Jason W. Moore: The impossible endless accumulation of capital (ep353)
“How we diagnose the origins of a problem in time and space determines, fairly decisively, our political assessments of the present...”
In this episode, we welcome Jason W. Moore, an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor of several books: most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life; and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, and he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Jason W. Moore: I grew up in a working-class, single, working mother household in Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s.
That conjuncture is important because it was simultaneously the rise of mainstream environmentalism—and we can touch on why that's deeply problematic and also deeply important—but also was in a time and place where the legacy of the new left and especially the anti-imperialist activism around Vietnam had, by that point, the 1980s, translated into important movements against American support for death squads, fascism in Central America, and, of course, against Reagan's second Cold War, and the effort to really reinvent America's first strike nuclear intentions against the Soviet Union.
So there, in a nutshell, are three moments: the environmental question, the question of imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the question of the American working class, which at that time was being decisively routed by the forces of capital in the United States.
By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, environmentalism as we know it, mainstream environmentalism—so not environmental justice—had turned decisively in favor of a corporate approach to planetary management, sometimes called greenwashing.
But also, importantly, the United States turned decisively in favor of the new Democrats represented by Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Of course, the latter comes to fame in environmentalist circles with Earth in the Balance in 1992, and he wins nomination as a vice-presidential candidate that year.
Clinton and Gore were both strongly to the right of Republicans on foreign policy matters. Gore, in fact, favored a drive into Baghdad in the first Iraq war, and then mainstream environmentalism returned the favor, if you will, or played into the hands of a corporate Democratic establishment, by undercutting its own grassroots membership and undercutting Labor's opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
So, all of this was coming together while I was growing up and coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s. [I saw] the profound contradictions of mainstream environmentalism, which they like to call, following Peter Davern, the environmentalism of the rich, and its long-standing support for American empire, going all the way back to the first Earth Day but continuing, as we've seen with support for North American free trade and the socio-ecological hellscape that followed, including the runaway carbonization of the neoliberal era.
So, this is a moment at which class and environment and the questions of empire were all coming together. Yet the movements themselves were very, very fragmented and environmentalism, especially in places like Oregon, even radical environmentalism was really not radical at all. They adopted the Malthusian language.
For instance, I went to the University of Oregon, where the so-called radical environmentalists were called the “survival center”. Survival is a classic Malthusian trope. That set of issues really speaks to the dynamics of the climate crisis today and the imperative of climate justice to build around the strategy, I draw inspiration from Martin Luther King’s triple evils critique, in the late 1960s, but it’s to emphasize that…
The climate crisis requires a multifaceted approach to confronting the class divide, the climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy as an evolving and organic whole.
Kamea Chayne: What I appreciate about your work is how you're constantly challenging a lot of the dominant discourses on different issues. That is what we're very keen on opening ourselves up to here with this platform.
One of the dominant views of the time that we're living in now is called the Anthropocene, and you're known especially for pushing back and saying that that isn't quite accurate and it lets off the hook some things that should be named and centered.
What issues do you take with the idea of the Anthropocene and what does singling the drastic changes the Earth has been experiencing, as the result of human activity in such a broad sense of the word… What does this fail to highlight or challenge?
Jason W. Moore: Let's begin by distinguishing two Anthropocene[s].
One is a geological Anthropocene, and this is the specialized academic field of research among geologists and Earth system scientists who are looking for and debating golden spikes or big stratigraphic signals in the Earth's layer.
For instance, one school of the geological Anthropocene wants to see 1945 to 1960 as the start point with chicken bones, plastics, and radioactive isotopes from above-ground nuclear testing.
Another, which is much more compelling to me, is Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s Orbis spike, [named] for the Latin for “global”, which identifies 1610 as the beginning of the geological Anthropocene. 1610 is the nadir of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere over the past 2,000 years or so that resulted from the capitalist genocides in the “New World” when 95 percent of the population—about 55 million people—were killed through a confluence of slaving strategies and new disease environments created by the capitalist invasions and commodification and colonialization of the “New World” in this long 16th century.
There's a geological Anthropocene, and it seems to me that that field produces very, very useful, indispensable knowledge about the world. Now there's a second Anthropocene. I call it the popular Anthropocene.
