The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism's planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene's shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of peasant studies 2017-05, Vol.44 (3), p.594-630
Main Author: Moore, Jason W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
21st century
Agriculture
Anthropocene
Capitalism
Centrality
Cities
Climate change
Crises
Ecology
Ecosystems
Environmental conditions
Environmental factors
environmental history
Environmentalism
History
Industrialization
Modes of production
Natural environment
political ecology
Political Economy
Production
world-ecology
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Summary:This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism's planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene's shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two arguments. First, I situate the Anthropocene discourse within Green Thought's uneasy relationship to the Human/Nature binary, and its reluctance to consider human organizations - like capitalism - as part of nature. Next, I highlight the Anthropocene's dominant periodization, which meets up with a longstanding environmentalist argument about the Industrial Revolution as the origin of ecological crisis. This ignores early capitalism's environment-making revolution, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities. While there is no question that environmental change accelerated sharply after 1850, and especially after 1945, it seems equally fruitless to explain these transformations without identifying how they fit into patterns of power, capital and nature established four centuries earlier.
ISSN:0306-6150
1743-9361
DOI:10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036