Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (KAIROS) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2016-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The origins of capitalism as a system of Cheap Nature are fundamental to thinking through the reality—and politics—of the present crisis. Let me be clear that we are dealing with capitalism as world-ecology, as a double internality of humanity-in-nature—not as a closed system that interacts with the rest of nature. The point is important, as even friendly critics of the Capitalocene concept have characterized it in dualist terms. With capitalism we are dealing with an emergent pattern of symbolic innovation and material transformation in which the value of labor-power, the rise of world-money, and the endless transformation of the earth form an evolving historical whole.

The problem today is the end of the Capitalocene, not the march of the Anthropocene. The reality is not one of humanity “overwhelming the great forces of nature” (Steffen et al. 2007), but rather the exhaustion of its Cheap Nature strategy. (This is the small kernel of truth in the otherwise absurd discourse on ecosystem services.) That process of getting Nature to work for very low expenditures of money and energy is the history of capitalism’s great commodity frontiers, and with it, of capitalism’s long waves of accumulation.

The appropriation of frontier land and labor—Cheap Nature—has been the indispensable condition for great waves of capital accumulation, from Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s (Moore 2010b, 2012, 2015). Capitalism has been able to outrun the rising costs of production by co-producing manifold Cheap Nature strategies, locating, creating, mapping, and quantifying natures external to capitalism but within reach of its power. Today there is nowhere to run. Much of what we have seen global capitalism achieve over the past decade has been a shifting of costs—from one capitalist to another, and especially from capital to the vast majority. And there has been another vector of cost-shifting, which has been accelerating in recent years: from the present to the future. This is true, as widely recognized, for future generations. But it is also true for the accumulation of capital, which has always been a series of bets on future income. The real basis of that future income has always been Cheap Nature. Hence: financialization and the polarization of income and wealth—the 1 percent and the 99 percent—are the predictable results of the end of Cheap Nature. That “end” of Cheap Nature may not bring liberation, but it cannot sustain capitalism. Popular strategies for liberation will succeed or fail on our capacity to forge a different ontology of nature, humanity, and justice—one that asks not merely how to redistribute wealth, but how to remake our place in nature in a way that promises emancipation for all life.

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