A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel

How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analysing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

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The Video:

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Award-winning writer and activist Raj Patel makes the case that in making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the earth. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once said, “I believe in capitalism. But capitalism only works if you have safety nets to deal with people who are naturally left behind and brutalized by it.” 

In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies, bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings. In the grips of another upheaval, Patel and Moore suggest innovative thinking to understand and reclaim the planet.

Thanks to Town Hall and University Bookstore
Recorded 10/11/17

Review

Raj Patel and Jason W Moore illustrate a ruinous economic system that benefits a minority class

Mark O'Connell reviewed this book in the Guardian (Thu 14 Jun2018):

Consider the McNugget. Consider not merely its proprietary combination of succulence and crispness and flavour, but also its usefulness as a symbol of the time in which we find ourselves. Consider its substance, derived from the world’s most common bird, bred to reach maturity within weeks, and with a breast so large it can barely walk. Consider that 60 billion of these birds are slaughtered every year, resulting in an abundant source of cheap food, and that this work necessitates a vast pool of cheap human labour. And consider that, long after humans have disappeared from the Earth, what will remain of us, along with the immortal residue of nuclear waste, is a fossil record that will register the truly insane volume of chicken carcasses we left behind.

In the early pages of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. One of their central contentions is that we are no longer living in the Holocene, but in a new geological era they refer to as the Capitalocene – the currently fashionable term “Anthropocene”, they argue, suggests that our current state of ecological emergency is merely the result of humans doing what humans do, whereas the reality is that it flows out of the specific historical phenomenon of capitalism. As a term, then, Capitalocene is designed to nudge us away from evolutionary determinism, and from a sense of collective culpability for climate change, towards an understanding of the way in which the destruction of nature has largely been the result of an economic system organised around a minority class and its pursuit of profit. “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change,” as they put it, “but most of us are in steerage.”

Patel and Moore’s essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness. (An earlier, more knottily theoretical work of eco-Marxism by Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, argues that “cheap nature” is as central an imperative of capitalism as cheap labour.) The seven “things” of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. In the chapter on cheap money, they demonstrate the process of cheapening through the barbaric silver mining practices of 16th-century Spanish colonialists in Peru. “Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money.”

One of the most persuasive aspects of Patel and Moore’s argument, in this sense, is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the “real work” it makes possible. “Writing a history of work without care work,” they write, “would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water. It’d be possible, in a limited fashion, but, once you’d realised the omission, hard to continue.”

The book itself is not much over 200 pages, followed by a further hundred or so of notes and references – a high proportion of which can be taken to illustrate Patel and Moore’s extreme scholarly hyperactivity. They date the Capitalocene’s year zero not to the dawn of the industrial revolution or to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but to the beginning of European colonial expansion into the Americas in the 16th century. This is the crucial historical juncture not just because it pushed out the frontier – one of the book’s central contentions is that capitalism lives by the often bloody expansion of frontiers – but because it provided a testing ground for new European ideas about the division between nature and society. Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Bacon, they argue, legitimated colonial violence through this conceptual division, which led to the relegation of indigenous peoples to the category of nature.

In the book’s exploration of how capitalism secured the cheapness of a particular “thing”, each chapter begins with some or other aspect of this colonial original sin. All but one, in fact, begin with Columbus, whom the authors intend to stand, in all his viciousness and greed, for capitalism itself – which, they argue, is historically inseparable from colonialism. Capitalism’s frontiers are “the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature – humans included. They are always, then, about reducing the costs of doing business. Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers.”

One of the book’s central contentions is that capitalism lives by the often bloody expansion of frontiers

It’s not something the book goes into, but while reading it I found myself thinking about how the notion of colonising Mars, as advanced by entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, represents the most extreme operation of this logic in our time. Capitalism is running out of frontiers, and the legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unliveable for vast numbers of its inhabitants. Mars exists as the possibility of a new frontier, a means of keeping capitalism alive after its current host-organism, Earth, has been drained of the ability to support life.

If Patel and Moore don’t quite make it to Mars, their book still covers an awful lot of ground. They move rapidly between economic analysis, history and political polemic, all in service of the premise that all the cheapness has in fact been catastrophically expensive. Their movement is not always fluid or seamless; the authors have a tendency to end their chapters with inelegant mechanisms of transition. The chapter on cheap care, for instance, concludes with the assertion that “it is to cheap food that we now turn”; the chapter on cheap food ends with “it is to cheap energy that we now turn” – and so on. You can almost hear the click and whirr of an old-style projector as the next slide turns over. But occasional clunkiness is only a minor issue; the overall impression is one of sweeping erudition, and an impressive ability to synthesise disparate elements.

