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Ecology & the Accumulation of Capita l, 1

Ecology & the Accumulation of Capital

A Brief Environmental History of Neoliberalism

Jason W. Moore1Department of Human Geography, Lund University

The developing tendencies of history constitute a higherreality than the empirical facts(Lukcs, 1971: 181).

We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with itsforces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out,

Raymond Williams first argued in 1971 (1980: 83). In an extraor-dinary essay, Williams directs his critique towards t hose singular

abstractions society and nature that confuse and obscure thehistorical relations between humans and the rest of nature. But thisis only part of what makes Williams argument so extraord inary.While we may perceive (or fail to perceive) the products of hu-manitys complex dealings with the physical world, Wi lliamsoutlines an approach that would demolish the fictions inscribed inthese singular abstractions, and deliver not only a more sophist i-cated but a more radically honest accounting. This alternative ac-counting is one premised on relations rather than products:

We ourselves are products: the pollution of industrial society isto be found not only in the water and in the air, but in the

1 Prepared for the workshop,Food, Energy, Environment: Crisis of the ModernWorld-System, Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, 9-10 October2009. Very special thanks to Diana C. Gildea, Benjamin D. Brewer, HenryBernstein, Richard A. Walker, and Andreas Malm for sustained commentary onprevious incarnations of this essay, and to MacKenzie Moore, Brett Clark, Erik

Jnsson, Cheryl Sjstrm, Harriet Friedmann, and Dale Tomich for discussions.Comments and critique welcome: Jason W. Moore, Research Fellow, HumanGeography, Lund University. Email: [email protected]. This draft 5

October 200 9.

slums, the traffic jams, and not these only as physical objectsbut as ourselves in them and in relation to them Theprocess has to be seen as a whole, but not in abstract or sin-gular ways. We have to look at all our products and activities,good and bad, and to see the relationships between them which

are our own real relationships (Williams, 1980: 83-84, empha-sis added).

Too often in environmental studies, we are riveted to the con-sequences issuing from societys footprint on nature. And this isthe way that many would put it (York, Rosa, Dietz, 2003; Jorgen-son, 2003; Wackernagel and Rees, 1996; Wackernagel, et al.,2002; Altvater, 2007). Debt leads to deforestation. Neoliberal pro-

grams drive cash-crop monocultures. Industrialization causes CO2emissions. Are these not reasonable causal statements?

The short answer is yes and no at the same time. All social re-search must explain change over time, necessarily implicatingsome mix of cause and effect. But the nature of the story changes,according to the ingredients of each moment. Ones point of de-parturenature? society? the relation between them? shapes therange of possible destinations. What I wish to highlight in this es-say is an uneasy fracture within a broadly conceived left ecology.On the one hand we find a set of sophisticated arguments that na-ture and society make a dialectical whole. On the other, a set ofempirically rigorous arguments that social causes (capitalism, in-

dustrialization, globalization) drive biophysical consequences (de-forestation, CO2 emissions, pollution). A relational ontology in therealm of social theory rubs elbows with a mechanical ontology in

the realm of social history. (Although social may no longer bethe way to put it!) The problem does not lay with the attention tosocial drivers or to environmental consequences, nor withcausal statements as such. Rather, a difficulty emerges with theelevation of these singular abstractions to the status of actor andacted-upon, foot and footprint, as the conventional metaphorwould have it. In this metaphor, we see a symbolic enclosure (andalienation) at work, which effects a separation of producer and
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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produced, manifest in a purified social repertoire of agents and apurifiedbundle ofenvironmental effects. It is an eminently Carte-sian way of seeing. It is, in other words, an ontology that producesa critique of the social domination of nature while (paradoxically)valorising its inner logic. This line of critique reproduces the very

alienation of nature and society an intellectual no less than ma-terial movementthat it seeks to weave together.If not the singular abstractions of society and environment,

what? The shortest answer, as Williams suggests, is to adopt a re-lational ontology. Here is a method premised on the dialecticalmovement and interpenetration of the (so-called) social and the(so-called) natural. There is nothing new itself in this answer, solong as one remains with the spheres of social theory and the study

of regional transformation. But what about our stories of the mod-ern world? Translating this re lational method from social theory toworld history has been an enduring challenge. That is to say,green social theory has not (yet) given rise to a green historyof capitalism. Now, it is certainly true that today we enjoy a vastand enormously rich literature on environmental history. But a ninspection of this literature, especially its world-historical compo-nent, reveals a series of narratives whose motive forces are irre-ducibly social the great thrusts of European colonialism, ofcommercialising imperatives, of civilising projects large and small(e.g. Ponting, 1991; McNeill, 2000; Richards, 2003).

