Ch7 Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis (169-192)
Moore, J (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life , Verso, London:UK
From Ecology to world ecology
The rise of Capitalism after 1450
Marked a change with humanity's relationship with nature - more so than since the neolithic establishment of the first major cities
"made possible by an epochal shift in the scale, speed, and scope of landscape transformation in the Atlantic world and beyond" 182
Examples of capitalism's transformation of land and labour prior to the Industrial Rev
Forest clearing in the Vistula Basin Brazil Atlantic Rainforest happened at a speed and scale 5X faster and bigger than forestry clearances in medieval Europe
agricultural revolution of the low countries - allowed 3/4 of the work force to move away from agriculture
Sugar's frontier movement in Sao Tome in 1540-1590 resulting in the first large scale plantations - sugar
drove large scale deforestation
Slavery - the exploitation/ use of cheap Labour
1570 sugar plantations spread to Brazil - became the main sugar economy
Iron and grain production in Europe and Scandinavia (Sweden - Iron) -resulting in deforestation
production of Iron spreads from country to country with the cheapest cost of production
Time marks a large scale use of resources and depletion of stocks - use of cheap nature????
Colonial Regimes of the Dutch (began with cloves), Spanish, Portuguese - use of resources in their colonies
overtaken by the West Indies in 1650 (Africa) again resulting in death to indigenous peoples and environmental destruction
"human ecologies too were transformed in many ways, not least through the sharply uneven "cerealization" of peasant diets - and the "meatification" of aristocratic and bourgeois diets - within Europe after 1550" 186 ⭐ ⭐ : 🚩
COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
"As Old World disease, animals, and crops flowed into the New World, and New World crops, such as potatoes and maize, flowed into the Old World" 187
All these examples show a "qualitative shift in relations between land and labour, production and power" 189
⭐"transition from control of land as direct relation of surplus appropriation to control of lands as a condition for advancing labour productivity within commodity production" 189 ⭐
Values labour productivity over land productivity
"Although the pace of technical change did indeed quicken - and the diffusion of techniques even more so - in the "first" sixteenth century (1450 - 1557), this was not enough to compel such an epochal shift in landscape transformation." 189
"That shift pivoted the inversion of the labour-land-relation (land used as a force of production and the ascendance of labour productivity as a metric of wealth, premised on appropriating Cheap NAtures. Here we may glimpse the tenuous and tentative formation of capitalism as a regime of abstract social labour, and the emergant disciplines of socially necessary labour-time" 189
Paragraph of essay
highlighting the structure of capitalism been set up and marking the change in relationship with nature
different to the Anthropocene 's steam engine, IR
Highlights that humanity's relationship with nature is much further the exploitation
The set up of Cheap Natures which is fundamental to capitalism today and to IR in Anthropocene's epoch
Also highlights the web of relations - not just humans dominering over nature but conceptualise the human and nature relationship as a porous one - conceptualise as connections between anture and nature - as web of actors
Taken from YouTube video Lectures
not capitalism as a system with natural factors/ conditions added on
Potential criticisms of world ecology argument
Industrialsation caused by 'capitalist technics' not landscape transformation
Counter argument
Examples of this prior to assembly line and steam engine
Furnaces for Iron making
Printing Presses - 1450
Sugar Mill in colonies
Which boosted labour productivity
Etc. Etc. lots of potential examples - water mills
Mechanization
Standardization and Rationalization
These are all examples of labour productivity