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Moore, Jason W
Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital I Jason W Moore.- 1st Edition.
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1. Economic development-Environmental aspects. 2. Economic policy-Environmental aspects. 3.
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CHAPTER 1

From Object to Oikeios:

Environment-Making in
the Capitalist World-Ecology

Words are like empty balloons, inviting us to fill them up with associations.
As they fill they begin to gain intrinsic force and at last to shape
our perceptions and expectations. So with the word "ecology" ...
(Worster, 1994)

For nearly half a century, Green Thought has wrestled with a double question. Is
nature exogenous to the essential relations of human history, for the most part
playing roles as tap (raw materials) and sink (pollution)? Or is nature a web of
life encompassing all of human activity, comprising taps and sinks, but also
much beyond? Is nature, in other words, a set of objects that humans act upon,
or is it a web of life that human relations develop through?
The vast Green literatures that have emerged since the 1970s-political ecol-
ogy, environmental history and environmental sociology, ecological economics,
systems ecology, and many more-have developed by answering "yes" (in one
form or another) to both questions. On the one hand, most scholars agree that
humanity is indeed part of nature. They reject the Cartesian dualism that puts
Society (without natures) in one box and Nature (without humans) in another.
On the other hand, the conceptual vocabularies and analytical frameworks that
govern our empirical investigations remain firmly entrenched in the interaction
of these two basic, impenetrable units-Nature and Society. This "double yes"
poses a real puzzle: How do we translate a materialist, dialectical, and holistic
philosophy ofhumans-in-nature into workable (and working) conceptual vocab-
ularies and analytical frameworks?
The arithmetic of Nature plus Society has been the bread and butter of envi-
ronmental studies since the 1970s. The arithmetic bears distinctive linguistic
inflections across the historical social sciences, and across the Two Cultures.
Earth-system scientists talk about "coupled human-natural systems";' Marxist
ecologists speak of the "nature-society dialectic"; cultural studies highlights
2

1 J. Liu, et al., "Coupled Human and Natural Systems:' Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007 ): 639-48.
2 B. Clark and R. York, "Carbon Metabolism:' Theory and Society 34 (2005):
391-428.
 34 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 35