This sort of social determinism was indeed my own point of

departure. Nearly a decade ago, I argued that environmental cris-es and long systemic cycles of environmental transformationcomplementedcapitalisms phases of development (Moore, 2000).It was clear, for instance, that the rise of monopoly capitalism inthe later 19th century entailed a set o f far-reaching agro-ecologicaltransformations, from the wheatfields of the American Midwest tothe copper mines of Chile and the rubber plantations of southeastAsia. But I soon found that one could travel only so far with such amodel. It was an approach that proceeded from a set ofa prioriconstructions ontologically prior to the relations I wanted to dis-cern. In other words, the game was rigged, the outcome deter-

mined in advance. The rise of monopoly capitalism, in thisscheme of things, causedchanges in the relation between natureand society. But is it not more reasonable to say that the rise ofmonopoly capitalism is a means of symbolizing (and explaining)a vast web of nature-society relations, as they unfolded through

the crises of the British global market forged in mid-century?After a certain point, the social cause-biophysical consequenceapproach didnt say anything that most of us didnt know to beginwith: Capitalism is bad news for the birds and bees, the water, thesoil, and pretty much all living creatures on the planet. (This hasprompted environmental historians disquiet over declensionism isnt there something more to the story? 2) Empirical evidencemight be amassed to verify this or that env ironmental impact,

but within the limits of the Cartesian scheme, the socio-ecologicalconstitution of capitalism itself remains unexplored. In an expan-sive sense, the big question here is not so much about the centrali-ty of capitalism as it is about the way we thinkcapitalism, or if youprefer, modernity, industrialisation, and the many other possiblemaster processes of world-historical change.3 The alternative isbetween differing ways of seeing between, say, a capitalism(or modernity, or industrial society) that acts upon nature, and onethat develops through nature. We have, I believe, arrived at a po-werful eductive momentone that allows us to erase old bounda-ries and open new vistas, and one where we can reconstitute eachof these processes on the historical basis of the nature-society rela-tion.4

Easier said than done! From this perspective, the call for inte-grating human and natural history is very much to be welcomed

(Costanza, et al., 2007a, 2007b; Beddoes, et al., 2009). I worry,

2 See Steinberg, 2004.3 Tilly, 1984.4 Thus my argument counterposes ideal-type conceptions of capitalism from

the left and the right in favor an methodological and theoretical approach thatenables the construction ofhistorical capitalism over large space and the longueduree (Hopkins, 1978, 1982; McMichael, 1990; Wallerstein, 1974; Moore,

2007).


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however, that in the absence ofsynthesisrelative to integrationwe are left with models that cobble together multiple observedtrends without explaining their interrelations. The interplay offactors is recognized as decisive, but the specifiable relations, un-derpinning the descriptive trends, remains in a black box. Costanza

and his colleagues, for instance, characterize the twentieth centuryas a Great Acceleration [whose] engine is an interlinked sys-tem that consists of population increase, rising consumption, ab-undant cheap energy, and liberalizing political economies (2007b:525). As such, the argument for causation in global environmentalchange tends to fall back on social drivers rather than socio-ecological relationsin a manner very close to world environmen-tal historys black boxing of commercialisation, population

growth, and industrialisation.5And yet, everything need not be deep history. There is much

to be learned from an examination of the interplay of distinct longwaves (and distinct temporal logics) framing the rise and fall ofworld hegemonies, financial complexes, and yes, environmentalchange in the modern world. But I will suggest that the relations ofwhole cannot be reduced to the sum of these interactions. A massof evidence indicting capitalism (or modernity, or industrial socie-ty) for its manifold environmental stressors and stresses does notexplain how these stresses are generated (and how they are genera-tive), how they turn into crises, and what kinds of crises they im-plicate.

