Jason W. Moore, ‘Ecology, Capital, and the Nature

Transcript:Jason W. Moore, ‘Ecology, Capital, and the Nature:
Jason W. Moore, ‘Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation and Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology’ (2011) Mike Davis, ‘Who Will Build the Ark?’ (2010) Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. (2009) “For all its dogmatic and formulaic tone, Stalin’s passage captures an assumption perhaps common to historians of the mid-twentieth century: man’s environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all.” Chakrabarty (204) “It is clear that the heat that burns the world in Arrighi’s narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not from global warming.” (200) Jason Moore, “Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times” (2011) “Capitalism as world-ecology” – Background / theoretical context World-systems theory – Immanuel Wallerstein / Giovanni Arrighi David Harvey – “all social projects are ecological projects and vice-versa” The “Oregon School” – John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York; “metabolic rift” theory The Emergence of the World-System Concept “The originator of the current world-systems perspective is Immanuel Wallerstein, who argues in his book the Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Econominy the Sixteenth Century (1974), that a world-system is a multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants. It is thus by definition composed of culturally different societies that are vitally linked together through the exchange of food and raw materials.” (Chase-Dunn and Grimes, 1995: 389) Capitalism is a world-system that is also a world system Rise of the capitalist world-economy / world-ecology World-economy and world-ecology represent ‘distinct angles of vision onto a singular world-historical process’ “With the rise of capitalism, local societies were not integrated only into a world capitalist system; more to the point, varied and heretofore largely isolated local and regional socio-ecological relations were incorporated into – and at the same moment became constituting agents of – a capitalist world-ecology. Local socio-ecologies were at once transformed by human labour power (itself a force of nature) and brought into sustained dialogue with each other. [. . .] Hence, the hyphen becomes appropriate: We are talking not necessarily about the ecology of the world (although this is in fact the case today) but rather a world-ecology.” (Moore, “Capitalism as World-Ecology”, 2003: 447) Raymond