This is, at its heart, a recapitulation of a much older, Malthusian dynamic that dates from the late 18th century—but in some ways, even earlier—that says humans did it, and we're dealing with problems of so-called natural law, that the problems created by capitalism are not really created by capitalism. They're created by humans in general and [because of] insufficient knowledge of or attention to something usually called natural law. Since 1972, [natural law is] often called natural limits.
We have to remember that in this statement, we have people trying to explain the origins and development of the drive towards the planetary inferno by implicating, first of all, an actor that doesn't exist: humanity. Second of all, they want to then tell the story as one of inadequate or wrongheaded technological directions or scientific knowledge, which hasn't quite caught up with the reality. If only we were to listen to science, everything would more or less be OK.
Now I want to be clear: yes, of course—emphatically—yes, we should be listening to scientists. But claims to listen to the science pretends that science itself is not a labor process. It pretends that science is something that is separate from the rest of history, specifically immunized from ideology, power, and all the rest, which it clearly is not.
So for my colleagues and I, [we are] talking about something called the Capitalocene, the age of capital, not the age of man. We are contesting this popular Anthropocene. We are pointing out that not only does humanity as a whole not exist as a historical agent—at best, it's a description of our species—but that's not how it's used.
When you read headlines in The (Bezos) Washington Post or the New York Times or any number of other magazines, YouTube shows and all the rest that humans are doing X, Y, and Z, that's not a species-level use of the word humans, that is a geo-historical use of the term humans.
That specifically conceals a bloody history in the modern world, which I would date from 1492. Of course, symbolically—the history is always messier and more evolutionary, more tentative than one date can allow… one of the hallmarks of the origins of modernity and the development of capitalism is the idea that there is one domain of reality called “society” or “civilization”, where the rich, the powerful, the knowledgeable, the expert, or the Christian, reside, and then another domain called “the savage” or “the natural,” in which not only do we find forests and fields and soils and streams, we also find the vast majority of humankind.
That's important to keep in mind when my colleagues and I talk about this “capitalogenic”—that is, made by capital—trinity of the climate-class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy. Because we are pointing to the origins of capitalism as not only an economic system, not only a social system, not only a geo-cultural system but also fundamentally a way of organizing the relations between some humans and everybody else, and the rest of nature, in order to turn nature into a set of profit-making opportunities.
So, when we criticize the popular Anthropocene, we are saying two things. One, the claim that humans did it is a great lie, and that it is a functional lie that reproduces the structures of power and profit in life in the modern world.
And we are pointing out that the history of capitalism is one of the creation of not just economic dynamics—people talk about de-growth these days and all the rest—but it's also the geo-cultural dynamics, of the domination of nature, which then provide the basis for the world color line and its successive reinventions, and for globalizing patriarchy and its successive reinventions.
When we look at the long history of the modern world, we need to be aware that whenever people are claiming "humans" did it, that is an ideological move that aims to distract us from what we should be doing—which is to name the system.
Kamea Chayne: I want to go back to something you mentioned, because we hear often, especially in discourses on climate change, that this should be understood as anthropogenic and that there is scientific consensus on that. I raise this question, as many of our listeners will know, not to dismiss the field of science, but to recognize humbly that every lens has its limitations, and getting to learn from as many different angles and views as possible is how we might arrive as close to the truth as we can.
So in this reframe, you invite us to look at this time as the capitalocene, especially given your background in history and sociology. Why do you think it is that the scientific community seems to have settled on pinpointing and explaining the anthropogenic nature of the climate crisis, and not something even more specific as you have?
I wonder if it might be the institutional bias behind the funding that limits the interpretation, or maybe just the lens of focusing on a lot of these quantifiable, rather than the deeper social context and histories?
Jason W. Moore: First of all, let's recognize that there are thousands, tens of thousands of Earth system scientists, climate scientists, bio-geographers, and many others who are working tirelessly to make sense of the biological, biophysical, and geophysical realities of climate change. We need that moving forward.
At the same time, we can identify, as you properly do, the very definite ideological and thought control mechanisms placed upon the science. So again, making a distinction between scientists often doing valiant work, often working and saying things in very courageous ways… from the overall architecture of uppercase-s Science, which has a long history in the modern world. We call it “natural” science…
But of course, the natural sciences are inventions of empires and territorial states. Geology is a classic example of a science that was directly developed, especially in the 19th and then 20th centuries, to pursue, identify, and locate the cheap nature necessary for capital accumulation.
