How did problems such as poverty, racism, gender inequality and increasing climate instability come to plague humankind? Binghamton scholar Jason W. Moore has an answer in his new book, 

Moore, a professor of sociology, is an environmental historian and historical geographer. His book, published last fall by University of California Press, argues that capitalism is one of the most flawed and inefficient systems of organizing humans and nature.

To understand his perspective, first look at what he means by “cheap.” 

Moore argues that cheapening is the method used by capitalism to extract the most profit with the least cost. “There are two motives of cheapness,” he says. “One is cheap in price, but the other is cheapening in an ethical political sense, as in to treat with less respect, to degrade the value of work.”

For example, companies sometimes use prison labor to manufacture products. Prisoners don’t need to be paid, and corporations only incur a small cost when working with the prison. This would be an example of cheap labor, one of Moore’s seven cheap things.

Cheapening also means externalizing costs, which include toxic waste, carbon emissions and other negative environmental byproducts. Environmental consequences are a cost capitalism has historically ignored.

A reason for this lies in one of the central tenets of Moore’s book: the mythical divide between nature and civilization. Capitalism promoted a Cartesian view of nature, which states that human society is above nature, and is actually meant to control nature and reap its benefits.

This made it possible to lessen the value of anything — even humans — by placing it under the category of nature. Slavery, the taking of indigenous land, racism and sexism are powerfully influenced by this concept, Moore writes.

Capitalism is more than just a socioeconomic construct — it is a way of thinking about and organizing life, Moore writes in A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things. “This is a book that encourages 21st-century thinking to deal with 21st-century problems,” he says. “We need to have a way of making sense of the biosphere and relationships between humans and the environment as fundamentally interconnected at every turn.”

Moore wrote this book with Raj Patel, an award-winning writer, activist and academic. Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, regularly writes for The Guardian and is an advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Moore and Patel had been reading each other’s work and borrowing ideas for a while. After meeting for the first time at a conference in Austin, they decided to write a book together the same day.

“This book is a set of ideas with a sense of urgency to it,” Patel says. “It’s exciting that there’s already a great deal of attention being paid to it.”

Moore previously wrote several other books, most recently Capitalism and the Web of Life (Verso, 2015) His next book, titled Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, covers a world history of the origins of climate crisis. He has an active research agenda that spans topics such as agriculture and energy, environmental history and climate change.

“His work is groundbreaking,” says Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and Moore’s doctoral advisor. “There are people working on many of the topics he covers, but the way he pulls it all together is unique, and it’s very accessible.”

Moore is also chair of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network, a group of scholars and activists dedicated to studying historical change through seeing human society as a product and producer of the environment.

For more details about Moore and his book A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, visit his website, https://jasonwmoore.com.

Candela, who joined Binghamton’s faculty as an assistant professor of sociology in 2014, focuses on how people maintained nationalistic sentiments for their native country while migrating to a new one. “I’m looking at their sense of national identity around what it means to be Chinese and have a sense of belonging to China while at the same time carving out a life in another country,” Candela says.

“My goal is to show these histories that get eclipsed,” Candela says. This involves studying people without isolating them to a single nation or culture. Chinese migrants aren’t typically included in the study of Latin American nations, or in the study of Chinese history, so this group is not well known.

Gail Hershatter, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz, advised Candela while she was a doctoral student school there. Candela has unique qualifications to do this work, she notes, as she is fluent in Chinese and Spanish.

“Her research is quite unique,” Hershatter says, “because most people that are trained to do East Asian history stay in East Asia. They do their research exclusively about China, but she is doing the history of a group that went from China to Peru. They kept really substantial ties to the homeland, and at the same time they were very involved in national events in Peru. And so she’s tracking both of those things. It’s a really transnational story, which is very unusual and hard to do.”

Candela is working on a book about overseas Chinese nationalism drawn from her dissertation. “The challenge is that you actually end up in the dissertation with a lot more questions than you started with,” she says. “And so then the question becomes narrowing down the scope of what you actually want to answer at this moment and finding how the past speaks to the present.”

Candela has travelled to Peru and China in search of answers. She has been approached by residents of Peru who had letters from relatives that they were unable to read because they were written in Chinese. As she translates these personal histories, she contributes to the understanding of these transnational relations in the global sense while also helping individual families better understand themselves and their histories.

“I think she’s a real pioneer,” Hershatter says of Candela. “I think more and more people are going to try and do the work she does.”

“In order to decrease its debt and get loans, Ghana had to get rid of a lot of social programs,” she says. “The two men I was interviewing grew up around that time. My goal was to tell a story about what had happened historically in Ghana and how it manifested in the lives of these two young men.”

From there, the sociology major’s work took a more personal turn.

Batiz’s honors thesis focuses on the Garifuna community in New York City. The Garifuna, including her own family in Brooklyn, are descendants of marooned slaves who were exiled when the British took over St. Vincent. The New York City community has grown to some 100,000 people.

“My inspiration was my own search for identity here in the United States,” she says. “Growing up, people would say to me, ‘You can’t be Latino; you’re black.’ For me, it was that confusion that drove me to write an honors thesis.”

Batiz conducted a survey of Garifuna and used census data to see whether individuals considered themselves black, Latino, both or neither. The results left Batiz with questions about how Americans negotiate race and how culture is transmitted. “Is it your phenotype?” she asks. “Is it the social condition you grow up in?”

Batiz’s advisor, Michael West, considers her self-directed and ambitious. “Her research shows that the Garifuna, as befitting a people spread over several nation-states in Central America, with roots in the Caribbean islands, have multiple identities,” says West, a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Binghamton. “They are at once Hondurans, Belizians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, etc., and Americans, and also Latinos, and black, plus of course Garifuna. Along this cultural continuum, there are varying degrees of identification with any of the categories according to class, gender, religion, age, education and so forth. The beauty of Luisa’s thesis is that it speaks to all of these issues.”

Last summer, Batiz traveled to the University of California, Berkeley, as a public policy and international affairs fellow. The program gave her a dynamic view of how to tackle issues, she says. She was part of a team tasked with improving education in Micronesia. The group didn’t find an easy fix, but the experience led her to an insight: “Often when we try to solve a problem, we come up with a Band-Aid when the real issue is that the problem is adaptive,” she says. “You’re only fixing part of the problem.”

Batiz, who will join Teach For America this fall, plans to pursue a doctorate in public policy.

“I do want to do research, but I also want to be sure that I am an advocate for what I’d like to see changed in the world,” she says. “Too many people accept things the way they are.”