The role of nature in Latin America has been central to both elite and grassroots political perspectives since the colonial era. These debates and struggles have taken on many forms, from concerns about the extraction of natural resources, labor, and the meaning of humanity itself, to ideas about conservation and tourism, food production, and energy. One of the main ways these issues have been explored is through culture, yet despite intensifying interest in the Environmental Humanities within Latin American studies — and Latin America’s centrality in dire contemporary environmental crises and dilemmas — culture’s place in materially rooted discussions remains elusive.

One possible opening, however, is offered by world-ecological approaches inspired by Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life (2016) that have gained increasing traction within Latin American Studies.1 Not only does it offer a longue durée account of colonialism and the capacity to think labor and value in new ways, but Moore includes the “cheap” or unpaid work/energy from gendered and racialized human and non-human natures in the making of capitalist value. He also notes the impinging role of negative value or the limits that emerge where nature can no longer be summoned for free (e.g., superweeds). This expansion of Marxism’s labor theory of value leads Moore to a theory of crisis, framed as a tendency of the rate of the ecological surplus to fall. For Moore, capitalism both isand makesits own organizational form of nature (rather than a form that draws on a nature conceptualized as external to it), and this process requires not just the machinery of exploitation but, importantly, geopolitical and cultural power.

Beyond his centering of Latin American colonization as a foundational event in capitalism, there is much in Moore that resonates with Latin American perspectives. On the one hand, there is Moore’s focus on extraction and attention to the geo-spatial dynamics of accumulation. On the other is Moore’s attention to how non- or partially capitalized sectors contribute to accumulation — a perennial concern in Latin American agrarian studies and in studies of class composition. Finally, we have Moore’s heterodox approach to Marx which chimes with the best, and most influential, Marxism in the Latin American tradition, which has often had to translate and adapt ideas produced elsewhere into local contexts. It is not difficult, then, to see why Moore has been quickly engaged by Latin American thinkers.

Of course, Moore’s work has also generated significant debate, particularly among Marxists and eco-socialists. Of these controversies three stand out: Moore’s extension of Marx’s law of value, Moore’s attack on the so-called Cartesian dualism of other ecological thinkers, and Moore’s degree of attentiveness to environmental destruction.2 As co-authors of the essays in this issue, the truth is we have a diverse set of views on these arguments. What we agree on, however, is that they are important, but also that the current state of the debate can be at times not particularly helpful. Many of us found salutary Nancy Fraser’s recent intervention where she argues for a trinity of concepts of Nature, each valuable at a particular moment of analysis.3 Our other point of agreement is simply that Moore’s world-ecology has something valuable to say to Latin Americanists, Marxists, and cultural critics, and all the combinations thereof. Our shared hope was that approaching Moore from below and the left, or reading him under Latin American eyes, could help shift some of these deadlocks by opening new avenues of conversation.

Perhaps most urgently, inspiration for this project derived from the question of the political within a world-ecological framework. What is to be done with Latin American culture amidst a set of political discussions that crisscross the environmental humanities, political ecology, and the wider climate movement and current state projects? While discourses around the Green New Deal, resource nationalism, and ecosocialism have been debated and critiqued, not only is there no viable political movement or even fragments of one, there is little agreement on a shared political horizon. Can Latin American culture conceived broadly, from the speculative to the state sponsored, intervene in questions intimately linked to the environment and capitalism, albeit in need of mutual articulation, such as security, violence, crises of care and reproduction, and the state? The essays in this dossier seek to address these questions and political horizons through cultural and material explorations of colonialism, geopower, water, social reproduction, and the political as they relate to and redefine world-ecological perspectives and potentials.

