theophrastus) – the “underlying relation” between
human and extra-human relations that gives rise to ‘nature’ and
‘society’
“To take the Nature/Society binary as a point of departure confuses
the origins of a process with its results. The plethora of ways that
human and biophysical natures are intertwined at every scale –
from the body to the world market – is obscured to the degree that
we take nature and society as purified essences rather than tangled
bundles of human- and extra-human nature.” p. 114
“capitalism does not develop upon global nature so much as it
emerges through the messy and contingent relations of humans
with the rest of nature.” p. 111
“Wall Street is a way of organizing nature”
“an elusive logic of financial
calculability rules the roost of global
capitalism, and shapes, as never
before, the structures of everyday
life – including the ‘everyday lives’ of
birds and bees and bugs” p. 136
“capitalism is constituted through a succession of ecological regimes that
crystallize a qualitative transformation of capital accumulation – for instance the
transition from manufacture to large-scale industry – within a provisionally
stabilized structuring of nature-society relations.”
Ecological revolutions and surpluses
Ecological revolutions reorganize a particular configuration of
nature-society relations so as to liberate accumulation after an
ecological regime has stagnated
Through a combination of productivity and plunder, they drive
down the capitalized share of world nature and increase the share
that can be freely appropriated
They do this by expanding the relative ecological surplus, a surplus
that finds its expression in the FOUR CHEAPS:
1. labour power;
2. food;
3. energy;
4. non-energy inputs such as metals, wood, and fibres.
Chakrabarty:
 “In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment
was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human
beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes
closely linked to their acquisition of freedom.” (208)
 “Analytic frameworks engaging questions of freedom by way of
critiques of capitalist globalization have not, in any way, become
obsolete in the age of climate change. [. . .] Capitalist globalization
exists; so should its critiques. But these critiques do not give us an
adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of
climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for
much longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone
many more historic mutations. The problematic of globalization allows
us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management.
While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do
with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is
not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once
the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the
Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The
geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the
now of human history.” (212)