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The Capitalocene Part 1: on the nature and origins of our ecological…
The Capitalocene Part 1: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. Moore (2017) The Journey of Peasant Studies
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Capitalocene
System of power, profit and re/production in the web of life
"The 'age of capital'" 3
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"Between 1450 and 1750, a new era of human relations in the web of life begins: the Age of Capital" 17
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"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
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Moore argues "extra economic movements of empire, science and culture that seek to control and dominate ... relations of human and extra-human work""
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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
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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
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this new metallurgical capitalism scoured the countryside for fuel, -resulting in widespread pollution and deforestation
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Anthropocene
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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
"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)
Human Exceptionalism
"human relations as not only distinct from nature, but as effectively independent of the web of life" 3
"Nature becomes a fantasy of the wild, of pristine nature, awaiting our protection, fearing destruction at our hands." 4
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
"trick as old as modernity - the rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we're to blame" 6
Green Arithmetic
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"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
"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
Cartesian Dualism
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Ontological status upon entities (substances) as opposed to relationships - energy, people, idea, matter become things
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Central to a way of organizing nature both ontologically (what is?) ans epistemologically (how do we know?)
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Cheap Nature
After 1450 human's transformation of the environment was faster than at any period which preceded it.
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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
Shift in what was valued
"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"
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"... the law of value is co-produced through the web of life. The law of value is a law of Cheap Nature" 28
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"Alongside new technologies. there was new technics - a new repertoire of science, power and machinery - that aimed at 'discovering'and appropriating Cheap Natures.
capitalism appropriates work/energy and biophysical utility produced with minimal labour-power, and directly implicated in commodity production and exchange"18
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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.
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ENERGY
cheap thermal energy to smelt metals, process sugarcane and make glass etc. everything demanded by the world market
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"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"
"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
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Great frontier movements reshaped food, energy and labour relations
"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 #
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World Ecology
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The remaking of planetary life would not have been possible without a revolution in ways of thinking and seeing the world # #
"emphasizes the rise of capitalism as a new way of organizing nature, organizing new relation between work, reproduction and the conditions of life." 14
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"The problem was capitalist and world-ecological: a problem of how humans have 'mixed their labour with the earth' 24
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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
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He argues for the importance of the "emergence of new relations of power, profit and re/production from the long 16thc" cc 28