Conceptualizing the origins of a crisis

In Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) a work of Marxist ecology that proposed substituting the term "Capitalocene" for "Anthropocene", Jason Moore held that "how we conceptualize the origins of a crisis has everything to do with how we choose to respond to that crisis." Andreas Malm, in his superlative Fossil Capital (2016), also sought out a point of inception, tracing the "origins of the fossil economy" to the rise of the coal-powered steam engine in the late eighteenth century, which allowed manufacturers to relocate production away from the land and into the cities, where labor was cheaper and more easily subordinated.

...All these books suggest that the source can be pinpointed, and that by choosing one germinal moment we are choosing the means to understand the current crisis.

- Flaubert's Planet by Aaron Matz, from the New York Review of Books

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