Why does a book with “capitalism” in the title and “accumulation of capital” in the subtitle not get reviewed in any major sociology journal within the first three years of its publication? This was the case with Jason W. Moore’s 2015 volume until the book co-authored with Raj Patel appeared in 2017—and was likewise met with sociological neglect. The reason for this disciplinary disregard might have something to do with the other major term in the title of the first book, the “web of life”, and with the fact that, as Jason Moore points out, the ecological change central to both books has until quite recently been marginal to sociology debates. However, the reasons for sociological inattention go far beyond that specific focus.
Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and geographer in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, and coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. Both his transdisciplinary background and his perspective (for which the hyphenation in “world-ecology” is a clear indication) therefore place his work in a similarly ambivalent position to sociological common sense as the tradition on which he draws and expands—world-systems analysis. As early as the 1980s, Immanuel Wallerstein described world-systems analysis as a form of protest against mainstream social science—rather than as a new theory, let alone a new paradigm. Some of its major tenets, such as the focus on global inequalities, world capitalism, and the critique of methodological nationalism have since become prominent in sociology as well as anthropology. Others, such as tracing capitalism back to European colonial expansion, rather than 18th century industrialization, and viewing the intellectual division of labor among the social sciences as a politically motivated barrier to understanding the relationality of the modern world’s economic, social, political, and epistemic realms, are still very much contested. Works based on the latter views, as are both books reviewed here, therefore risk being met with sociological inattention (at best) or dismissed as unsociological (at worst) on account of their explicit political commitment. Yet the discipline, and in particular global and historical sociology, would be missing a great deal by not engaging with and learning from the arguments put forth in them.
In different ways, both books propose a world-ecological perspective as a framework for world-historical change. The first [Moore 2015] is a comprehensive monograph with rich and at times overwhelming terminological innovation that cross-references numerous theoretical debates. The second [Patel and Moore 2017] is a short and engaging book with an ample introduction and clearly structured chapters full of easy to grasp examples.
In close parallel to world-systems analysis, Moore defines world-ecology as “a perspective, not a theory” [2015: 28]. The book’s main contribution lies in providing a method of moving beyond the Cartesian dualism that pits Nature against Society and towards a relational view of the dialectics shaping “human activity and the rest of nature” as interdependent in the “web of life”. Similarly, Patel and Moore adjust readers’ expectations of being offered “a history of the whole world”, which their book’s title implies, to the no less ambitious goal of tracing the history of processes that explain how capitalism expanded, a goal they conceive of as “an antidote to forgetting” [2017: 18] the scale and impact of European colonialism. The consistent focus on Europe and European colonialism in both works should however not be mistaken for a Eurocentric perspective. It is part of the method that allows the authors to ask different questions from those we are accustomed to hearing about the origin and the logic of capitalism as well as its historical and present-day impact. In short, it allows us “to prioritize the relations of power, capital, and nature that rendered fossil capitalism so deadly in the first place” [2015: 173].
Moore and Patel’s world-ecological perspective resonates with a wide array of relational approaches to capitalism, such as Sidney Mintz’s account of the role of the sugar plantation for industrial capitalism or Maria Mies’s analysis of the relation between patriarchy and global capital accumulation. At the same time, the perspective transcends the determinism of several other approaches that search for a prime-mover of capitalism in either the economy or the environment. By denouncing what is viewed as the erasure of capitalism’s early modern origins since the European colonial expansion and the reshaping of nature long before the steam engine, world-ecology as presented by Moore and Patel also dovetails well with decolonial understandings of modernity and capitalism, in particular as put forward by Enrique Dussel’s theorization of the first Iberian modernity and of the impact of the Cartesian revolution on our views with respect to Nature and Society to this day.
