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  JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 

 

Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part II1 
Superexploitation in the Web of Life  
 
Jason W. Moore 

Binghamton University 
jwmoore@binghamton.edu     

 

 

 

 

In the hustle and bustle of climate scholarship it’s easy to lose sight of something fundamental 

about the climate crisis: it’s the direct outcome of the bourgeoisie’s drive to turn all life into profit-

making opportunities. The climate crisis is a class struggle. But it begs some questions: What kind 

of class struggle is it? And what kind of class analysis is called for? 

 Nearly a half-century of neoliberal triumph has silenced this line of inquiry. Within the 

knowledge factory, the realignment of the Western intelligentsia after the 1970s—when a minority 

tendency broke with its historic allegiance to the ruling class (Chomsky 2017)—embraced a 

democratic theory of causation. For mainstream and left-ish thinkers alike, causal pluralism 

returned with a vengeance. For the former, Marxism was simply unscientific; for the latter, it was 

a “Western construction” (e.g., Robinson 1983; Mignolo 2012; see San Juan, Jr. 2002; Moore 

2022a). Marxism became something more than bad scholarship that could cost you a career. It was 

politically retrograde to pursue dialectical syntheses of capitalism in the web of life. In diverse 

academic movements—from poststructuralism to globalization—“progressive neoliberalism” 

won the day (Fraser 2019). “ABC [anything-but-class] leftism” prevailed, defined by the refusal 

 
1
 “Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part I: Method, Ideology, and the Violence of the Civilizing Project” can be 

found in the Journal of World-Systems Research 28(2): 415–426 https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1140 

ISSN: 1076-156X  |  Vol. 29   Issue 2  |   DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2023.1225  |  jwsr.pitt.edu 

 

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of progressive intellectuals to countenance any theory of class exploitation (Vieux 1994; Parenti 

1997). In its place were manifold and mushy notions of general interactivity.  

 But if everything is connected, all is not connected equally. The “point of view of totality” is 

not—as sometimes supposed—a revanchist “God trick” (Haraway 1988). It’s an emancipatory 

methodological procedure (Lukács 1971; Moore 2022b). As we learned in Part I (Moore 2022e), 

that method seeks to develop a revolutionary praxis. Allowing for sophisticated reassessments of 

specific moments of class struggle according to the level of abstraction, geographical and temporal 

resolution, and angle of vision, dialectical materialism equips the socialist movement with the 

capacity to discern specific ensembles of “primary” and “secondary” contradictions (Ollman 1993; 

Mao 2007).  

 This alternative speaks directly to the tasks of the world socialist movement in the era of 

climate crisis. Geohistorical materialism’s great contribution is to reveal the ideological character 

of causal pluralism and its assemblages of “chaotic conceptions” (Marx 1973: 100). Its dialectical 

counterpoint is the “standpoint of the proletariat” (Lukács 1971). In this, revolutionary materialism 

joins the “historical life process” and “physical life process” of capitalism (Marx and Engels 2010: 

36). Its differentiated unity is a contradiction of “mode of production” and “mode of life” (Marx 

and Engels 2010: 58).  

 The goal is not a “better” understanding of capitalism in some abstracted empirical fashion—

an academic confusion of basic and historical facts (Carr 1961). Geohistorical materialism 

commits to the “theoretical struggle”—internal to class politics and struggles (Engels 1926; Lenin 

1961). A materialist dialectics is therefore a “philosophy of praxis”—a method of investigation 

internal to the method of revolutionary praxis (Gramsci 1971).  

 For Marx, capital accumulation, riven by the contradiction of its constant and variable 

moments, is also a class struggle, riven by the conflict of bourgeois and proletarian. Just as the 

class struggle assumes an economic expression in the circuit of capital, it also finds expression in 

work-centered “social metabolisms” (Marx 1981: 949). These include webs of life beyond the 

control of any human formation (Marx and Engels 2010). Within such metabolisms, proximate 

webs of life subject to social transformation and exhaustion are also shaped by non-dialectical 

antagonisms. Witness the contribution of 2022’s Hunga Tonga eruption to global warming (Besl 

2023). Solar cycles, volcanism, orbital variations, and the wobble of the Earth: all shape the 

geohistorical dialectics of class metabolisms (Moore 2015). Finally, Marx’s materialism is a 

political conception. It recognizes that the bourgeoisie reproduces its class power through the 

organized violence of the modern state, deployed against the re/producing classes in the interests 

of a “good business environment.” 

 Within any class society, this “rich totality of many determinations” (Marx 1973: 100) is 

animated by a fundamental socio-ecological ontology. That ontology is premised on the labor 

process as “reciprocal codetermination” in the web of life (Engels 1987; Levins and Lewontin 

1997; Moore and Antonacci 2023). Class society—and capitalism in particular —possesses a 

“twofold character… on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation” (Marx and 

Engels 2010: 43). This socio-ecological tension is the “production of life” through which the 



 

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everyday production of subsistence meshes with the intergenerational production of “fresh life in 

procreation[:] social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter 

under what conditions, in what manner and to what end” (Marx and Engels 2010: 43; see esp. 

Seccombe 1992).  

 This is a necessary insight as we envision socialist reconstruction in the wake of capitalogenic 

ecocide. Cooperation is a “productive force” (Marx and Engels 2010: 43; see O’Connor 1998). As 

a “source of wealth” and as historical man’s “inorganic body,” extra-human webs of life are 

internal to the proletarian struggle to de-alienate the relations of “the soil” and “the worker” (see 

respectively, Marx 1970, 1975: 275, 1977: 283). Put simply, the class struggle is a multispecies 

affair through which “the soil” and “the worker” interpenetrate. Proletarian emancipation and 

biotarian liberation are two moments in the journey towards the communist horizon (Collis 2014; 

Moore 2018b, 2022c).  

 This is not for some warm-and-fuzzy ecocentric reason. No indeed! The socialist 

development of the productive forces can only be realized through such cooperation.2 Extra-human 

life is not outside but immanent to the cooperative potentialities that may be awakened by the 

revolutionary struggles of the “associated producers” (and reproducers) (Marx 1977: 283, 1981: 

959). A praxis of biotarian/proletarian unity would advance a Red Prometheanism, not as a 

bourgeois logic of domination but as the spark of a really revolutionary road—one that develops 

the productive forces through the liberation of life. “The creatures too must become free” (Thomas 

Münzer quoted in Marx 1978a: 51; Moore 2018b; Salvage Collective 2021). 

 This provides a guiding thread for two tasks. The first is the critique of capitalism’s “twofold 

character,” centering the reproduction of life and power. This shapes the geohistorical logic of 

modern class struggle. For Marx and Engels, it’s a break with vulgar materialism; they weave 

together ruling class “material” domination with the production of “ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels 

2010: 59). Primitive accumulation is therefore class formation that integrates the ideological and 

material moments. Class societies entwine material relations with the “means of mental 

production” (Marx and Engels 2010: 59). It’s this second moment that generates a bourgeois 

Prometheanism, enfolding an “abstractly material” science and ideology, blurring the lines 

between them (Marx 1975: 303). That blurring could not be more relevant to an era in which 

climate science and Good Science as ideology are tightly bound – and their relations deeply 

mystified (Moore 2021c).   

