Moore, J.W. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.

Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life argues that ecological crisis cannot be understood through the conventional opposition between Society and Nature. For Moore, capitalism is not simply an economic system acting upon an external environment; it is a world-ecology, a historical way of organising human and extra-human nature together. His concept of the double internality expresses this mutual constitution: capitalism works through nature, while nature works through capitalism. This means that forests, soils, rivers, labouring bodies, food systems and energy regimes are not passive backgrounds to accumulation, but active conditions of capitalist development. Moore therefore criticises “Green Arithmetic,” the idea that political economy plus environmental damage equals ecological crisis, because it leaves intact the very dualism that capitalism itself depends upon. Instead, he proposes the concept of the oikeios, the relational field through which humans make environments and environments make humans. The case of “Cheap Nature” is central: capitalism has historically survived by appropriating unpaid or low-cost work/energy from human and extra-human natures, including labour, food, energy and raw materials. The present crisis signals that this strategy is reaching its limits, as the web of life can no longer be made to yield endless cheap inputs. Moore’s intervention is therefore both historical and political: to confront ecological collapse, one must not ask what capitalism does to nature, but how capitalism is itself made through nature.