Professor Jason W. Moore - Capitalism in the Web of Life

Why Nature Matters, and Not (Always) in the Way You Might Think

Professor Moore spoke at the Susquehanna Group of the Sierra Club in Endicott, NY on January 19, 2016.

Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In this talk, 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: labor, 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 mosaic of crisis and limits today.  He shows how thinking about humanity as part of nature is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation and sustainability in the century ahead.

Bio

Jason W. Moore is Associate Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, where he teaches world history and world-ecology. He is author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015) and editor of Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016). He writes frequently on the history of capitalism, environmental history, and social theory.

 

Moore is presently completing Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, an environmental history of the rise of capitalism, and with Raj Patel, Seven Cheap Things: A World-Ecological Manifesto – both with the University of California Press. He is coordinator of the World-Ecology Network. Many of his essays can be found on his website: www.jasonwmoore.com.