Jason W. Moore

Binghamton University | SUNY Binghamton · Department of Sociology

Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing his...

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow historicization, I argue for the Capitalocene, understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life. In Part I, I pursue two argument...

In this essay, I elaborate the possibilities for a unified theory of historical capitalism – one that views the accumulation of capital and the production of nature (humans included!) as dialectically constituted. In this view, the modern world-system is a capitalist world-ecology, a world-historical matrix of human- and extra-human nature premised...

It is now widely understood that the “end of cheap food” has arrived. But just what does this mean for the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism, and for the future of capitalism? In this essay, I argue that cheap food has been recurrent condition for the revival of accumulation in successive eras of capitalism. Neoliberalism has been no exception. The c...

Comida barata y mal clima: del plusvalor al valor negativo en la ecología-mundo capitalista, Encrucijadas 23(1, 2023), 1-46. Traduccion: Ismael de la Villa Hervas. Resumen El capitalismo, entendido como una ecología-mundo que articula la acumulación, el poder y la naturaleza en una unidad dialéctica, ha tendido a evadir las denominadas dinámicas m...

No civilization has organized through the visual more than capitalism. Its capacity to image, survey, and map planetary ecologies of every kind has been a centerpiece of modern world history. That’s a story of capitalism, not as a narrowly-defined economic system but as a way of organizing life: as a world-ecology premised on endless accumulation a...

TEMPI PRESENTI. Tra i suoi libri, per ombre corte, «Ecologia-mondo e crisi del capitalismo» e «Antropocene o Capitalocene?». Una intervista allo storico dell’ambiente e docente di Economia politica a Binghamton: «Il mio ecologismo si ispira a quello di contadini e lavoratori, alle loro lotte per la giustizia. La politica dominante è invece un ostac...

We live in times of anthropogenic climate crisis. Or do we? This essay shows how “humanity” is a thoroughly modern fetish, forged in the bloodbath of militarized accumulation and conquest after 1492. To say the the Anthropos drives the climate crisis implicates a historical actor that does not exist. But the reality is different. Humanity does noth...

Like Nature, Technology is one of our most dangerous words. It’s a metaphysic, a narrative prime mover endowed with supernatural powers. Such words are never innocent. They are never just words. They are guiding threads for the rulers. For the rest of us, they’re everyday folk concepts. These concepts shape what we see and what we don’t see, what w...

Żyjemy w czasach antropogenicznego kryzysu klimatycznego. Ale czy na pewno? Szkic pokazuje, jak w krwawej łaźni zmilitaryzowanej akumulacji i podboju po 1492 r. ukształtował się na wskroś nowoczesny fetysz „ludzkości”. Twierdzenie, że to Antropos napędza kryzys klimatyczny, implikuje aktora historycznego, który nie istnieje. Rzeczywistość jest odmi...

We live in times of anthropogenic climate crisis. Or do we? This essay shows how “humanity” is a thoroughly modern fetish forged in the bloodbath of militarized accumulation and conquest after 1492. To say that the Anthropos drives the climate crisis implicates a historical actor that does not exist. But the reality is different. Humanity does noth...

The political distance between so-called liberal environmentalism and ecofascism has never been quite so large as we would like. Liberal environmentalism and ecofascism share many of the same elements in their cosmology. They have different politics and different political inflections – for example, the environmentalist right is much more strident...

La natura non è né un osservatore innocente, né una vittima che può essere “salvata”. Tanto meno la natura è una descrizione libera da valori di uccelli e alberi, di rocce e bestiame, di torrenti di montagna o inondazioni torrenziali. No, davvero. Natura, ha osservato Raymond Williams, è la parola più complessa della lingua, di qualsiasi lingua mod...

Anthropogenic phraseology serves double duty for much of the Green Left. It works descriptively, advancing a naïve empiricism. To the degree that a philosophical an-thropology is offered, we are served up a philosophy of history that turns on a self-referential, even tautological, conception of human nature: “The struggle for freedom represents the...