hybrids, assemblages, and networks. 3 Establishing this arithmetic as a legitimate but also products of them? The idea that social organization carries with it envi-
domain of scholarly activity has been Green Thought's greatest contribution. ronmental consequences has taken us far, but it is unclear just how much farther
The environmental humanities and social sciences brought to light the other, Green Arithmetic can take us.
previously forgotten or marginalized, side of the Cartesian binary: the world of But if Green Arithmetic cannot get us to where we need to go today, what
environmental impacts. No small accomplishment, this. "The environment" is can?
now firmly established as a legitimate and relevant object of analysis. My response begins with a simple proposal. Needed, and I think implied by
About this signal accomplishment, I would make two observations. First, the an important layer of Green Thought, is a concept that moves from the interac-
work of bringing nature as factor into the study of global change is now largely tion of independent units-Nature and Society-to the dialectics of humans in
complete. It is increasingly difficult to address core issues in social theory and the web of life. Such a concept would focus our attention on the concrete dialec-
social change without some reference to environmental change. There remains tics of the messily bundled, interpenetrating, and interdependent relations of
considerable unevenness, across the historical social sciences, in how environ- human and extra-human natures. Needed, in other words, is a concept that
mentally oriented research is valorized (or not). But the core project of Green allows a proliferating vocabulary of humanity-in-nature, rather than one
Thought, from the time it gathered steam in the 1970s, has been successful: the premised on humanity and nature.
legitimacy and relevance of environmental research is no longer in question.
This project was always infused with a dialectical sensibility. 4 But its operation-
alization turned on an affirmation of the first question we posed at the
THE OIKEIOS: INTERACTION, DIALECTICS, AND THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY
outset-environment as object-rather than nature as the web oflife. This prior-
itization-could it have been otherwise?-resulted in the disjuncture we I propose that we begin with the oikeios.
encounter today: between humanity-in-nature (as philosophical proposition) Oikeios is a way of naming the creative, historical, and dialectical relation
and humanity and nature (as analytical procedure).This disjuncture lies at the between, and also always within, human and extra-human natures. The oikeios
core of the impasse in environmental studies today: an impasse characterized by is shorthand: for oikeios topos, or "favorable place:' a term coined by the Greek
a flood of empirical research and an unwillingness to move beyond environment philosopher-botanist Theophrastus. For Theophrastus, the oikeios topos indi-
as object. Nature with a capital "N" has been prized over the web of life. This cated "the relationship between a plant species and the environment:'s Properly
impasse may be understood in terms of a generalized reluctance to refigure speaking, oikeios is an adjective. But in the long journey towards a vocabulary
modernity as producer and product of the web of life. that transcends the Two Cultures (the physical and human sciences), I hope the
My second observation therefore turns on the exhaustion of the Cartesian reader might excuse a few liberties with the language.
binary to deepen our understanding of capitalism, historically and in the present Neologisms come a dime a dozen in Green Thought. We needn't not look far
crisis. Today, that binary obscures, more than it illuminates, humanity's place in for concepts aiming to fuse or combine the relations of human and extra-human
the web oflife. "Nature plus Society" appears especially unsuited to dealing with nature. 6 And yet, after decades of vigorous Green theorizing and analysis, we
today's proliferating crises-not least those linked to climate change and finan- still lack an approach that puts the oikeios at the center. Such a perspective would
cialization-and also with the origins and development of these crisis tendencies situate the creative and generative relation of species and environment as the
over the broad sweep of modern world history. ontological pivot-and methodological premise-ofhistorical change. This reori-
Is it now necessary to move beyond the environment as object? Can the proj- entation opens up the question of nature-as matrix rather than resource or
ect of writing environmental histories of social processes adequately capture the
manifold ways in which these processes are not only producers of environments, 5 J. Donald Hughes, "Theophrastus as Ecologist;' Environmental Review: ER 9, no.
4 (1985): 296-306; Pan's Travail (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994),
3 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 4· Emphasis added.
Press, 1993); J. Bennett, "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout;' 6 Some of the most imaginative conceptualizations (cyborg, natureculture) have
Public Culture 17, no. 3 (zoos): 445-65. come from Haraway's groundbreaking work, whose particularizing thrust ought not to
4 Cf. R. Williams, "Ideas of Nature" (1972); D. Harvey, "Population, Resources, distract us from their world-ecological implications. D. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and
and the Ideology of Science" (1974); R. A. Walker, "Human-Environment Relations: Women (New York: Routledge, 1991); When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of
Editor's Introduction;' Antipode 11, no. 2 (1979): 1-16. Minnesota Press, 2008).
 36 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 37
~
enabling condition-for historical analysis; it allows the reconstruction of what does it really mean? Are we simply adding nature to a long list of historical
humanity's great movements, from warfare to literature to scientific-technolog- actors? Or does recognition of nature-as-oikeios imply a fundamental rethinking
ical revolutions, as if nature matters to the whole of the historical process, not of agency itself? We can read many arguments that seek to elucidate nature's agen-
merely as its context, or its unsavory consequences. cy.'o It is not, however, clear how nature's agency-whether conceived in Cartesian
This is the intended contribution of the oikeios. Naming the relation through or dialectical terms-might clarify the making of the modern world. Does nature,
which humans (and other species) create the conditions of life-"definite modes say climate, "have" agency in the same way that classes or empires "make" history?
of life" in Marx and Engels' nicely-turned phrase7 -immediately directs our Yes and no. Part of the problem is the temptation to assign agency to both
attention to the relations that activate definite configurations of acting units and sides of the Cartesian binary. Climate, weeds, disease, in such assignments,
acted-upon objects. The oikeios is a multi-layered dialectic, comprising flora and "have" agency in a manner analogous to classes, capital, and empire. There has
fauna, but also our planet's manifold geological and biospheric configurations, been a certain arithmetic logic to these assignments: if humans have agency, can
cycles, and movements. Through the oikeios form and re-form the relations and we not say the same thing about extra-human natures? That sounds right, but
conditions that create and destroy humanity's mosaic of cooperation and does not, I think, adequately capture how agency unfolds. For relations of class,
conflict: what is typically called "social" organization. Nature-as-oikeios is, then, capital, and empire are already bundled with extra-human natures; they are
not offered as an additional factor, to be placed alongside culture or society or configurations of human and extra-human natures. From this it follows that
economy. Nature, instead, becomes the matrix within which human activity agency is a relational property of specific bundles of human and extra-human
unfolds, and the field upon which historical agency operates. From such a nature. Class power (and not only the agency of classes) derives and unfolds
vantage point, the problems of food, water, oil (and so much more!) become through specific configurations of power and (re)production in the web of life.
relational problems first, and object problems second; through the relations of If nature is indeed a historical protagonist, its agency can be comprehended
specific civilizations, food, water, and oil become real historical actors. adequately only by stepping out of the Cartesian binary. The issue is emphati-
From the perspective of the oikeios, civilizations (another shorthand) do not cally not one of the agency of Nature and the agency of Humans. These are
"interact" with nature as resource (or as garbage can); they develop through unthinkable without each other. Rather, the issue is how human and extra-hu-
nature-as-matrix. Climate change is a good example. Civilizations develop by man natures get bundled. Yes, diseases make history, but only as epidemiological
internalizing extant climate realities, favorable and unfavorable. "Climate" is not vectors bound to commerce and empire. This is, too often, left out of arguments
a historical agent as such; it is no more a historical agent, in itself, than empires of nature's agency: the capacity to make history turns on specific configurations
or classes abstracted from the web of life. Historical agency is irreducibly bundled of human and extra-human actors. Human agency is always within, and dialec-
in and through the oikeios. To lean on Marx, a species (or biospheric process) tically bound to, nature as a whole-which is to say, human agency is not purely
that does not have its agency outside itself does not exist. 8 Agency, in others human at all. It is bundled with the rest of nature.
words, is not a property of Nature and (or) Society-not even of humanity's The world-ecological alternative takes these bundles of human/extra-human
spectacular forms of sociality. Agency is, rather, an emergent property of definite activity as its starting point. Civilizations are big, expressive examples of this
configurations of human activity with the rest of life. And vice versa. dialectical bundling. From the large-scale and long-run patterns of human-led
Agency is clearly a key question for left ecology. Here I take agency as the capac- environment-making, we can discern historical facts from the practical infini-
ity to induce historical change (to produce ruptures), or to reproduce extant tude of basic facts. Climate change, in this scheme of things, becomes a vector of
historical arrangements (to reproduce equilibrium). It is a crude but useful distinc- planetary change woven into the very fabric of civilizational power and produc-
tion. To say that nature is a "historical protagonist"9 sounds quite attractive. But tion (class, empire, agriculture, etc.). Hardly a recent phenomenon, this I
socio-ecological fabric stretches back millennia. This is the spirit, if not always
11

