ECOLOGY, CAPITAL, AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES: ACCUMULATION & CRISIS IN THE CAPITALIST WORLD-ECOLOGY
By Jason W. Moore. 2011
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this essay, I elaborate the possibilities for a unified theory of historical capitalism – one that views the accumulation of capital and the production of nature (humans included!) as dialectically constituted. In this view, the modern world-system is a capitalist world-ecology, a world-historical matrix of human- and extra-human nature premised on endless commodification. The essay is organized in three movements. I begin by arguing for a reading of modernity’s “interdependent master processes” (Tilly) as irreducibly socio-ecological. 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. Second, the paper engages Giovanni Arrighi’s handling of time, space, and accumulation in The Long Twentieth Century. I highlight Arrighi’s arguments for a “structurally variant” capitalism, and the theory of organizational revolutions, as fruitful ways to construct a theory of capitalism as world-ecology. I conclude with a theory of accumulation and its crises as world-ecological process, building out from Marx’s “general law” of underproduction. Historically, capitalism has been shaped by a dialectic of underproduction (too few inputs) and overproduction (too many commodities). Today, capitalism is poised for a re-emergence of underproduction crises, characterized by the insufficient flow of cheap food, fuel, labor, and energy to the productive circuit of capital. Far from the straightforward expression of “overshoot” and “peak everything,” the likely resurgence of underproduction crises is an expression of capitalism’s longue duree tendency to undermine its conditions of reproduction. The world-ecological limit of capital, in other words, is capital itself.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/072e564a6185687b5585ebeea15b6cf917808771
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Citations in the corpus
- Greening Capitalism? A Marxist Critique of Carbon Markets (2012, methodology): “The capitalist world-system is thus conceptualized as constituting an ever-changing global ‘world-ecology’ or sequence of ‘ecological regimes’ (Moore, 2010, 2011a, 2011b).”
- The theory of unequal ecological exchange: a Marx-Odum dialectic (2014, methodology): “It is possible, we believe, to link this up with theories based on Marx’s metabolic rift analysis (Foster 1999, Foster, Clark, and York 2010, Schnedier and McMichael 2010, Moore 2011a).”
- Accumulation by Conservation (2014, background): “(2010: 395, emphasis in original) His answer is the latter, again signifying the idea that we have reached, as he phrases it, ‘the end of a road’ in the sense that contemporary capitalism is in the midst of a qualitative sea change (see also Moore 2011).”