Now, that doesn't invalidate the work of geologists. It points to a very real fact that both the definite organization of scientific research and the overall ideological role of science in the capitalist world-ecology is front and center in these discussions over the climate crisis.
One of the hallmarks of modernity is to separate out the true and the good. This is the myth of value-neutral science. And as I always like to say, the most ideological statement one can ever make is that science is value-neutral, or that it is objective. It is not.
What counts as good science—and there is an essay on my website—the short version of it is called “The Opiates of the Environmentalists”. The short version of this argument is that what counts as “good science” has not been a friend of democracy, has not been a friend of equality, and has indeed been an instrument of imperial power and class power from the very beginning of capitalism.
We ignore that at our peril. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the history of eugenics, which then went underground as various forms of genetic determinism. Unfortunately, these are still very much with us.
Eugenics was cooked up as a “good science” in the late 19th century—the era of the scramble for Africa and the associated new imperialisms of dramatic working-class revolt across the North Atlantic, and also, as we know in American history, the era of massive immigration from eastern and southern Europe, and East Asia. In this era, eugenics came along to explain, in terms of nature and natural law and “good science,” the dramatic inequalities that were clearly emerging and transforming the capitalist-world ecology at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
As late as the 1970s, there were a number of states in the United States that still had eugenics boards and some of the foundational figures in American environmentalism, since 1968, like Garrett Hardin, [author] of the Tragedy of the Commons, were outright eugenicists—and white supremacists.
There is a longstanding ideological structure that separates out facts and values and pretends that science is value-neutral, which then allows for the powers that be to present—as we see with the climate crisis, as we see with the IPCC—the climate crisis as one of “anthropogenic” change…
… instead of saying what is obvious, that it is the Fortune 500 companies, the key financial institutions in the world, who are driving this process. So, we have to be attuned—and this makes it very important in the era of the climate crisis and attempts to realize climate justice—to the fact that this is not just one standpoint among many. This approach to uppercase-S science is really the standpoint of the one percent.
And to that, we need to counterpose what's sometimes called citizen science, or peasant or working-class science, depending on where we are in the world. That fits very well with, say, claims for recuperation of Indigenous ways of knowing and ecological knowledge, that we need a recuperation of an alternative democratic science from the standpoint of, what I would call, the planetary proletariat—that is, all of those humans and the rest of nature put to work for capital, for the enrichment of capital.
Kamea Chayne: In naming the major turning points that led to our socio-ecological crises of today, a lot of people will name, for example, the industrial revolution.
But you think it ought to go further back and you ask, "Why do we view the steam engine and not the modern map as the key machine of modernity?" That really stood out to me. I think it speaks to the deeper worldviews and shifts in value and relationships with the world that set the stage for the physical actions taken for "advancement" and the manifestations in the world order later on.
I'm curious to hear you elaborate on the significance of the beginnings of modern map-making and what that oriented people's values and perceptions of the land to.
Jason W. Moore: It's so important. How we diagnose the origins of a problem in time and space determines, fairly decisively, our political assessments of the present.
For example, if we think that the key driver of the planetary crisis today is the steam engine and its successor is the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, then the politics are obvious. Get rid of the steam engines, the combustion engines, and the jet engines and replace them with something that is not carbon and greenhouse gas-intensive. That's a very limiting view.
One of the hallmarks of modern knowledge, which has produced many, many useful findings, to be sure, is to look at reality as a set of fragments that are then interacting with each other, like pool balls on a pool table that are colliding with each other.
An alternative is to ask questions about, in this case, what are the relations of the steam engine? What made the steam engine possible and necessary in the late 18th and early 19th centuries?
Once we ask a question like that, we begin to look at the world in very, very different ways. We would begin to look outside of the standard “Hurrah for England!” story. We begin to look at what were the necessary conditions, the proximate, necessary conditions for the acceleration of industrial fossil-fuel-dependent growth in England in the opening decades of the 19th century. The answer, once you begin to look at history a little bit, is fairly clear.
We begin to look at the cotton gin, the reinvention of slavery, the so-called second slavery which sweeps across the Western hemisphere, around cotton in the U.S., sugar in Cuba, and coffee in Brazil.