As mentioned above, one of the features that makes the world-ecology paradigm so attractive for scholars who work on Latin America is that it places Latin America at the very center of the emergence of the Capitalocene. For Moore, clearly, colonialism is the very condition of possibility of capitalism both in an historical/geopolitical and an (onto)logical sense. For Moore, fond of Maria Mies’s phrasing, every act of production of surplus value in the center depends on a disproportionately larger act of appropriation of the unpaid labor of women, nature, and colonies at the commodity frontiers. From a historical/geopolitical perspective, Moore rejects the two-century box according to which capitalism begins in England with the Industrial Revolution. By incorporating Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory into eco-marxism, Moore puts primitive accumulation and the Latin American colonial experience at the core of historical and geopolitical conditions of capitalism. Moreover, Moore assigns a material and practical preeminence to the non-valued, preexisting conditions of the production of value itself. Moore mobilizes the concept of “abstract social nature” as a way of indicating how both non-human and colonial agents not only work, but work in ways that are often seen. The very logic of capital, the very immanence of value in motion, presupposes a process of devaluation that is intrinsically colonialist because it consists of cheapening, appropriating, and removing certain metabolic processes of their own movements of reproduction treating them as if they had no agency, qualities, or determinations. Multiple essays in this dossier explore how placing Latin America within a web of capitalist value relations opens up new discursive space for thinking anew two classic Latin American problems: extractivism and colonial relations of power.

As Eduardo Galeano famously put it, Latin America is the land of the “open veins,” where resource extraction has been a perennial concern and curse. After the end of the industrialization of the post-war period, the neoliberal turn recentered Latin American economies, once again, on extraction. After the disastrous decades of neoliberalism, the election of “pink tide” governments in the first years of the twenty-first century reawakened the hope, possibility, and belief in a socialist alternative. However, pink tide governments, despite their progressive, anti-imperialist rhetoric, quickly became enmeshed in the realpolitik and global pressures of resource dependency. Bolivia and Ecuador, whose constitutions granted rights to nature and recognized sumak kawsay or Buen Vivir as a model for the state and the economy, opened new territories for hydrocarbon and mineral extraction in protected areas and Indigenous territories. In 2015, the Venezuelan government created the Ministry of Eco-socialism and Water just as it expanded the mega-mining project Arco Minero del Orinoco (Orinoco Mining Arc). Today, extractivism not only threatens the livelihood of thousands of Indigenous peoples and the biodiversity of the region, but also integrates nature-exporting countries further into the structures of global capitalism as dependent producers of raw materials. In his essay in this dossier, Santiago Acosta charts one of the many pre-histories of this predicament, exploring how the Venezuelan artistic movement of cinetismo served not simply as ideological cover for state-led petro development, but rather played a critical and active role in the world-ecological transformations of Venezuela. In her essay on the work of Colombian visual artist Carolina Caycedo, Victoria Saramago explores how visual art practice can make visible the often invisible nature of hydropower and the nationalist frames and narratives which are marshaled in its sense-making, while Paige Andersson examines how the Mexican state historically tried to resolve contradictions of ecological accumulation with gendered labor of social reproduction. Each of these essays explores how world-ecology’s emphasis on global value-relations has the potential to bring a more nuanced understanding of global and national power relations, providing new insights into the constitutive predicaments of Latin American societies.

Value relations also open up new avenues for thinking the question of colonial relations of power. The dominant approach to this question in the scholarly field today is the decolonial option. In some of its most prominent U.S. scholarly manifestations and classic texts, the decolonial option is an attempt to consolidate a geopolitics of knowledge that centers the question of epistemological recognition and stresses the importance of speaking from Latin America, that is, from the colonial difference, as a valid position of enunciation.4 As a result, decolonial thought has had a diffident relationship to Marxism, with foundational texts rejecting the applicability of Marxism to Latin America, although other decolonial scholars, particularly younger ones, are less apt to draw such hard distinctions or to depend entirely on epistemological arguments.5

World-ecology enables a new approach to these questions by placing the colonial perspective in dialogue with value creation and value relations. By bringing value into the conversation, colonial difference is seen not just as a place of enunciation for the creation of knowledge, but an actual material producer of value that then is retroactively devalorized by its own product, value itself. The world-ecology perspective can help to avoid the classic decolonial tendency to work within “the colonial/modern” divide by emphasizing how commodity fetishism feeds the appropriation and subordination of non-valued colonial subjects to the production of value through a longue durée perspective. World-ecology’s synthetic character is extremely attractive because it can incorporate an anti-colonial approach that gives proper weight to the joint economic, ecological, and epistemological project of coloniality that endures into the present. Orlando Bentancor’s essay in this dossier explores precisely these dynamics, tracking how the present intensification of the extractive paradigm and continued deterritorialization of capital flows has deepened colonial relations while further enmeshing Latin America within anonymous global value relations. In his contribution, Brian Whitener demonstrates the impact of global value relations in shaping the turn to para-state violence as a form of accumulation in Mexico and the devastating consequences of local pressures of global accumulation dynamics.