In Alex Gebara e Leo-nardo Marques, eds., História das mercadorias: trabalho, meio ambiente e capitalismo mundial (séculos XVI-XIX) (São Leopoldo: Casa Leiria, 2023), 41-77. Este artigo busca restaurar e operacionalizar o conceito de fronteira para o estudo da expansão capitalista mundial e sua tendência estrutural à degradação ambiental. Estudios...

Escrevendo em meio ao maior boom econômico na his-tória do capitalismo, um historiador texano chamado Walter Prescott Webb acreditava que o colapso era iminente. O ano era 1952. Webb argumentava que o capitalismo moderno foi pos-sível por causa da Grande Fronteira, aberta em 1492. A Europa, chamada por ele de "Metrópole", era pobre em 1492; ela enr...

L’accumulazione infinita e patologica Jason W. Moore, 20.04.2023, Il Manifesto MARX CI RICORDA che il capitalismo produce zone di sacrificio: «popolazioni usa e getta» e «materiale umano usa e getta». Queste non sono «esternalità» come nel linguaggio dell’economia neoclassica, ma piuttosto sono «una delle condizioni d’esistenza del modo di produzi...

Questo non è un libro sulla Natura. È un libro sul capitalismo, sui rapporti umani di potere e ri/produzione, e su come entrambi si sviluppano nella rete della vita. Esso parla di come la disuguaglianza senza precedenti tra gli esseri umani nel capitalismo sia resa possibile ed espressa attraverso un dominio senza precedenti – non dell’Uomo sulla N...

CFP extended! April 2023. The climate crisis amplifies longstanding inequalities of power and wealth in global capitalism. For over a half-century, the "environmental" question has been central to contentious world politics, framed by growth, sustainability, development, and justice. Growth. Sustainability. Justice. Development… For whom? And in w...

Forthcoming, Technological Accidents, Joke Brower and Sjoerd van Tuinen, eds. (Leiden: V2 Publishing), 2023. Like Nature, Technology is one of our most dangerous words. It’s a metaphysic, a narrative prime mover endowed with supernatural powers. Such words are never innocent. They are never just words. They are guiding threads for the rulers, and,...

For nearly a century, the Environmental Imaginary has been ob-sessed with resource scarcity. But what if the twenty-first century’s pivotal biophysical contradiction turns not on resources, but on waste? Marco Armiero puts this question to us in Wasteocene. If -cene fatigue has set in, if the -cene mania seems to produce ever more banal neologisms,...

When I grow up, I hope to write a book half as good as Power Struggles. Its narrative is elegant, engaging, accessible. Its insights will keep you thinking long after you read the last page. Power Struggles is that rare book: scholarly without being scholastic; intimately ethnographic without losing sight of the Big Picture; politically committed w...

Warum scheint es einfacher zu sein, sich das Ende der Welt vorzustellen als das Ende des Kapitalismus? Ein Teil der Antwort basiert auf einer Kluft zwischen radikalem ökonomischen und ökologischen Denken. Wie arbeitet sich der Kapitalismus durch das Lebensnetz? Wie können wir den Kapitalismus nicht bloß als wirtschaftliches System von Märkten und P...

Imperialism is not merely about the refashioning of colonial ecologies in the interest of metropolitan accumulation. It also turns on Great Power conflict. Here the escalation of war moves to center stage, just as the last frontiers of Cheap Nature are exhausted, just as the climate crisis accelerates. That escalation expresses the Westphalian Orde...

Warum scheint es einfacher zu sein, sich das Ende der Welt vorzustellen als das Ende des Kapitalismus? Ein Teil der Antwort basiert auf einer Kluft zwischen radikalem ökonomischen und ökologischen Denken. Wie arbeitet sich der Kapitalismus durch das Lebensnetz? Wie können wir den Kapitalismus nicht bloß als wirtschaftliches System von Märkten und P...

