World-Ecology
Description
1. Jason W. Moore:
"The world-ecology perspective argues that humans are a part of nature, such that capitalism does not act upon nature but develops through the web of life. In this view, the modern world-system is a capitalist world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature in dialectical unity."
(http://entitleblog.org/2016/01/12/jw-moore-politicalecology-or-worldecology/)
2. Emanuele Leonardi:
" the essential reference of such a global conversation (Leonardi and Pellizzoni, 2019) is represented by Jason Moore, a Marxist sociologist known above all for having developed the analysis of the world-system proposed by Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein in the direction of an in-depth approach to environmental issues. This led to world-ecology, a proposal according to which capitalism does not have an ecological regime but is itself an ecological regime, that is, a specific way of organizing nature. Beyond any residue of Cartesian dualism, the concept of world-ecology refers to an original mixture of social dynamics and natural elements that make up the capitalist mode of production in its historical development, in its tendency to become a world-market. In this framework, the capitalist theory of value imposes space as flat and geometric, time as homogeneous and linear, nature as external, infinite, and free.
In particular, the notion of abstract social nature allows us to better understand the specific terms through which "nature" is internalized in the valorization process as an enabling yet invisible limit—that is, a necessary condition for capital and wage labor to meet, but not a factor directly involved in the act of creating value. Moore identifies the epochal transition from land to work as the primary source of productivity, which took place during the long sixteenth century, the conditio sine qua non for the internalization of nature into value. What does this mean? It means that, for valorization to occur, the vital activities of which nature is an expression must be transformed in such a way as to conform to the logic of value. A framework emerges that, schematically, we can summarize as follows: abstract social labor—that is, wage-labor organized by capital and measured in discrete units of labor time—is the only source of value located in the sphere of production. However, for the mechanisms of value-creation (which Moore defines as the area of commodification or accumulation by capitalization) to be set in motion, it is necessary that a large amount of unpaid (and therefore unwaged) labor be made available to capital. Moore calls this movement accumulation by appropriation: it defines the sphere of abstract social nature in which the elements traditionally relegated to the sphere of reproduction (housework, slave work, environmental “free gifts”) converge. These subjects of reproduction, it is worth reiterating, can function as a condition for value only on the condition that they are “accounted for” as infinite and free (again: enabling yet invisible).
To sum up:
- Capitalist technics seek to mobilize and to appropriate the (unpaid) “forces of nature” so as to make the (paid) “forces of labor” productive in their modern form (the production of surplus value). This is the significance of the production of nature; nature is not a pre-formed object for capital, but a web of relations that capital reshapes so as to advance the contributions of unpaid biospheric “work” for capital accumulation. Capital, in so doing, is reshaped by nature as a whole. (Moore, 2014, p. 295)
A good example of Moore's argumentative strategy is represented by coal: through WE it is possible to accurately reconstruct how the social relations that emerged starting from the sixteenth century transformed coal from simple rock into fossil fuel, as well as the set of biological, physical and geological knowledge necessary to make the very concept of “fuel” conceivable/usable. It follows that the development of production based on coal would have been inconceivable apart from the value relations established in early modernity: “the prejudice of green materialism tells us that ‘coal changed the world.’ But is not the reverse formulation more plausible? New commodity relationships transformed coal (at the same time activating its epochal power)” (Moore, 2017, pp. 53-54)."
Discussion
Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:
"Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.
To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.
This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.
Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.
World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life."
(https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)
Discussion
The World-Ecological perspective and the Law
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."