The Capitalocene Part 1: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. Moore (2017) The Journey of Peasant Studies
argues for the centrality of historical thinking
Capitalocene
System of power, profit and re/production in the web of life
Criticisises the Anthropocene
Nature/ culture binary - refusal of Capitalism to consider humans as part of nature
Critical of Industrial Revolution as a starting point of the ecological crisis
"Ignores early capitalism's environment-making revolution"
Argument is that the Industrial Revolution fits into systems of power, capital and nature established 4 centuries earlier
Three entangled moments of the Anthropocene Conversation
Anthropocene
Paul Crutzen
Caused by Coal and Steam from the industrial revolution in Britain
Driven by "Anthropos humanity as an undifferentiated whole" 2
"Separates humanity from the web of life" 2
Commonly thought to marks to beginning of capitalism, industrial society and modernity
Moore criticises this
:1. Humanity and Nature as real abstractions
frames our view of the world and how we know it
2.Historical Capitalism as a world-ecology of power
Capital and nature, dependent on finding and co-producing cheap natures.
3. The History of Capitalist Origins - the origins of ecological crisis" 2
Moore situates the concept in Green Thought
defined as enviro orientated research since the 1970s
Capitalism began much earlier #
"The 'age of capital'" 3
historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital
Steffen 2011
Human Exceptionalism
"human relations as not only distinct from nature, but as effectively independent of the web of life" 3
Essential in Anthropocene discourse as it presents humans as effecting nature - Humans and then enviro it is harming - an unit it is independent of
It presents the human population as one- ignoring racism, imperialism, inequality, commodification, patriarchy within Humanity
Green Arithmetic
"Nature plus Society equals the whole"
"Nature becomes a fantasy of the wild, of pristine nature, awaiting our protection, fearing destruction at our hands." 4
Capitalism has "directed horrific violence towards human and extra-human life" 4
"Unusual combination of productive and necrotic violence defines capitalism" 4
McBrien (2016) the Capitalocene is also a Necrocene
"System that not only accumulates capital, but drives extinction"
"Humanity's agency is realised principally through technology-resources complex rather than interpenetrated relations of power, technology and capital"5 #
Human/ Nature binary
"This dualism obscures our vistas of power, production and profit in the web of life. It prevents us from seeing the accumulation of capital as a powerful web of interspecies dependencies, it prevents us from seeing how those interdependencies are not only shaped by capital, but also shape it, and it prevents us from seeing how the terms of that producer/product relation change over time." 5
"offers a Human/Nature binary that can proceed only by converting the living, multi-species connections of humanity-in-nature and the web of life into dead abstractions - abstractions that connect each other as cascades of consequences rather than constitutive relations"5
"come to mean all things to all people" 5
"trick as old as modernity - the rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we're to blame" 6
Web of life
Larger than any one species
operates independently of humans
But planetary life is also a web of interdependencies" 6
each era of capitalism "turns on agricultural revolutions that comprise not only of class, production and power, but also new agronomic and botanical knowledges" 6
Fundamental to capitalism is the separation of Humanity and nature
Cheap Nature
World Ecology
Nature and society is an simply a analytical problem but a real abstraction
Most humans considered in as part of nature #
women
indigenous people
'savagery' vs 'civility'
As a result they could be treated cheaply
"Treated as real by capitalist and empires, they are implicated in modernity's violence" 11
Cartesian Dualism
:⭐ "Modernity's thought structures... more than 'superstructures'. Systems of thought... become 'material forces' when seized by empires and Bourgeoisies" 12
"The capitalist revolution... turned on a Cartesian revolution" 12
Ontological status upon entities (substances) as opposed to relationships - energy, people, idea, matter become things
either or rather than both/and logics --> Nature and Society rather than society-in-nature
control of nature - conquest and domination of nature
Empirical knowledge - the visual knowledge is valued above all else as a way of knowing the world
"conditions of capitalist development can be reduced neither to the world market nor to brute force" 12
Origins between the 15th and 18th century
Central to a way of organizing nature both ontologically (what is?) ans epistemologically (how do we know?)