Marx’s socio-ecological ontology enables the critique of capitalism’s peculiar logic of 

domination, pivoting on the divorce of the direct producer and reproducer from the means of 

production and reproduction. (And subsequently reified as the conflict of Man and Nature, Man 

and Woman, Civilized and Savage, etc.) In contrast to precapitalist ideologies, it ruptures rather 

than affirms holism (e.g., feudalism’s Great Chain of Being) (Moore 2017a, 2019). That 

fragmentation’s material basis is alienation under the law of value, understood as an unevenly 

 
2
 Here is agro-ecology’s vital contribution to socialist reconstruction (e.g. Altieri 1989; Altieri and Funes-Monzote 

2012). 



 

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combined synthesis of economic valuation and geocultural devaluation (Moore 2017c). Its 

mechanical worldview, closely linked to imperialism, derived from the same impulses as those 

driving enclosures from England to Brazil (Merchant 1980; Moore 2018a, 2021b). Here’s an 

underappreciated element of Marx and Engels’ materialism: their sociology of knowledge and 

ideology, and the “means of mental production” (2010: 59). They lay bare modern class 

antagonisms as encompassing—and alienating—multiple domains: production and reproduction; 

ideology, science and class; cooperation as a productive force; the irrepressible conflict between 

capitalism’s mode of production and the “modes of life” on which it depends.  

 From this, a second task follows: the socio-ecological and world-historical movements of 

capitalist development underpin the possibility for proletarian unity grasped as a rich totality of 

many determinations. Dialectical totality is eductive: a method that draws out complexity and 

seeks out its connective tissues in the interest of a “higher synthesis” (Marx 1977: 637). This is the 

counter-tendency not only to ABC leftism but also to the renaissance of class formalism (e.g., 

Malm 2016; Huber 2022). Against such formalisms, the dialectical method explores the 

possibilities for a class unity praxis that takes the unevenly combined character of the planetary 

proletariat as its point of departure. As we saw in Part I, dialectical interpretation and socialist 

praxis flow through—not despite—variation (Moore 2022e).  

 

Prometheanism, Bourgeois Naturalism, and the Problem of Superexploitation 

Among the thorniest problems of twentieth century socialism was the great divide between 

analytics and strategies premised on the “most exploited” and the “most oppressed” (Wallerstein 

1973). These dilemmas have not disappeared; they have merely been driven underground by the 

political triumph of the neoliberal bourgeoisie and its cadres. The anti-imperialist Marxism that 

informed Fanon (1963), Wallerstein (1974), and Rodney (1972) is rarely seen. In its place are 

multiple species of race and civilizational reductionisms: the racial capitalocene, decolonial 

approaches, the ungainly plantationocene. Each typically deploys radical-sounding rhetoric, at the 

end day preaching some combination of woke bourgeois nationalism, tepid social democracy, and 

a healthy dose of anti-communism (Moore 2022b).  

 In the climate crisis debate, this methodological and political “groupism” (Brubaker 2004) 

manifests a curious neoliberalization of the Capitalocene thesis—the ecosocialist alternative to the 

bourgeois antics of the Anthropocene (Moore 2017a, 2018a). Accepting that all humans are not 

responsible for the climate crisis, some prefer that we discuss the Capitalocene without class. This 

re-signifies the villain of climate crisis: from an abstract Man to an abstract Europe or metaphysical 

Whiteness. Class may be mentioned in passing, as description or formal category; class analysis 

as dialectics is apparently unthinkable.   

The “racial capitalocene” is a case in point. Even so insightful an analyst as Françoise Vergès 

(2017) invokes the Capitalocene thesis cleansed of its Marxist critique. She obeys the neoliberal 

diktat that one can speak of work and race but not class. Banished is a pillar of the Capitalocene 

thesis: the claim that race is a class project of bourgeois naturalism and imperial power rooted in 



 

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the “climate fix” of the long, cold seventeenth century (Moore 2021c). Climate apartheid is 

rendered a consequence rather than cause of capitalogenic climate crisis. 

 For Vergès and cognate ABC leftisms, the opportunity to confront big “E” 

Environmentalism—and its class project of race- and class-blind politics of “saving nature”—is 

lost (Moore 2022f). So too the possibility of situating environmental justice movements within the 

“racialized nature of the class struggle” (Pulido 1996: 196). Indicative of her ABC leftism, Vergès 

(2019) invokes the great Communist Party USA theorist Claudia Jones, while scrubbing out 

Jones’s Marxism-Leninism. That’s argument worth exploring. Jones pushed the CPUSA’s theory 

of racialized superexploitation and super profits to incorporate the Woman Question from the 

standpoint of the worldwide class struggle (Davies 2007). She highlighted the centrality of 

imperialism, racism, and sexism in surplus value production and the reproduction of labor-power 

(Jones 2010). To erase the class relation at the core of Jones’ thinking, and replace it with a 

fragmented conception of work and race, falsifies her contribution. In this anti-communist scrub 

job, Vergès also erases the Capitalocene’s arguments on the very issues she cares about: the unpaid 

work of “women, nature, and colonies” (Mies 1986: 77); the centrality of socially-necessary 

unpaid work; racialized and gendered class struggles in the making of climate crisis.  

 Pushing in the other direction are workerist critiques, encompassing a spectrum of Trotskyist 

and leftwing social-democratic perspectives (Malm 2016; Huber 2022). These rightly foreground 

class arguments against the chaotic pluralisms of the academic left; they correctly argue that no 

political sense can be made of capitalism without class. But in their “orthodox” posturing to define 

class at the point of production (Huber 2022), they miss its wider interpretive and political 

implications. In short, they do not carry the class struggle method far enough. Their formalism 

reduces class to a “basic unit” of capitalism rather than, as for Marx and Engels, its ontological 

basis. This distinguishes a formal and dialectical method; the latter takes the socio-ecological core 

of class relations as a guiding thread, an eductive approach to capitalism’s manifold expressions 

of exploitation and domination in the web of life (Moore 2022e).  

 Here we encounter a curious situation. Workerist approaches share with race reductionism a 

reluctance to pursue the Holy Grail of twentieth century revolutionary Marxism: unifying 

capitalism’s dynamics of exploitation and domination. Each takes one pole of the dialectic as a 

prime mover rather than grappling with the whole relation. The class formalists are therefore 

unable to see, empirically or theoretically, how the proletariat depends on unpaid work/energy 

delivered by the femitariat and biotariat. The groupists are unable to see the rich totality of racial 

and gender formation within world accumulation and class structure. As a consequence, neither is 

able to conceptualize environment-making as a class struggle, conditioned by geocultural 

domination, shaped by dialectical and non-dialectical antagonisms. They cannot see how the 

worldwide class struggle and its meshes of domination and exploitation always unfold through 

webs of life, themselves dominated, and today in open revolt (Moore 2021d).  

