Jason W. Moore

Environmental crises and the metabolic rift in world-historical perspective

This article proposes a new theoretical framework to study the dialectic of capital and nature over the longue duree of world capitalism. The author proposes that today’s global ecological crisis has its roots in the transition to capitalism during the long sixteenth century. The emergence of capitalism marked not only a decisive shift in the arenas of politics, economy, and society, but a fundamental reorganization of world ecology, characterized by a “metabolic rift,” a progressively deepening rupture in the nutrient cycling between the country and the city. Building upon the historical political economy of Marx, Foster, Arrighi, and Wallerstein, the author proposes a new research agenda organized around the concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation. This agenda aims at discerning the ways in which capitalism’s relationship to nature developed discontinuously over time as recurrent ecological crises have formed a decisive moment of world capitalist crisis, forcing successive waves of restructuring over long historical time..

Capitalism as World-Ecology Braudel and Marx on Environmental History

This essay considers the relevance of Fernand Braudel’s world-historical studies for the theory and practice of environmental history. Arguing against the conventional viewthat Braudel regarded the environment as a backdrop, the essay points to his sophisticated layering of time, space, and nature in which society and ecology actively shape each other. Braudel’s greatest historical-geographical insight is the idea that world-economies are not simply social constructions but also ecological projects. In this fashion, Braudel implicitly suggests the concept “world-ecology.” Although never spelled out in precisely these terms, the idea that ecogeographical processes permeate the ever-shifting relations of region, state, and world-economy runs like red thread through Braudel’s corpus. Braudel understood nature in terms of transitory but identifiable socio-ecological moments that shape and are shaped by a world-ecological whole. Unfortunately, Braudel’s underconceptualized approach prevented him fromidentifying with greater specificity capitalism’s world-ecological contradictions. To build effectively upon Braudel’s ecohistorical insights, we might turn to Marx and Engels’ ecological critique of capitalism.

Capitalist Development in World Historical Perspective

The particular way in which we periodize capitalist history largely depends on the temporal and spatial horizons of our observations and on the conceptual frameworks that underlie those observations. Most periodizations have been based on observations and conceptual frameworks that refer implicitly or explicitly to national dynamics of capitalist development. This is a perfectly legitimate and useful way of analyzing and periodizing capitalist development, provided that we do not conflate the dynamic of capitalist development as it unfolds in specific national (or sub-national) locales with the dynamic of capitalist development as it unfolds in a ‘world’ consisting of a large number and variety of such locales. Although these two dynamics influence one another, each has a logic of its own and must be treated as an object of analysis in its own right.

The Crisis of Feudalism An Environmental History

Environmental historymayhelp explain feudalism’s demise and capitalism’s ascent in the 16th century. Medieval Europe was riven by profound socio-ecological contradictions. Feudalism’s environmental degradation pivoted on the lord-peasant relationship, which limited the possibilities for reinvestment in the land. Consequently, feudalism exhausted the soil and the labor power from which it derived revenues, rendering the population vulnerable to disease. The Black Death decisivelyaltered labor-land ratios in favor of western Europe’s peasantry. This new balance of class forces eliminated the possibility of feudal restoration and led the states, landlords, and merchants to favor geographical expansion—an external rather than internal spatial fix to feudal crisis. This external fix, beginning in the Atlantic world, had capitalist commodityproduction and exchange inscribed within it. Capitalism differed radicallyfrom feudalism in that where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them. From this standpoint, the origins of capitalism mayshed light on today’s ecological crises.

Marx's Ecology and the Environmental History of World Capitalism

It is a common occurrence in the history of ideas, that practitioners of an emergent research perspective will close ranks to defend its legitimacy. On the one hand, such defensiveness often serves to protect “emergent programs against the risks of premature death.”1 On the other hand, it serves to undermine such programs’ longer-run development by cutting off the supply of new ideas. Proponents of the new perspective tend to classify challenges as more or less serious threats. Such challenges are evaluated on this basis rather more than on their merits. External critiques become the preferred response. I think we can see these tendencies embodied in CNS’s recent symposium on John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology2 The debates that ensue from this kind of academic sectarianism typically obscure the original research topic — say, the relation between capitalism and nature — in the struggle to establish the legitimacy of one or another perspective. In the limited space given to me, I wish to by-pass the question of whether Marx’s Ecology is compatible with the research program of ecological Marxism as defined by CNS, and focus directly upon its contribution to a new environmental history of world capitalism.

Ecology and Imperialism

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike DavisThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Book Review Essay: (Re)Discovering Marx’s Materialism

The National Research Councils report on police practices offers a comprehensive review of what scientific research has taught us about policing. In the aftermath of its release, it is worth asking what contributions other varieties of scholarship can make to knowledge about the police. This essay discusses the role of humanistic inquiry. The humanities produce a different kind of knowledge than the sciences. Where the sciences search for causal laws that govern the social and physical world, the humanities search for interpretive understanding (Webers verstehen). The different ways the two enter-