7 F. Engels, "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man;' in The lill!
I
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers,
1970). 10 T. Steinberg, "Down to Earth;' The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002):
8 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Mineola, NY: Dover 798-820; J. Herron, "Because Antelope Can't Talk;' Historical Reflections 36, no. 1 (2010):
Publications, 2007). 33-52.
9 B. Campbell, "Nature as Historical Protagonist;' Economic History Review 63, no. 11 W. F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum (Princeton: Princeton University
2 (2010): 281-314. Press, 2005).
 38 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 39

the letter, of much climate historiography.' 2 When climate changes, so too category of basic facts; these are the raw materials of historical explanation.' 5
change the structures of power and production. However, this is not because Basic facts become historical through our interpretive frames. These frames-
climate interacts with civilizational structures, causing problems at some point whether Cartesian, world-ecological, or something else-offer a way of sorting
in these structures' otherwise independent lives. We might do better to reorient out basic facts, and assigning them to one or another category. One quite fash-
our vision, to see climate conditions as present at, and implicated in, the birth of ionable approach is to evade the thorny issue of historical facts altogether and
these structures. Civilizations are unthinkable in the absence of climate-itself declare oneself in favor of a flat ontology in which nothing necessarily causes
(yet another) shorthand for a diversity of atmospheric processes that co-pro- anything else. ' 6
duce relations of power and production. As such, climate is but one bundle of But this will hardly be satisfying for those seeking explanations of crisis and
determinations-not determinisms-that push, pull, and transform the rich change in historical capitalism. This has been the strength of a Red-Green
totalities of historical change. When climate has changed dramatically, the Cartesian approach to global capitalism and global environmental change. ' 7
outcomes have often been dramatic and epochal. Consider, for example, the Not so long ago, virtually all narratives of human history were organized as if
eclipse of Rome after the passing of the Roman Climatic Optimum around 300 nature-even in a Cartesian sense!-did not matter. Today, this has changed.
c.E., or the breakdown of feudal civilization with the coming of the Little Ice Age A broadly conceived environmental history perspective has triumphed. Here
a thousand years later. ' 3 But consider also those climate shifts favorable to the the accumulating impacts ofbiospheric change have met up with the accumu-
ascent of Roman power (c. 300 B.C.E.) or the dawning of the Medieval Warm lating accomplishments of Green politics and Green Thought to produce a vast
Period (c. 800-900) and the rapid multiplication of new "charter states" across but weak hegemony in the world university system. It is no longer possible to
Eurasia, from France to Cambodia.' 4 ignore the status of "nature" in social theory, and it is increasingly difficult to
The point is not to argue against climate change as historical vector; it is, ignore the problem of nature in the history of capitalism at any scale. This
rather, to situate that vector within the oikeios, and its successive historical hegemony says, in effect, that any attempt to interpret the broad contours and
natures. contradictions of world history without due attention to environmental condi-
The ontological point calls for its epistemological corollary. If climate's agency tions and changes is inadequate.
is a bundle of human and extra-human natures, these bundles are unevenly This is a major accomplishment. It is also one that has occurred within a
refracted through particular historical-geographical formations. Climate change limited frame. Green Thought has rarely challenged the hegemony of the
(and climate is always changing) is a fact. Climate change is not, in itself, a histor- Cartesian binary over the core conceptual language of historical change.
ical fact, any more than population and production data. It belongs to the Transcending the Nature/Society binary has been one thing to do philosophi-
cally, theoretically' 8 and through regional- and national-scale history.' 9 It has
12 Cf. M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001); B. Fagan, The Great been quite a different enterprise for world-historical change! Environmental
0

Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); D. Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History:' change has been added to the history of capitalism, but not synthesized.
Critical Inquiry 3 5 (2009 ): 197-222. Scholars addressing the contemporary dynamics of capi- Weiner is surely correct when he identifies the spirit of the environmental
talism and climate have gone further, advancing distinctive world-ecology syntheses whose
paradigmatic implications remain, at least for now, underappreciated. Here I am thinking,
above all, of Larry Lohmann's analyses of carbon markets and financiatization and Christian 15 E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Penguin, 1962); R.C. Lewontin, "Facts
Parenti's interwoven narrative of climate, class, and conflict in the early twenty-first century. and the Factitious in Natural Sciences;' Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 140-53.
L. Lohmann, "Financialization, Commodification and Carbon: The Contradictions of 16 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1993); J. Bennett, "The Agency of
Neoliberal Climate Policy;' in Socialist Register 2012: The Crisis and the Left, ed Assemblages" (2005).
L. Panitch, et al. (London: Merlin, 2012), 85-107; C. Parenti, Tropic of Chaos (New York: 17 Foster, et al., The Ecological Rift (2010).
Nation Books, 2011). 18 Cf. Smith, Uneven Development (1984); B. Braun and N. Castree, eds., Remaking
13 C. Crumley, "The Ecology of Conquest;' in Historical Ecology, ed. C. Crumley Reality (New York: Routledge, 1998).
(Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 183-201; J.W Moore, Ecology 19 Cf. R. White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996); J. Kosek,
in the Making (and Unmaking) of Feudal Civilization (Unpublished book manuscript, Understories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); J. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New
Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, 2013). Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
14 V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. Boo-1830, 20 See Moore, "Nature and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism:' Review
Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 26, no. 2 (2003): 97-172.
 FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 41
40 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS

history project in the twenty-first century: "We are all postructuralists now:'
21 in twenty-first century capitalism. "Nature plus Capitalism'' is increasingly less
By this, he means that environmental historians have come to see nature as productive, because the approach is additive rather than synthetic. The "red"
irreducibly intertwined with the fundamental relations of historical change.
22 critique is now closely paired with the "green" critique, but neither Greens nor
(Whether this relation is best described as poststructuralist is another ques- Reds have moved towards a synthesis that demonstrates a relational reconcep-
tion.) But this now-common political ecology perspective has been reluctant tualization of "economy-making" in light of "environment-making" and vice
to challenge the Cartesian binary on the terrain of historical capitalism. versa.26

