Among other things, capitalism is a mode of economic production based on dissymmetrical relations of production that allow the exploitation of the majority by a minority through the extraction of work force from our minds and bodies.
But who is susceptible of becoming work force under capitalism? Almost everything – not just you and me. A river by producing electric energy, for example. Or the earth, by producing fuel. In fact, the exploitation of “nature” via the extraction of energy and resources from it is not less essential to capitalism than, say, the enslavement of children is. Therefore, capitalism does not only commodify everything, it does not only transform whatever it can into a commodity, and rather quickly for that matter. It also extends the very notion of work force to the whole cosmos.
Capitalism, then, is a cosmopolitics: a politics of the cosmos – and, in the last instance, a politics against the cosmos. Capitalism is a cosmopolitics in which profit breathes death onto a world emptied of self-consistency, a world that is nothing beyond what capitalism forces it to be. Capitalism is the commanding principle in a cosmos turned labour force.
Further reading: Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life
Image: The earth transformed into diamond-producer work force in Mirny (Yakutia, Russia)