The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy

Abstract

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.

Keywords:

• world-ecology
• history of capitalism
• Anthropocene
• political ecology
• historical political economy
• environmental history
• historical geography

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Diana C. Gildea, and also to Gennaro Avallone, Henry Bernstein, Jay Bolthouse, Neil Brenner, Holly Jean Buck, Alvin Camba, Christopher Cox, Sharae Deckard, Joshua Eichen, Samuel Fassbinder, Kyle Gibson, Daniel Hartley, Donna J. Haraway, Gerry Kearns, Emmanuel Leonardi, Ben Marley, Justin McBrien, Laura McKinney, Phil McMichael, Tobias Meneley, Michael Niblett, Roberto José Ortiz, Christian Parenti, Raj Patel, Andy Pragacz, Stephen Shapiro, Daniel Cunha Richard Walker and Tony Weis for conversations and correspondence on the themes explored in this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I chart the genealogy of the Capitalocene elsewhere (Moore 2016b). The term originates with Andreas Malm. The conceptual use of the Capitalocene to signify capitalism as a system of power, capital and nature is broadly shared with Haraway (2016). Haraway and I began experimenting with the concept independently before discovering each other in 2013.

2 Real abstractions ‘are not mental categories that ideally precede the concrete totality; they are real abstractions that are truly caught up in the [socio-ecological] whole’ (Toscano 2008, 274–75).

3 Although this is how Malm (2016) uses it.

4 A problem besetting radical as well as mainstream accounts (e.g., Foster et al. 2010; Steffen et al. 2011).

5 It is difficult for me to read the Soviet project as a fundamental rupture. The great industrialization drive of the 1930s relied – massively – on the importation of fixed capital, which by 1931 constituted 90 percent of Soviet imports. The Soviets were so desperate to obtain hard currency that ‘the state was prepared to export anything and everything, from gold, oil and furs to the pictures in the Hermitage Museum’ (Kagarlitsky 2007, 272–73). If the Soviet project resembles another of production, it is surely the tributary, not socialist, mode, through which the state directly extracts the surplus. Nor did the Soviets turn inward after 1945. Soviet trade with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries (in constant dollars) increased 8.9 percent annually between 1950 and 1970, rising to 17.9 percent a year in the following decade (calculated from Gaidar 2007, 14) – a trend accompanied by sharply deteriorating terms of trade and rising debt across the Soviet-led zone (Kagarlitsky 2007). Need we recall that the 1980s debt crisis was detonated not by Mexico but by Poland in 1981 (Green 1983)?

6 A point made brilliantly by von Werlhof (1988).

7 Presented here as a logical sequence, the historical geography of this process is dynamic, overlapping and considerably messier (Moore 2015a).

8 Produce does not mean ‘call forth at will’, but rather a dialectic of co-production (Marx 1977, 283).

9 Movements to drive down labor costs are found in technical innovation in core industrial sectors, alongside class politics and imperial initiatives to widen the sphere of appropriation. Thus, English labor-to-capital costs were 60 percent higher than on the Continent in the mid-eighteenth century, encouraging mechanization (Allen 2011, 31–32). Nevertheless, the new industrialization gathered steam in those regions of England – such as the northern Midlands – where wages were low relative to southern England (Hunt 1986). Yet, such mechanization was possible, especially after the 1780s, because of technical innovations that were ‘capital-saving’ as much as they were ‘labor-saving’ (von Tunzelman 1981), at least until the 1830s (Deane 1973). In textiles, we are clearly dealing with rising labor productivity. But even here the technical composition of capital (the mass of machinery) could rise much faster than its value composition because of opportunities for appropriating cheap energy and cheap iron through the coal/steampower/iron nexus.

10 Here, Federici’s critique of Marx is correct to the letter (2012) – that Marx does not recognize the centrality of reproductive work. It also obscures the methodological possibilities of connecting the appropriation of unpaid work to relative surplus value.

11 The Weberian tradition has long made the argument for the centrality of modernity’s forms and logics of rationalization. In my view, the differences with Marx’s value-relational approach have been overstated, unproductively framed by economy/culture and economy/polity dualisms. The argument for abstract social nature incorporates certain elements of the Weberian – and Foucauldian – traditions, but with an eye to those practices that directly enter into the identification and appropriation of sources of unpaid work in service to capital accumulation.

12 Missed in Harvey’s pioneering formulation (1982) – and subsequent elaborations – is the significance of successive waves of producing built environments across the urban–rural divide. While the production of urban built environments facilitates the circulation of capital and the exploitation of commodified labor-power, the production of town-country and agrarian built environments also facilitates the productive appropriation of unpaid work for capital, enabling flows of the Four Cheaps to move from country to city. Brenner and Schmid’s groundbreaking arguments on planetary urbanization point in precisely this analytical direction (e.g., 2015).

13 ‘The critical advance came from the re-evaluation of Euclid and the elevation of geometry to the keystone of human knowledge, specifically its application to three-dimensional space representation through single-point perspective theory and technique’ (Cosgrove 1985, 47).

14 ‘There is something radical in the metric system that is related to its revolutionary origin. The metric system was part of a larger project to introduce a rupture at all levels of collective life, to create a “new man”, to initiate a new era in history, and to rationalize social life as a whole’ (Vera 2008, 140).

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Jason W. Moore

Jason W. Moore teaches world history and world-ecology at Binghamton University, where he is an associate professor of sociology and a research fellow at the Fernand Braudel Center. He is the author of Capitalism in the web of life (Verso, 2015) and editor of Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (PM Press, 2016). He writes frequently on the history of capitalism, environmental history and social theory. Moore is presently completing Ecology and the rise of capitalism, an environmental history of the rise of capitalism, and (with Raj Patel) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A User's Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Planet – both with the University of California Press. He is coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network.