The accusation that with the invocation of the concept of Web-of-Life Jason W. Moore aligned himself too much with monism and abandoned the orthodoxy of Dialectical Historical Materialism must have come to him as a bit of a shock. He responded to it by stating that he loathed Bruno Latour and other monistic bourgeois thinkers. Case closed, so it seems, because how is one to recover from loathing?
Since I have written so many blog entries against identity thinking, it should not come as a surprise that the rejection of identity thinking will also include and substantive disidentification. That is, when a reference is made to “bourgeois thinkers”, I am going to assume that – as a dialectical historical materialist, Jason Moore was actually referring to the adjective “bourgeois” as the mode of thought deployed by Latour, rather than a substantive categorization of the person Bruno Latour. If we were to adopt the latter than by their very employment as academics and thus members of the PMC all those talking about Marxism as part of the profession are bourgeois thinkers. Hence, I think we are on safer grounds if we simply talk about “bourgeois modes of thought”.
Moore seems then to imply that monism is a bourgeois mode of thought and thus to agree with the likes of Foster and Malm. Unfortunately for Marxists, opposing monism with dualism also stems from a bourgeois mode of thought. As Moore himself has shown, to think of concepts such as “Human”, “Nature” and even “Human Nature” we have already appropriated the metaphysical abstractions that emerged from European Imperialism (at least) since the 15th Century. As Weber – inspired by Troeltsch – has shown, the Protestant Ethic forms the blueprint of the bourgeois mentality, i.e. the spirit of capitalism.
A critique of the German Ideology by Marx and Engels, in which they attacked the likes of Feuerbach as sheep in wolves clothing, should remind us how Historical Materialism conceptualizes bourgeois modes of thought: as justifications rather than explanations. Of course, the spirit of capitalism did not cause capitalism, just as spectatorial materialism (c.f. Feuerbach) did not cause secularization, but was a product of a radical institutional reconfiguration of philosophy under the capitalist mode of production. It was perhaps Marx himself, who discovered the lack of dialectical-historical materialism in his initial critique of Feuerbach, which halted the completion of the German Ideology until Engels took on the job after Marx had passes away.
Many debates among the few intellectuals who still fight on behalf of what they consider “true Marxism” seem paralyzed by their own lack of relevance. What they suffer from is what Bruno Latour in a private conversation referred to as “a translation deficit”. They struggle to retain relevance because they have become too concerned with the semantics of critique, rather than with the (often pragmatic) experiential anchoring of critique.
Jason W. Moore is different in this respect, however, as he does look to world history and geography to establish associations that are not necessarily semantically proof-read from the perspective of Marxist orthodoxies. His reward has been being accused of pandering monism. In my very irrelevant opinion, that is indeed a reward. Moore does actually try to reduce the translation deficit.
By looking at the disjunctive function of European imperialism in the 15th century, Moore is first of all able to maintain a historical-materialist argument that insists on the necessity of the collapse of the feudal mode of production, that characterizes the European Middle Ages. Whereas medieval historians rightly – because based on historical evidence – argue that feudalism is not a static system and evolved with technicity, hence empirically speaking they may actually prefer to refer to feudal modes of production, they do not deny that European feudalism was technologically, militarily, politically and economically unable to impose itself onto the rest of the world as a dominant, even hegemonic, force. Moreover, one could also ask whether feudal modes of production actually inhibit interests to do so.
Secondly, however, medieval scholarship can also show that some of the prerequisites for European imperialism were already present in medieval European feudalism. For example, alongside technological innovations, climate change and the growing influence of practices of χρηματιστική (chrēmatistikē) (especially with reference to mathematics and the increase of the use of money to calculate debt) , questions around the relationship between acts of violence and their legitimacy changed the relationship between religious and secular powers, and ultimately became the grounds for the formal separation of church and state. Political struggles may have involved issues of access to resources such as wood, stone, iron, copper and silver as well as control over agricultural land and water, and the shift from use-value to exchange-value, which expanded with the growth of markets.
Hence the birth of imperialism must be understood as a slow-cooking process, which, however, accelerated as soon as different “states” started to understand access to “the world” as a matter of competition. Then we see a domino-effect of imitations (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, France, Sweden and England) that one might than refer to as a historical disjuncture. This acceleration cannot be understood, if one does not think dialectically.
Disaffected Sociology 
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