The book ends with a brief but hopeful conclusion, introducing an idea the authors refer to as “reparation ecology”. The concept is delineated only hastily, and hazily, though it involves a broad redistribution of natural and cultural resources, and a proper valuation of all the things capitalism has cheapened over the centuries. There’s no real attempt to work through how this might be achieved; it’s offered less as a programme than as a provocation to imagine a future outside of capitalism’s violent imperatives. It’s an invitation, as they put it, to “dream seditiously”. 

Review

Review by John Fullerton for Freedom Books:

Welcome to the Capitalocene. Humans, at least some of them, are killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times faster than the background rate. The scale of destruction can’t be simply extrapolated from the excesses of our knuckle-dragging forebears. What has really changed since the 1400s is capitalism – and this is what the book is about: showing how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things – nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.

Take the humble chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, product of post WW2 freely-sourced genetic manipulation to produce the most profitable fowl. It reaches maturity in six weeks, can barely walk, has an oversized breast, and is slaughtered en masse, at the rate of sixty billion a year. Cheap Nature. In the United States two cents for every dollar spent on fast-food chicken goes to the poultry workers. Cheap Work. Eighty-six percent of workers are in pain because of repetitive hacking and twisting on the production line. Denial of injury claims is common. The result is a fifteen percent decline in income for ten years after injury, so recovering workers depend on family for support – outside the production circuit but central to maintaining the workforce. Cheap Care. So chickens don’t fart methane like cows, but they are bred in huge barns that need fuel to keep them warm. Low-cost chickens require loads of propane. Cheap Energy. Franchising and public subsidies for private profit mitigate the financial risks of commercial sales, right through to the land on which soy is grown to feed the chickens, in China, Brazil and the United States. Cheap Money. Last, persistent acts of chauvinism against animal and human lives – women, the colonized, the poor, people of colour and immigrants, make these six cheap things possible.

Of course there’s resistance, from indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the genetic material for breeding to care workers demanding recognition. ‘The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.’

The Medieval Warm Period ran from around 950 to 1250 across the North Atlantic. Populations swelled, towns multiplied. Europeans nearly tripled in number to 70 million. Agricultural surpluses soared. Relative prosperity fuelled expansionism. Beginning in 1095, the Crusades were commercialised military operations targeting the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean. Conquest was made to pay by imposing tribute; the forerunner of colonial capitalism. The greatest conqueror of all, however, was cultivation; by the fourteenth century, agriculture took up a third of all European land use, a sixfold increase in 500 years, much of it at the expense of forests.

Then famine returned with colder, wetter weather. Massive rains struck Europe in May 1315 and did not ease up until August, ending with a cold snap. Europe’s population shrank by twenty percent in five years and the so-called Great Famine continued until 1322. This was the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 19th century. Feudalism crashed, not least because feudal lords wanted cash or grain, and they consumed any surpluses rather than reinvesting in agriculture. Left to their own devices, peasants would probably have shifted to crop mixes, including garden produce. Peasant autonomy would have allowed medieval Europe to feed up to three times as many people. But the transition never happened. In 1347 the Black Death struck an already weakened population. Almost overnight, peasant revolts became large-scale threats to the feudal order.

Repressive legislation to keep labour cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, was the response, for example England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers. ‘The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionisation harder’, the authors write.

Capitalism was born out of this mayhem. Ruling classes didn’t just seek to restore the surplus but to expand it, and it was the Iberian aristocracy that stumbled on a solution, especially in Portugal and Castile. To make war with the Moslem powers on the peninsula – the Reconquista – they depended on financiers. War and debt remade society and spurred the earliest invasions of the Canary Islands and Madeira. ‘The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers.’

Madeira was a case in point. In the 1460s a new way for producing food took shape. One traveller reported in 1455 there was not a foot of ground on the island not covered in great trees. By the 1550s it was hard to find any wood at all. The reason: sugar production. It had arrived in Ibera by the 14th century and by 1420 it was being grown commercially, funded by German banks and cultivated near Valencia by a mix of slaves and free workers. In the 1460s and 1470s farmers on Madeira gave up wheat and grew sugar exclusively. The sugar frontier spread to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a massive scale to the New World. And like palm and soy monocultures today, it rapidly exhausted soils, cleared forests and encouraged pests. As for the workers, they were indigenous people from the Canary Islands in the case of Madeira, North African salves and in some cases paid plantation labourers from Europe.

When Madeira’s trees were all consumed, sugar production crashed. Capitalism reinvented itself. After sugar came wine, the casks being imported from the ‘cheap’ forests of the New World. Commodities flowed the other way: Madeira was a conduit for the African slave trade, and in a more recent reinvention, today that grim history is exploited and marketed in the form of tourism.

Here then, is the central theme of this highly readable, heavily-sourced book: ‘Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services…For capitalism, what matters is that the figures entered into ledgers – to pay workers, to supply adequate food for workers, to purchase energy and raw materials – are as low as possible. Capitalism only values what it can count and it can count only dollars…this means that the whole system thrivers when powerful states and capitalists can reorganise global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy and raw materials with as little disruption as possible.’