Jason W. Moore – The Rise and Fall of Cheap Nature

Work, Power, and Capital in Making & Transcending the Planetary Crisis

Toronto — 13 December 2016.

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a ‘world-ecology’ of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength – and the source of its problems – is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labour, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature – rather than capitalism and nature – is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

Jason W. Moore – Sociology, Binghamton University and author of Capitalism and the Web of Life (2015).

Sponsored by: Centre for Social Justice, Socialist Project and from York University: Global Labour Research Centre, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Geography.

[More LeftStreamed on ecology: Facing the Anthropocene; After the Sands; Climate Crisis and Climate Realism; Linda McQuaig is Right.]