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\"Both green and red analyses of capitalism's deepening contradictions have acknowledged the close relation of economic and environmental crises. But environmentalists have not yet fully integrated social and historical factors in their scathing indictment of the current disaster. Capitalism in the Web of Life will undoubtedly help to change that. Charting the recurrent crises, and long cyclical expansions of capitalism as socio-ecological process over the past six centuries, Jason Moore provides a groundbreaking theory and historical account of capitalism's development that comprehends the transformation of nature as constitutive of capital accumulation. Along the way, he moves beyond the society/nature distinction that limits so much environmentalism\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism's troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature.

\"Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding--and reclaiming--the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century\"--Provided by publisher.

No civilization has been more Promethean than capitalism in its aspirations. Named after the Greek Titan who gave fire to humankind, Prometheanism is understood as a kind of environmental-but not (necessarily) environmentalist-strategy for the domination and management of something usually called Nature. Unfortunately, the discussion often stops there. But if Prometheanism is domination, How does it turn a profit? This is an elementary, yet frequently, unasked question of a civilization that dispenses with everything ill-suited to the law of value. The uncontroversial statement that capitalism is a system of profit-maximizing class power hasn't translated to a dialectical synthesis of power and profit in the web of life. There are surely many reasons for this. One of them is the systematic acceptance on the left of Nature as a value-free concept. And yet, historically, bourgeois naturalism has been the ideological lynchpin of successive Civilizing Projects and Malthusian moments. To ignore this is to disarm struggles for climate justice and planetary socialism.

حقق هذا الكتاب منذ صدوره ضجة كبرى في الأوساط الأكاديمية والثقافية، إذ تناول فكرة الرأسمالية من زوايا مختلفة قطعت مع القراءات الأكاديمية المغلقة. يربط الكتاب فكرة الرأسمالية بالطبيعة ويرى المؤلفان أن استغلال الطبيعة على نحو خاطئ ومتوحش مهد المجال لاستغلال البشر وبذلك نشأت الرأسمالية على ثنائية استغلال الطبيعة والإنسان، وهو استغلال جعل من العالم عالما رخيصا ففكرة الاستعمار هي التي جعلت من المال رخيصا بما أنها استطاعت توفيره من جماجم المضطهدين كما جعلت من الغذاء رخيصا بما أنها نهبت العوالم الجديدة ودمرت الحياة الإيكولوجية فيها كما دمرت حيوات الأفراد عبر تعزيز ثقافة العبودية والاستغلال والاضطهاد علاوة على آثارها في جميع مناحي الحياة. يأخذنا هذا الكتاب في رحلة مع الاكتشافات الكبرى التي شهدها العالم القديم وكيف كانت تلك الاكتشافات مدخلا لبروز عصور دموية ومريعة، علاوة على تطرقه إلى دور الأوبئة والجوائح في بروز فكرة الاستعمار بشكلها الحالي. يمكن القول إن هذا الكتاب من أبرز الكتب التي تؤرخ للعالم من منظور مختلف ومتحرر من التحيزات والمركزية الأوروبية التي سادت في أغلب البحوث الأكاديمية.