At least three immediate and momentous consequences of this relational perspective that are distinct from all of these previous or related approaches stand out from a strictly sociological point of view. The first one concerns the authors’ rejection of the very terms of the agency vs. structure debate as caught in the Cartesian dualism that the world-ecological perspective questions. Defined as “the capacity to induce historical change (to produce ruptures), or to reproduce extant historical arrangements (to reproduce equilibrium)” [2015: 37], agency becomes a relational property, rather than a capacity inherent in either humans or nature, such that “human agency is always within, and dialectically bound to, nature as a whole” [ibid.]. Consequently, capitalism-in-nature, which Moore presents as a world-ecological alternative vision, is not merely, and not even approximately, a structure that can be “saved”, but only a set of relationships to be transformed according to a different logic. Not one revolution would accordingly do the trick, but rather a comprehensive process of “revolutionizing” – both of the forces of production and of the relations of reproduction.
The second consequence is the conceptual and theoretical shift from the widely debated notion of the Anthropocene to the one of Capitalocene, which Moore puts forth in the 2015 book and expands on with Patel in the 2017 volume. While the Anthropocene is seen as a return to a Eurocentric view of humanity and as relying on notions of resource and technological determinism, the Capitalocene is defined as “shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital” [2015: 173]. For Moore, consistently referring to the Capitalocene—“an ugly name in an ugly system” [ibid.]—means understanding capitalism not only as an economic system, but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature—thus again undoing both the agency vs. structure and the humans vs. nature binaries. More recently, world-systems scholars have imputed the term Capitalocene with centering capitalism while neglecting race and colonialism, and have turned to the notion of the Plantationocene, centered on the colonial plantation, instead. Yet, as Patel and Moore make perfectly clear in their long introduction, from a world-ecological perspective, the plantation was the original factory [2017: 28]. Its history, starting from the sugar plantations in Madeira that later shifted to the Caribbean and the Americas, is inseparable from the racial hierarchies that the reliance on enslaved labor on colonial plantations pioneered. Here, too, the history of world capitalism functions as an antidote to forgetting its earliest industrial beginnings—plantation slavery and its ecological impact.
The third sociologically compelling consequence of a world-ecological perspective is a reinterpretation of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation through an advance of commodity frontiers. In his earlier work, Moore had analyzed how commodity frontiers can expand as long as there remains uncommodified land, and, to a lesser extent, labor, beyond the frontier’s reach. In his view, it was precisely because the most significant commodity frontiers—sugar, silver and gold mining, tobacco, and grain—were based on the exploitation of the environment, that the concept of commodity frontier made available an exploration of the interrelationships between production in one place and the expansion of capitalist space in general. This perspective is present in his 2015 book as a process that mobilizes natures at low cost—it cheapens them—and historically generated four main “cheaps”—labor, food, energy, and raw materials. This cheapening through frontiers structures the account of world history in the book co-authored with Patel, which expands and adjusts the list to seven “cheaps”—nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. This analysis not only makes possible a reinterpretation of the productivity of capitalism through frontiers that mobilize natures at low cost. It also shifts focus from cheapness as a property to cheapening as a set of strategies, and thus to a central process of global capitalism, “the process through which capitalism transmutes these undenominated relationships of life making into circuits of production and consumption, in which these relations come to have as low a price as possible. Cheapening marks the transition from uncounted relations of life making to the lowest possible dollar value” [2017: 33]. Like “revolutionizing” above, “cheapening” points to the ongoing, processual character of both ongoing and future transformations. At first sight, the merits of such a measure seem to lie in the mere suffixation of the terms so as to indicate processes. Yet the advantages this move offers primarily reside in calling attention to the historical entrenchment of today’s structures of global inequality, while making a rethinking of alternatives a more informed choice.
Questions, such as why Andre Gunder Frank’s notion of “primary accumulation”, which would fit like a glove, is not used to describe what the authors view as “ongoing primitive accumulation”, remain. So do the occasional redundancies in both books, which however mostly help drive the main points home (we do find out several times what the four cheaps, and the seven cheaps, are). At times, what is a familiar narrative for world-systems analysts might come across as too fast-paced an account for readers with different theoretical backgrounds, especially in Patel and Moore’s book. And theorists of social capital will surely object to how quickly the notion is dismissed in a side note for not taking political economy into account. These are, however, points of debate made all the richer by the clear and radical account offered by the world-ecological perspectives in these two ground-breaking books.