In the case of the United States, we then can begin to understand this perfect storm of the second slavery. The cotton gin, which is a simple machine but audaciously productive of human labor—[offered] a 50-fold increase over previous methods of extracting cotton seeds, which far outstrips anything that we saw with the steam engine. [Also], by the way, [it led to] the dispossession of American Indians, the Cherokees, for instance, by many others, and the appropriation of a particular strain of cotton that could withstand machine milling. Because if you didn't have a variety of cotton that could withstand machine milling, there was going to be no industrial revolution premised on cotton textiles.
Once we begin to ask those questions, they bring into focus questions of imperialism of the plantation, evolutions of racism, and of how the political economy of capitalism is premised on the super-exploitation of humans and the rest of nature in the most ruthless and violent ways. This gives us a very, very different picture of the origins of the planetary crisis. But then if we ask, well, how did we get the plantation system in the first place? The story is about far more than just plantations, but that's clearly a pivotal moment in the rise of capitalism.
We go to your question of the creation of a transatlantic-capitalist world ecology in which power, profit, and life were unfolded with each other, in order to transform life into a series of profit-making opportunities, and to cook up this fantasy, that unfortunately is still with us today, of the endless possibilities and imperative for capital accumulation—sometimes called economic growth, but I think capital accumulation is a better term for this.
When people want to talk about degrowth, we need to go back to the origins of capitalism and look at how the particular configuration of science and technology in the case of the modern map, modern cartography, and modern shipbuilding fused together with military power, with financiers, and with empires, to relentlessly turn the “New World” in particular, into an endless series of profit-making opportunities, through sugar plantations, silver mines, stock raising, cash-crop agriculture of other kinds, like tobacco, and so on and so forth, that we begin to see how the story of the modern world begins in 1492.
It is by the 1570s—and that's an important date because it's when the first capitalist climate crisis sets in as a result of what I mentioned earlier, this Orbis Spike, that is the result of the genocides of the New World: where forests grew back and absorbed carbon, soils were left undisturbed and absorbed carbon, which reinforced other natural factors like volcanic activity and changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation to produce the first great climate crisis of capitalism in the years 1550-1570.
Now, why am I sharing this with you? Well, I'm sharing this with you because it is during that period that we see modern racism, modern sexism, and the full-blown plantation system. The dynamic of capitalism is one that continues to produce new kinds of workers or proletarians. Basically, all the major forms of capitalism matured in this period of the climate crisis, which was a period of tremendous political unrest. That's also a big part of the story: that moments of unfavorable climate change are moments of political instability, not just economic instability.
So in telling the story and the history of modern mapping, it directs our attention to what maps, in a modern sense, do: which is to show where the profitable opportunities are and show how to deploy military power in order to protect and safeguard those economic interests.
One of my favorite tidbits of this is the typical sugar mill in early 17th-century Brazil. If you think of the hump of Brazil on a map, the typical sugar mill was in fact a fortress with a cannon, because the Portuguese, as they were building the sugar plantations, was also involved in an endless guerrilla war with Indigenous peoples in that period.
So again, it's guns, life, and profit that are always entangling, and we cannot understand today's crisis without going back to this period because this trinity of the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, and climate apartheid is not the result of climate change today. It is the driver of climate change today. Of course, the geophysical moments of that are reinforcing the very worst elements of that capitalogenic trinity of class, race, and gender in the climate crisis.
Kamea Chayne: It's always instructive and helpful to understand the deeper history and the broader context of the crises that we're trying to understand and to go deeper into the systemic orientation towards endless capital accumulation, which I prefer to “economic growth”…
You've talked before about the idea that the expansion of capital and commodification actually also leads to a greater essentialness of unpaid work. I haven't heard a lot of people highlight that peripheral story, so I want to hold that front and center here. How would you illustrate this picture that the dominant money economy requires a much larger array of unpaid work from people and the broader web of life, whose roles are really essential but have been cheapened, and therefore exploited?
Jason W. Moore: The more valuable and the more strategically important one's work is—whether it is the work of a forest, or, as Claudia von Werlhof points out, the work of bearing children biologically—the more it must be redefined as Nature, with an uppercase-N. Claudia von Werlhof, the great German-Austrian sociologist and social theorist, says simply that nature is everything the bourgeoisie does not wish to pay for.
