Page Title / 16 OT27 / April 2015 Every civilisation must decide what is, and what is not, valuable. Marxists occasionally speak of a “law of value.” It is not a concept easily translated into everyday politics, or into our histories of capitalism. It sounds quaint, curiously out of step with our times. And yet the essential insight of the Marxist argument on value remains extraordinarily relevant: to how we connect capitalism’s manifold crises, and to how we respond to them. Let us consider three radical critiques, their assertions of value, and their diagnoses of the present global conjuncture. For the Marxist, value is socially necessary labour- time: abstract social labour. We might think of abstract labour as the average labour-time embedded in the average commod- ity for the system as a whole. For the feminist, value is produced through the relations of social reproduction every bit as much as the relations of commodity production; neoliberal globalisation cannot, for instance, be understood solely through the “global factory”, it must also be understood through the “global house- hold”. hirdly, for the environmentalist, Nature is intrinsically valuable, and capitalism destroys it. These are, of course, stylised. Each tradition, practically and theoretically, has been pursuing synthesis. Each borrows extensively across critiques: eco-feminism, feminist political economy, eco-Marxism, and so forth. But a synthesis of capital, power, and nature in modernity’s relations of produc- tion and reproduction has been elusive. My intention is to point towards one possible synthesis. his understands capitalism as a world-ecology, joining the re/production of everyday life and the re/production of capital in dialectical unity. Laws of value – understood as large-scale and long-run patterns that govern the life of a civilisation (e.g. Song China, feudal Europe, capitalism) – lead a double life. One oper- ates in a domain that is usually called “economic,” but is in fact much more expansive. his is the domain of surplus production and distribution: who gets what and how do they get it? It’s not really economic for two good reasons. First, the question of sur- plus always implies power; and second, the production of surplus always pivots on the reproduction of life, from one day, and from one generation, to the next. Every “mode of production” is at the same time a “mode of reproduction.” But there’s another, equally signiicant, dimen- sion of value. his is value as ethico-political norm. What do we value? A wetland or an industrial park? “Men’s work” or “women’s work”? In this second domain, the feminist and Green critique – not the Marxist – has led the view. But the diferences have been viewed in terms that are much too ixed. he distinction between the irst and second “life” of capitalism’s value system has often been confused. Each tradition’s angle of vision has identiied – and announced – distinctive weaves of value as systemic logic and ethico-political alternative. And yet, I think we have reached a conjuncture when clarity – at least greater clarity – is possible. he tremors of systemic crisis – inancial, climate, food, employment – are translating into a new ontological politics that challenge capital- ism at its very core: its law of value. Today’s movements for cli- mate justice, food sovereignty, de-growth, the right to the city – and much beyond – underscore a new set of challenges: to cap- italism’s value system, understood simultaneously in its ethico- political and political-economic dimensions. his new ontologi- cal politics has long been implicit in radical politics. But it seems to have reached a new stage today. Entwining distributional demands – the right to food, housing, a safe environment – with calls for fundamental democratisation, justice, gender equity, and sustainable environment-making, these movements have brought capitalism’s “law of value” into question as never before. How to bring clarity to this exciting – and complex – reality? Our irst act of rethinking must be ontological. We must rethink the essence of modernity’s most sacred divide, Human- ity/Nature. Civilisations had long distinguished between humans and the rest of nature. But during the rise of capitalism, some- thing peculiar occurred. Humans were no longer “distinct”; they became, in modernity’s new cosmology, wholly separate. And so did Nature, now with a capital ‘N’. Nature became an object. he point was not only to interpret the world but to control it. his had a decided advantage: Nature-as-object could be made cheap. And this Cheap Nature became the foun- dation for a new law of value. he unpaid work of natures became the pedestal of a new civilisational strategy: appropriate the whole of nature as a way to advance labour productivity within the commodity system. he result was an unprecedented revo- lution in human-initiated environmental change, as landscapes from Southeast Asia to the Baltic to Brazil were radically trans- formed, their peoples uprooted and dispossessed in the service of the endless accumulation of capital. In practice, both Humanity and Nature were luid categories, and enabled luid strategies of accumulation. Humanity did not, in the irst instance, include all humans. he rise of early modern materialism – the “scientiic revolution” and all that – redeined some humans, most humans, as less-than- human. Women especially. he dualism of Humanity/Nature was the creation not of science alone, but of science, capital, and empire - entwined movements in a world-ecological system. When the Spaniards conquered Peru – a vast zone much larger than the country today – their name for indigenous peoples was naturales. he debate over indigenous slavery in the early 16 th century – personiied by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas – turned on the meaning of “natural slaves.” From the very beginning, capitalism’s crucial point of fracture was not Humanity/Nature but between two zones with luid bound- aries: the zone of exploitation in commodity production, and the zone of appropriation, comprising the unpaid work of Maria Mies’ “women, nature, and colonies”. My use of appropriation therefore difers from Marx, for whom appropriation was synonymous with the exploitation of wage-labour. Accumulation by appropriation names those extra-economic processes that identiy, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital. Scientiic, cartographic, and botanical rev- olutions, broadly conceived, are good examples. During the rise of capitalism, for example, a new way of seeing – and imagin- ing – the world took shape. he world could be comprehended from outside rather than from within. It was of course a partial perspective, treating the speciically capitalist ordering of the world as “natural”. It was also a violent perspective. States and empires could now reckon vast expanses of world-nature, like the Americas, as spaces of unpaid work/energy detached from local conditions. he furious pace of mapmaking and surveying in early capitalism sustained the furious pace of property-mak- ing in its broadest sense: drawing lines around particular spaces so as to create general markets in land. he extension of bour- geois property relations in northwestern Europe and the map- ping of the Americas are much more intimately linked than often supposed. Both marked the rise of world-praxis in which nature is external, time linear, and space lat. his world-praxis was about far more than reshaping landscapes; it was about reorganising human (and other animal) populations in service to endless accumulation. Sheep “ate men” in New Spain (Mexico) no less than in England. Andean peasants were dispossessed and reor- ganised in this era just as they were in England. On both sides of the Atlantic, these transformations – enabling rapid bursts of accumulation by appropriation – were enabled by new ways of mapping space and nature. In the centuries that followed, this praxis was ampli- ied and reinvented. he British and American empires consolidated world power, in part, by mapping and reworking world-natures. he 19th century’s Kew Gardens and the postwar era’s International ENDLESS ACCUMULATION, ENDLESS ( UNPAID ) WORK? by Jason W. Moore Every “mode of production” is at the same time a “mode of reproduction.” The point was not only to interpret the world but to control it.