New updates appear regularly (25 April, 2023)
Essays and interviews in Portuguese, French, Korean, Czech, Persian, Polish, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Arabic, Thai, Croatian, German, and other languages can be found here.
2023, Imperialism, With and Without Cheap Nature: Climate Crises and the Demise of Westphalia. English text for Das Argument 340 (2023), see https://jasonwmoore.com/in-translation/.
2023, in press. There is No Such Thing as a Technological Accident: Cheap Natures, Climate Crisis & Technological Impasse. In Technological Accidents, Joke Brower and Sjoerd van Tuinen, eds. (Leiden: V2 Publishing).
Like Nature, Technology is one of our most dangerous words. It’s a metaphysic, a narrative prime mover endowed with supernatural powers. Such words are never innocent. They are never just words. They are guiding threads for the rulers, and, for the rest of us, everyday folk concepts. They shape what we see and what we don’t see, what we prioritize, and what we ignore. These concepts do not merely describe the world; they license and guide modern ways of organizing power and re/production. They have real force in the world, because of what they mystify, and because of what they enable. Such ideas present themselves as innocent. They are anything but.
Sometimes demon, sometimes savior, the ruling abstraction Technology conjures something mystical, outside of history yet relevant to it. Its power is the alchemist’s illusion: the magical notion that machinery will produce something out of nothing. Our uppercase emphasizes the double register of both Nature and Technology: as ruling abstractions, central to modern mythmaking, and as material processes of power, profit and life.
2022. Waste in the Limits to Capital, Emancipations 2(1/4), 1-45.
2022. Imperialism, With and Without Cheap Nature: Climate Crises, World Wars & the Ecology of Liberation, Working Papers in World-Ecology 3/2022.
2022. Our Capitalogenic World: Climate Crises, Class Politics & the Civilizing Project, Working Papers in World-Ecology 1/2022.
We live in times of anthropogenic climate crisis. Or do we? This essay shows how “humanity” is a thoroughly modern fetish, forged in the bloodbath of militarized accumulation and conquest after 1492. To say the the Anthropos drives the climate crisis implicates a historical actor that does not exist. Humanity does nothing. Specific groups of humans make history – empires, classes, religious institutions, armies, financiers. This essay reveals the Anthropocene as more than lousy history – although the flight from world history is crucial. It argues that today’s Anthropocene is one pillar of the Environmentalism of the Rich. It is rooted historically in the Civilizing Project, and more recently, in post-1970 “Spaceship Earth” environmentalism. Both Environmentalism and its recent Anthropocene craze have sought to do one thing above all: deflect blame from capitalism as the prime mover of climate crisis. From the beginning, Environmentalism avoided “naming the system.” Only by identifying the climate crisis as capitalogenic – “made by capital” – can we begin to forge an effective socialist politics of climate justice.
2022. Beyond Climate Justice. In The Way Out of…, E. Degot & D. Riff, eds. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag), 105-130.
2022. Power, Profit and Prometheanism, Part I: Method, Ideology and the Violence of the Civilizing Project, Journal of World-Systems Research 21(2), 415-426.
2022. How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life: Towards a World-Historical Materialism in the Web of Life, Journal of World-Systems Research 21(1), 153-168.
2022. Anthropocene, Capitalocene & the Flight from World History: Dialectical Universalism & the Geographies of Class Power in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1492-2022, Nordia 51(2), 123-146.
2021. Empire, Class & The Origins Of Planetary Crisis: The Transition Debate in the Web of Life, Esboços: Histories in Global Contexts 28, 740-763.
2021. Opiates of the Environmentalists? Anthropocene Illusions, Planetary Management & the Capitalocene Alternative, Abstrakt (November).
2021. Climate, Class & the Great Frontier: From Primitive Accumulation to the Great Implosion, unpublished paper, World-Ecology Research Group, Binghamton University.
2019. Value, Nature, and the Vortex of Accumulation. In Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene, H. Ernstson and E. Swyngedouw, eds. New York: Routledge, 48-68.
2018. The Capitalocene, Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy, The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(2), 237-279.
2017. The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 37(3-4), 245-292.
2017. World Accumulation and Planetary Life, or, Why Capitalism will not Survive until the ‘Last Tree is Cut.’ IPPR Progressive Review 24(3), 175-202.
2017. Confronting the Popular Anthropocene: Toward an Ecology of Hope, New Geographies 09, 186-191.
2017. Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method, Theory & Society 46(4), 285-318.
2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3), 594-630.
2017. Anthropocenes & the Capitalocene Alternative, Azimuth 5, 71-80.
2016. The Rise of Cheap Nature, in Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press), 70-115.
2015. Nature in the Limits to Capital (and Vice Versa): Why Limits Thinking Has Been So Flawed and How to Start Fixing It, Radical Philosophy 193, 9-19.
2015. Cheap Food & Bad Climate: From Surplus Value in Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology, Critical Historical Studies 2(1), 1-42.
2014. The End of Cheap Nature, or, How I learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism. In Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, C. Suter and C. Chase-Dunn, eds. Berlin: LIT, 285-314.
2014. Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology, New Geographies 6, 10-19
2012. Cheap Food and Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism, Review 33(2-3), 225-261.
2011. Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times: Accumulation & Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology, Journal of World-Systems Analysis 17(1), 108-147.
2011. Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology, The Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1), 1-46.
2011. Madeira, Sugar, & the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Local Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506-1530, Review 33(1), 1-24.
2010. Madeira, Sugar, & the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part I: From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420-1506, Review 32(4), 345-390.
2010. ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire, and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545-1648, The Journal of Agrarian Change 10(1), 33-68.
2010. ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, Part II: The Global North Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, The Journal of Agrarian Change 10(2), 188-227.
2010. The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology, 1450-2010, The Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3), 389-413
2010. ‘This lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world’: Potosí in the world-ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century, Journal of Philosophical Economics 4(1), 58-103.
2007. Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450-1640. In Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change, J.R. McNeill, Joan Martinez-Alier, and Alf Hornborg, eds. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press), 123-142.
2003. Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History, Organization & Environment 16(4), 431-458.
2003. Nature and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 26(2), 97-172
2003. The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, Theory & Society 32(3), 307-377.
2002. Remaking Work, Remaking Space: Spaces of Production and Accumulation in the Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1865-1920, Antipode 34(2), 176-204.
2002. The Crisis of Feudalism: An Environmental History, Organization & Environment 15(3). 301-322.
2001. Capitalist Development in World-Historical Perspective, with Giovanni Arrighi, in Robert Albritton, et al., eds., Phases of Capitalist Development. New York: Palgrave, 56-75.
2000. Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective, Organization & Environment 13(2), 123-158.
2000. Marx and the Historical Ecology of Capital Accumulation on a World Scale: Comment on Hornborg, Journal of World-Systems Research 6(1), 134-139.
2000. Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 23(3), 409-433