If we pause for a moment and think about the centrality of unpaid work in the modern world, the unpaid work especially of women in care and reproductive labor of every kind, the unpaid work regimes or super-exploited regimes of slavery, and other forms of coerced labor, not limited to slavery as we know it in the United States; as we're familiar with the creation of a Jim Crow regime after reconstruction was an attempt to re-impose a super-exploited labor regime under the sign of white supremacy.
This means that while we need to focus on money relations, more importantly, capitalism and the endless accumulation of capital, is enabled by extra-economic, cultural, legal, and military means of ensuring that huge flows of unpaid work go to underwriting the cost of doing business in capitalism.
In a nutshell, I call this the theory of cheap nature. Cheap nature is sometimes misunderstood. Cheap nature is only one part of driving down the cost of basic commodities. I identify four of those: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That's only one part of it. The other part is to cheapen in the sense of devaluation, to cheapen, to treat with less respect, the work, the lives, and the labor of the vast majority of humankind and of the web of life as a whole. From this perspective, we can see historically this is not just a claim about the climate crisis, but...
We can see historically that every great wave of capital accumulation—think of the areas of the industrial revolution we were just talking about—depends upon a massive expansion of unpaid work from women, nature, and colonies, as Maria Mies, a German sociologist underscores.
That means moving to the frontiers. Every great era of capital accumulation depends on culture and politics to enforce a new regime of unpaid work.
We could see this even if you just remember a little bit from maybe high school and university history courses how in these new economic eras, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are reinvented, but the underlying problems persist.
The underlying problems persist because of racism and sexism and what underlines all of it, which is something called Prometheanism (after the Greek titan who gave fire to humans and is usually used as a reference for man's domination of nature). But it is in fact a shorthand for capital's domination of nature, including human nature, that all these fit together as an unceasing drive to secure work at very low or no cost at all.
Here's the punch line to all of this: that this word that environmentalists love to use, "nature" is part of an overall system of thought and meaning—effectively, ideology—in the modern world, called naturalism.
If we pause for a moment and think about sexism and racism historically and even the kinds of pernicious language that is still with us today, unfortunately, it's shot through with naturalistic metaphors. It's shot through with references to nature. We have to recognize that what we're doing here in looking at capitalism as a system of cheap nature is understanding that the geocultural moment of sexism, racism, Prometheanism, and the political economy moment of class and capital are two sides of the same process. What environmentalists have really failed to do is to understand just how deeply those two moments are entangled with each other.
Kamea Chayne: [What’s] problematic is this perception of the binary of society and nature which you have spoken extensively about.
You invite people to see nature not as a resource, but nature as a matrix, and that really put a name to something I've felt but haven't been able to articulate as I've been called to take on a more enmeshed and entangled worldview of being a part of it all. But a lot of environmentalists and green scholars, as you note, starting with a worldview of separation with that binary, often privilege narratives of what humanity has done to nature.
All of this can be a little abstract and quite deep, I would appreciate it if you could walk us through what you mean by seeing this alternate story of the web of life, in which there is what you call the double internality of both humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity. What does this mean and what is the significance of having this sort of consciousness shift?
Jason W. Moore: Let's look at the climate crisis. In the climate crisis, dynamics of capital accumulation, above all carbonization of the atmosphere, are clearly transforming the biosphere, the atmosphere, into a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions. That's an instance of capitalism doing to the web, of one moment of this double internality. It is internalizing the atmosphere as a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions.
On the other hand, the web of life is not passive, and there is a fundamental insight here long-recognized by some kinds of environmentalist thought, but then the logical conclusion is not followed through, which is that the activity of the web of life, in this example of the climate crisis is now coming directly into the disruption of one of the core relations of capitalism. That relation is the agricultural revolution.
The basic, fundamental premise of capitalist development is the agricultural revolution, that more and more food, calories, whatever can be produced with less and less labor time. That has now come to an end after about five centuries.
We know this from the work of most recently, Bobea and her colleagues, who report in a 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change that eight years of agricultural productivity have been lost because of yield suppression owing to climate change. So that's an example of the double-entry analogy, that the climate is in capitalism, and capitalism is in the climate.