Certainly, few texts in recent memory combine Marxist political economy with the sensibility of the cultural turn like Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life. In Moore’s work, long passages on the importance of cartography sit comfortably side-by-side with excurses on the rate of profit and the tendency for the rate of ecological surplus to fall. As a result, cultural theorists have been quick on the uptake. However, when we turn to the role of the cultural in the political response to ecological collapse, Moore’s text provides few guideposts, and it falls to cultural theorists to stake out our own. In our discussions over the kind of work that needed to be done, we turned over a vast array of questions to grasp what the possible role of culture in Latin American ecological politics today might be. We asked questions like: If in 1993 John Beverley called for us to think “against literature” in the context of a revolutionary upheaval, what role is there for culture, and by extension critique, to play in the ecological present of post-Lettered City societies? If we agree that an expansion of our political imaginations is required to deal with ecological crisis does this imply a renewed role for cultures of representation? Or given the compressed timeframe of the present catastrophe in Latin America must all culture cleave more closely to the asymptote of politics, tending to the anti-representational and being of the street, the demo, the barricade? And finally, as more and more cultural workers turn to speculative modes, how can the speculative be matched with history to chart where our world-ecologies and its imaginaries have already been and where they might go?

One approach the essays in this volume take in thinking world-ecology in a Latin American cultural context is through the concept of geopower, which names the geo-managerial capacity of state-capital-science complexes. Christian Parenti describes geopower as “the statecraft and technologies of power that make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable”6 and Moore defines it as a force “at the heart of modern capitalism,” comprised of a mix of science, technology, governance, and culture, which allows capitalists and states to “map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital.”7 In other words, geopower acts through the symbolic production of “abstract social nature,” which in turn serves to fashion nature into a motor of capital accumulation.8 Such operations are largely carried out through visual practices wherein vision and the gaze become instruments and objects of territorial control.9 What is unique about these conceptualizations of the power to remake the biosphere is the active role given to the “soft” technics of intellectual labor and symbolic praxis in processes of nature appropriation.

However, and as much as Moore and others have suggested that culture plays a crucial part in environment-making, studies about the cultural dimension of geopower are scarce. On one hand, culture and ideology are still too often understood as superstructural forces with only circumstantial or indirect impacts on the material world. On the other hand, the emancipatory potential of culture and the arts is sometimes overemphasized, blinding us to the contradictory ways in which cultural producers are often already enmeshed in the conditions in which they live and work (including the cultural apparatus of state-capital articulations). Approached in the right way, the world-ecological perspective, with its emphasis on the effects that real abstractions have on human and extra-human natures, offers a way of grasping culture as a much more tangible interplay between the abstract and the concrete, between the material and the immaterial, and between humans and the rest of nature. As Santiago Acosta’s essay shows, an engagement with the notion of geopower can help scholars to elaborate a new theoretical framework wherein culture works through matter as an active force that intervenes in the organization of nature in the service of capital. Essays in this dossier such as Acosta’s and Whitener’s bring the concept of geopower into the realm of cultural studies to explore how aesthetic objects and discourses are crucial to materialize ways of capturing natural forces and supporting regimes of extraction. At the same time, Acosta’s article calls for a rethinking of the compartmentalization of scientific knowledge-making and cultural practices (which seem to remain separated in Moore’s conception of geopower).