This article reconceptualizes the history of the capitalist world-ecology through the enclosure of the Great Frontier. Conceptualizing capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit and life, the author argues that the underlying source of capitalism’s success has been its capacity to “put nature to work” — as cheaply as possible. This Cheap Nature strategy combines capitalization (the logic of capital) with extra-economic appropriation, including the socially-necessary unpaid work of humans. At the core of every great wave of capitalist development has been the Four Cheaps: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. Those Cheap Natures were appropriated — through the dynamics of imperialism and militarized accumulation — through great waves of planetary enclosure, what I call the Great Frontier. These enclosures allowed imperial bourgeoisies to win the worldwide class struggle; to reduce the costs of production and therefore to advance the rate of profit; to resolve the surplus capital problem; and to sustain labor productivity growth. Today, the continuation of these four great bourgeois accomplishments are in question. The climate crisis represents the biospheric contradiction of the worldwide class struggle in the web of life. The enclosure of the atmospheric commons is a pivotal moment in the epochal crisis of capitalism — understood through the dialectic of planetary life and world accumulation. The more that capital and the imperialist forces seek to subordinate the biosphere to the logic of endless accumulation, the more that webs of life find creative and non-linear ways to defy and resist the planetary dictatorship of capital. This dialectic prefigures the Great Implosion. The Great Implosion thesis contends that the dynamics of non-linear change attributed to the climate crisis apply also to capitalism’s unfolding epochal crisis. The geohistorical transition now underway is an epochal inversion of capitalism’s defining relation with and within the web of life. This is the transition from the web of life as a cost-reducing and productivity-advancing dynamic to a cost-maximizing and productivity-reducing one. Its early signs are now widely grasped as the Great Stagnation. But this is only the beginning; we might call it a signaling crisis. The Great Stagnation signals the first moments of the Great Implosion. The author constructs the rise and ongoing demise of the Great Frontier in three parts, focusing successively on environmental history, Civilizing Projects, and today’s climate crisis. In Part I, I reprise the historical-geographical outlines of the Great Frontier in the rise of capitalism. The author revisits core elements of the commodity frontier argument, developed to interpret the epochal shift in world environmental history after 1492. From this historical-geographical sketch of the rise of capitalism, I unpack a twofold argument. One is that commodity frontiers are not strictly about commodities or commodification. They are about imperialism, which is always the world bourgeoisie’s favored mode of class formation. Imperialism is the world politics of the tendency (and countertendency) of the rate of profit to fall. It is premised not only on armed force but also on the geocultural hegemony and violence of Civilizing Projects. This is the focus of Part II. To be sure, commodification is in play; but to reduce the story to market forces replays a neo-Smithian error. It fails to grasp the centrality of imperialism and its mechanisms of class power in forging capitalism’s major commodity frontiers. Capitalist relations of Nature — I use the uppercase to underscore the real abstraction — are always politically-mediated by states that pursue the creation and reproduction of a “good business environment.” The (geo)political project of managing and securing webs of life for capital depends upon a geocultural project that makes possible the practical violence of commodity fetishism on the Great Frontier. This is civilizational fetishism. Its expressions are found the successive and overlapping Christianizing, Civilizing, and Developmentalist Projects of great empires, given intellectual expression over the longue durée by figures ranging from Francisco de Vitoria to Walt W. Rostow. These projects reproduce and reinvent the ruling abstractions of Civilization and Savagery. After 1949, this was President Truman’s “Point Four” declaration on the divide between the “developed” and “undeveloped world.” A second argument foregrounds the connective tissues binding our historical-geographical assessments of capitalist frontier-making and today’s climate crisis. In Part III, I frame the planetary crisis as joining two fundamental moments: an unfolding crisis in life-making, registered widely in the climate and biodiversity literatures; and an unfolding crisis in profit-making, registered widely in the Great Stagnation discourse. Those two moments are unevenly combined in the geohistorical character of climate crisis, one in which the geophysical turning point finds expression in the destabilization of a trinity born in the seventeenth century: the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, climate apartheid. The seventeenth-century’s climate crisis hothoused the Great Frontier as accumulation strategy, assuming its modern form between 1550 and 1700 as a climate fix to the era’s “general crisis”: an era of interminable war, endemic political crisis, and economic instability. In this era we find the maturation of capitalism’s Planetary Proletariat, joining socially necessary “paid” and “unpaid” work by humans and the rest of nature: the differentiated unity of Proletariat, Femitariat, and Biotariat The blossoming of the Great Frontier as a full-fledged productivist revolution — the Plantation Revolution — inaugurated the Great Cheapening, a long-run secular decline in the price (value composition) of the Big Four inputs: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. A specifically capitalist historical nature was born, and its epoch-making service to world accumulation was to allow the systematic reduction of re/production costs for capital. Today we are witnessing that strategy’s implosion. The web of life is rapidly moving from a source of Cheapness to an unavoidable vector of rising costs. The Biotariat is in open revolt. In place of the “limits to growth,” the world-ecological alternative offers an alternative: Not only is “Another world possible” — the unofficial slogan of the World Social Form — but: Another class struggle is possible. We have in the Great Stagnation the revolt of the Biotariat — whose contribution to the revolutionary destabilization of capitalism has been underestimated by Environmentalists and Marxists alike. Although easily romanticized, grasping the web of life through the oikieos — the creative, generative, and multilayered pulse of life-making — asks us to reexamine human solidarity with the rest of nature in ways that challenge the Promethean domination of life and that explore the communist possibilities for liberation: “the creatures too should become free.” Foregrounding the oppressive and exploitative dynamics of work, life, and power, Planetary Justice prioritizes the abolition of the Proletarian-Biotarian-Femitarian relation created through the Great Frontier after 1492. This is the challenge of the planetary class struggle in the last days of the Holocene. Este artículo vincula dos grandes acontecimientos histórico-mundiales: el auge del capitalismo tras 1492 y su crisis epocal actual, al final del Holoceno. El autor sostiene que la interminable acumulación de capital ha sido, desde el principio, posibilitada por la interminable conquista de la Tierra: la Gran Frontera. La ecología-mundo capitalista es un tipo peculiar de sociedad de clases que combina la acumulación monetaria con la apropiación excepcionalmente rápida del trabajo humano y planetario. La Gran Frontera es la zona de la Naturaleza Barata, uniendo dialécticamente la valorización del capital y la desvalorización ético-política de los humanos y del resto de la naturaleza, así, el racismo, el sexismo y el prometeísmo revelan ser pilares ideológicos fundamentales de la acumulación de capital. De manera crucial, la Gran Frontera ha permitido a las burguesías imperialistas avanzar en la productividad del trabajo, reducir los costes de los insumos y resolver las recurrentes crisis de sobreacumulación del capitalismo. Hoy en día, estamos asistiendo a la inversión geohistórica de la estrategia de la Naturaleza Barata del capitalismo. Se trata de la transición de la red de la vida como una dinámica de reducción de costes y aumento de la productividad a otra de maximización de costes y reducción de la productividad. La clase dominante y los economistas marxistas han entendido sus primeros signos como el “Gran Estancamiento”. Pero esto es sólo el principio; podríamos llamarlo una “crisis de señalización”. El Gran Estancamiento indica los primeros momentos de la Gran Implosión. Al igual que el cambio climático se entiende como un proceso no lineal que confunde los modelos biosféricos, la Gran Implosión es una dinámica no lineal a través de la cual las contradicciones del capitalismo en la red de la vida confunden los modelos lineales del cambio histórico. El capitalismo, frente a este panorama, es mucho más vulnerable de lo que creemos, y, sobre todo, lo es a la revuelta que el Proletariado Planetario está cociendo a fuego lento.

