Book review: Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital

Abstract

In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore advances a new synthetic framework that draws on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought to formulate a theoretical edifice of capitalism-in-nature (as opposed to capitalism and nature). Hailing from the growing World-Ecology Research Network, Moore’s book is unique in its transdisciplinary approach, spanning an impressive array of key scholarship from sociology, economics, geography, history, international development, and political science, among others. The crux of the argument hinges on an essential concept, the oikeios, that “enables—but on its own does not accomplish—a theory of capital accumulation in the web of life,” (p. 10). For Moore, the oikeios names the life-making relation that includes all forms of human organization, which is both a product and producer of the oikeios. It is with this dialectical tool that Moore disrupts Green Thought’s basic questions that center on the origins of a perceived separation of humanity from nature and anthropogenic contributions to ecological degradation and crises; in doing so, he shifts focus to how humanity is unified with nature within the web of life and chronicles the historical co-production of wealth and power accumulation in which humans put nature (including other humans) to work. For Moore, human history must be reconsidered to reflect the co-production of humans in nature within the web of life.