Wer ist für die Klimakrise verantwortlich? Wer kein Klimaleugner ist, wird schnell die Antwort parat haben: die Menschheit. Leben wir nicht im Anthropozän, dem Zeitalter der Erdgeschichte, in das sich der Mensch unwiderruflich eingeschrieben hat? Ja und nein. Zwischen »Die Menschen sind verantwortlich!« und »Bestimmte Menschen sind verantwortlich!...

For nearly a century, the Environmental Imaginary has been ob-sessed with resource scarcity. But what if the twenty-first century’s pivotal biophysical contradiction turns not on resources, but on waste? Marco Armiero puts this question to us in Wasteocene. If -cene fatigue has set in, if the -cene mania seems to produce ever more banal neologisms,...

The climate crisis is anthropogenic. Literally, “made by humans.” We’re told this every time we read or watch or hear climate news. We hear it almost every time we hear a scholar speak on climate change, or when we read a book or article on the climate crisis. The “anthropogenic” party line finds few dissidents, regardless of academic discipline or...

Published in Emancipations 2(1/4), 1-45. The Capitalocene’s ecocidal logic of imperial accumulation – from the silver mines of Potosí to American nuclear and chemical warfare in East Asia – did not “destroy the environment.” Environments cannot be destroyed, only their habitability for specific biota (Lewontin and Levins 1997). These imperial pract...

¿Sería el homo sapiens el causante de la destrucción del planeta? En un nuevo libro, ¿Antropoceno o Capitaloceno? Naturaleza, historia y la crisis del capitalismo, Donna Haraway, Jason Moore y otros proponen un paso adelante: centrarse en el sistema que produce "naturaleza barata" y la extinción de culturas, lenguas y vidas. Las noticias no son bue...

No civilization has been more Promethean than capitalism in its aspirations. Named after the Greek Titan who gave fire to humankind, Prometheanism is understood as a kind of environmental—but not (necessarily) environmentalist—strategy for the domination and management of something usually called Nature. Unfortunately, the discussion often stops th...

La crisi che stiamo attraversando ha molte facce: è una crisi di produzione della vita, una crisi climatica, di estinzione di massa e di molte altre forme di trasformazione del sistema planetario. Inoltre, si tratta di una crisi della capacità di accumulare profitti da parte del capitale, e della fine della natura a buon mercato, che si rivela nel...

As notícias não são boas para o planeta Terra. A humanidade — e todo o restante da vida que a acompanha — encontra-se agora no limiar do que os cientistas do Sistema Terra chamam de “mudança de estado”. Esse momento está representado na consciência crescente acerca das mudanças climáticas — entre pesquisadores e também entre um amplo público preocu...

Jason W. Moore Interview, Circular Metabolism podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvtdkZhT1yw

Foreword to William I. Robinson, Can Global Capitalism Endure? (2022). Can Global Capitalism Endure? Probably not. As Robinson illustrates, the ongoing breakdown of the five-century capital accumulation model is at once producer and product of a novel political project, pursued by a critical fraction of the imperialist bourgeoisie – the Transnation...

This fateful conjuncture – an epochal crisis of capitalism – asks us, as ever, to revisit Marx’s dialectical imagination. Marx’s genius joined the economic analysis of accumulation crisis with the sociology of class. But he did not stop there. For Marx, class exploitation under capitalism – the struggle over surplus value – is irreducibly socio-eco...

El Capitaloceno se ha convertido en la contranarrativa más importante al Antropoceno popular y a su reposicionamiento neoliberal del lamento de Pogo: “Hemos conocido al enemigo y somos nosotros”. La fuerza mítica del hombre y la naturaleza no se socava fácilmente, y sus linajes cartesianos, lockeanos y maltusianos son muy fácilmente olvidados —si e...