Continuing with the line of research in world-ecology, the author explains here the centrality of the reproduction of labor and unpaid work (human and extra-human) for the maintenance of capitalist accumulation cycles. Although the role that migrations play in these structural dynamics is only briefly mentioned in the chapter, the world-historical analysis of the centrality of cheap labor at a global level provides an excellent framework for the contents of this issue and for the development of future studies in this field. Siguiendo con la línea de investigación en ecología-mundo, el autor explica aquí la centralidad que ocupan la reproducción de la mano de obra y el trabajo no remunerado (humano y extra-humano) para el mantenimiento de los ciclos de acumulación capitalista. Aunque el papel que las migraciones cumplen en estas dinámicas estructurales es sólo brevemente mencionado en el capítulo, el análisis histórico-mundo de la centralidad del trabajo barato a nivel global aporta un marco inmejorable para los contenidos de este número y para el desarrollo de futuros estudios en este campo.

This article considers the emergence of world environmental history as a rapidly growing but undertheorized research field. Taking as its central problematic the gap between the fertile theorizations of environmentally-oriented social scientists and the empirically rich studies of world environmental historians, the article argues for a synthesis of theory and history in the study of longue duree socio-ecological change. This argument proceeds in three steps. First, I offer an ecological reading of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System. Wallerstein's handling of the ecological dimensions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is suggestive of a new approach to world environmental history. Second, I contend that Wallerstein's theoretical insights may be effectively complemented by drawing on Marxist notions of value and above all the concept of \"metabolic rift,\" which emphasize the importance of productive processes and regional divisions of labor within the modern world-system. Finally, I develop these theoretical discussions in a short environmental history of the two great \"commodity frontiers\" of early capitalism - the sugar plantation and the silver mining complex.

It is now widely understood that the \"end of cheap food\" has arrived. It is much less clear what this means for the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism, and for the future of the capitalist world-ecology. Taking the accumulation of capital and the production of nature as a world-historical unity, this paper explores the connections between a new era of financialization, the exhaustion of capitalism's longue durée model of agricultural revolutions, and the closure of the last remaining frontiers of appropriation since the 1970s. In this perspective, the \"food crisis\" and \"financial crisis\" are understood as expressions of neoliberalism's signal crisis—when prices for strategic commodities such as food, energy, and raw materials begin to rise rather than decline in any long accumulation cycle. This tipping point is a reversal of the system's capacity to produce more and more food, energy, and raw materials with less and less labor—fundamentally, a crisis of value relations. Although this reversal is often attributed to resource depletion, the reality is at once more complex, and more intractable. Neoliberal financializations, marked by an unprecedented penetration into the everyday lives of human and extra-human natures, have induced an upward spiral of socio-ecological unpredictability alongside deepening resource depletion. Among the consequences is a new phase of extra-human nature's revolt against the disciplines of capital, especially in world agriculture—the Superweed Effect. From glyphosate-resistant weeds to spiraling antibiotic resistance, ours is an era marked by the rising capacity of extra-human natures to elude capitalist control.

Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560-some kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world's first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in this journal, I explain how the epoch-making acceleration of boom and bust on Madeira, during Braudel's \"first\" sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557), marked a new crystallization of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallization represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism's \"commodity frontier\" strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system—as capitalist world-ecology no less than world-economy. From this standpoint, the very conditions of Madeira's rapid ascent were also the conditions of its rapid decline after 1506. These stemmed from the rapid commodity-centered organization, and consequent exhaustion, of the relations governing human and extra-human nature: labor and land.