Tyler Grasser
1/26/2021
Response paper 2(Patell and Moore)
The argument presented in the reading “The History of The World in Seven Cheap Things” by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore is that humans as a whole, need to intellectually shift away from capitalism to help protect and preserve this planet. It is the interaction between the humans and both the physical and biological world that has brought the planet to its current situation, not human behavior. This claim is quite significant because typically when society thinks of climate change or the planet in general, we think that it is shaped by the actions of people or for some, they don’t believe people have an effect at all.
The term “cheap” is used quite a bit throughout this reading, most prominently in the title. The seven cheap things that the authors claim made the world are as follows; cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap lives. At first I was confused about the use of the word “cheap” when combined with these seven supposed things that made the world. Money, work, care, food, energy, and lives to me are big things that are important to life, so to combine them with the word cheap was puzzling. As I continued to read it became clear. The capitalist system that stems from European colonialism and influence runs on the cheapness of many important things. Because of the need to make, save, and maintain wealth, which equals power, society steamrolls the natural world as well as cultures that differ from the capitalist mind frame. The environment is used as wealth in raw form or the means to make wealth. This is why the authors maintain that we should refer to this era as Capitalocene rather than the widely accepted name Anthropocene, as capital is what is shaping the planet.
If we look at examples, like what is happening to the Amazon Rainforest, where massive swathes of forest are being logged, clear cut, and burned to fuel industry in order to make capital using cheap local labor with complete disregard for the Indigenous peoples that call the forest home and rely on the forest to live as well as the loss of vital habitat and biodiversity. We can see a clear connection to the points the authors are making.
Great point on the specific way cheapness is understood here to refer to a particular process. Yes the authors want to critique the use of the term Anthropocene and propose a new term, Capitalocene, in order to make a more specific point: it is not humans that are effecting the world this way, so much as it is humans under the economic process of capital which, the authors want to show, benefits few at the expense of the majority. How and why else to the authors propose a new language to being the important discussing of creating change?
ReplyDelete