"rise of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics" 13
"Capitalocene names capitalism as a system of power, profit, and re/production in the web of life. It thinks capitalism as if human relations form through the geographies of life. ... it highlights capitalism as a history in which islands if commodity production and exchange operate within oceans of Cheap ... Natures. Vigorous accumulation depends on the existence - and active production- of human and extra-human natures whose cost of reproduction are kept 'off the books'". 13
Underproduction = Marx
Classic model of how capitalism functions - the material production of how capitalism operates - the base material economy
Begin with some money ⇒ buy wood + labour ⇒ create a product ⇒ which has more value
As capital rises you often have a counter tendency of rising raw material costs
"The revival of world accumulation ... depends on renewed primitive accumulation.
Moore argues "extra economic movements of empire, science and culture that seek to control and dominate ... relations of human and extra-human work""
Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on cheap natures
"the capital system cannot tolerate 'expensive' Natures" 14
"emphasizes the rise of capitalism as a new way of organizing nature, organizing new relation between work, reproduction and the conditions of life." 14
"(C)apitalism is co-produced by and within the web of life at every turn" 14
Moore's big problem is how the narrative of the Anthropocene has to highlight the substantial change in planetary systems to one to explain how we got here - its the how he disagree's with
Concepts us to unsettle dualistic narratives/ conceptions of the Anthropocene- industrial/pre-industrial, circulation and production
"The Capitalocene argues for situating the rise of capitalism, historically and geography within the web of life. This is capitalism not as economic system but a situated and multispecies world-ecology of capital, power and re/production" 16 - link and reference to Haraway
What counts as a resource is not fixed
"They evolve through historical conditions of power, re/production and geography. Resources 'become': they are both 'given' and 'constructed'"
There is a co-production dynamic - geology is a 'historical' fact through resource production, unfolding through the human/extra human nexus: the oikeios 16
After 1450 human's transformation of the environment was faster than at any period which preceded it.
Especially in the commodity frontiers
after 1450 everything moved faster - "on the commodity frontiers... capitalism radically changed life and land within a generation or two".17
Moore argues commercial advancement of productivity was dependent on new machines, new labour systems, new economic organization
New scale of production and commerce both a product and process of a new scale of credit and money" 17
"Between 1450 and 1750, a new era of human relations in the web of life begins: the Age of Capital" 17
"Between 1450 and 1750, a new era of human relations in the web of life begins: the Age of Capital" 17
Shift in what was valued
Driven by new ways of mapping and calculating the world
"Alongside new technologies. there was new technics - a new repertoire of science, power and machinery - that aimed at 'discovering'and appropriating Cheap Natures.
"Value shifted from land productivity under conditions of seigneurial power to labour productivity under the hegemony of the modern world market, the very basis and living atmosphere of the capitalist mode of production'" 17
"shift from land to labour productivity as the decisive metric of wealth implied a novel approach to human activity in the web of life"
nature was used to increase the productivity of human labour
BUT only some human work - only that deemed within the economy
"Human work within (the) ... sphere of commodity production and exchange - called 'the economy'" 17
all other activity devalued - appropriated to service labour productivity - facilitating commodification
Primitive accumulation marks the beginning of cheap nature as an accumulation strategy
capitalism appropriates work/energy and biophysical utility produced with minimal labour-power, and directly implicated in commodity production and exchange"18
C.N. effect the revival of world accumulation by reducing the value composition of one of the Big Four inputs (labour,food, energy, raw materials) below the system-wide average.
