Author | Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Verso Books |
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:
Cheapness is defined as 'a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life'. Cheapness then is not just about low cost. It is rather a strategy capitalism has employed transform undenominated objects and relationships into circuits of production and consumption that have the lowest possible dollar value. [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]
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.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an English broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
The triple bottom line is an accounting framework with three parts: social, environmental and financial. 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.
The Royal Society Science Books Prize is an annual £25,000 prize awarded by the Royal Society to celebrate outstanding popular science books from around the world. It is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience, and since it was established in 1988 has championed writers such as Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Bryson. In 2015 The Guardian described the prize as "the most prestigious science book prize in Britain".
Green liberalism, or liberal environmentalism, is liberalism that includes green politics in its ideology. Green liberals are usually liberal on social issues and "green" on economic issues. The term "green liberalism" was coined by political philosopher Marcel Wissenburg in his 1998 book Green Liberalism: The Free and The Green Society. He argues that liberalism must reject the idea of absolute property rights and accept restraints that limit the freedom to abuse nature and natural resources. However, he rejects the control of population growth and any control over the distribution of resources as incompatible with individual liberty, instead favoring supply-side control: more efficient production and curbs on overproduction and overexploitation. This view tends to dominate the movement, although critics say it actually puts individual liberties above sustainability.
A steady-state economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. In effect, such an economy does not grow in the course of time. The term usually refers to the national economy of a particular country, but it is also applicable to the economic system of a city, a region, or the entire world. Early in the history of economic thought, classical economist Adam Smith of the 18th century developed the concept of a stationary state of an economy: Smith believed that any national economy in the world would sooner or later settle in a final state of stationarity.
In Marxian economics and preceding theories, the problem of primitive accumulation of capital concerns the origin of capital, and therefore of how class distinctions between possessors and non-possessors came to be.
Post-capitalism is a 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 some classical Marxist and some 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. The most notable among them are socialism, anarchism, and degrowth.
Metabolic rift is Karl Marx's notion of the "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism", i.e. Marx's key conception of ecological crisis tendencies under capitalism. 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.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on video taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.
Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist, specialising in development economics. Currently he is a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002). In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.
Rajeev "Raj" Patel is a British Indian 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."
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.
Why Marx Was Right is a 2011 non-fiction book by the British academic Terry Eagleton about the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx and the schools of thought, collectively known as Marxism, that arose from his work. Written for laypeople, Why Marx Was Right outlines ten objections to Marxism that they may hold and aims to refute each one in turn. These include arguments that Marxism is irrelevant owing to changing social classes in the modern world, that it is deterministic and utopian, and that Marxists oppose all reforms and believe in an authoritarian state.
Political Economy in anthropology is the application of the theories and methods of historical materialism to the traditional concerns of anthropology, including, but not limited to, non-capitalist societies. Political Economy introduced questions of history and colonialism to ahistorical anthropological theories of social structure and culture. Most anthropologists moved away from modes of production analysis typical of structural Marxism, and focused instead on the complex historical relations of class, culture and hegemony in regions undergoing complex colonial and capitalist transitions in the emerging world system.
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, and founding Board member of the World Federation for Animals.
Karl Marx's theory of history is historical materialism which locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labour together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and Engels the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. Historical materialism provides a profound challenge to the view that the historical process has come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work is a 2015 monograph by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, published by Verso Books.
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.