In fact, if we look at everything that species do in this life, it is, as the evolutionary geneticist Richard Leavens points out, not this old story of Darwinian evolution where species just adjust to their niches. In fact, species are continually making their niches, and the niches are continually making the species and conditioning the patterns of adaptation.
If we take that great insight into the realm of humankind, we can see that every kind of human organization, from families to family farms, to financial centers, to empires, all are making environments and being made by them—never equally so.
In the era of the climate crisis, we are on this earth increasingly confronting capitalism, whose capacities to remake the planet in the interests of endless accumulation are being limited by the very history of capitalism's environment-making, especially the carbonization of the atmosphere, which is now coming in and undermining and disabling some of the key dynamics of capitalist development, not just in the agricultural revolution, but also physical labor productivity is increasingly fettered by climate change.
As everyone knows, in times of severe weather, whether it's very cold or extreme heat, both of which are becoming more frequent, your capacity to labor outside is going to be limited, so there is a whole set of dynamics that are not simply natural limits, but limits that come from the web of life, and the activity of the web of life. The creative and generative possibilities of the web of life [that] are coming in now are increasingly being activated by the very long history of capitalist development, and coming in to limit those old patterns of capitalist development.
Kamea Chayne: So, the strains on the web of life themselves, for example, we are seeing being manifested within and affecting the capitalist system, which is a part of that web of life. There's this constant interaction going on that, because they're not separate, they're part of the broader whole.
When you talked about this linear path of the cheapening of nature, a question I'm left pondering is: is the imposition of value and the imposition of the idea of value itself a force of reductionism and exploitation? So that even as we see the other side of cheapening—which is valuing more— valuation and devaluation feel relative and maybe go hand in hand…
I know this is how the world is run today, so it's hard to even imagine a world beyond how we presently value and treat people, labor, and everything extracted or converted from the planet in order to organize ourselves and the economy. But if we allowed ourselves to dream freely, I wonder what could our web of life look like beyond this way of seeing ourselves and the Earth?
Jason W. Moore: All civilizations have, if you will, laws of value that combine ethical, political, and cultural priorities, on the one hand with economic dynamics. Capitalism in that sense is only very specific in what it counts and what it doesn't count.
Famously, as Marilyn Waring told us in the late 1980s in a great book called If Women Counted—a great, masterful critique of neoclassical economics—we're essentially ignoring unpaid work, unpaid human work in economic accounting and economic policy formation. That's the spirit of the analysis here.
That we need to imagine—and imagination is crucial here—how to revalue and reinvent the valuation of life in the world in the era of the climate crisis.
For me, I talk about something called the planetary proletariat, and that might sound very old-fashioned to some of you listening, just bear with me.
Only one part of the planetary proletariat is the conventionally-defined working class, which was always enabled, as we were just talking about, by forms of unpaid social reproductive labor—which probably should be put at the center. (And wage labor should be and is still very important, but should not be made so central as we've learned to think about it.)
But planetary proletariat has also formed a femetariat, overwhelmingly gendered unpaid work, care work, and social reproductive work provided overwhelmingly by women, but not biologically mandated by that in any stretch of the imagination… Then also there’s what Stephen Collis, the great poet and social theorist [from] Simon Fraser University, calls the bioteriat, that is all webs of life put to work to enable the endless accumulation of capital.
So essentially, what we have in that from this standpoint is a standpoint of the planetary proletariat that says reproductive justice, broadly conceived, must be the organizing premise moving forward. So reproductive justice includes the capacity of the planet to reproduce the diversity of life. It includes, of course, a democratic, egalitarian, and feminist approach to family formation. It includes the right, as food sovereignty advocates have underlined, the right to access land and the ability to care for the soil, the aquifers, and the forests in a genuinely and radically sustainable way, not as planetary management from above or sustainable development that we have encountered in mainstream environmentalism.
We, instead of subordinating reproductive work of every kind: human and extra-human, which is what capitalism does, we need a radical inversion to transcend that subordination of the unpaid reproductive work of humans and the rest of nature by capital in order to enrich Jeff Bezos and his super-rich buddies.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for that. There's so much that we will continue to ponder after this conversation. I want to acknowledge that all of these things we discussed here are big concepts and it's important not to see our crises and movements as siloed and separate, but as one of the broader whole—it’s necessary to complicate our understandings of these issues and to situate them in even broader contexts and historical understandings.