reducing cost of production
Examples
Timber 17th C
Oil 20th
"Because capitalism's law of value privileges labour-power and its productivity as the metric of wealth, a fundamental moment of every great wave of capital accumulation is a paired movement of poletarianization/dispossession and agricultural revolution" 18
each agri revolution required less labour production - reducing cost
explaining "why de-pesantization, proletarianization and agro-ecological change are entwined in every great expansion of the capitalist world-ecology" 18
LABOUR
FOOD
RAW MATERIALS
ENERGY
"fundamental to capitalism as a system to Cheap Nature"19
Women and slaves
"number of slaves disembarked each decade in the Americas - mostly to grow sugar, modernity's original cash crop - increased a staggering 1065 percent between 1560 and 1710" 19
"The whole of nature had to be put to work -in a radically alienating and dynamic way - for capitalism to survive" 20
"As the forces of production advanced, so too demand for cheap energy, food and raw materials"
cheap thermal energy to smelt metals, process sugarcane and make glass etc. everything demanded by the world market
Cheap food to keep the cost of labour low
Cheap R.M to "maintain a virtuous cycle of expanding commodity production" 20
"The problem was capitalist and world-ecological: a problem of how humans have 'mixed their labour with the earth' 24
"Agricultural revolutions are world-historical events. The condition for a labour productivity revolution in one region is the expansion of 'accumulation by appropriation' on a much larger scale" 21
"The Dutch agricultural revolution was necessary - if not sufficient - condition for Dutch world hegemony. Dutch supremacy was realized through mutually reinforcing movements in the deployment of power, the organization of trade and production, and coercive remaking of land and labour on a planetary scale". 21
"Dutch power rested on a thoroughly modern recognition: that world-money, world-power and world-ecology were dialectically bound"21
Through the readily available capital available from the establishment of the first stock exchange, - directly cheapen natures
The Dutch were involved in nearly every environmental change fof the long 17thc
Every new great commodity expansion requires new sreams of cheap Labour
From all the examples Link Title
Once domestic ... of cheap natures had been exhausted cheap natures had to be found elsewhere - driving colonial appropriation
as seen in England in 1620
Colonisation of Ireland
An era of violence towards both humans and non-humans - not just non humans exploited
Great frontier movements reshaped food, energy and labour relations
In Central Europe in 1470 capitalism's basic raw materials were produced: copper, lead and iron
mining and metallurgical revolution supplied the emergent capitalisms physocal basis for money -silver and manufacturing - iron and copper" 22
As a result production of all metals soared at least fivefold between 1450s and 1530s
this new metallurgical capitalism scoured the countryside for fuel, -resulting in widespread pollution and deforestation
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
"the early modern landscape revolution represented an early modern revolution in labour productivity. This revolution in the zone of commodification was rendered possible by a revolution in the technics of appropriating Cheap Natures, especially the Four Cheaps of food, labour, energy and raw materials. This was realized not only through the immediate practices and structures of European imperialism. More fundamentally, the 'new' imperialism of early modernity was impossible without a new way of seeing and ordering reality" 27
"early forms of external nature, abstract space and abstract time enabled capitalists and empires to construct global webs of exploitation and appropriation, calculation and credit, property and profit on an unprecedented scale" 27
Early modern labour productivity revolution depended on the Great Frontier
3 Revolutions
Landscape change
labour productivity
technics of global appropriation
all suggest a way if thinking capitalist crisis world-ecologically" 27
"putting nature at the center of thinking about work; putting work at the center of our thinking about nature" 27
"Cheap Nature as a system of domination, appropriation and exploitation that acknowledges the diversity of human and extra-human activity necessary to capitalist development but not directly valorized ('paid') through the money economy." 27 #
early capitalism depended on global expansion as the main way of advancing labour productivity and facilitating world accumulation
after 1450 commodification was there to stay as a result of capitalism's technics - tools, power, knowledge and production - were specifically organized to treat the appropriation of global space as the basis for the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form: capital as abstract social labour" 27
The Four Cheaps are used
"... the law of value is co-produced through the web of life. The law of value is a law of Cheap Nature" 28
Historical work is necessary in the origins of ecological crisis is necessary to source the or
"It is problematic because it has preconceptualized the problem: it has embraced a longstanding myth that has guided social theory and environmental critique" 28
Industrialization Thesis as the origins of ecological crisis is dangerous because it blinds us to the early modern remaking of planetary natures (cc28)
"environmental history is central to understanding the origins of capitalism and relevant form of crisis today" 28
He argues for the importance of the "emergence of new relations of power, profit and re/production from the long 16thc" cc 28