Accumulation is reckoned as a social process with environmental conse- The synthesis that might unify the recognition of global capitalism as a
quences, rather than a way of bundling human and extra-human natures.
23 "real" historical place and as a real bundle of human and extra-human
Global political ecology and environmental history has embraced an environ- natures has been slow to materialize. Cartesian thinking in global studies has
mental perspective that emphasizes the environmental history of social been especially resilient. The key concepts of historical change remain
relations (Nature-plus-Society), rather than modernity's "social" relations as embedded in an ontology that few of us, today, agree with: that notion that
producers and products of the web of life (society-in-nature/nature-in-soci- humans are independent of the rest of nature. The idea persists that concep-
ety). Are we all postructuralists now? Perhaps. But when it comes to historical tual renovation can occur through the promiscuous deployment of
adjectives-environmental, ecological, and all manner of cognates-that
capitalism, dualism retains its hegemony.
This is perhaps most evident in the populist notion of"converging" crises as assume precisely what needs to be explained. Thus we have environmental
a way of articulating the global turbulence of the twenty-first century. 24 Insofar justice and social justice; ecological imperialism and economic imperialism;
as this breaks with the crisis discourse of the 1970s-in which biophysical the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of labor; economic crisis and
contradictions were hived off from the crises of capital and class -the
25 ecological crisis. The stylized list could be multiplied endlessly. The addition
language of converging crises is an important advance. In another sense, of ecological adjectives is surely an advance upon older, social reductionist
however, the radical critique of capitalism since 2008 has proceeded in terms historiographies and analytical frames for which nature-in any sense of the
entirely agreeable to the Cartesian sorting out of crisis tendencies. One can term-really did not matter.
now add "climate" or "ecology" to the proliferating list of significant fractures Today, however, the model of Nature plus Society is increasingly self-limiting.
We can add environmental factors and consequences indefinitely. But concrete
historical wholes-such as capitalism-cannot be constructed by "adding up"
21 D.R. Weiner, "A Death-Defying Attempt to Articulate a Coherent Definition of
the Social and Environmental parts. Nor can capitalism be aggregated through
Environmental History;' Environmental History 10, no. 3 (2005): 404-20.
22 Cf. R. White, "'Are you an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?"' in regional case studies that theorectically (rather than historically) construct the
Uncommon Ground, ed. W. Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). modern world-system.
23 At its best, political ecology recognizes global political economy as co-constitu-
tive, and poses the right questions: How are "specific environmental conditions"
produced, and when, where, and how are these conditions "entangled [or not] with the
WORLD-ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATIONS: TOWARDS CAPITALISM-IN-NATURE
tendencies of global capitalism ... : accumulation, growth, and crisis" (Peet, et al., eds.
Global Political Ecology, (2011), 29)? But for all of political ecology's incantations of the
Although Theophrastus seems to have used the oikeios topos in a fairly conven-
global (ibid.), the world-system remains a theoretical rather than historical construction,
a generality relegated to the "context" of specific conditions-as if capitalism itself is not tional way, to signify what we would call an ecological niche, a dialectical
a specific place with its own specific conditions of production and power! (See especially alternative is suggested by nearly a century of holistic thought.' 7 In this
Moore, "'Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway' Part r;' Journal of Agrarian Change 10, no.
1 (2010): 35-71). Contextualizing, rather than specifying, world-historical dynamics has 26 But see Lohmann's breathtaking analyses of carbon markets, climate change, and
left political ecology with a social-reductionist political economy rather than a set of world accumulation: L. Lohmann, "When Markets are Poison: Learning about Climate
propositions concerning capital accumulation as socio-ecological process. Policy" (2009); "Financialization, Commodification and Carbon: The Contradictions of
24 Cf. S. George, "Converging Crises" (2010); P. McMichael, "The Land Grab'' (2012). Neoliberal Climate Policy" (2012).
25 Compare for example D.H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: 27 J.C. Smuts, Holism and Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Capra, The
Signet/Mentor, 1972); with G. Arrighi, "Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis;' New Left Turning Point (1982); J.B. Foster, Marxs Ecology (2ooo); Harvey, "Population, Resources,
and the Ideology of Science'' (1974); Harvey, "The Nature of Environment" (1993); R.
Review, no. 111 (1978; 1972 original): 3-24.
 42 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 43

dialectical and holistic alternative, the oikeios informs a perspective on historical negotiating biological and geographical relations; they are ways of environ-
28
change in the web of life as simultaneously enfolding and unfolding. This alter- ment-making. They are not the "natural base[s]" in a mechanical base/
native is the world-ecology synthesis. Like many other Green perspectives, the superstructure model of historical change, but rather the constitutive relation
world-ecology approach offers a philosophy of history premised on humani- "with the rest of nature" through which humans produce (and are products of)
ty-in-nature.29 World-ecology's distinctiveness lies in its attempt to translate the "definite mode[s] oflife:' 33
philosophical premise into world-historical method, emphasizing the bundling The observation applies not only to the relations of everyday life but also to
of human and extra-human natures through the oikeios. Such bundling neces- the large-scale patterns of power and production in the modern world-system.
sarily carries us far beyond the (so-called) "environmental" dimensions of human The idea that capitalism acts upon nature, rather than develops through the web
activity. Our concern is human relations as always already interpenetrated with of life, is prevalent in critical environmental studies today. It is the analytical
the rest of nature, and therefore always already both producers and products of practice of a broadly-defined global political ecology-even when the philo-
change in the web of life. 30 The manifold projects and processes of humani- sophical premise is explicitly relational. 34 We now have a robust political
ty-in-nature-including imperialisms and anti-imperialism, class struggles economy of the environment, but few reconstructions of capital accumulation in
from above and below, capital accumulation in its booms and crises-are always the web oflife.JS
products of the oikeios, even as they create new relations of power and produc- This has allowed for all manner of neo-Malthusian tendencies-as in the
"fossil capitalism" argumenP 6 -to creep into left ecology. They are neo-Malthu-
tion within it.
World-ecology is, then, a framework for theorizing those strategic bundles sian because they reproduce Malthus's original error, which was less about
of relations fundamental to capitalist civilization. These strategic relations- population than it was about taking the dynamics of nature out of history. In this
above all value/capital as abstract labor-in-nature-are typically viewed as scheme, limits are external-rather than co-produced. As global political econ-
social relations: as relations between humans first, and, only subsequently, as omy and political ecology developed, scholars tended to accept (implicitly) or
interactions with the rest of nature. Environmental history, from its origins, reject (explicitly) this conception of limits. But there was little reconceptualiza-
sought to resolve this social determinism in a new formulation. Four decades tion of capitalism's limits as produced through the oikeios.
ago, Crosby argued that humans are biological entities first, before they are The view that resources are things unto themselves-and that the limits of
Catholics, capitalists, colonizers, or anything elseY Alas, Crosby's ground- capitalism are external constraints rather than internal contradictions-is of
breaking argument did not resolve the problem of social determinism so much course not new to our era. It was not new even in the 1970s. It is a view that
as invert it. For humanity's biological existence is collective and collaborative, locates the taproot of capitalism's limits not only outside of the strategic relations
turning on species-specific capacities for symbolic production and collective of capitalism, but importantly, outside of historical change. Social limits, in this
memory. Biology and sociality are not separate, and to suppose so is to opt for scheme of things, are historical, flexible, open to revision; Natural limits are,
a Hobson's choice of biological determinism or social reductionism. Happily, effectively, outside of history. As with agency, we may ask: Is the best procedure
the oikeios gives us a real choice. Here we take "the first premise [s] of all human for ascertaining civilizationallimits one of assigning limiting power to one or
history" as producer/product relations in the web of life. 32 Thus food-getting the other side of the Cartesian binary? Among the consequences of such Nature/
and family-making were (and are) affairs of culture/sociality as a ways of Society models is a pronounced tendency towards an "externalist" view of limits.
The obverse of social reductionism in thinking capitalism's limits is biospheric
Levins and R. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (1985}; E. Odum, "The Emergence of determinism. Such has been the argument of left catastrophists, reintroducing
Ecology as a New Integrative Discipline:' Science 195 (1977}; B. Oilman, Alienation
33 Ibid.
(1971).
28 D. Bohm, The Essential David Bohm, ed. L. Nichol (New York: Routledge, 2003). 34 Foster, et al., The Ecological Rift (2010}; N. Heynen, et al., eds. Neoliberal
29 Cf. Capra, The Turning Point (1982}; C. Folke, et al. "Resilience Thinking:' Ecology Environments (New York: Routledge, 2007}; Peet, et al., eds., Global Political Ecology (2011).
and Society 15, no. 4 (2010), http:// www.ecologyandsociety.org/voh5/iss4/art2o/. 35 But cf. Burkett, Marx and Nature (1999).
30 Williams, "Ideas of Nature" (1972). 36 A. Malm, "The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British
31 A.W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Cotton Industry:' Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013}: 15-68; E. Altvater, "The Social
and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism:' in Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist
1972).
32 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1970), 42. Register 2007, ed. L. Panitch and C. Leys (London: Merlin Press, 2006).
 FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 45
44 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS

sense, however, only if we presume an originary separation of Society and

biospheric determinism under the veil of climate change-whose trajectory is
Nature. Once we start to look closely at these historical processes-energy
transforming the conditions of planetary life, but whose transformations cannot
regimes and agricultural revolutions, yes, but also nationalisms, develop-
be explained by treating climate as external force.
mentalist projects, national literatures, financializations-we begin to see
The biosphere is a kind of limit. But it is a limit of what and not how. To say
just how deeply rooted in the oikeios they really are. Through this move-
"limits" is to invoke the external but to implicate the oikeios. Historical limits can
ment of oikeios-bundling, we may encompass the concerns of the
be explained only through historical abstractions, not general ones. And so
environmental studies-writing environmental histories of social
"nature in general" is oflittle immediate use. The general abstraction-Nature-
processes-while demonstrating that the social processes, too, are prod-
cannot take us to a deeper understanding ofbiospheric limits as products of the
ucts of the web of life. This is the transition from environmental histories
double internality: the internalization of biospheric relations within capitalist
of modernity, to modernity as environmental history. And to accomplish
civilization, and the internalization of value-relations in biospheric
this involves a transition from seeing capitalism as a social system to seeing
reproduction. capitalism as world-ecology, joining capital, power and nature in a "rich
Historical nature moves us from the commonplace view of nature as
totality of many determinations:' 4o
object to nature as matrix, the field within which capitalism unfolds. We are
still interested in those objects-what we call resources. Building on Marx's
relational ontology, we can see resources as relational and therefore histori-
calY Geology is real enough. But it becomes geo-history through definite FROM ENVIRONMENT TO ENVIRONMENT-MAKING
relations of power and production in which geological dispositions are
immanent. Geology cannot "directly determine" the organization of produc- In this way of seeing, the "ecology" in world-ecology is not a noun modified by
tion,38 precisely because production relations are co-produced. Articulations a geographical adjective, much less a synonym for interactions within extra-hu-
of production and reproduction are mediated through the oikeios, not least man natures. Rather, our ecology derives from the oikeios, within and through
the dialectic of organic life and inorganic environments. 39 Geology, in other which species make-and always remake-multiple environments. Nature can
words, co-produces power and production as it bundles with historically neither be saved nor destroyed, only transformed. The oikeios represents a radi-
specific human relations. These specific relations, including geology, cal elaboration of the dialectical logic immanent in Marx's concept of metabolism
undergo successive transformations. One epoch-shaping instance was the (Stoffwechsel). 4 ' Stoffwechsel signifies "a metabolism of nature ... in which
re-bundling of human activity in the nineteenth century North Atlantic as neither society nor nature can be stabilized with the fixity implied by their ideo-
the energy regime shifted from charcoal and peat to coal. In this view, geol- logical separation:'42 In this dialectical elaboration, species and environments
ogy is at once subject and object. Civilizations move through, not around, the are at once making and unmaking each other, always and at every turn. All life
makes environments. All environments make life.
web oflife.
We can, through the oikeios, implicate the widest range of meta-pro- This implies a shift from environment to environment-making: the
cesses in the modern world as socio-ecological, from family formation to ever-changing, interpenetrating, and interchanging dialectic of humans and
racial orders to industrialization, imperialism, and proletarianization. environments in historical change. We are looking at the relations that guide
From this perspective, capitalism does not develop upon global nature so environment-making, and also the processes that compel new rules of environ-
much as it emerges through the messy and contingent relations of humans ment-making, as in the long transition from feudalism to capitalism. 43 And, at
with the rest of nature. There is no question that, for most of us, these great the risk of putting too fine a point on it, "environments" are not only fields and
processes of world history look like hybrids or fusions. These terms make 40 Marx, Grundrisse (1973), 100.
41 Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1977).
37 Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1977); Ollmann, Alienation (1971); Harvey, "Population,
42 N. Smith, "Nature as Accumulation Strategy;' in Socialist Register 2007= Coming
Resources, and the Ideology of Science'' (1974).
to Terms with Nature, ed. L. Panitch and C. Leys (London: Merlin Press, 2006), xiv.
38 S.G. Bunker and P.S. Ciccantell, "Economic Ascent and the Global Environment;'
43 Moore, "The Modern World-System as Environmental History?': Theory and
in Ecology and the World-System, ed. W.L. Goldfrank, et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Society 32, no. 3 (2003): 307-77; "Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism" (2007); "'Amsterdam
Press, 1999), 25. Is Standing on Norway' Part I" (2010); '"Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway' Part II"(2010).
39 Birch and Cobb, The Liberation of Life (1981).
 FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 47
46 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS

