Capitalism in the Web of Life

Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital

Jason W. Moore

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781781689035
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today's global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a "world-ecology" of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism's greatest strength-and the source of its problems-is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature-rather than capitalism and nature-is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

Part I

FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS:
CAPITALISM AS WORLD-ECOLOGY

CHAPTER 1

From Object to Oikeios:
Environment-Making in
the Capitalist World-Ecology

Words are like empty balloons, inviting us to fill them up with associations. As they fill they begin to gain intrinsic force and at last to shape our perceptions and expectations. So with the word “ecology”…

(Worster, 1994)

For nearly half a century, Green Thought has wrestled with a double question. Is nature exogenous to the essential relations of human history, for the most part playing roles as tap (raw materials) and sink (pollution)? Or is nature a web of life encompassing all of human activity, comprising taps and sinks, but also much beyond? Is nature, in other words, a set of objects that humans act upon, or is it a web of life that human relations develop through?

The vast Green literatures that have emerged since the 1970s—political ecology, environmental history and environmental sociology, ecological economics, systems ecology, and many more—have developed by answering “yes” (in one form or another) to both questions. On the one hand, most scholars agree that humanity is indeed part of nature. They reject the Cartesian dualism that puts Society (without natures) in one box and Nature (without humans) in another. On the other hand, the conceptual vocabularies and analytical frameworks that govern our empirical investigations remain firmly entrenched in the interaction of these two basic, impenetrable units—Nature and Society. This “double yes” poses a real puzzle: How do we translate a materialist, dialectical, and holistic philosophy of humans-in-nature into workable (and working) conceptual vocabularies and analytical frameworks?

The arithmetic of Nature plus Society has been the bread and butter of environmental studies since the 1970s. The arithmetic bears distinctive linguistic inflections across the historical social sciences, and across the Two Cultures. Earth-system scientists talk about “coupled human-natural systems”;¹ Marxist ecologists speak of the “nature-society dialectic”;² cultural studies highlights hybrids, assemblages, and networks.³ Establishing this arithmetic as a legitimate domain of scholarly activity has been Green Thought’s greatest contribution. The environmental humanities and social sciences brought to light the other, previously forgotten or marginalized, side of the Cartesian binary: the world of environmental impacts. No small accomplishment, this. “The environment” is now firmly established as a legitimate and relevant object of analysis.

About this signal accomplishment, I would make two observations. First, the work of bringing nature as factor into the study of global change is now largely complete. It is increasingly difficult to address core issues in social theory and social change without some reference to environmental change. There remains considerable unevenness, across the historical social sciences, in how environmentally oriented research is valorized (or not). But the core project of Green Thought, from the time it gathered steam in the 1970s, has been successful: the legitimacy and relevance of environmental research is no longer in question. This project was always infused with a dialectical sensibility.⁴ But its operationalization turned on an affirmation of the first question we posed at the outset—environment as object—rather than nature as the web of life. This prioritization—could it have been otherwise?—resulted in the disjuncture we encounter today: between humanity-in-nature (as philosophical proposition) and humanity and nature (as analytical procedure).This disjuncture lies at the core of the impasse in environmental studies today: an impasse characterized by a flood of empirical research and an unwillingness to move beyond environment as object. Nature with a capital “N” has been prized over the web of life. This impasse may be understood in terms of a generalized reluctance to refigure modernity as producer and product of the web of life.

My second observation therefore turns on the exhaustion of the Cartesian binary to deepen our understanding of capitalism, historically and in the present crisis. Today, that binary obscures, more than it illuminates, humanity’s place in the web of life. “Nature plus Society” appears especially unsuited to dealing with today’s proliferating crises—not least those linked to climate change and financialization—and also with the origins and development of these crisis tendencies over the broad sweep of modern world history.

Is it now necessary to move beyond the environment as object? Can the project of writing environmental histories of social processes adequately capture the manifold ways in which these processes are not only producers of environments, but also products of them? The idea that social organization carries with it environmental consequences has taken us far, but it is unclear just how much farther Green Arithmetic can take us.

But if Green Arithmetic cannot get us to where we need to go today, what can?

My response begins with a simple proposal. Needed, and I think implied by an important layer of Green Thought, is a concept that moves from the interaction of independent units—Nature and Society—to the dialectics of humans in the web of life. Such a concept would focus our attention on the concrete dialectics of the messily bundled, interpenetrating, and interdependent relations of human and extra-human natures. Needed, in other words, is a concept that allows a proliferating vocabulary of humanity-in-nature, rather than one premised on humanity and nature.

THE OIKEIOS: INTERACTION, DIALECTICS, AND THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY

I propose that we begin with the oikeios.

Oikeios is a way of naming the creative, historical, and dialectical relation between, and also always within, human and extra-human natures. The oikeios is shorthand: for oikeios topos, or “favorable place,” a term coined by the Greek philosopher-botanist Theophrastus. For Theophrastus, the oikeios topos indicated “the relationship between a plant species and the environment.”⁵ Properly speaking, oikeios is an adjective. But in the long journey towards a vocabulary that transcends the Two Cultures (the physical and human sciences), I hope the reader might excuse a few liberties with the language.

