The alternative is seeing capitalism for what it truly is
Moore, 11, Jason Moore, environmental historian and historical geographer, PhD, Alice Hamilton Prize, Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology, Capitalism as world-ecology, or, the oikeios as dialectic , page 4- FT
This sort of social determinism was indeed where I began (Moore 2000a). Nearly a decade ago, I argued that ‘environmental crises’ and long ‘systemic cycles’ of environmental transformation complemented capitalism's phases of development. It was clear, for instance, that the rise of monopoly capitalism in the later nineteenth century entailed a set of far-reaching agroecological transformations, from the wheatfields of the American Midwest to the copper mines of Chile and the rubber plantations of southeast Asia. I soon found that one could travel only so far with such a model. It was an approach that proceeded from a set of a priori constructions ontologically prior to the relations I wanted to discern: the game was rigged, the outcome determined in advance. The rise of monopoly capitalism, in this scheme of things, caused changes in ‘the’ environment. But such a view begs an important question. To wit, How does the nature–society relation ask for a rethinking of capitalism and its phases of development? Perhaps even more important: What can a socio-ecological method reveal about capitalism that was previously underappreciated or mis-recognized? This was a much more intriguing line of questioning. I appreciated the flood of critical scholarship that accounted for capitalism's environmental depredations, but after a certain point, I wasn't learning anything that most of us didn't already know: Capitalism is bad news for the birds and bees, the water, the soil, and pretty much all living creatures on the planet. Empirical evidence might be amassed to verify this or that ‘environmental’ impact, but within the limits of the Cartesian scheme, the socio-ecological constitution of capitalism itself remains unexplored. It is not that we don't need an analysis of impacts. Rather, the problem is that Cartesianism narrows, rather than expands, the kinds of impacts under investigation – farming is important, and so are CO2 emissions, but not global finance and its mania for securitization, or the Washington Consensus, or the dollar as world currency.In an expansive sense, the big question turns on how we think capitalism, or if you prefer, modernity, industrialization, imperialism, and the many other possible ‘master processes’ (Tilly 1984) of world-historical change. Thealternative is between differing ‘ways of seeing’– between, say, a capitalism (or modernity, or industrial society) that acts upon nature, and one that develops through human and extra-human natures.We have, I believe, arrived at a powerful eductive moment– one that allows us to erase old boundaries and open new vistas, and one where we can reconstitute each of these processes on the historical basis of the nature–society relation.3