 If the workerists insist (rightly) on the primacy of the climate class divide, the other camp 

underlines (rightly) the domination inscribed in climate apartheid and the racial capitalocene (e.g., 

Vergès 2017; Tuana 2019). Alas! Rarely the twain shall meet. Both tendencies keep their distance 



 

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from Marx’s labor-metabolic ontology. Class formalism and race reductionism are conceptualized 

independently of webs of life. Both default to Feuerbach’s illusion of abstract Man, so roundly 

criticized by Marx. From a geohistorical perspective, neither class exploitation nor geocultural 

domination is independent—of each other, of the webs of life in which they’re embedded, and of 

the ideological infrastructure of capitalism’s ruling ideas, manifested in the geocultural trinity of 

Man, Nature, and Civilization.   

 The challenge of unifying exploitation and domination was a priority of anti-imperialist 

thinkers in the long 1970s. They recognized the interdependence of class exploitation, geopolitical 

power, and shifting forms of geocultural domination, primarily ethnonationalism, racism, and 

sexism. This led them to experiments with the superexploitation concept, viewing coercive labor 

market segmentation and the geocultural ruses of divide et impera as viciously reinforcing.3 In so 

doing, they suggested elements of a world-historical theory that might explain how capital 

accumulation requires geocultural domination and how modern geoculture is shaped by class 

exploitation. Radical groupism and Marxist workerism might then begin a fruitful dialogue. 

 This implicates a theory of superexploitation with a twist. On the one hand, these thinkers 

focused on the quantitative extension of the working day, paid and unpaid, dirty and dangerous. 

On the other hand, often just under the surface, was an emphasis on the qualitative appropriation 

of unpaid work/energy—to which the “creation of fresh life in procreation” is indispensable. This 

twist challenges class formalism and race reductionism. It joins proletarianization to regimes of 

socially-necessary unpaid work, performed by humans and the rest of life: the femitariat and 

biotariat. Such unpaid work/energy is the dialectical inverse and enabling condition of the wage-

labor relation; it is to wage-labor what use-value is to exchange-value. That value relation is 

disproportionate (Altvater 1993).  

 Value accumulation implies a rising material throughput. And yet, the qualitative 

contradiction is not eclipsed but intensified. In its gendered moment, the ecological surplus is 

always qualitative, even as capital demands disproportionately more and more of its abstractly 

material mass (Moore 2015). As Federici emphasizes (2004), bourgeois domination is a perverse 

form of securing “cooperation” as a productive force.  Such geocultural domination—amplified 

by institutional power and organized violence—is consequently fundamental to capital’s expanded 

reproduction. Its successive eras of “economic equivalence” demanded new forms of “natural 

distinctness” through which to fix previous accumulation crises (Marx 1973: 141; Moore 2015).  

 Geocultural domination is essential to this world dialectic of equivalence and distinctness. 

It’s manufactured with the ideological raw material of Nature. Nature is the most dangerous word 

in the language for this reason. Prometheanism is its extractive motor (Moore 2023b), wresting 

one-sided materialisms from Nature in the interests of bourgeois hegemony. As we learned in Part 

I (Moore 2022e), the long history of “natural law” ideologies—today recognizable as 

environmental neo-Malthusian—yield Nature and Naturalized ideological material, reworked into 

 
3
 Experiments with superexploitation included Goldberg 1970; Gorz 1970; Harris 1972; Marini 1973, 1974; Dixon 

1977; Amin 1980; Frank 1981; Dixon et al. 1983. 



 

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modern racism and sexism after 1492. Everywhere in the capitalist world-ecology, bourgeois 

forces set in motion a grand ideological offensive with the onset of the long, cold seventeenth 

century (1550–1700) (Ladurie and Daux 2008; Moore 2021c, 2023c). This was when the 

Naturalized fetishes Man/Woman and Black/White were forged—not coincidentally, the exact 

moment of capitalism’s epoch-making class formation (Seccombe 1992; Federici 2004; 

Bethencourt 2014).  

 This was also the dawn of the Civilizing Project—an uneven yet intimately connected 

structure of domination that invented “savagery” as a geocultural logic (Moore 2023c). The 

bourgeois geopoetics of Man, Society, Civilization, Nature, Savagery were tentpoles of this 

imperial Prometheanism. They took shape not in an era of market expansion narrowly conceived, 

but during the climate-class crisis of world power, world money, and world nature after 1550 

(Parker 2013). For an ascendant capitalist world-ecology, the turning point was reached in the 

years following the great financial crisis of 1557. Virtually everything we associate with modern 

capitalism crystallized in this era. Rapid proletarianization, the plantation system, large-scale 

extractivism, formal colonial empires, the military revolution, Cartesian rationality and 

Promethean Science, the feminization of unpaid work, the world color line, the development of 

robust state-machineries, a growing dependence on fossil fuels, and by 1648, modern geopolitics. 

These combined to produce the greatest environment-making revolution since the mid-Holocene’s 

urban and agricultural revolutions. Landscapes were transformed at a pace unprecedented in 

human history. What took medieval and other tributary civilizations centuries to achieve—in forest 

clearance and the far-flung movements and reorganization of human populations—was realized in 

mere decades (Moore 2017a, 2018a; Patel and Moore 2017).  

 Two necessary implications can be drawn. First, the “transhistoric racialism” thesis now 

widely embraced by the academic left is historically untenable and politically dangerous. It 

reinforces racialism’s petite bourgeois and divide et impera tendencies (e.g., Robinson 1983; see 

Briggs 1931; Reed 2018; Robinson, Rangel, and Watson 2022). Second, the capitalogenic trinity—

the climate class divide, climate apartheid, climate patriarchy—is neither abstractly 

“intersectional” nor the result of today’s planetary inferno; it’s a rich totality that coalesced during 

capitalism’s first climate crisis—and reinvented through successive terrestrial, aquatic, and 

atmospheric enclosures ever since (Moore 2019, 2022a).  

 Identifying the geohistorical logic and its relevant geohistorical patterns is crucial. The 

mystification of capitalism’s world history is a central task of bourgeois ideology; the academic 

left’s flight from history and its preference for Young Hegelian-style theoreticist theory speaks 

volumes to its surrender to neoliberal ideology (Moore 2022b). Only a world-historical 

imagination can enable a socialist critique of how the planetary proletariat was cohered—and how 

it’s been set against itself. Such a critique allows us to overcome the tyranny of Cartesian 

naturalism: to reveal those ideologies of divide and conquer as not only illusory—but pivotal to 

the politics of accumulation in the web of life.  

  



 

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Prometheanism, Cheap Labor, and Capitalogenesis 

The unfolding climate crisis is not anthropogenic; it’s capitalogenic. The climate crisis is, in other 

words, a product of the worldwide class struggle. But climate history also produces the conditions 

of struggle. To paraphrase Marx, a class and class structure that does not find “its nature outside 

itself” is not a class (1975: 337). 