Jason W. Moore: What you said is so important there.
I want to ask your listeners to go back and look at what Martin Luther King was doing in the last year of his life when he came out against the war in Vietnam. We have just written the piece on this called Beyond Climate Justice, after King's famous speech at Riverside Church on April 4th, 1967, where he comes out against the war—and he comes out against the war in the most brilliant and inclusive expansionary way possible—which he calls “Beyond Vietnam”.
He was coming out not just against the war in Vietnam, but against the whole system of U.S. militarism and its protection of foreign investment, and linking that to class exploitation and racism at home.
That's the sensibility that we need in order to pursue climate justice. We need a “beyond climate justice” vision that puts these together instead of, as you said, in silos and fragmented.
That moment of ‘67 and ‘68, before his assassination, undoubtedly with the connivance of the American intelligence apparatus—there is a lesson there, that was subsequently eclipsed in the United States by environmentalism.
If we take seriously Dr. King's views, including, by the way, views about the web of life—and I encourage people to go back and read his Christmas sermon from 1967 to see just how deeply and powerfully synthetic his vision was about linking these questions of social justice, anti-imperialism, and webs of life—if we can carry that imagination forward in the spirit of conviviality and comradeship, then we can begin to really form a unified, radical politics against the one percent and their capitalogenic disasters.
Kamea Chayne: On that, I will say that I've observed among people who are well aware that the current capitalist system cannot coexist or cannot exist given the limitations of our planet and is not oriented towards helping us to achieve collective thriving, there are various anti-capitalist visions and some of them are still rooted or are coming from the binary of seeing society and nature as separate, so some may be more focused on the social system while not taking into account implications for the more-than-human web of life, and then other visions are more focused on the more-than-human web of life, without the class struggle analysis.
It's important for us to constantly take another step back and another step back, and to learn from the different movements that may be focused on different things, that really should be understood as pieces of the whole that we should weave together.
To translate all these complicated things we discuss here into action, how do we better understand our roles within this matrix of relations that have been beyond centuries in the making? What other calls to action or a deeper inquiry would you like to leave our listeners with?
Jason W. Moore: The first lesson is precisely as you indicate: that we need to understand capitalism as a class society, and it's a system of class rule. That does not mean class as opposed to racism, sexism, and other dynamics—which are ideological formations that come out of a particular history and coalesces in the late 16th and 17th centuries…
We need to exactly take seriously the challenge of synthesis and we need to do so in a directly political way. As my friend Christian Parenti emphasizes: in eras of crisis, the state is always culled.
We need to have, as a social movement, political imagination and we need to build a politics that has a real strategy for moving forward in the era of the planetary inferno.
Sadly, every major city on the coastline on this planet will have to be moved sometime in the next century or so in some fundamental ways.
Whole infrastructures, water, electricity, and transportation will have to be rebuilt and reinvented. Going back to our discussion of values, we will need a value system that privileges a radical democracy, a working-class, broadly-conceived democracy, and we will need forms of knowledge that are—to borrow from Mao and the Chinese revolution—"green red.”
We need engineers, for instance, to do all this, and we need engineers and policymakers who understand that a city is not a city. A city is a particular built environment that enforces particular class relations and privileges certain laws of value, in the cultural, political and economic sense.
In all of this, there is a tendency, especially under the influence of mainstream environmentalism and its third-way politics from the first Earth Day in 1970, to not be directly political.
That's exactly what will be necessary as we enter into the coming era of unprecedented social volatility, because when the climate changes dramatically, social and political unrest invariably follows. This is true for the history of the modern world, but you can go back to the crisis of feudalism, to the crisis of the Roman West in the fifth century.
Moments of unfavorable climate change are moments of political volatility, but also moments of political possibility.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Jason W. Moore: Rosa Luxembourg's The Accumulation of Capital.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Jason W. Moore: Lean into your weaknesses.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration right now?
Jason W. Moore: My son.
Kamea Chayne: Jason, I am invigorated the most by conversations that push back against a lot of dominant discourses and really pick everything apart. So, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and thank you so much for sharing your time and all of your learnings with us here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Jason W. Moore: Be fearless about re-imagining the future and reinventing the ideas you've received from your schools, your family, and politics. Be fearless about pursuing the connections of humans in the web of life in the interests of planetary justice.