Another nodal point across multiple articles in this dossier is the focus on water. In particular, the potential of hydric formations to elaborate intersections between the cultural and the political places water in a privileged thematic, historical, and theoretical position. Moore’s reframing of water as cheap nature, from its role in irrigating the Green Revolution to the historical capitalist reliance on water as a source of energy, from the water mills of early capitalism to contemporary hydropower plants, has been inspiring a growing critical corpus, which includes critical responses to the intensification of potable-water extraction, such as Sharae Deckard’s discussion of “extreme water,” as well as the nexus between cultural form and “strategies of enclosure and accumulation” of freshwater, among other interventions.10 However, the imaginative fluidity of water in Latin America, including saline as well as freshwater, encompasses numerous and varied cosmological dimensions, the centrality of waterways in economic and migratory patterns, the availability of water for the maintenance of life, and the symbolic role of large rivers in national encodings. All these significations, extensively explored by Latin American artists and writers and also present in this dossier, allow for a productive rereading of the world-ecology paradigm as it intersects with a broader range of meanings and resonances present across the region’s cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Three of the articles included in this dossier expand the critical possibilities of water-as-resource — reinforcing and challenging the world-ecology paradigm — through analyses of seas, rivers, and water infrastructures in film, literature, and visual arts. Representations of water as ungovernable can, as Paige Andersson demonstrates, challenge infrastructures of enclosure, thus making the case for a political reckoning of the related yet independent autonomies of nature and human labor. Santiago Acosta shows how state-sponsored visual arts movements can establish a close connection with nationalistic thinking through the symbolic legitimization of large-scale environmental interventions such as the building of hydropower megadams. For her part, Victoria Saramago explores the aesthetic and narrative challenges of making visible the human and nonhuman displacements implicated in the building of megadams. Read together, these contributions aim to reconfigure the cartographies of extraction and accumulation, on which the world-ecological understanding of water as cheap nature is based, from the viewpoint of cultural production.

If the essays in this dossier find traction within world-ecology with geopower and water, they are more sanguine in their assessment of Moore’s political framework, and the essays explore a number of different uncertainties and fissures. The political framework Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life offers is notoriously thin, comprising just a few pages but it heavily centers the role of the state, and while more recent work has provided more insight, political thinking is not the strongest aspect of his work.11 Moreover, the state horizon of Moore’s politics, raises important concerns in Latin America, such as: What does this ecological politics have to offer in a region where states have terrorized, displaced and disappeared environmental and other organizers or where they have coordinated with paramilitary organizations to clear land or turned a blind eye to other forms of dispossession? What are the resonances of calls for new forms of developmentalism, even of a green kind, in a Latin American context where indigenous ecological thought is prominent and where post-developmental discourses are foundational to current critical thinking? While Moore’s conceptual and historical framework centers Latin America as a global commodity frontier par excellence, at the moment of political theory, Moore’s approach seems to lack the same nuanced and dynamic internationalist understanding that would allow its seamless translation into the region.

In their own ways, each of the essays in this volume touch on questions of the political and the translation of world-ecology into a Latin American context. One important line of questioning, pursued by both Paige Andersson and Brian Whitener, is the place of social reproduction within a world-ecological framework. Ecological crises and larger questions of day-to-day survival and reproduction of individuals or communities move hand-in-hand, particularly in Mexico, while struggles against illegal logging and mining are also often struggles to maintain or recuperate forms of life that are under attack. Often Mexican cultural production addresses ecological themes alongside or through the more capacious lens of social reproduction. In both their essays, Andersson and Whitener ask what it would mean to follow cultural production’s lead and center social reproduction as a frame around which ecological political struggles turn and a horizon toward which they move.

Across many of the essays, but particularly those of Andersson, Acosta, and Saramago, questions of the state and state-led world-ecological projects loom large. Each of these essays asks from the position of culture what would it look like to move beyond these disastrous projects as they also chart the complicated ways in which cultural practice has participated in or dissented from them. Finally, the essays of Andersson, Whitener and Bentancor, grapple with how to understand the present and near future political horizon of capitalist ecocide and its meaning, effects, and cultural mediations in Latin America. Bentancor inverts the nihilism of contemporary weird fiction into an analytic of contemporary global capitalism’s suicidal world-ecology; Andersson examines the interplay between cultural production and a capitalism which has exhausted its stocks of value and tricks for resolving its own crises; while Whitener gives us a dialectical image of a world that could be, a world-ecology of a different order beyond capitalism and the state.