Neologisms come a dime a dozen in Green Thought. We needn’t not look far for concepts aiming to fuse or combine the relations of human and extra-human nature.⁶ And yet, after decades of vigorous Green theorizing and analysis, we still lack an approach that puts the oikeios at the center. Such a perspective would situate the creative and generative relation of species and environment as the ontological pivot—and methodological premise—of historical change. This reorientation opens up the question of nature—as matrix rather than resource or enabling condition—for historical analysis; it allows the reconstruction of humanity’s great movements, from warfare to literature to scientific-technological revolutions, as if nature matters to the whole of the historical process, not merely as its context, or its unsavory consequences.

This is the intended contribution of the oikeios. Naming the relation through which humans (and other species) create the conditions of life—“definite modes of life” in Marx and Engels’ nicely-turned phrase⁷—immediately directs our attention to the relations that activate definite configurations of acting units and acted-upon objects. The oikeios is a multi-layered dialectic, comprising flora and fauna, but also our planet’s manifold geological and biospheric configurations, cycles, and movements. Through the oikeios form and re-form the relations and conditions that create and destroy humanity’s mosaic of cooperation and conflict: what is typically called “social” organization. Nature-as-oikeios is, then, not offered as an additional factor, to be placed alongside culture or society or economy. Nature, instead, becomes the matrix within which human activity unfolds, and the field upon which historical agency operates. From such a vantage point, the problems of food, water, oil (and so much more!) become relational problems first, and object problems second; through the relations of specific civilizations, food, water, and oil become real historical actors.

From the perspective of the oikeios, civilizations (another shorthand) do not “interact” with nature as resource (or as garbage can); they develop through nature-as-matrix. Climate change is a good example. Civilizations develop by internalizing extant climate realities, favorable and unfavorable. “Climate” is not a historical agent as such; it is no more a historical agent, in itself, than empires or classes abstracted from the web of life. Historical agency is irreducibly bundled in and through the oikeios. To lean on Marx, a species (or biospheric process) that does not have its agency outside itself does not exist.⁸ Agency, in others words, is not a property of Nature and (or) Society—not even of humanity’s spectacular forms of sociality. Agency is, rather, an emergent property of definite configurations of human activity with the rest of life. And vice versa.

Agency is clearly a key question for left ecology. Here I take agency as the capacity to induce historical change (to produce ruptures), or to reproduce extant historical arrangements (to reproduce equilibrium). It is a crude but useful distinction. To say that nature is a “historical protagonist”⁹ sounds quite attractive. But what does it really mean? Are we simply adding nature to a long list of historical actors? Or does recognition of nature-as-oikeios imply a fundamental rethinking of agency itself? We can read many arguments that seek to elucidate nature’s agency.¹⁰ It is not, however, clear how nature’s agency—whether conceived in Cartesian or dialectical terms—might clarify the making of the modern world. Does nature, say climate, “have” agency in the same way that classes or empires “make” history?

Yes and no. Part of the problem is the temptation to assign agency to both sides of the Cartesian binary. Climate, weeds, disease, in such assignments, “have” agency in a manner analogous to classes, capital, and empire. There has been a certain arithmetic logic to these assignments: if humans have agency, can we not say the same thing about extra-human natures? That sounds right, but does not, I think, adequately capture how agency unfolds. For relations of class, capital, and empire are already bundled with extra-human natures; they are configurations of human and extra-human natures. From this it follows that agency is a relational property of specific bundles of human and extra-human nature. Class power (and not only the agency of classes) derives and unfolds through specific configurations of power and (re)production in the web of life.

If nature is indeed a historical protagonist, its agency can be comprehended adequately only by stepping out of the Cartesian binary. The issue is emphatically not one of the agency of Nature and the agency of Humans. These are unthinkable without each other. Rather, the issue is how human and extra-human natures get bundled. Yes, diseases make history, but only as epidemiological vectors bound to commerce and empire. This is, too often, left out of arguments of nature’s agency: the capacity to make history turns on specific configurations of human and extra-human actors. Human agency is always within, and dialectically bound to, nature as a whole—which is to say, human agency is not purely human at all. It is bundled with the rest of nature.

The world-ecological alternative takes these bundles of human/extra-human activity as its starting point. Civilizations are big, expressive examples of this dialectical bundling. From the large-scale and long-run patterns of human-led environment-making, we can discern historical facts from the practical infinitude of basic facts. Climate change, in this scheme of things, becomes a vector of planetary change woven into the very fabric of civilizational power and production (class, empire, agriculture, etc.). Hardly a recent phenomenon, this socio-ecological fabric stretches back millennia.¹¹ This is the spirit, if not always the letter, of much climate historiography.¹² When climate changes, so too change the structures of power and production. However, this is not because climate interacts with civilizational structures, causing problems at some point in these structures’ otherwise independent lives. We might do better to reorient our vision, to see climate conditions as present at, and implicated in, the birth of these structures. Civilizations are unthinkable in the absence of climate—itself (yet another) shorthand for a diversity of atmospheric processes that co-produce relations of power and production. As such, climate is but one bundle of determinations—not determinisms—that push, pull, and transform the rich totalities of historical change. When climate has changed dramatically, the outcomes have often been dramatic and epochal. Consider, for example, the eclipse of Rome af...