Place: University of Bonn Date: June 8-10, 2022 Abstracts due: January 25, 2022

LfB: Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus 7 (2021), 4-11

DALAM bukunya Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore menjelaskan urgensi bagi pengerjaan ulang teoritis yang lengkap dan sintesis dari pemikiran Marxis, pegiat lingkungan, dan feminis dengan menyatakan: “Saya pikir banyak dari kita memahami secara intuitif - bahkan jika kerangka analitis kita tertinggal di belakang - bahwa kapitalisme lebih...

W roku 1800 kapitalizm nie był żadną Ateną, która wyskoczyła, w pełni ukształtowana i uzbrojona, z głowy węglonośnego Zeusa. Cywilizacje nie powstają drogą Wielkich Wybuchów. Wyłaniają się poprzez bifurkacje i kaskadowe przekształcenia działalności ludzkiej w sieci życia. Źródło kaskady tkwi w chaosie, jaki nastąpił po epokowym kryzysie cywilizacji...

We are discovering in the era of climate crisis that the Transition Debate is a debate over the origins and crisis tendencies of capitalism in the web of life. The original Debate emerged in its contemporary form in the thick of the Cold War, assuming mature form during the world revolution of 1968. It was a historical-analytical debate over the hi...

The Marxist geographer talks with Tom Gann and josie sparrow about world ecology, Marxist beef, and what it means to be in solidarity with oppressed and devalued natures. Jason W. Moore's work-from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of our Planet (co-written with Raj Patel), to the huge range...

Effective ideologies blur the lines between empirical realities and political interpretation. Some members of the human species are indeed driving planetary life into the planetary inferno. This geological and geohistorical transition is often narrated as the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. Major corporate news platforms – like The New York Times and...

Wiadomości dla planety Ziemia nie są pomyślne. Ludzkość – a wraz z nią reszta życia – znalazła się na progu czegoś, co przedstawiciele i przedstawicielki nauki o systemie Ziemi nazywają „zwrotem systemowym” [„state shift”]. Wagę tego momentu podkreśla rosnąca świadomość zmian klimatu – wśród badaczy i badaczek, a także wśród zatroskanej opinii publ...

Este artículo vincula dos grandes acontecimientos histórico-mundiales: el auge del capitalismo tras 1492 y su crisis epocal actual, al final del Holoceno. El autor sostiene que la interminable acumulación de capital ha sido, desde el principio, posibilitada por la interminable conquista de la Tierra: la Gran Frontera. La ecología-mundo capitalista...

La tesis del Capitaloceno propone que la actual crisis planetaria es el resultado de una lucha de clases a nivel mundial. En esa lucha, la burguesía del mundo triun-fó… por ahora. Su logro supremo es haber puesto fin al Holoceno. Y esto nos deja una cosa en claro: la crisis climática no es antropogénica («procede de los huma-nos»), sino capitalogén...

Los acontecimientos de finales del siglo XX, con la victoria del mundo capitalista sobre el socialismo soviético, influyeron de forma definitiva en la disciplina de Relaciones Interna-cionales. La euforia liberal-realista que acompañó el supuesto "fin de la historia" vaticinado por Fukuyama pareció confirmar que los postulados de las escuelas hegem...

Natureza, Dinheiro, Trabalho, Cuidados, Alimentos, Energia e Vida São estas as sete coisas que fizeram o nosso mundo e que moldarão o futuro. ao torná-las acessíveis e baratas, a economia moderna tem controlado, transformado e devastado a Terra. Este livro apresenta uma nova abordagem à análise das emergências do planeta nos dias de hoje. Associa...

Die kapitalistische Aneignung der Natur gleicht einem ausbeuterischen Klassenverhältnis, so Jason Moore. Interview mit Jason Moore geführt von Michael Kleinod Der weltökologische Ansatz des US-amerikanischen Sozialwissenschaftlers Jason W. Moore sorgt unter ökologisch Bewegten für Begeisterung und Kontroversen. Er will verständlich machen, wie die...

La transición al capitalismo fue una cuestión teórica importante, con amplias implicaciones políticas para la izquierda en el mundo durante toda la era dorada de la hegemonía norteamericana, entre finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el largo estancamiento global que comenzó en los años 1970. Íntimamente vinculado a cuestiones políticas tan presi...

