"Cheap is the opposite of a bargain - cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life. 'Things' become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print." 3
"Great historical transitions occur because 'business as usual' no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing." 12
"While much has been made of its gory and oppressive history, one fact is often overlooked: capitalism has thrived not because it is violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way. Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work - as cheaply as possible." 19
"Everything that humans make is coproduced with the rest of nature: food, clothing, homes and workplaces, roads and railways and airports, even phone and apps... The 'human' relations of power and difference, production and reproduction, not only produce nature, they are products of nature." 20
"Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible." 21
"In economics, an externality is a cost or a benefit, private or social, that doesn't appear in the calculus of production. We're arguing that the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself into that calculus. The modern world happened because externalities struck back." 21
"Frontiers are so important in these processes because they offer places where the new cheap things can be seized - and the cheap work of humans and other natures can be coerced. We come, then, to what we mean by cheapness: it's a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism's crises." 22
"Capital isn't the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill. For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress itself. It is through the live circulation of money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens." 26
"Capital is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion within the finite web of live." 27
"The story of cheap things and the crises that follow their cheapening is not one of inevitability. Humans can and do fight back. Capitalists then try to address that resistance with a range of cheap fixes. These too inevitably generate their own crises and, in turn, more and more sophisticated mechanisms of control and order." 29
"... without the power to decide whose lives matter and whose do not, it would not have been possible to suppress Indigenous Peoples or members of rival religions and states and appropriate their knowledge, resources, and labor power." 37
"So when we write and hyphenate world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of 'world-systems' to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation." 38
"The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear, and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history - one that includes the early modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples, and Africans from humanity - is testimony to modernity's extraordinary capacity to make us forget." 39
chapter 1: Cheap Nature
"Where European capitalism thrived was in its capacity to turn nature into something productive and to transform that productivity into wealth. This capacity depended on a peculiar blend of force, commerce, and technology, but also something else - an intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as opposite of Society." 46
"Originally just a claim on land, the encomienda became a strategy to shift certain humans into the category of Nature so that they might more cheaply work the land." 50
"This means that Descartes's philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force... Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society." 52
"This Cartesian revolution accomplished four major transformations, each shaping our view of Nature and Society to this day. First either-or binary thinking displaced both-and alternatives. Second, it privileged thinking about substances, things, before thinking about the relationships between those substances. Third, it installed the domination of nature through science as a social good. Finally, the Cartesian revolution made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination." 54
"So peasants were forced either to leave the land or to offer the only thing they had left to sell: their labor. In this sense their labor was 'free' - its sale was uncoerced by anything other than poverty and prison terms for vagrancy, the laws against poverty and vagabondage being motivationally harsh." 60
"Knowledge was enclosed too. If anything was to be known about nature and the world, European men would author and authorize it."61
chapter 2: Cheap Money
"Two movements make financialization attractive and even useful to capitalism when the world's economic pie stops growing. One is the tendency of leading powers to go to war, or at a minimum to build up their war-making capacity... As we will see, modern states rarely self-finance their wars. They have to borrow money just like everyone else. The other thing that boosts financialization is that capital in the heartlands of the system begins to flow toward the frontiers." 69
"Financialization's bet on the future has worked historically so long as there were bountiful frontiers, where humans and other natures might be put to work - or otherwise extracted - for cheap." 69
"The silver boom didn't just make money - it also produced one of the first modern working classes, devastated landscapes, and provoked modernity's first great worker and peasant revolt" 73
"One of his earliest inventions was the repurposing of an Indigenous labor regime: the mita. Every community in the sixteen provinces around Potosi had to send one in seven men to work in the silver mines. These men, called mitayos, were required to work from dawn until dusk. This stipulation, enforced by violence, was waived on Sundays and Christian holidays... He knew that Indigenous People were in the realm of nature but might redeem their souls through labor." 83
"Hence the role of a credible 'lender of last resort' - a state bank or, more recently the IMF - an institution that, with hard currency and military connections, can guarantee a given hegemonic order." 87
