The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy

This essay - Part II - reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the 'age of capital'. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by '...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of peasant studies 2018-02, Vol.45 (2), p.237-279
Main Author: Moore, Jason W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accumulation
Anthropocene
Appropriation
Capitalism
Colonies & territories
Empires
Energy
environmental history
Exploitation
Females
historical geography
historical political economy
history of capitalism
Imperialism
Labor
Labor productivity
Managerial authority
political ecology
Political economy
Politics
Power
Production
Productivity
Radicalism
Unpaid
Women
Work
Working women
world-ecology
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Summary:This essay - Part II - reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the 'age of capital'. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by 'women, nature, and colonies' (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state-capital-science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per 'unit' of abstract nature. Historically, successive state-capital-science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism's preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize - and seek to mobilize through - a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.
ISSN:0306-6150
1743-9361
DOI:10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587