LIPA, PHILIPPINES - DECEMBER 3: Motorists navigate a flooded highway during the onslaught of Typhoon Kammuri on December 3, 2019 in Lipa town, Batangas province, Philippines. Tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated as Typhoon Kammuri slammed into the Philippines' main island of Luzon. The powerful typhoon has forced hundreds of flights to be cancelled and has caused the Southeast Asian Games currently being held in the country to be postponed. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
Jason W. Moore || This essay builds out an argument for understanding the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the “age of capital.” The present essay – the second of two parts – reconstructs the limits, opportunities, and crises of the capitalist world-ecology since the long 16th century. This reconstruction is pursued through the world-ecological reading of value-relations introduced in Part I. While Marxist political economy has taken value to be an economic phenomenon with systemic implications, I suggest value-relations as a systemic phenomenon with a pivotal economic moment. The accumulation of abstract social labor is possible only to the degree that unpaid work (human and extra-human) can be appropriated. The value-form (the commodity) and its substance (abstract social labor) depend upon value-relations that configure wage-labor with its necessarily more expansive conditions of reproduction: unpaid work.
Elaborating an approach that seeks to translate the appropriation of work/energy into value, I argue for a conception of value-relations as co-produced through relations of exploitation (capital-labor) and appropriation (capital-unpaid work). This latter, accumulation by appropriation, is enabled by abstract social nature, the relational counterpoint to abstract social labor. If the substance of abstract social nature is the production of “real abstractions” of time (linear), space (flat), and nature (external), its historical expressions are found in the family of processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service to capital accumulation.
The historical conditions of “cheap nature” are found not only in the capital-labor relation but also in the production of knowledge-practices necessary to identify and to appropriate unpaid work. A framework that unifies the domains of human and extra-human activity in the making of the modern world may well prove useful in developing effective analytics and emancipatory politics as modernity unravels today.
See Part 1 here.
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