"The extraordinary volatility of financial markets speaks not only to the dominance of finance capital but also to its weakness. At some point, bets on the future must pay off. And that's precisely what past centuries' frontiers of work, food, energy, and raw materials enabled. Today, those frontiers are smaller than ever before, and the volume of capital looking for new investments is greater than ever before." 88
chapter 3: Cheap Work
"So the Portuguese crown requested and received permission from Rome for its subjects to capture and enslave any north or west Africans they encountered on their colonial adventures." 92
"Since it was hard to argue that residents of the Americas harbored actual enmity toward Christianity, a new criterion emerged: ignorance. What people knew, and didn't know, became the proper subject of the state, for the purposes of acquiring and managing a labor force." 93 Requerimiento
"In his debate against Sepulveda before the panel, Las Casas conceded that there is a hierarchy of life, that some kinds of humans are superior to others. At issue was the position of Indigenous People in this hierarchy and the duties of Christian conquerors toward them. In the end, it was resolved that although Indigenous People aren't part of society, they might escape their place in nature through generations of labor." 94
"Note the toxic chemistry of greed and piety. If colonization was to proceed, God had to be okay with it. Ultimately, it was the duty of care for Indigenous souls that licensed the appropriation of their land and their labor to work it, in the service of civilization... Here lies capitalism's most sinister accounting tricks. Putting most humans into the category of Nature rather than Society enabled an audacious act of frontier bookkeeping." 94
"The conquest of the Americas therefore involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the 'lazy' native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism's ecology." 98
"Slavery was the cost of cheap cotton." 103
"And with every resistance to it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again." 107
"It's time now for us to explore the boundaries of what has counted as payable work and as the kind of work offered, by nature, as a 'free gift' to the economy." 110
chapter 4: Cheap Care
"There's no necessary reason why the language of sex should also be the language with which silver mines were acquired. Yet as some humans moved across the surface of the planet, bringing it under the reign of property, they compassed it as they would a sexual conquest. The reign of cheap nature and cheap work was, from the beginning, a transformation not just in how and what humans could own but also in who could won and work, how they would be born, and how they would be cared for." 113
"For the order of cheap nature and cheap work to be created, other work needed to happen without being paid at all - most of all, the creation and management of bodies to do that work... Such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work, wage work would simply be too expensive. At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and mange the category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women... we continue to think of 'real work' solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible" 116
"For modern models of the household to stick, economics wasn't enough. Women and men needed to be schooled and disciplined in their new household responsibilities." 120
"The hegemony of the modern household wasn't made purely through instruction manuals. It was also made by force. As with cheap work, the bodies of certain kinds of humans needed to be disciplined for the strategy of cheap care to work. Transforming women's bodies into compliant machines of reproduction took force and fear and social policing. The institutions of this policing included the prison, the school the clinic, the madhouse, and the management of public and private sex and sexuality through violence and shaming... The household's violent education was enforced through law, property law in particular." 121
"Kin networks that had supported women, men, and children beyond the nuclear family were destroyed no less than the commons. The extended family and relationships that could sustain families were transformed and professionalized... Women's economic activity, insofar as it was permitted, was confined to the domestic sphere, a domain from which politics was correspondingly banned." 128
"To make this system work, the state developed a keen interest in enforcing the categories of man and woman." 128
"... to use the term workshop is to mischaracterize how housework was viewed. It was considered precisely beyond the domain of wage work, a favor that women did for men, akin to the free gifts that nature offered enterprise." 129
"The global household has always done the work that makes possible the global factory and the global farm." 134
"To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for the end to capitalism." 135
"To imagine a world of justice in care work is to imagine a world after capitalism. But while capitalism persists, the cheapness of labor reproduction is based in turn on other cheap things." 137
chapter 5: Cheap Food
"Without food surplus, there is no work outside agriculture." 140
"While historians debate the precise timing of its agricultural revolution, it's clear that by 1700 England was doing the two big things that every great capitalist power must: increasing the agricultural surplus and expelling labor from the farm." 141
"Every global factory needs a global farm." 142
"Cheap food is 'cheap' in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system." 143
"Cheap food required the suppression of political dissent. The Green Revolution was, after all, a package of reforms designed to prevent the Red revolutionary political goal of many peasants' and landless workers' movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform. That's why, in its implementation, the Green Revolution was often an authoritarian program." 151
"Raw meat in the supermarkets is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism's ecology." 156
"The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system. This is one of the reasons why meat is so cheap. Cheap labor is another." 156
chapter 6: cheap energy