 Modern class formation’s tipping point occurred in the long, cold seventeenth century (Tilly 

1984). It was the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, and the coldest era of the past 8,000 years. 

Largely the result of natural forcing, this long, cold century was amplified by the slaving-induced 

genocides of the New World, an event that hothoused the trans-Atlantic slave trade and manifold 

forms of proletarianization, from the Andes to the English countryside (Lewis and Maslin 2015; 

Moore 2015; Wanner, Pfister, and Neukom 2022).  

 It was also the moment of violently gendered primitive accumulation across western Europe 

(Seccombe 1992; Federici 2004). This was a climate-class conjuncture of the highest order. Its 

contradictions generated the capitalogenic trinity: the climate class divide, climate apartheid, 

climate patriarchy. These were differentiated moments in modern class formation under 

spectacular domination and an unprecedented environment-making revolution, knitting together 

paid and unpaid work under a new law of value. It was the birth of the planetary proletariat, human 

and extra-human. In capitalism’s first great climate crisis, proletariat, biotariat, and femitariat 

developed as and through an organic whole—not as a taxonomical trinity. That distinction is 

crucial to capitalism’s last great climate crisis. If the planetary proletariat orients us to biospheric 

revolution, the latter entrains the technocratic authoritarianism of planetary management. The 

choice is between a professional-managerial road, with its Orwellian slogans of “planetary 

stewardship” and “nature positive,” and the liberation of the associated producers and reproducers 

in the web of life: the Proletarocene (Salvage Collective 2021; Moore 2021c).  

 One necessary step towards the Proletarocene involves reconstructing our world-historical 

past—which of course is not past, and never less so than in the present conjuncture. World history 

is not everything. But without it, the socialist movement is flying blind.  

 Historical capitalism emerged from the climate-class conjuncture at the dawn of the Little Ice 

Age. This was the epochal crisis of feudalism, when climate, disease, productive stagnation and 

popular revolt terminated the feudal logic of accumulation (Wallerstein 1974). The outcome was 

not a tributary restructuring but a capitalist revolution enabled by a novel form of geographical 

expansion: the Great Frontier (Moore 2023d). Paradoxically, the geographical conquests after 

1492 were secondary to the subordination of labor. In one illuminating example, the encomienda 

was re-tooled by the Spanish invaders immediately upon arrival, shifting from a land grant to a 

labor grant (Elliot 1964). Conquering land was easy; organizing labor-power was another matter 

entirely (Patel and Moore 2017). The Great Frontier’s “windfall profits” depended on it (Webb 

1952).  

 Early capitalism’s radical break with premodern civilizations was the drive to subordinate 

land to a new logic: the law of value and its peculiar prizing of labor productivity. That labor 

productivity was narrowly constructed to exclude the unpaid work/energy necessary for endless 



 

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accumulation. That narrow construction was enacted through a novel mix of monetary and 

coercive power—the latter variously entwining cultural, physical and legal force. A radically new 

mode of thought overdetermined these compulsions, joined at the hip to a Promethean geoculture. 

This was the rise of Man and Nature as capitalism’s pre-eminent ruling abstractions: the former 

becoming the imperial bourgeoisie’s over-represented fantasy of itself, the latter becoming 

everything that the imperial bourgeoisie did not wish to pay for (von Werlhof 1985; Wynter 2003; 

Moore 2022d). 

 Prometheanism cohered this imperial fantasy of Man and Nature. The word has circulated in 

environmentalist theory over the past few decades. It’s frequently assumed that Prometheanism is 

synonymous with the cyberneticist fantasy: Man’s total control over Nature.4 Green thinkers have 

promiscuously charged not only bourgeois but socialist regimes with Prometheanism, and Marx 

as a paradigmatic Promethean thinker (e.g., Clark 1989).  

 There is undoubtedly a bourgeois Prometheus, variously celebrated and denounced across the 

past two centuries. There is also a proletarian Prometheus. This is Prometheus the trickster, the 

rebel, the defier of Gods and the enabler of human creativity. This was the Prometheus that Marx 

admired. For good reasons, many socialists advocate a Red Prometheanism as we envision the 

revolutionary terraforming necessary to render late capitalism’s planetary hellscapes livable in the 

coming centuries (Salvage Collective 2021). 

 These discussions have their place. They foreground Prometheanism as thought-abstraction. 

My argument moves in a different direction. I take Prometheanism as a specifically-capitalist 

geocultural formation, including its infrastructures for producing ruling abstractions (Sohn-Rethel 

1978; Moore 2022d; Marx and Engels 2010). Every phase of capitalism reinvents that 

infrastructure: the means of mental production appropriate to the era’s instrumental and ideological 

tasks.  

Prometheanism, the geohistorical formation, initially developed as a way of seeing, 

interpreting, and ordering reality through the rise of capitalism. It was certainly an impulse of 

domination, but not an abstract European or colonial “will to power.” Prometheanism does not sail 

under its own power. Its geocultural logic was directed towards resolving the feudal crisis: the 

economic stagnation of the long fourteenth century and a balance of class power that favored the 

direct re/producers (Moore 2003). Its key breakthrough was as technical as it was ideological: the 

Promethean Gaze directly joined cartographic and ocularocentric procedures with the Civilizing 

of the wild and savage Americas (Moore 2018a, 2023e).   

 That logic would evolve. But its emphasis on labor mobilization, Civilizing the Savage, and 

profit maximization would persist. In contrast to premodern commercialization, the novelty of 

early capitalist expansion was the primacy of conquest in securing the necessary conditions of 

surplus accumulation. Far from fixated on land, the core intention was to secure the tractable labor-

power under conditions of formal colonial rule. Prefiguring Marx’s insight that the accumulation 

 
4
 Fluss and Frim (2022) provide an insightful survey. Sheasby (1999) offers a lucid survey of the environmentalist 

debates. 



 

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of capital is the multiplication of the proletariat, colonialism was the bourgeoisie’s preferred mode 

of class formation. The conquistadors did not come to the New World to dig for metals, however 

precious they might have been. Without a proletariat, territory was worthless. Without 

Naturalization, the proletariat was too costly.  

 This meant that capitalism structured the world, ideologically and materially, around a 

thoroughly binarized “us versus them” logic. Simply: Prometheanism was the mode of thought 

that corresponded to the rise of capitalism. Successive incarnations would revise, but never alter, 

its essential logic: Cartesianism, Malthusianism, cybernetics (Moore 2021c). It invented—indeed 

sacralized—the categories of Man and Nature. The geocultural mediation of Man and Nature, 

which had little to do either with soils and streams or humans beings as such, was the Civilizing 

Project (Moore 2023c).  

