New Earth
Economic productivity and ecological plunder go hand in hand. For global capitalism needs to dominate so-called nature in order to thrive. Like the alienation of labor discussed in my previous blog post, our current ecological crises call for deep economic transformation.
Exploitation and Appropriation
That’s the lesson, both sobering and inspiring, to be learned from a pathbreaking book by Jason W. Moore titled Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015). Moore does not deny that exploitation of paid labor lies at the heart of capitalism. If paid labor power were not exploited, corporations and investors could not benefit financially from the work done, and their wealth would not grow. To sustain such growth, either the paid labor must become ever more productive, or the wages paid must diminish.
Mountaintop removal mine in southwest Virginia, USA
Moore argues, however, that the exploitation of paid labor simultaneously requires the appropriation of so-called nature. By appropriation Moore means all the ways in which “unpaid work” supports and enables the exploitation of paid labor. Over the past five centuries, these ways have included what he calls the “Four Cheaps”: unpaid human work (much of it, such as childcare, done by women), food, energy, and raw materials. Through exploration, colonization, slavery, scientific revolutions, and technological breakthroughs, the capitalist system has constantly sought out new resources at a low cost. When one resource becomes too scarce or raises the cost of producing commodities, capitalists quickly move on to others. In Moore’s words, “Every act of exploitation (of commodified labor-power) therefore depends on an even greater act of appropriation (of unpaid work/energy)” (p. 54).
If Moore is right—and I think he is—then we cannot change the beating exploitative heart of capitalism without breaking its dependence on the appropriation of so-called nature. By the same token, however, we cannot address the ecological “effects” of capitalist transactions—climate change, pollution, water scarcity, species die-offs, famines, viral pandemics, etc.—without simultaneously confronting the exploitation of paid labor. Plunder and productivity go hand-in-hand.
Web of Life
All of this suggests, in turn, that we need to reimagine our relation to so-called nature. I say “so-called,” because the modern concept of “nature” already embodies the separation and even antagonism between humans and the rest of Earth that capitalism both assumes and secures. To distinguish between “nature” and “society” or “nature” and “culture” encourages us to regard other creatures as mere resources for human use and abuse, not as fellow earthlings with their own integrity and purpose.
“Finding My Roots.” Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
When I was in high school many decades ago, our biology teacher assigned a little book on ecology by John Storer titled The Web of Life. This was just a few years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) began to awaken North Americans to the environmental destruction wrought by synthetic pesticides. My high school introduction to ecology imprinted “the web of life” as an image of interconnection among all creatures, an image informed by my growing up on a small dairy farm, where we learned to care for and care about the land and animals.
That’s precisely the image Jason Moore uses to challenge the separation between society and nature, between humans and the rest of Earth, that capitalism fosters. Instead, he says, we need to resituate capitalism itself in the web of life. Or, to use terms introduced in my blog post Critical Hope, we need to envision a society where all creatures flourish—not only humans, and not only some privileged people—and where they flourish in interconnection with each other. For this, we need an economy that carefully stewards both human and nonhuman potentials for the sake of interconnected flourishing.
End or Beginning?
Solar eclipse in Kentucky, USA. Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash
At the end of his book, Moore asks whether, in our current ecological crises, we might be witnessing “the end of cheap nature.” Have we reached an unsurpassable limit to the growth of privately controlled wealth at the expense of Earth itself? Are we nearing the end of so-called nature’s capacity to be both “resource zone and rubbish bin” (p. 296) for capitalist transactions?
If we are near the end, then we need to ask whether capitalism, with its heavy reliance on both exploiting paid labor and appropriating unpaid resources, can become a more stewardly economy. If it can’t, then what are the prospects for new, postcapitalist ways to organize economic life around the world? Or, if it can—if capitalism does still hold possibilities for genuine resourcefulness or stewardship—then how can we break its reliance on exploitation and appropriation?
Ronald Saunders from Warrington, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There’s no going back to a pre-capitalist economy, nor should we want to: pre-capitalist societies had their own forms of oppression and violence. But are there ways to move forward? Can the end of cheap nature be when newly interconnected flourishing begins? Might there be healing for what I have called Earth’s Lament? These questions, both sobering and inspiring, arise when we resituate capitalism in the web of life.