"Here a new layer of cheapness emerges in our picture of the world: capitalism's global factory requires not just a global farm and a global family, but a global mine as well." 165
"Why is cheap oil so important? It's not that capitalism can't do without fossil fuels. After all, retailers and manufacturers don't care if their electricity comes from ancient fossils, windmills, or solar panels. Cheap oil is so important because today's capitalists don't wish to support the kinds of massive investment that would make a solar transition possible... If a solar transition is to happen under capitalism, it will only be because governments will pay for it." 178
"Yet we cannot end a discussion of energy without observing that the IEA in 2016 announced that the capacity of renewable energy exceeds that of coal. Does this render a discussion of cheap energy moot? Hardly. Look inside the batteries of the solar revolution, and you'll find blood minerals from the DRC and Bolivia." 179
"It requires violence meted by public and private sectors, licensed by a world-ecology that stretches back to cheap nature and is possible only because of a collective understanding that cheap energy is part of the national bounty." 179
chapter 7: cheap lives
"Yet while it certainly involved bloody murder, colonialism was never exclusively an act of brute force. Columbus and his descendants had weapons but also an organization and language that legitimated their use of that force. Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World's order was kept through race, police, and profits. These technologies of hegemony and order are the subject of our final chapter." 181
"Women, wageworkers, Indigenous People, and even those members of the ruling class on whose fortunes the sun has set - all have fought, more or less successfully, against the requirement of their subservience. In response, capitalists developed new strategies to forge new frontiers and to deepen existing ones... Governments, merchants, and financiers scaled new heights of creativity and destruction in the search for profit. But capitalism's ecology has also expanded and consolidated itself through prodigious experimentation in the arts and science of social order" 181
"To maintain hegemony is, as Antonio Gramsci observed, to recruit and maintain forces from across society in a bloc that is able to continually outmaneuver its rivals. In the pursuit of order and control, the idea of 'the nation' became affixed to the state in ways that few could predict and which continue to shape the planet." 182
"Keeping things cheap is expensive. The forces of law and order, domestic and international, are a costly part of the management of capitalism's ecology." 182
"More important still, as states confront the limits of their ability both to manage the lives in their charge and to provide conducive environments for liberal capitalism, we're reaching the end of an era of cheap lives." 182
"In New Spain, the sistema de castas emerged as a way of policing citizens, taxes, and labor requirements, as well as proximity to god. It ranked people according to their blood, with categories emerging like answers to a combinatorial mathematics problem." 185
"Once assigned, these categories were enforced. Which is to say that women's bodies, workers, taxes, religion, and property rights were policed simultaneously." 186
"Geographers and chorographers were in the first ranks of empire, and map making helped to define not only the state but also the new story of what united the citizens of that state, the story of national blood and soil." 195
"Race, nation, and print capitalism were tightly linked. Strategies that required cheap care and cheap labor produced and reproduced the racial orders by which bodies were read, categorized, and policed at the boundaries of Society and Nature. Print and narratives that both fixed domestic order and offered future national greatness in reward circulated and confirmed these orders." 196
"No surprise then that... on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination." 196
"Through this idea of nationalism, states' power to police their citizens extended to everything from productive to reproductive labor through actions in defense of currency and food purity to mental health policy" 197
"This is the strategy of cheap lives in three words: define and rule" 198
"Hegemony, the idea with which we began this chapter, is never secure or guaranteed. It must always be maintained, by force and suasion... The nation is a fiction in permanent flux, written and rewritten to interpret and order its destiny - and thus the present. But the ideas of the nation and its economic destiny aren't the exclusive domain of a particular hegemonic bloc. Indeed, this is why we see in moments of capitalist crisis the rise of alternate interpretations of national destiny" 199
conclusion
"Our cheap things didn't magically make themselves. They emerged through a violent alchemy of ideas, conquest, and commerce in the modern world. At its heart has been a series of binaries that entwined with each other from the beginning: Society and Nature, colonizer and colonized, man and woman, the West and the Rest, white and not-white, capitalist and worker. Each of these dualisms has not merely worked to describe and categorize the world but served practically to dominate and cheapen the lives of nearly all humans and the rest of nature." 202
"The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by 'lifestyle choices' rather than socially enforced logics." 204
"If we are made by capitalism's ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations." 206
"But knowing that there is someone whose only fault is to be born now, likely a woman, Indigenous, harmed by climate change and pollution, and whose life will be rendered demonstrably worse by the cumulative actions of everyone able to read this sentence, how might we live differently? The outlines of such a program must include recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation." 207
"There's no easy calculus for the computation of suffering and repayment." 208
"In other hands, this might be evidence of the futility of reparations, of the hopelessness of changing on thing when everything must change." 209