Кто виноват в климатическом кризисе? Для всех, кто не отрицает изменения климата, ответ на этот вопрос прост: человек. Кто в здравом уме будет спорить с тем, что изменения климата — антропогенны, то есть вызваны деятельностью человека? Мы живем в эпоху антропоцена, то есть в эпоху человека как геологической силы, так?Мой ответ: и да, и нет. Предпол...

Doğa/Toplum düalizminin temel özellikleri arasında, neyin Toplumsal neyin Doğal olduğu arasına sert ve keskin çizgiler çizerek hakikat iddialarını sınırlama eğilimi yer alır. İşte size bir yarık: epistemik bir yarık. Özünde, iki ayrı epistemik alanın yaratılmasına ve yeniden üretilmesine dahil edilen bir dizi şiddetli soyutlama vardır: Doğa ve Topl...

¿Quién es responsable por la crisis climática? Para todas las personas que no sean negacionistas climáticas, hay una respuesta fácil a esta pregunta: la humanidad. ¿Quién, en su sano juicio, podría cuestionar la idea de que el cambio climático es antropogénico (hecho por humanos)? ¿Acaso no vivimos en el Antropoceno: la era del Hombre como una fuer...

The journal Relaciones Internacionales has been published without interruption for 15 years; this electronic publication of the Autónoma University of Madrid (Spain), published every four months, has become a reference in the Spanish language literature on the theoretical and epistemological reflection of international relations, thanks to its effo...

La revista Relaciones Internacionales se publica ininterrumpidamente desde hace casi quince años; durante esos tres lustros, esta publicación cuatrimestral electrónica de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (España) se ha convertido en un referente de la literatura actual en lengua castellana sobre la reflexión teórica y epistemológica en la discipli...

How does capitalism work through the web of life? How can we begin to understand capitalism not simply as an economic system of markets and production and a social system of class and culture, but as a way of organising nature? This essay explores a relational, historical, and geographical answer to these questions. Arguing that capitalism is a wor...

Yarım binyıllık sömürgeci kapitalizmin anatomisi sayılabilecek bu çalışma, apaçık ortada durduğundan olsa gerek, çoğunlukla önemsemediğimiz doğa, para, emek, bakım, gıda, enerji ve yaşamın ucuzlatılmasıyla kapitalizmin insanlarla yaşam ağı arasındaki ilişkileri nasıl kontrol ettiğinin izini sürüyor. İlk kapitalist ürün şekerin üretiminden kapitalis...

Erderwärmung, Naturkatastrophen, der Finanzcrash und Hungersnöte – im noch jungen 21. Jahrhundert häufen sich Krisen globalen Ausmaßes. Statt sie getrennt zu lesen, gilt es, sie zusammen zu denken – und zu begreifen, dass der Kapitalismus kein der Natur äußerliches System ist, sondern diese erst hervorbringt. Den Kapitalismus gilt es, als Naturerei...

In vista dello sciopero globale per il clima che si terrà il 27 settembre, Effimera propone la pubblicazione di una serie di riflessioni dal dibattito italiano, a partire da un'intervista di Gennaro Avallone a Jason Moore. Oggi, la seconda parte dell'intervista (qui la prima). Ricordiamo che i contributi, in inglese, verranno pubblicati in ottobre...

In vista dello sciopero globale per il clima che si terrà il 27 settembre, Effimera propone la pubblicazione di una serie di riflessioni dal dibattito italiano, a partire da un'intervista di Gennaro Avallone a Jason W. Moore, di cui oggi pubblichiamo la prima parte. Si tratta di una discussione globale su natura sociale astratta, valore-negativo e...

Published in Maize 6 (2019), 49-54. Who is responsible for the climate crisis? For everyone who isn’t a climate denialist, there’s an easy answer to the question: humanity. Who, in their right mind, would challenge the idea that climate change is anthropogenic (made by humans)? Are we not living in the Anthropocene: the Age of Man as geological fo...

