The capitalist economy interested in capital accumulation appropriates raw materials, energy sources, food necessary for production cheaply, and often for free, and does not pay for the labour-power needed to operate the system. Thus, continued growth is guaranteed by the exploitation of wage labour and the depletion of nature. According to Jason W. Moore, a prominent figure in critical ecological thinking, capitalism is not a socio-economic system, but a world-ecological nature-making praxis that is facilitated by the appropriation of cheap nature. His main insight is that capitalism has now exhausted the Four Cheap Resources (labour-power, food, energy, raw materials). And the end of Cheap Nature means that the “unpaid costs” manifest themselves as ecosystem degradation and climate change, which hinder continued economic growth and thus bring about a crisis of capitalism. Moore therefore argues that it is not humanity as a whole which is responsible for the ecological crisis (anthropocene), but that the root of the problem lies in the profit-oriented logic of capitalism (capitalocene).
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