Ecology, Labour and the Climate Crisis: A discussion with Stefania Barca and Jason W. Moore.

When: Wednesday, June 30, 2021, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Zoom, Online

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The Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP) is delighted to host the event 'Ecology, Labour and the Climate Crisis: A discussion with Stefania Barca and Jason W. Moore'. The event will take place on Wednesday 30 June 2021, 3pm - 5pm.

Stefania Barca will present On keeping the world alive. Ecology, labour and the "forces of reproduction”.  The concept of "forces of reproduction", coming from socialist ecofeminism, offers a fresh perspective on the nexus between labour and ecology in the capitalist system. This presentation will discuss the genesis, potentialities and limits of the concept as a tool for capturing the interlocked nature of ecological and care crises.

Jason W. Moore will present on Superexploitation in the Web of Life: The Origins of the Climate Class Divide, Climate Patriarchy, Climate Apartheid. The history of class society is a climate history. From the mid-Holocene stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide, class society has been at once a producer and product of climate history. Across the millennia, unfavorable climate changes have destabilized ruling classes. Identifying key moments of climate/class crises – not collapse – since the Bronze Age crisis, this talk foregrounds a class struggle account of the rise of capitalism, webs of life, and worldwide class formation. Tracing the emergence of the Planetary Proletariat through the genocidal thrust of New World invasion and the ensuing “long, cold seventeenth century” – the worst of the Little Ice Age – Moore argues that capitalism survived the era’s harrowing climatological conditions through an imperialist climate fix that enforced the superexploitation of racialized and gendered semi-proletariats. The climate class divide, climate patriarchy, and climate apartheid are not the results – but the causes – of today’s planetary crisis. Any assessment of the climate crisis that denies class struggles in the web of life will lead to unduly partial – and ineffectual – historical assessments and political strategies


Stefania Barca is Zennström professor in Climate Change Leadership at the University of Uppsala. She is an environmental historian who specialized on the labour/nature/gender nexus in the industrial era. Her latest book, Forces of Reproduction. Notes for a Counter-hegemonic Anthropocene, was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press.

Jason W. Moore is Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University. He is an environmental historian and historical geographer. His Recent books include A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (California, 2017); Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press, 2016); and Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015).