Rozdział "Tania natura" z książki: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore: "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (Black Inc., Carlton 2018) w przekładzie: Andrzej W. Nowak, Przemysław Czapliński. Przekład zamieszczony w książce: "O jeden las za daleko". Red. P. Czapliński, Joanna B. Bednarek, Dawid Gostyński (2019). Autorzy opisują zapoczątkowany w XV...

The most dystopian story brings out capitalism's darkest and most oppressive features. And the most utopian stories bring out modernity's most hopeful and emancipatory features of modernity. Utopias/dystopias are at once predictive retrodictive. These forms of story-telling and world-making are increasingly necessary in the twenty-first century. Th...

Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labor in the process of production; or is something broader, as in the idea of land and the territory upon which capitalism develops? Such questions rest on a conception of extra-h...

The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet’s favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind’s 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now c...

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 app...

Why does it seem easier to imagine the end of the world than to see the end of capitalism? Part of the answer turns on a rift between radical economic and ecological thought.

Critical geography as a field has yet to reckon with a fundamental geographical blind spot: the historical-geographical patterns of capitalism as a whole. There has been a steady—and studied—reluctance to grapple with capitalism as a historical-geographical place. A geography of value relations must proceed from the unities-in-diversity of capitali...

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s pl...

Siguiendo con la línea de investigación en ecología-mundo, el autor explica aquí la centralidad que ocupan la reproducción de la mano de obra y el trabajo no remunerado (humano y extra-humano) para el mantenimiento de los ciclos de acumulación capitalista. Aunque el papel que las migraciones cumplen en estas dinámicas estructurales es sólo brevemen...

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstr...

Jason W. Moore: «Stiamo vivendo il crollo del capitalismo»-Intervista di Joseph Confavreux e Jade Lindgaard-Uno storico propone una tesi controcorrente: la natura non è stata sfruttata, ma è stata prodotta dal capitalismo, il quale se n'è servito per creare della ricchezza. Per Jason W. Moore, è assai più moderno e molto più fruttuoso pensare una «...

In this CFP we are looking for papers that address commodity frontiers broadly-defined. Papers may address place making for expanded commodity production, including the enclosures of the commons and the exhaustion of nature, land and labor, or technologies/policies/etc. that enable frontier making, or a related subject.

Das Anthropozän ist zum wichtigsten – und auch zum gefährlichsten – Umweltkonzept unserer Zeit geworden. Es ist nicht deshalb gefährlich, weil es die planetarische Krise so falsch erfasst, sondern weil es zwar die laufenden „Zustandsveränderungen“ der Naturen beschreibt, gleichzeitig aber die dahinterliegende Geschichte mystifziert (Barnosky u.a. 2...

Cómo conocemos una crisis ecológica cuan-do la vemos? Para gran parte del mundo, la res-puesta es un poco como el viejo cliché acerca de definir la pornograf ía: lo sé cuando la veo. Las respuestas de sentido común a las preguntas espinosas siempre tienen un núcleo de verdad. Pero, ¿es el sentido común un buen sentido? El cambio climático está incu...

“Toplum artı doğa” anlayışının yeşil aritmetiğindeki sorun çevre adaleti ve toplumsal adalet, doğada sürdürülebilirlik ve toplumsal sürdürülebilirlik, ekolojik emperyalizm ve normal emperyalizm arasında yaptığımız garip ayrım. Emperyalizmin tarihini bilen herkes bilir ki aslında her şey “Neye değer veriyoruz?” ve “Toplumun hangi kesimine değer veri...

We live at a crossroads in the history of our species – and of planetary life. What comes next is unknowable with any certainty. But it is not looking good. Environmentalist theory and research tells us, today, just how bad it is. Mass extinction. Climate Change. Ocean acidification. To these planetary shifts, one can add countless regional stories...