Never uniform, these essays prick and probe, translate and adapt elements of world-ecology testing and essaying their possible utility for Latin American Marxist thought and Latin American cultural and literary studies. The results, which was our aim in organizing this dossier, are also not uniform. Moore’s thought is found wanting in several instances, needing supplement in others, and a supremely useful interlocutor across all the essays. As a whole the essays demonstrate the productive utility of world-ecology for cultural work in Latin America and our hope is this dossier will contribute to a deepening of these conversations.

1. Within Latin American cultural studies there has been significant work. A non-exhaustive list would highlight: Sharae Deckard, “”Mapping the World-Ecology,” https://www.academia.edu/2083255/Mapping_the_World_Ecology_Conjectures_on_World_Ecological_Literature; Sharae Deckard, “Latin America in the World-Ecology: Origins and Crisis.” In Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, edited by Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) 3-20; Michael Niblett, World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Kerstin Oloff, “The ‘Monstrous Head’ and the ‘Mouth of Hell’: The Gothic Ecologies of the ‘Mexican Miracle,’” in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, edited by Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 79-98. In the larger field of Latin American Studies, see Gennaro Avallone, “Las perspectivas de la ecología-mundo y postcolonial: buscando una alternativa al dualismo cartesiano,” (2015), https://www.academia.edu/15228892/Las_Perspectivas_de_la_Ecolog%C3%ADa_mundo_y_Postcolonial_Buscando_una_Alternativa_al_Dualismo_Cartesiano; Laura Casanova Casañas, “Megaproyectos y conflictos ecoterritoriales. El caso del Tren Maya,” Relaciones Internacionales, 46 (2021), 139-159; Iagê Miola et al., “Bonos verdes en la ecología-mundo: capital, naturaleza y poder en la expansión financiarizada de la industria forestal en Brasil,” Relaciones Internacionales, 46 (2021) 161-180; Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo and Lucía Linsalata, “Capitaloceno, luchas por lo común y disputas por otros términos de interdependencia en el tejido de la vida. Reflexiones desde América Latina,” Relaciones Internacionales, 46 (2021), 81-98. Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo and Horacio Machado Aráoz, La trama de la vida en los umbrales del Capitaloceno. El pensamiento de Jason W. Moore (México: Bajo Tierra, 2021); and Roberto José Ortiz, “Agro-Industrialization, Petrodollar Illusions and the Transformation of the Capitalist World Economy in the 1970s: The Latin American Experience,” Critical Sociology 42.4-5 (2014), 599-62.
2. For two representative critiques of Moore see Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2018) 178-83, 190-6, and John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, “Value isn’t Everything (2018). https://monthlyreview.org/2018/11/01/value-isnt-everything/
3. Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism,” New Left Review 127 (2021) 107-8.
4. See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Walter Mignolo, “I Am Where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8.2 (1999) 235-245; and Walter Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: on (de) Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience,” Postcolonial studies 14.3 (2011): 273-283.
5. See for instance Geo Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), and Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (New York: Pluto Press, 2019).
6. Christian Parenti, “Environment-Making in the Capitalocene: Political Ecology of the State,” Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016) 171.
7. Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45.2 (2018) 245-46.
8. Moore, “The Capitalocene Part I” 245.
9. See Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II”; Timothy W. Luke, “On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 57-81; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us (New York: Verso, 2016) 87-96; and Gearóid Ó Tuathail, “At the End of Geopolitics? Reflections on a Plural Problematic at the Century’s End,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 22.1 (1997): 35-55.
10. Alexandra Campbell and Michael Paye, “Water Enclosure and World Literature: New Perspectives on Hydropower and World-Ecology,” Humanities 9.3 (2020): 1-15, and Sharae Deckard, “‘Waiting for the Master’s Dam to Crack’: Hydro-dependency, Water Autonomy and World Literature,” new formation: a journal or culture/theory/politics 103 (2021): 134-155.
11. See for example Jason W. Moore, “Climate, Class & the Great Frontier: From Primitive Accumulation to the Great Implosion” (2021). https://jasonwmoore.com/academicpapers/ and Jason W. Moore, “Opiates of the Environmentalists? Anthropocene Illusions, Planetary Management & the Capitalocene Alternative,” Abstrakt (2021). https://jasonwmoore.com/academicpapers/