 Prometheanism is not defined by technology in the abstract, or spectacular technological 

vistas of terraforming, geoengineering, and other eco-fixes. It is best considered as the source code 

for capitalism’s software, animating the hardware of epochal inventions like the shipbuilding-

cartographical or steam engine revolutions (Moore 2023e). Capitalism’s technological 

developments internalizes that Promethean source code. Its creative and dominating impulses 

created, dramatically by the seventeenth century, the ruling idea of Nature and its accumulation 

strategy: a project whereby most humans and the rest of life could be rendered into unpaid work-

machines for capital. For every moment of surplus-value extraction, there would be a 

disproportionately greater appropriation of the unpaid work of humans and other webs of life: 

work/energy. For every proletariat, there would be a disproportionately greater biotariat and 

femitariat—not as separate categories, but as interpenetrating antagonisms of planetary work: a 

planetary proletariat (Moore 2015, 2021a). 

 Prometheanism justified two major processes. One was the Civilizing Project. The new 

empires saw the “civilizing” of “savage” humans as among their greatest responsibilities. Through 

Nature, Civilizers enclosed the lives and labors of most human beings along with new territorial 

frontiers. The ruling abstraction Nature served imperial claims to the unpaid work/energy of 

“women, nature and colonies” (Mies 1986). A second was the instrumentalization of Civilization 

and Nature into an imperial-managerial philosophy. To borrow from Descartes, “thinking things” 

managed “extended things” (including humans). Thence the bourgeoisie’s epochal responsibility: 

“We must make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes 2006: 51; see Moore 

2021c). Nature became the bosses’ view of the web of life. 

 

Superexploitation in the Web of Life 

Superexploitation was initially formulated in the 1930s (Briggs 1931; Allen 1938). But it led a 

low-profile existence. That changed in the 1970s.5 It’s been called the “most fundamental concept 

of the Marxist dependency school” (Antunes de Oliveira 2021). Readers are forgiven if that’s 

 
5
 See footnote 3.  



 

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news. World-historical Marxists pioneered its elaboration within the imperial core (Dixon 1977; 

Mies 1986; but also Harris 1972). But world-systems analysts gave up on the idea by the 1980s. 

Lately, anything-but-class leftists have returned to the concept, predictably removing its class 

critique and Mies’ (1986) attention to proletarianization (see, e.g., Collard and Dempsey 2020).  

 That’s not gone unchallenged. Anti-imperialists have revisited superexploitation in recent 

years.6 Monthly Review Press’s recent English translation of Marini’s 1973 classic Dialectics of 

Dependency is sure to encourage debate. For all their diversity, these approaches highlight the 

“suppression of wages below the value of labour power” (Smith 2018).  

 A distinct but complementary reading of superexploitation, focusing on domination and labor 

markets, has also materialized. That move was prefigured by American Communists like Haywood 

(1933), Allen (1938) and Jones (2010). After 1968 the critique was renewed. Socialists 

investigated and debated race/class formations through labor markets, the Black “subproletariat,” 

and internal colonialism (Baron 1971; Harris 1972; Oppenheimer 1974; Bush 1981–82; see Wood 

2022). Other interventions, precociously, spotlighted transnational migration (Gorz 1970). All 

agreed on the importance of national, racial and gendered domination; that this domination 

implicated politically-constituted labor markets; and that there was something distinctive about the 

exploitation of surplus value. There was, sadly, little cross-fertilization between these tendencies—

or dialogue with Marini’s superexploitation thesis (but see Mies 1986; Maroney 1978). 

 There are, then, two moments of the superexploitation thesis. One is economic (but not 

economistic), emphasizing the value of labor-power. Let’s call this Superexploitation I. The other 

focuses on the role of geocultural domination—race, gender, nation—in driving down wages, 

largely through labor market segmentation, enabled by ideologies of domination and reinforced 

by a ballooning “garrison economy” of cops, borders and prisons (Gordon et al. 1982; Bowles et 

al. 1992). Let’s call it Superexploitation II.  

 The two moments are angles of vision on a singular world-historical dynamic. A synthesis 

adequate to the theoretical struggle must move beyond banal formulas of interactivity. Here the 

world-historical insistence on the household rather than the individual as the unit of class analysis 

is salient (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984; Smith and Wallerstein 1992). It broke the vise-like 

grip of methodological individualism on Marxism, refusing the notion that the male wage-worker 

belonged to one class, the housewife to another (Arrighi et al. 1979). Today, we use different 

language. But the heuristic value remains.  

 For Mies (1986), proletarianization and “housewifization” formed a relation of 

superexploitation under capitalist hegemony. Notwithstanding its Boomer inflection, Mies 

conceptualized housewifization as a relation of oppression that mobilized unpaid work internal to 

proletarianization. Proletarianization and housewifization are not colliding, autonomous 

processes. They are internal to each other: a differentiated unity of world class formation. Its 

contradictions formed and re-formed the semi-proletarian household over the longue durée, 

 
6
 See Bond 2021; Duque Garcia 2021; Portes Virginio et al. 2023; Pröbsting 2015; Smith 2016; Wood 2022; Valencia 

2015; Selwyn 2020. Higginbottom (2023) provides a useful survey.  



 

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reshaping the ideological formations of naturalized gender and successive Cheap Labor regimes 

(Dunaway 2001). In establishing the household as a fundamental institution of world capitalism, 

world-historical Marxists installed unpaid work as immanent to the law of value, sustained by 

extra-economic coercion—legal, political, and cultural.  

But they had not yet grappled with extra-human life as a source of unpaid work.  

 How to synthesize superexploitation’s quantitative and qualitative moments? 

Superexploitation is indeed an accumulation strategy that seeks to suppress wages below 

reproduction costs. The balance obviously must be made good somewhere. That somewhere is the 

relation of unpaid human work mixed with the Earth: femitariat and biotariat. The 

Superexploitation I thesis unpacked by Marini and Smith finds its systemwide condition in a rising 

agricultural surplus wrested from the Earth according to the same logic: the suppression of 

reproduction requirements at the cost of long-run sustainability. As with Superexploitation II, the 

extra-economic appropriation of unpaid work/energy from the Earth relies on labor regimes 

entwined with bourgeois Prometheanism and its illusions of “mastery.”  

 Given the law of value’s tendency to induce rising costs—through exhaustion and popular 

resistance – superexploitation is immanent to capitalism’s recurrent fixes, which pursue new and 

expanded sources of unpaid work/energy. Socially-necessary labor time stands on the pedestal of 

socially necessary unpaid work/energy, delivered by femitariat and biotariat. Such 

disproportionality counteracts the tendency of rising costs and the falling rate of profit by enabling 

a high (or rising) “ecological surplus”: the ratio of (low) paid to (high)  unpaid work. The rate of 

profit and therefore investment rises and falls in response to that world-ecological surplus. The 

rate of exploitation, in particular, is decisively shaped by point-of-production relations and the 

extra-economic appropriation of unpaid work (Moore 2015). The points of production and 

reproduction are also dialectically interpenetrated in class politics; in an example Huber (2022) 

might appreciate, proletarian women played a decisive role in the United Auto Workers’ 1936–37 

Flint sit-down strike—a turning point in American labor history (Dollinger 1996). Contra the 

workerist position, proletarian struggles unfold within and across these domains: production and 

reproduction, paid and unpaid, human and extra-human (O’Connor 1998; Federici 2004).  