forests; they are homes, factories, office towers, airports, and all manner of built complex webs of biophysical determination: we are, among other things, an
"environment" for the trillions of microbial symbionts (the micro-biome) that
environments, rural and urban.
Capitalism takes shape through the co-production of nature, the pursuit of inhabit us, and that make our life-activity possible. We are dealing, in other
power, and the accumulation of capital. These are not, however, three indepen- words, with "worlds within worlds:' 47
dent blocks of relations that may then be interconnected through feedback links. The problem is more than reductionism, however. Dialectics is about more
Rather, these three moments interpenetrate each other in the making of histori- than interaction. The difference is one with major implications for how we see
cal capitalism-and in its unraveling today. We are charting the emergence of historical change. Even among radical critics, the Cartesian binary of Society
definite historical relations through the oikeios that bring together (bundle) defi- (humans without nature) and Nature (environments without humans) holds
nite human and extra-human activities and movements. When Marx observes sway. 48 From the perspective of the oikeios, the Cartesian view is theoretically
that humans "act upon external nature, and in this way . . . simultaneously arbitrary and empirically misleading. Try drawing a line around the "social" and
changes [our] own nature;' 44 he is making a point about the centrality of the the "natural" in the cultivation and consumption of food. In a rice paddy or a
labor process as "bundled" in a world-ecological sense. "External nature" is not wheat field, in a cattle feedlot or on our dinner table, where does the natural
outside the labor process but constitutive of it. The pivotal relation, in turns process end, and the social process begin? The question itself speaks to the tenu-
liberating and limiting, is between human and extra-human natures. ous purchase of our Cartesian vocabulary on the everyday realities that we live,
Environment-making is an activity of all life; and humans, too, inhabit and and seek to analyze. One can say that we are social and natural beings, but this
rework environments "made" by extra-human agencies. merely begs the question: When are humans "social" beings, when are we "natu-
To be sure, humans are unusually effective at environment-making: reconfig- ral" creatures, and what are the relations that govern these shifting boundaries?
uring the web of life to accommodate, and to enable, definite relations of power When it comes to food (and not just food), every step in the process is bundled.
and production. In world-ecological perspective, civilizations do not act upon The question becomes not one of "Is it social or natural?" but one of, "How do
nature but develop through the oikeios. Civilizations are bundles of relations human and extra-human natures fit together?" Any adequate response to the
between human and extra-human natures. These bundles are formed, stabilized, question must flow through some form of dialectical-oikeios reasoning.
and periodically disrupted in and through the oikeios. Humans relate to nature This reasoning leads us to see capitalism as a specific dialectic of project and
as a whole from within, not from outside. Undoubtedly, humans are an espe- process. On the one hand, the projects of capitalist agencies-capital and empires,
cially powerful environment-making species. But this hardly exempts human to keep it simple-confront the rest of nature as external obstacles, and also as
activity from the rest of the nature. We are shaped by the environment-making sources of wealth and power. On the other hand, these projects are also co-pro-
activities of extra-human life, for whom humans (individually and collectively) duced through processes, the unruly movements of bundled natures, through
are "environments" to be made, and also to be unmade. 45 "To say that man's which civilizational projects discover spectacular contradictions: global warm-
physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to ing in the twenty-first century, or the mid-fourteenth century confluence of
agro-ecological exhaustion, disease, and (yet again) climate change. In this light,
itself, for man is a part of nature:' 46
If all relations between humans, all human activity, unfold through the oikeios civilizations internalize the relations of nature in contingent, yet quasi-linear,
(which itself enfolds), it follows that these relations are always and everywhere a fashion-and they do so within the processes and through the projects of
relation with the rest of nature. It is a dialectic that works simultaneously inside- (so-called) human history.
out and outside-in: the earth is an environment for humans, and humans are Highlighting this dialectic of project and process is a means of guarding
environments (and environment-makers) for the rest oflife on planet earth. The against our tendency to accept capital's ontology: the notion that humans (or
usual approach to these questions is to view the dialectic of human and extra-hu- human organization) act upon nature rather than enter a ceaseless cascade of
man natures as one of interaction. But the interactionist model is premised on a mutual transformation within it. And, crucially, it is a means of highlighting
grand-and I think unwarranted-reductionism. Humans, in themselves, are the real historical power of ontological and epistemic dualisms. Nature may be
a violent abstraction-a concept in which essential relations are abstracted

