When it comes to its understanding of nature, capitalism is nothing short of schizophrenic. Right from its beginnings political economists have argued that of all the possible economic systems, none is more in tune with the way the world actually is than the capitalist system where human beings are free to truck and barter till their heart’s content.

One could begin here in 1705 with Madevelle’s infamous The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits where the subtitle gives the whole plot away. The idea that the world has been set up so that individual greed in the aggregate brings untold benefits to the whole was maybe the earliest versions of “the balance of nature”, a fairy tale constructed from the observations of an industrious insect. And we’ve gotten to the point where people are not just arguing that markets are natural, but that nature itself is a market. 

Weirdly enough, these ideas of capitalism’s naturalness run parallel to another idea at the root of its economics- that nature is something external to the capitalist system, a mere source of inputs at best and at worst an easily ignorable dumping ground for its unavoidable material waste.

It is this second (and in his view unique) attitude towards nature that is the main subject of Jason Moore’s book Capitalism in the web of life : ecology and the accumulation of capital. In his view capitalism inherited a dualistic idea of nature from the Cartesians where society and nature are something separate and that all of us, including environmentalists, have been in this intellectual trap ever since.       

Moore argues that all economic systems are natural in the sense that they are the way in which human beings socially plug into the flows of the larger biosphere in which they are embedded. All such social systems aim to reshape nature in its own image, and while at first glance this might seem a highly unnatural thing to do, on reflection one realizes that not just humans but probably most animals do something similar in kind if not to the same degree.

What he is describing is something ecologists call niche construction, and can be found throughout the living world. Beavers are famous for so molding the natural environment, and before the arrival of humans in the Americas (and perhaps even after), had a profound impact on the natural ecology. Yet Beavers are nothing when compared to microbes which have radically reshaped the earth’s oceans and atmosphere, sometimes to disastrous effect.

For Moore what makes capitalism distinct is that it is a system that can only function when it has access to “cheap” nature, that is, cheap labor, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap resources. Capitalism’s expertise lies in scanning the globe and constantly finding new sources of cheap inputs to exploit. At the heart of every wave of wealth accumulation, somewhere lies a hidden act of expropriation.

What I find compelling here is that Moore has managed to clearly link the concerns of environmental and social justice while also connecting different realms of social justice into one overarching framework that includes the nonhuman world. Capitalism hasn’t merely lived off the underpaid labor of child and industrial workers, or on imperialism against the global south, or slavery and sharecropping, but the unpaid work of women and even the family itself.

Like all social systems, Moore thinks capitalism has an end date, and though I agree with him on that point, I think the death of capitalism is nowhere in sight, and this is the case even if I accept his proposed cause of mortality.

What Capitalism in the web of life argues is that we’re coming to the end of the age of the “Four Cheaps” and without them capitalism will be unable to function. As the population ages cheap labor disappears, the combined effects of a plateau in crop yields and climate change means the end of cheap food, we’ve reached the end of the line when it comes to cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and resources are becoming ever scarcer and therefore more expensive to extract. However, capitalism is a wily beast and if it resembles anything in nature it is evolution and its seemingly infinite adaptability. On the verge of running out of their current cheaps, capitalists are exploiting yet more new ones.

In terms of labor we have not so much automation as partial automation as a route to turn the customers themselves into part of the workforce. A large Walmart night have just two or three cashiers leaving those unwilling to waste an afternoon in line to check themselves out. Turning customers into workers is the essence of surveillance capitalism. The aging of the workforce in developed countries may or may not lead to increasing levels of automation, but for now our robots can be driven by remote workers in the developing world, our AI a magic trick performed by ghost workers hidden from sight. Many of these workers will eventually be plugged in global youth hungry for wages and prevented from being able to move. Africa is set to have 100s of millions of those. Frighteningly enough, capitalism’s new frontier seems to be inside the human body, our genes, our thoughts and emotions and the body itself.

The end of cheap energy doesn’t seem to be in the current cards either. The arrival of green energy is supplementing rather than replacing fossil fuels, fracking has turned the US into the world’s largest producer of oil, dirty coal remains cheap and plentiful, and is in decline largely because fracked natural gas has gotten so cheap so fast. When it comes to cheap resources, we now have serious talk about mining the ocean floor, or pummeling the earth with the mineral wealth derived from asteroids and the moon.

The one place where continued cheapness seems legitimately threatened is in terms of food as yields plateau in the face of climate change a still rising global population and a hoped for second Green Revolution via biotech continues to fail to arrive. I would include with that cheap water. But then again capitalism might just end up proposing we turn bugs into food.

A question I kept asking myself over and over as I read Capitalism in the web of life was if capitalism was really to blame for our environmental crisis or was it something else? For while I hate that system as much as anyone I can’t help wondering if we lost something important when we abandoned the concept of modernization. It was a detente era concept meant to explain the transition from agricultural to industrial societies from economies based on limited to commerce to consumer societies driven by the needs and wants of mass society.

Modernization theory, as I understand it, was ideologically ecumenical. Whether these transitions we driven from the top down as in Soviet communism or from the bottom up as in US style capitalism wasn’t as much a concern as the universal nature of these developments. We jettisoned modernization theory after the Cold War. The capitalist had won- it looked like there was only one way to truly modernize after all.

What was lost in abandoning modernization was the ability to see not just the difference between capitalism and communism, but their similarities. Creating societies based on ever rising production and mass consumption was bound to have a huge impact on the larger biosphere. Communist societies pursuing these goals were no better, and sometimes much worse, than capitalist ones.

In line with what I’ve said previously, what makes capitalism worse for nature than its alternatives is not so much the problems it causes but that it makes addressing these problems so wickedly difficult. If we really are facing the end of the Four Cheaps it will be because capitalism in its current neoliberal form proves itself incapable of making the kinds of systemic changes that system’s very survival requires. Balkanized global capital is probably not up to the task of generating what would amount to a second industrial revolution in terms of energy use, food production, resource extraction and a dozen other things. In that case our only hope will lie in planning from above, otherwise we’ll face not just the end of this despicable form of economy we call capitalism, but the end of a nature compatible with human flourishing as well.