World-Ecological Perspective and the Law
Discussion
Jeremy Santora:
"The world-ecology perspective (Moore 2003c, 2003a, 2015). This framework takes modernity to be an organic whole consisting of structures of knowledge; relations of power, re/production, and wealth; and patterns of environment-making (Moore 2015:3). World-ecology has opened a plethora of research areas, including financialized accumulation (Ortiz 2020, 2023), military revolutions (Antonacci 2021), desalination (O’Neill 2020), and the tributary ecologies of the High Middle Ages (İdiman 2022a, 2022b). Its capacity to intervene into these bodies of scholarship to provide novel syntheses pivots on its rejection of Cartesian dualism, in favor of a dialectical and materialist approach that takes capital accumulation, class struggle, and environment-making to be internally connected as a “rich totality of many determinations” (Marx 1973:100; see also Harvey 2004; Marx and Engels [1932] 2010; Ollman 2003).
By offering an analysis of legal Naturalism, world-ecology can push the Transition Debate beyond the impasse of infrastructure and superstructure, represented respectively by the social property form and commodity form camps. Legal Naturalism posits a duality in legal systems: there are both positive laws—sovereign commandments backed by organized state violence—and Natural laws—axiological systems which determine the validating norms that govern social relations (Táíwò 2015:67–68, 80; see also Benjamin 2021; Blomley 2003). In this framework, positive laws derive their legitimacy from external and transcend validating norms such as God, Reason, or Nature (Tigar and Levy [1977] 2000:259–60). Where a sole focus on positive law reifies the law as a static structure, and a sole focus on Natural law abstracts axioms into transhistorical concepts, the world-ecology perspective reconciles this duality by fore fronting their internal relations. Through the double-internality of positive and Natural law, world-ecology sees capitalism as a “structure of class power” that organizes webs of life around capital accumulation by deploying “force as a permanent weapon” and controlling the “means of mental production” (quotes respectively from Moore 2024; Luxemburg [1913] 2003:351; Marx and Engels [1932] 2010). In this conception, law is a socio-ecological infrastructure—a material force that reorganizes webs of life to facilitate capital accumulation. Positive laws are thus shaped and made possible by ideological claims about Nature produced by the intelligentsia of ruling classes. They are specific class projects. Qualitative transformations in Natural law are a product of crises and turning points within the medium-term cycles and long-term trends of the capitalist world-ecology. The successive reinvention of Natural law makes possible new positive laws, operationalized through coercive state-violence, to reorganize webs of life and rewrite capitalism’s rules of reproduction.
World-ecology contains a novel conceptual architecture to enable such an account of law.
First, world-ecology provides a materialist account of ideology through the concept of ruling abstractions. This concept denotes the ideological software and practical guide that ruling classes deploy through law, violence, and cultural power to reorganize webs of life (Moore 2021b, 2022c:8). Synthesizing Marx and Engels’ ([1932] 2010:59) “ruling ideas” and Sohn- Rethel’s ([1970] 2021) “real abstraction,” ruling abstractions describe more than just belief structures. They are material forces, “developed, used, and periodically reinvented by the imperial bourgeoise and their intelligentsias to practically reshape the world in ways favorable to the endless accumulation of capital” (Moore 2023d:11). For instance, the promethean trinity of Man, Nature, and Civilization—forged amidst the Little Ice Age (c. 1550-1700)—provided the necessary “managerial ethos” to political resolve the 17th century climate crisis through dispossession, proletarianization, and the relocation of most human and extra-human life to the category Nature (Moore 2022a:417; see also Plumwood 2002; Wynter 2003). Ruling abstractions thus shape the contours of and make possible new class projects. Through this lens the ideological history of legal thought can be connected to concrete legal projects.
Second, world-ecology maintains positivism’s focus on extra-economic state force through the concepts of accumulation by appropriation, abstract social nature, and geopower (Moore 2018; Parenti 2016). Appropriation describes the extra-economic mobilization of uncapitalized work/energy through material and symbolic moments of primitive accumulation (Moore 2015:111). On the one hand, capital turns to states to deploy “force as a permanent weapon” to open frontiers of Cheap labor, energy, food, and raw materials and thus allow for their renewed and expanded flow within the commodity system (Luxemburg [1913] 2003:351; Moore 2015:98). On the other hand, capital uses geopower to create surplus profits by making “territory make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable” in ways conducive to capital accumulation (Parenti 2016:117). In other words, it produces an abstract social nature that optimizes the appropriation of unpaid (extra-)human work outside the cash nexus in the same way that capitalization optimizes abstract social labor to intensify the exploitation of paid work within the cash nexus (Moore 2018:245–47). World-ecology thus offers an account of how ruling classes deploys coercive state-power through positive laws to appropriate uncapitalized work/energy and remake legal relations.
Third, world-ecology enables law to be approached as a historical process. By unifying legal dualism, world-ecology enables historical capitalism to be understood as “a history of revolutionizing nature” (Moore 2015:112). It grasps this history through the concepts of historical nature, world-ecological regimes, and world-ecological revolutions. Historical nature describes the form that human and extra-human relations take at specific conjunctures. While there is a historical nature endemic to capitalism as a whole—the “praxis of external nature”—there are also successive historical natures “coproduced through the law of value” (Moore 2015:112, 116). These successive historical natures name the form that human and extra-human relations take under distinct world-ecological regimes. In other words, successive world-hegemonies secured durable governance patterns, class structures, organizational forms, and technological innovations to sustain and propel world accumulation (Moore 2015:158). They did so by optimizing their control and management the web of life. While it enabled new cycles of accumulation, it also brought up new crises. As these regimes exhausted the metabolic conditions of their reproduction they opened the door for new capitalist and terrirotialist organizations to revolutionize scientific practices, legal structures, and cultural norms for “reproducing capital, power, and nature” (Moore 2015:113). Through this lens, world-ecology enables legal transformation to be grasped in capitalism longue durée by connecting these turning points to crises and cycles that punctuate historical capitalism.
World-ecology thus offers a novel approach to the study of historical legal transformations; one that resolves the lacuna at the heart of the Transition Debate."