They're working as though there weren't a billion tiny specks of rain drifting down on them like smoke. As though it really were summer.

And I am abruptly reminded of the need for this frantic labour. If the bees were to disappear as a species, humans will join them. Some say within four years. We will drop like bees, by the billions, famished.

We depend, albeit obliviously for most of our existence, on the bees for a huge amount of the food we eat. The mere work of pollination is worth billions -- of people, and pounds. It is worth tonnes and tonnes of exportable crops.

The sudden, sharp collapse of bee colonies across Europe and North America over the last century has been, gradually and reluctantly, correlated with capitalogenic climate change. A body of research tracking the relationship has begun to develop. Certain pesticides may also accelerate the problem, beyond the point of repair.

The interesting thing about the phenomenon of colony collapse is that it resembles an abrupt and irreversible work stoppage. The workers bees simply quit, walk off the job, leaving enough food for the short-term survival of the queen and infants.

We all sort-of-knew of, but took for granted, the sexual and reproductive labour of pollination. Until the possibility of its sudden withdrawal brutally forced us to face up to an unacknowledged dependence. One species-death brings another in its wake.

II.  Let's say it again: we sort-of-knew. And we sort-of-know about multitudes of other ecological dependencies, even if we proceed as though we didn't know. 

The term for sort-of-knowing but ignoring is disavowal. In psychoanalytic terms, we disavow in order not to admit our castration, our dependence. And this particular disavowal is an operation of capitalist social relations. 

It is not that it would be a good idea to re-enchant the earth, even were that possible. But disenchantment, as Adorno & Horkheimer have shown from one perspective, and Carolyn Merchant from another, was part of a gigantic civilizational rupture as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth century, bring new modes of oppression and exploitation with it.

The augmentation of the early modern state as it struggled to manage the emergent capitalist system. The acceleration of the Reformation into a continent-wide war that consumed eight million lives, produced a demographic crisis, and triggered the formation of a new states system. The enclosures and witch-hunts, the re-regimentation of gender on the basis of a division between public and private. The transformation of animisms, magical practices and alchemies of the Renaissance into the mechanistic, experimental sciences of the Enlightenment.

The gains of this continental cataclysm, of course, need little elaboration here. We enjoy perpetually longer lives, expanding capacities, mobilities, and literacies, and perhaps even the possibility of human emancipation before human annihilation, because of the progressive part of that explosion. 

But, bringing with it a new set of social relations, it also brought with it a new set of conceptual distinctions and dichotomies. Above all, the creation of 'Nature' as a distinct and subordinate realm of being, over which 'Man' enjoyed dominion. And if Francis Bacon liked to imagine 'Nature' as a woman, to be interrogated, chastened, and brought under control, the division of being envisioned here would see women, workers, and black and colonised subjects, placed firmly in the camp of 'Nature'.  

If the disenchanted earth, atomistic and mechanistic, was finally regarded as being so available for domination, it was because it had been deprived of anything that could be regarded as agency. It was a raw material, potentially resistant, but otherwise strictly dependent and subordinate.

III.  In this way, capitalism obscured its own conditions of possibility, even as the screen image of capital as a sleek, immaterial, weightless spirit is perpetually obscuring its vulgar agrarian origins, its basis in the exploitation of plant, animal and human labour.

The disavowal of what we sort-of-knew has consequences. If we cannot simply re-enchant the earth, we need to re-discover at the level of theory what has been blotted out of everyday perception.

This starts with the acknowledgment that, as Jason Moore puts it, capitalism is a civilizational order that is "co-produced by humans and the rest of nature". It depends as much on the unpaid work and energies of forests, rivers, and wind, as on the unpaid work of women and slaves. Capitalism is a "multispecies affair". The bees work for capitalism.

There is, as Moore suggests, not only the "socially necessary labour-time" of commodified labour, but also the "socially necessary unpaid work" of uncommodified labour, which "crosses the Cartesian boundary" between 'Human' and 'Nature'. 

To make all this labour happen on terms commensurate with capitalist production, capitalists and states have to take hold of, observe, measure, classify and code all the various 'natures', human or not. They have to subject them to a capitalist grid of intelligibility, which is the grid of commodity production. All of these processes, wherein different forms of 'nature' are converted into preconditions for capital, Moore calls "abstract social nature".

This, drawing directly on Donna Haraway's work, demystifying and dismantling the nature/culture opposition, assigns its findings a specific theoretical value within marxism. And in so doing, it gives the term "capitalocene" its proper conceptual basis (see Daniel Hartley's perspicacious but sympathetic critique here), without which it would simply be a sarcastic rejoinder.

But it brings us to this. Capitalism's "law of value" was always "a law of Cheap Nature". And yet, of course, cheap nature was always a fiction. "Abstract social nature" organises its exploitation so that its costs are externalised, driven outside the circuit of production: but they are still costs borne somewhere. And we are beginning to see where: they were piled up somewhere in the future, for generations unknown to encounter as their cataclysmic end.

From various directions, the strains are showing, and revealing themselves to be potentially terminal. The possibilities of extinction multiply. In our thousands, in our millions.