44
Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1977), 283. Emphasis added.
Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (1985). 47 Ley et al., "Worlds within Worlds" (2oo8).
45 48 Cf. Foster et al., The Ecological Rift (2010).
46 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (2007), 107.
 48 FROM DUALISM TO DIALECTICS FROM OBJECT TO OIKEIOS 49

from the reality in question 49 -but it is also a real abstraction, an operative humans narrowly, but through the oikeios, the pulsing and renewing dialectic of
force in the world. 5° To be sure, Nature/Society is not the only dualism, but it humans and the rest of nature. At stake now-perhaps in a more salient way
is the originary dualism. The separation of the peasant from the land and the than ever before in the history of our species-is exactly this: emancipation or
symbolic separation of Humans and Nature were a singular process. The emer- oppression not from the standpoint of humanity and nature but from the
gence of Nature as a violent, but real, abstraction was fundamental to the perspective of humanity-in-nature ... and nature-in-humanity.
cascading symbolic-material transformations of primitive accumulation in
the rise of capitalism.
The capacity to make history is an expression not only of internally differen-
tiated conditions and relations within human populations, but also of the
differentiated conditions and relations of the biosphere. Humanity, too, is an
object for the historical movements and fluxes oflife and the geophysical move-
ments of our planet. Thus, these capacities to make history may be turned
outside-in and inside-out. (Our double internality.) Does anyone today seri-
ously doubt that diseases, or climates, or plants make history as much as any
empire? At the same time, is it possible to articulate the role of diseases, plants,
or climate abstracted from accumulation, empire, or class? This line of question-
ing allows us to go beyond a view of nature as a place where one leaves a footprint.
It encourages a way of seeing nature as an active movement of the whole, one
comprising deforestations and toxifications and all the rest but not reducible to
these. It is through the oikeios that we can see-and reconstruct historically-
nature as far more than an aggregate of consequences (deforestation, soil erosion,
pollution, etc.). The movements and cycles of extra-human natures are produc-
ers/products of historical change, internal to the movements of historical change.
Nature-as-matrix is cause, active condition, and constituting (bundled) agent in
the history of civilizations.
It is already quite challenging to make these arguments on the terrain of
philosophy and regional history. Constructing narratives of the longue dun~e as
if nature matters-as producer no less than product-is more challenging still.
This is the challenge that world-ecology meets head on. If nature matters onto-
logically in our philosophy of history, then we are led to engage analytically the
human-biospheric double internality. Humans simultaneously create and
destroy environments (as do all species), and our relations are therefore simul-
taneously-if differentially through time and across space-being created and
destroyed with and by the rest of nature. Through this optic, nature's status
undergoes a radical shift: a transition from nature as resource to nature as
matrix. Nature can be neither destroyed nor saved, only reconfigured in ways
that are more or less emancipatory, more or less oppressive. But take note: our
terms "emancipatory" and "oppressive" are offered not from the standpoint of

49 Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction (1987).

50 Toscano, "The Open Secret of Real Abstraction" (2008).