Empire, class and the origins of planetary crisis: the transition debate in the web of life
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Moore, Jason W. [1]
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[1] Binghamton University
Binghamton University
City of Binghamton, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Esboços: histórias em contextos globais, ISSN-e 2175-7976, Vol. 28, Nº. 49, 2021, págs. 740-763
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
We are discovering in the era of climate crisis that the Transition Debate is a debate over the origins and crisis tendencies of capitalism in the web of life. The original Debate emerged in its contemporary form in the thick of the Cold War, assuming mature form during the world revolution of 1968. It was a historical-analytical debate over the historical geography of capitalist origins, and its two poles were 1492 and 1800. The divergence turned as much on differing conceptions of capitalism as it did on empirical- analytical substance: the terrain of “actually existing” world history. And it was a political debate over the priorities of socialist politics, especially the enduring tension between “socialism in one country” and proletarian internationalism that had riven the world left since 1914 and the historic betrayal of Europe’s social democratic parties in support of War. In the 21st century, the language of the Debate has changed, but assumed an even greater prominence in the unfolding climate crisis, captured in the debate between the Anthropocene (“Age of Man”) and the Capitalocene (“Age of Capital”). In what follows, I will focus on the historical-analytical challenge, mindful of its relation to the ongoing struggle for planetary justice – and against the Popular Anthropocene’s imperial-technocratic ambitions. We may begin with an extraordinary misperception of the Transition Debate. It is not, in the main, a contention between “production” and “circulation.” If anything, it is about how class politics and modern state formation – including modern empires – cohere relations of production, reproduction, and accumulation.
