 First edition | |
| Author | Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | University of California Press (US) Verso Books (UK) Black Inc (Aus) |
Publication date | 2018 |
| Pages | 336 |
| ISBN | 978-1-78873-213-0 |
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of he Planet is a book by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore published in 2018.
The book considers the development of Capitalism and the Anthropocene through the interrelationship of seven 'cheap things'. These are:
The book suggests that these seven things must be cheap to sustain the capitalist system. Cheapness is then defined as 'a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life', meaning its value is established by social or cultural relationships that maintain the cost lower than what should actually be worth. Cheapness then is not just about low cost. It is rather a strategy capitalism has employed to transform undenominated objects and relationships into circuits of production and consumption that have the lowest possible dollar value. Thereafter, if the "actual" price of these things would be respected or at equilibrium, the system would not maintain itself if it would be too costly.
Both authors are considered neo marxist, at least in their method and critique to the exploration relations of capitalism. [1]
The authors adopt a world ecology approach. This approach commits to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life.
The Guardian praised the book's 'impressive ability to synthesise disparate elements'. [2]
Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.
Natural capital is the world's stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms. Some natural capital assets provide people with free goods and services, often called ecosystem services. All of these underpin our economy and society, and thus make human life possible.
In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the economic relationships of production and exchange as relationships among things rather than among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.
The triple bottom line is an accounting framework with three parts: social, environmental and economic. Some organizations have adopted the TBL framework to evaluate their performance in a broader perspective to create greater business value. Business writer John Elkington claims to have coined the phrase in 1994.
Eco-capitalism, also known as environmental capitalism or (sometimes) green capitalism, is the view that capital exists in nature as "natural capital" on which all wealth depends. Therefore, governments should use market-based policy-instruments to resolve environmental problems.
In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation of capital concerns the origin of capital and therefore how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
The law of the value of commodities, known simply as the law of value, is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with reference to David Ricardo's economics. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work, namely that the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them within the capitalist mode of production.
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.
Metabolic rift is a theory of ecological crisis tendencies under the capitalist mode of production that sociologist John Bellamy Foster ascribes to Karl Marx. Quoting Marx, Foster defines this as the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism". Foster argues that Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist agricultural production and the growing division between town and country.
Joel Stephen Kovel was an American psychiatrist, scholar, human rights activist, and author known as a founder of eco-socialism. Kovel became a psychoanalyst, but he abandoned psychoanalysis in 1985.
Rajeev "Raj" Patel is a British academic, journalist, activist and writer who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing."
Regenerative design is about designing systems and solutions that work with or mimic the ways that natural ecosystems return energy from less usable forms to more usable forms. Regenerative design uses systems thinking and other approaches to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society and the well-being of nature. Regenerative design is an active topic of discussion in engineering, economics, medicine, landscape design, food systems, and urban design & community development generally.
The value-form or form of value is an important concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, discussed in the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1. It refers to the social forms of tradeable things as symbols of value, which contrast with their physical features, as objects which can satisfy human needs or serve a useful purpose. The physical appearance or the price tag of a traded object may be directly observable, but the meaning of its social form is not.
Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.
The commodification of nature is an area of research within critical environmental studies that is concerned with the ways in which natural entities and processes are made exchangeable through the market, and the implications thereof.
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, consumers, suppliers, communities and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
Philip John Lymbery is the Global CEO of farm animal welfare charity, Compassion in World Farming International, Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester’s Centre for Animal Welfare, President of Eurogroup for Animals, Brussels, founding Board member of the World Federation for Animals and a Leadership Fellow at St George's House, Windsor Castle.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences. An example of this can be found in the works of Soviet economists like Lev Gatovsky, who sought to apply Marxist economic theory to the objectives, needs, and political conditions of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, contributing to the development of Soviet Political Economy.
World-Ecology is a global conversation of academics, activists, and artists committed to understanding human relations of power, production, and environment-making in the web of life. An evolving conversation rather than a theory, the world-ecology approach is unified by a critique of Nature-Society dualisms, a world-historical interpretation of today's planetary crisis, and an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender in capitalism's environmental history. Key figures in the world-ecology conversation include Jason W. Moore, Sharae Deckard, Raj Patel, Christian Parenti, Tony Weis, Neil Brenner, Kerstin Oloff, Andrej Grubacic, and Marion Dixon. Since 2015, the World-Ecology Research Network has sponsored an annual conference.
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