Without geopower, the web of life is only potential work/energy. Through geopower, the 

alliance of capital, empire, and science identifies, secures and otherwise enables the appropriation 

of webs of life. Imperial geopower—and all manner of environment-making territoriality—is 

therefore central to accumulation by appropriation, necessary to reproduce accumulation by 

capitalization in successive eras (Moore 2015, 2018a; Parenti 2015). Here is Superexploitation I 

and II as a rich totality. Every world hegemonic project created anew the world-historical unity of 

the proletariat, femitariat, and biotariat: the planetary proletariat. When one moment revolts—as 

in the biotariat’s ongoing “general strike” under conditions of climate crisis—ruling classes must 

adjust and fix the conditions of these revolts, or pay the consequences (Moore 2021d).  

 This ratio of paid to unpaid work, determining the ecological surplus and therefore the 

conditions for superprofits, is quantitative only in appearance. As Marilyn Waring (1988) 

bemoaned three decades ago, economic quantism has a difficult time with qualitative labor outside 



 

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—but necessary to—the cash nexus. (Hence the significance of politically-dependent 

accumulation on frontiers.) Those new and expanded sources of unpaid work/energy that anchor 

every great capitalist fix also entail qualitative developments, including new historical natures 

inclusive of capitalism’s human socio-metabolic requirements (Moore 2015).  

 While the result of superexploitation is quantitative (driving wages below reproduction 

costs), the relation of superexploitation is a specific contradiction between “economic 

equivalence” and “natural distinctness.” The quantitative results of superexploitation depend on 

specific forms of oppression and coercion necessary to deliver indispensable qualitative forms of 

work that are not easily displaced by “normal” proletarianization. For human workers, this 

historically involves all manner of social reproductive and agro-extractive labor. Not 

coincidentally, every wave of capitalist development has created new fictions to justify the 

“natural” character of racialized and gendered proletarians’ confinement to these labor segments. 

 From here we can make sense of women’s oppression as a strategic relation of capitalism. 

The modern fetish, Woman, is a specific outcome of the class struggle in early modern Europe—

with significant ramifications in the colonies. Prometheanism directly and intimately shaped this 

fetish. Defining women as the “savages of Europe,” the “sphere of reproduction” was 

“naturalized,” licensing women’s subordination (quotations Federici 2004: 100, 8; also Mies 1986: 

68-69ff). This was not propelled by a masculinist will to power—a view that confuses cause and 

consequence. The gendered pillar of primitive accumulation was, rather, a class project necessary 

to resolve the era’s greatest structural crisis: the underproduction of labor-power (Moore 2017a). 

The breakneck pace of proletarianization by the later seventeenth century is testimony to the 

triumph of the bourgeois forces in resolving this crisis. The geocultural consolidation of 

Civilization/Savagery and Man/Woman within early capitalist social formations was essential to 

that triumph. There was no Great Proletarianization without the Great Domestication (Tilly 1984; 

Patel and Moore 2017). Women’s oppression was the dialectical tissue that bound this epochal 

shift. It turned on the qualitative character of the superexploitation relation and its Promethean 

Naturalism. 

 Nature allowed the bourgeoisie to avoid paying its costs of reproduction.  From the standpoint 

of the law of value 

 
there is… a tendency to maximize the range of resources, products and people (as 
bearers or possessors or labour power) to be treated as if they were nature and 
available gratis… The labour of these people therefore pronounced to be non-labor, 
to be biology:… their ability to work appears as a natural resource…. [Capitalism 
is defined by] a progressive extension of the concept of nature to cover all people. 
(von Werlhof 1985: 97) 

 

Von Werlhof clarifies capitalism’s specific dependence on female biological capacity, giving teeth 

to Marx and Engels’ conception that modes of production are defined by a “twofold relation”: 

between the immediate conditions of production and the “creation of fresh life in procreation.” If 

the “accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat” (Marx 1977: 764), von 

Werlhof clarifies the socio-biological significance of women’s oppression in class formation: 



 

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Capital can… establish a relationship with non-human, external nature only via 
people… And the sole supplier of people are women and their wombs. But wombs 
cannot simply produce as many new human beings as might be demanded, even if 
they were to be transformed into child-producing machines. So far, [capital has] 
been unable… to liberate [itself] from their dependency on the uterus… [T]he 
capacity to bear children has probably never played such a central role in history as 
under our present system… As much as it would like to replace living with dead 
labour, no other system has been as radically dependent on such a massive 
depredation of nature and human labor-power. (von Werlhof 1985: 100) 

 

Von Werlhof’s insight can be dialectically situated. A one-sided biologism is always a temptation. 

This led some ecofeminists to see “woman” as somehow closer to “nature.” (A cognate 

misrecognition has recently played out around indigenous peoples.) A one-sided biologism inverts 

the Baconian-Cartesian Prometheanism, celebrating rather than demonizing Naturalism’s 

oppressive character (Plumwood 1993). For von Werlhof, this biologist tendency led to a false 

prioritization of sexism over racism—to which we’ll turn presently. There is a biological moment 

to gendered class regimes quite different from racialism, whose ideological relation to biology is 

purely idealist. But a retreat to biologism is interpretively unnecessary and unduly favorable to the 

ruling classes—as the history of “natural law” ideology testifies (Moore 2022e). 

 The mere imperative—“the accumulation of capital is the multiplication of the proletariat”—

is analytically insufficient. As Federici shows, the fetish Woman took shape only when the 

biological and the social were alienated, and modern ruling abstractions imposed. The 

bourgeoisie’s geocultural victory—crystallizing climate patriarchy—required Prometheanism and 

its Naturalism. The modern fetishes, Man/Woman, could only be assembled through Nature, which 

had to be invented—as it was—immediately prior to the crescendo of gendered primitive 

accumulation. To paraphrase von Werlhof (1985), there was nothing natural about capitalist 

patriarchy; its specific biologized ideology created Woman as Natural. Not only gestation and 

birth, but all manner of domestic and care labor, were redefined as Natural: unworthy of 

remuneration. Cheap Labor was born.  

 Racism, too, grew from the soil of Naturalism. As with gendered class formation, it emerged 

during the long, cold seventeenth century. The geohistory of that first capitalogenic climate crisis 

is relevant. The genocides that followed 1492 were driven by imperialist slaving. Slave raiding 

and village “reductions” produced disease environments that decimated New World peoples 

(Moore 2021c, 2023c). Predictably, the underproduction of labor-power intensified. Depopulation 

led to a modest but significant atmospheric decarbonization—as forests regenerated and 

cultivation collapsed. This was the Orbis Spike (Lewis and Maslin 2015). Dramatic planetary 

cooling followed, and with it, political and economic instability from Paris to Beijing (Parker 

2013). Unfortunately for us—but fortunately for capital—a climate fix beckoned: the decimation 

of indigenous labor-power called forth the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1570 (Moore 2017a, 

2021c).  



