Consider the McNugget. Consider not merely its proprietary combination of succulence and crispness and flavour, but also its usefulness as a symbol of the time in which we find ourselves. Consider its substance, derived from the world’s most common bird, bred to reach maturity within weeks, and with a breast so large it can barely walk. Consider that 60 billion of these birds are slaughtered every year, resulting in an abundant source of cheap food, and that this work necessitates a vast pool of cheap human labour. And consider that, long after humans have disappeared from the Earth, what will remain of us, along with the immortal residue of nuclear waste, is a fossil record that will register the truly insane volume of chicken carcasses we left behind.
In the early pages of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. One of their central contentions is that we are no longer living in the Holocene, but in a new geological era they refer to as the Capitalocene – the currently fashionable term “Anthropocene”, they argue, suggests that our current state of ecological emergency is merely the result of humans doing what humans do, whereas the reality is that it flows out of the specific historical phenomenon of capitalism. As a term, then, Capitalocene is designed to nudge us away from evolutionary determinism, and from a sense of collective culpability for climate change, towards an understanding of the way in which the destruction of nature has largely been the result of an economic system organised around a minority class and its pursuit of profit. “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change,” as they put it, “but most of us are in steerage.”
Patel and Moore’s essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness. (An earlier, more knottily theoretical work of eco-Marxism by Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, argues that “cheap nature” is as central an imperative of capitalism as cheap labour.) The seven “things” of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. In the chapter on cheap money, they demonstrate the process of cheapening through the barbaric silver mining practices of 16th-century Spanish colonialists in Peru. “Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money.”
One of the most persuasive aspects of Patel and Moore’s argument, in this sense, is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the “real work” it makes possible. “Writing a history of work without care work,” they write, “would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water. It’d be possible, in a limited fashion, but, once you’d realised the omission, hard to continue.”
The book itself is not much over 200 pages, followed by a further hundred or so of notes and references – a high proportion of which can be taken to illustrate Patel and Moore’s extreme scholarly hyperactivity. They date the Capitalocene’s year zero not to the dawn of the industrial revolution or to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but to the beginning of European colonial expansion into the Americas in the 16th century. This is the crucial historical juncture not just because it pushed out the frontier – one of the book’s central contentions is that capitalism lives by the often bloody expansion of frontiers – but because it provided a testing ground for new European ideas about the division between nature and society. Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and Bacon, they argue, legitimated colonial violence through this conceptual division, which led to the relegation of indigenous peoples to the category of nature.
In the book’s exploration of how capitalism secured the cheapness of a particular “thing”, each chapter begins with some or other aspect of this colonial original sin. All but one, in fact, begin with Columbus, whom the authors intend to stand, in all his viciousness and greed, for capitalism itself – which, they argue, is historically inseparable from colonialism. Capitalism’s frontiers are “the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature – humans included. They are always, then, about reducing the costs of doing business. Capitalism not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers.”
It’s not something the book goes into, but while reading it I found myself thinking about how the notion of colonising Mars, as advanced by entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, represents the most extreme operation of this logic in our time. Capitalism is running out of frontiers, and the legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unliveable for vast numbers of its inhabitants. Mars exists as the possibility of a new frontier, a means of keeping capitalism alive after its current host-organism, Earth, has been drained of the ability to support life.
If Patel and Moore don’t quite make it to Mars, their book still covers an awful lot of ground. They move rapidly between economic analysis, history and political polemic, all in service of the premise that all the cheapness has in fact been catastrophically expensive. Their movement is not always fluid or seamless; the authors have a tendency to end their chapters with inelegant mechanisms of transition. The chapter on cheap care, for instance, concludes with the assertion that “it is to cheap food that we now turn”; the chapter on cheap food ends with “it is to cheap energy that we now turn” – and so on. You can almost hear the click and whirr of an old-style projector as the next slide turns over. But occasional clunkiness is only a minor issue; the overall impression is one of sweeping erudition, and an impressive ability to synthesise disparate elements.
The book ends with a brief but hopeful conclusion, introducing an idea the authors refer to as “reparation ecology”. The concept is delineated only hastily, and hazily, though it involves a broad redistribution of natural and cultural resources, and a proper valuation of all the things capitalism has cheapened over the centuries. There’s no real attempt to work through how this might be achieved; it’s offered less as a programme than as a provocation to imagine a future outside of capitalism’s violent imperatives. It’s an invitation, as they put it, to “dream seditiously”.
Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine won this year’s Wellcome book prize.
• A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is published by Verso in the UK and Black Inc. in Australia. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