 

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 Climate patriarchy and climate apartheid therefore emerged simultaneously and in response 

to the same crisis: the underproduction of labor-power. As an ideology and practice of class 

formation —the plantation proletariat (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000)—racism’s qualitative socio-

ecological character was to render possible the profit-oriented appropriation of use-values in the 

Americas in a way that was impossible in Europe. Let us recall, with Marx, that use-values are not 

the abstract utility of bourgeois economics; they are geohistorically enabled by modes of 

re/production, themselves influenced by specific geographical and climate conditions (Smith 

1984; Marx and Engels 2010). In the classic formula of resource economics: resources become 

(Zimmerman 1951).  

 So too modern racism. Its handmaiden is coercive semi-proletarianization, defined by the 

disproportionality of paid and unpaid work/energy at the points of production and reproduction. 

Capital fears that such disproportionality will falter—which can and does occur, often through 

political struggles in which class/race dynamics feature prominently (Wallerstein 1983). 

Capitalism thrives when islands of commodification unfold within oceans of potentially Cheap 

Nature (Moore 2017b). Superexploitation occurs when and where semi-proletarian relations 

re/produce qualitative use-values that are difficult or impossible to obtain except through a 

combination of geocultural domination in its modern forms: Prometheanism, sexism, and racism. 

Such domination necessitates the bourgeoisie’s use of “force as a permanent weapon” (Luxemburg 

2003: 351) 

 In the Americas (and Ireland), superexploitation revealed the same logic as in Federici’s 

narrative—but this time with entire peoples. This inaugurated a bloody dynamic of ethnicization 

and the policing of Cheap Lives (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Patel and Moore 2017). Just as 

only women could deliver the necessary reproductive labor specific to capitalism’s imperatives, 

Prometheanism said that “only” indigenous peoples, redefined as naturales, could perform the 

qualitative labors necessary to sustain the era’s earliest commodity frontiers.  

Let us recall the two major phases of capitalist invasion and conquest. A “plunder” economy 

lasting until the 1550s was followed by an epochal, productivist turn, moving at full throttle by the 

1570s. This turn had three geographical loci: colonial Peru’s silver mining complex, northeastern 

Brazil’s sugar frontier, and New Spain’s mix of stockraising and silver mining. (These were also, 

horrifically, the loci of depopulation.) All set in motion new labor regimes of coercive semi-

proletarianization, cohering by the late sixteenth century in colonial Peru’s mita. Until the turn of 

the century, indigenous labor was the only source of labor-power (Moore 2010). This was 

primitive accumulation on a continental scale. Racialized labor becomes: “A Negro is a Negro. 

Only under certain conditions does he become a slave” (Marx 1978b: 207).  

 The initial crystallizing of a vast but weak racial regime occurred during the transition from 

plunder to productivism. That shift was—not surprisingly—the beginning of a protracted 

underproduction crisis of tractable and cheap labor-power: 

 
The incubation period for this [Naturalization]… of “the native” can be dated 
between… 1542 and 1590. During this period, the relationship between nature and 
the native begins to cohere in theological and scientific efforts to identify a primary 



 

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and continuous relationship between the two. That relationship is varyingly 
expressed in the respective terms naturales in Spanish and naturall inhabitants in 
English. Two figures … [are] exemplary. For the Spanish empire, Bartolomé de 
Las Casas, the Dominican friar and Court-appointed “Protector of the Indians,” 
reshapes the meaning of the Castilian legal category naturales. In the English 
context, Thomas Harriot, the… navigator central to Sir Walter Raleigh’s initial 
efforts to colonize Virginia, inaugurates the usage of the term naturall inhabitants 
in his only published work, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of 
Virginia. (Vasko 2022: 9) 

 

 The flashpoints of capitalist transition—of commodification, proletarianization, and racial 

formation—were in the silver mining and sugar planting zones. Capitalism’s first silver mining 

boom had been cut short by class revolt and socio-ecological exhaustion after the German 

Peasants’ War (1525). Central Europe’s reserves of copper-silver ores were exhausted and much 

more modest than Potosi’s, the “rich mountain” whose use-values enabled early capitalism’s 

creation of a durable Cheap Money regime, an essential condition for smoothing out potentially 

troublesome “switching crises” in the circuit of capital (Patel and Moore 2017). Without the flood 

of American silver, the inter-regional division of labor knitting together Brazilian sugar, Polish 

cereals, Norwegian timber, Dutch shipbuilding, and Swedish copper could never have stabilized. 

All of it depended on imperial reforms in Peru after 1571 and the attendant ideological redefinition 

of indigenous peoples—conscripted under various mitas—as naturales (Moore 2010; Vasko 

2022). 

 Sugar could only be cultivated, in its mature capitalist form, in tropical zones like Brazil. The 

New World’s sugar revolution began in Pernambuco during the 1570s. Indigenous slavery was by 

this point formally outlawed, but continued de facto in various forms of coercive semi-

proletarianization. As with silver mining, only a modern infrastructure of culture, law, and 

organized violence could sustain this mode of labor mobilization, on the canefields and its regional 

division of labor. A byzantine racial taxonomy quickly developed as African slaves arrived in 

growing numbers by century’s end (Eichen 2020). Central to this superexploitation dynamic was 

the socio-ecology of sugarcane, which narrowed the conditions of its large-scale profitability to a 

racialized labor regime. The sugar complex could only contain these explosive contradictions—

and maintain its strategic role as producer of the era’s definitive mass commodity—through 

superexploitation. This animates not only racism but bourgeois fantasies of dominating Nature, 

intimately joined throughout the early modern plantation complex. This superexploitative dynamic 

unfolded again, on yet a larger scale, two centuries later during the “second slavery” and ensuing 

cotton boom. Its qualitative contributions enabled Britain’s textile industrialization (Marx 1971; 

Tomich 2016; Patel and Moore 2017; Moore 2023a). Fossil capital was born of the plantation.  

 In both eras, the Civilizing Project fused “indigenous” and “racial” questions within its 

Promethean cosmology. Strategically necessary qualitative labor processes—including socio-

biological reproduction—were redefined as Natural. Such Naturalism implied a spectrum of 

violent (and real) abstractions. That spectrum encompassed manifold gradations of Naturalized 

work, from the “non-work” of socio-biological reproduction to culturally devalued work, almost 



 

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always related to primary production and domestic labor. Not coincidentally, this spectrum of 

devlauation mapped perfectly onto the new mental and manual division of labor and its hierarchies 

(Marx and Engels 2010). At every turn, groups of workers—African, indigenous, female, Celtic—

were said to be “naturally” predisposed to their assigned position in the division of labor. In these 

terms, we can grasp the Cartesian Revolution and its bourgeois Prometheanism as pivotal to the 

racialization and gendering of class and labor “market” segmentation. Thus Cheap Nature’s double 

register of economic and ethico-political devaluation.  

 

Civilizing Projects, Climate Crisis, Class War: Towards the Proletarocene? 

This outline of superexploitation orients us to modernity’s geocultural logic of domination as one 

moment of the evolving capitalist world-ecology. Such domination is the furthest thing from the 

transhistoric groupism that now pervades the academic left (e.g., Robinson 1983; see Robinson, 

Rangel, and Watson 2022). Capitalism’s geocultural domination begins with the invention of 

Nature as a ruling abstraction (Patel and Moore 2017). Its strategic orientation was labor, and the 

creation of Cheap Labor through imperialism as the necessary—if not sufficient—“fix” to the late 

feudal crisis. This was accomplished through bourgeois naturalism and capitalism’s original 

moment of domination: Prometheanism.  

From this world-historical fact one can dispense with metaphysical explanations of 

domination, and explicitly and intimately see it as one moment of capitalism’s drive to turn webs 

of life into profit-making opportunities. Severing this trinity—power, profit and life—has been the 

accomplishment of the neoliberal turn in the academy, everywhere insisting on the priority of these 

fragments and their particularities. But on the ground of real historical specificity, I think of sugar 

frontiers in Bahia and Barbados, no such fracturing occurred. Racist domination, ruthless class 

exploitation, a ceaseless drive for profit, extraordinary deforestations—all were entangled in a 

capitalist world-ecology that rewarded competitive fitness and punished those who failed to 

advance the rate of profit. Frontiers were places where riches beckoned, precisely because frontiers 

were places where the possibilities for effective resistance were lowest, and “natural fertility” 

(soils, ores, forests, etc.) was highest. The Civilizing Project—from Columbus to Truman’s Point 

Developmentalism —provided the geocultural contribution to 

 
an apartheid-like tendency… [animating] two very different types of development 
and two different types of capitalist sociality at the very core of exploitative 
capitalism. One is defined by a civilized, cosmopolitan, state-regulated, lawful, 
welfare-supported, ecologically concerned exploitation. The other is defined by a 
savage, anarchic capitalism, spatially or socially peripheral to the cosmopolitan 
center (this center-periphery logic can be international or intra-national…), and 
dominated by unchecked exploitation, theft, and pillage. One is regulated with a 
policing logic. The other is a space of war. (Hage 2017: 60) 

 

Hage’s brilliant formulation of imperialism’s “apartheid-like” strategy crystallizes capitalism’s 

geocultural logic. It’s also a prime example of anything-but-class leftism. The apartheid metaphor 



 

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cannot reasonably be deployed abstracted from its class basis. South African apartheid was a class 

project intimately tied to imperial ambitions, internally and externally oriented towards securing 

Cheap Natures, labor above all. This implied and necessitated a racialized political regime 

premised on Superexploitation—I and II. It imposed strict controls on labor mobility and 

reproduced desperately insecure semi-proletarian households. Apartheid properly signifies an 

imperial-developmentalist accumulation strategy of superexploitation (Bond 2007). Across 

twentieth century southern Africa—but with parallels that reach back to early modern Ireland, 

Peru, and elsewhere—colonial rule committed to a “labor reserve” strategy to ensure dependable 

supplies of Cheap Labor (Meillassoux 1981). Racism and the Civilizing Project were reinvented 

to serve these priorities in each instance.  

 Historically, the chief difference between such “sub-imperial” and fully imperial states is the 

comparative ease with which labor-power can be secured; hence the illusion of “free labor” in the 

latter. Today, the deepening stagnation of population and productivity—in aggregate, and 

especially in agriculture and other outdoor work—portends a resurgence of superexploitation 

strategies in the imperialist centers. The increasingly violent policing of an imperial “climate wall” 

and immigrant workers everywhere is suggestive (Moore 2022b).  

 The imperial bourgeoisie’s victory in the neoliberal class war was a world-historical reversal 

(Wallerstein 1995). These conditions have intensified as productivity has stagnated, 

overaccumulation intensified, and the climate warmed (Moore 2021d). This conjuncture 

terminated the expensive “appeasement” of the working classes, marking a “return to the pre-1848 

strategy of handling workers’ discontent by indifference plus repression” (Wallerstein 1995: 26). 

Just as Wallerstein predicted, militarized accumulation has intensified as stagnation deepened. 

One-third of U.S. foreign military interventions since Independence have occurred since 1999. 

American special forces operate in three-quarters of the world’s countries (Moore 2023f). As 

Wallerstein envisioned, most of those countries are on the “other” side of the world color line. 

Thus do the imperialist bourgeoisies set the planetary proletariat against itself: divide et impera.  

 The planetary crisis demands a politics of planetary justice premised on a singular critique, 

joining the exploitation of surplus value, the appropriation of unpaid work/energy, and the 

“mastery” of “external nature” (Engels 1987: 460, 105). All three moments are fused in the 

dynamics of superexploitation, enabled by capitalist Prometheanism and the Civilizing Project. 

Whether or not the precise contours of this formulation stand the test of time, the question of 

synthesis—of power, profit and life—is undoubtedly correct. The forces behind the capitalogenic 

trinity—the climate class divide, climate apartheid and climate patriarchy—will not go quietly into 

the night. The danger of a “decadent” transition to a post-capitalist order—one that preserves 

existing inequalities of wealth and power in a new mode of production—is real (Amin 2018).  

 Will a revolutionary alternative prevail? This will depend on the left’s capacity to identify 

common ground and to forge a general proletarian interest—something that will not happen absent 

a militant theoretical struggle, one premised on dialectical synthesis. The point of imperialism and 

its ruling ideas is to divide us and obscure its real relations. The point of geohistorical materialism 

is to identify those diverse yet connected relations, so that we may lay bare their weak links, and 



 

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advance the possibilities for the liberation of the planetary proletariat: the triumph of the associated 

producers and reproducers in the web of life. 

 

 

 

About the Author: Jason W. Moore is a historical geographer and environmental historian at 

Binghamton University, United States, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor 

of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso 2015), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press 2016), 

and with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press 

2017). He is co-coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. Many of essays, in English 

and nearly two dozen other languages, can be found on his website, https://jasonwmoore.com/. He 

can be reached at jwmoore@binghamton.edu.  

 

Acknowledgements: Very special thanks to Diana C. Gildea, Malcolm W. Moore, Andrej 

Grubačić, Christian Parenti, Marcie Smith, Raj Patel, John P. Antonacci, Marija Radovanovic, 

Anne Muha, Joshua Eichen, Jeremy Santora, and Neil Brenner for conversations on the themes 

explored in this essay. Its core formulations gestated with the brilliant graduate and undergraduate 

students in my seminars at Binghamton University. To them I am eternally grateful.   

 

Disclosure Statement: Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of 

the article’s text. Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon 

submission of the article to the journal. 

 

 

 

 

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