From where I sit, to say that every phase of capitalist develop-ment is complemented by a specific mode of environmentaltransformation makes about as much sense as saying that every

phase of capitalism are complemented by new bourgeoisies, newimperialisms, new socio-technical innovations. But where the ge-nerative capacities of new bourgeoisies, imperialisms, and innova-tions in the making of successive capitalist orders have been self-

5

For example, McNeill, 2000; Richards, 2003; Ponting, 2003. For a engage-ment of the problem of explanation in world environmental history, see Moore,

2003b.

evident, the hegemony of Snows two cultures (1964) persistsstill in obscuring the nature-society relations constituting capital-ism as a whole.

The alternative I will pursue is one that privileges the totalityof nature-society relations. For this reason I shall borrow from the

Greek root oikos (home or house) and speak in terms ofecologicalregimes, revolutions, and crises. And while the Greeks of antiquitydid not have a word for ecology, the philosopher-botanist Theoph-rastus deployed the term oikeios in a way very close to our own:to indicate the relationship between a plant species and the envi-ronment (Hughes, 1994: 4, emphasis added). The shorthandecological therefore speaks to a holistic perspective on the or-ganism-environment/society-environmentrelation. Each dialecticalmovement is actively constructed by (and through) the other. Iforganism and environment constitute the parts, ecology signifiesthe whole that emerges through these relations (Levins and Le-wontin, 1985).

I have therefore refrained from the language ofenvironmentalcrisis, and embraced that of ecological transformation. Ecologyand ecological, then, signify the relations of the whole, mediatedthrough the partial totalities of capital accumulation and the shift-ing mosaic of nature-society relations. Such a perspective impliesand indeed necessitates a much different set of questions from theCartesian model. Rather than write a history of capitalisms im-pact on the environment, then, we might posit a generative relation

between endless accumulation and the endless conquest of na-ture. Instead of a method that identifies societys footprint onthe rest of nature, we might well ask how the provisionally stabi-

lized re lations between these two end-points creates, simultaneous-ly, a footprint on society no less than upon the so-called envi-ronment. The accumulation of capital and the production of na-ture are, then, distinct rather more than discrete categories, so in-tertwined as to make the one unthinkable without the other.

If these are distinctive moments within a dialectical unity, wemight ask, just what are the methodological frames and conceptualpremises necessary to illuminate these relations?


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Wall Street is a Way of Organising Nature

My response builds out from a simple proposition: Just as a

farm is a way of organising nature, so is a market, an empire, afactory. There are distinctions to be made, of course. Let us be

clear, at the outset, that the production of nature is no act ofPromethean constructivism; it signifies a coevolutionary process.The production of nature qua the production of capital expresses adefinite relation with (not to) nature. Our putatively social for-mations make history, but not within biophysical relations and de-terminations of their own choosing; society is as much biophysi-cally constructed as nature is socially constituted, even as theseconstructions and constitutions reveal distinctive modes of opera-

tion.The problem of language here is inescapable. The approach on

offer eschews a voluntarist approach we cannot simply inventnew categories to talk about the relations between nature and so-ciety. We can, however, shift the terms of the discussion from areductive focus on the end points (nature, society) to an eductivemethod, one capable of drawing out the relations through which

nature and society take shape, as material formations and intellec-tual constructs alike. Benton I think grasps the nettle of the issue:

To transcend dualism is not to abandon the making of dis-tinctions between and within the domains conventionallyassigned to one side or other of a dichotomy [nature, socie-ty]. Indeed, part of the strategy may be to proliferate dis-tinctions, to undermine the forced unity ascribed by dualis-tic ways of thinking to each term To do this is not onto-logically dualist (2001: 311, emphasis added).

Let me risk a blunt statement. Capitalism does not have an eco-logical regime; it is an ecological regime. Or rather, capitalism is

constituted through a succession of ecological regimes that crys-tallize a qualitative transformation of capital accumulation forinstance the transition from manufacture to large-scale industry within a provisionally stabilized structuring of nature-society rela-tions. Ontologically speaking, historical capitalism emergesthrough the dialectic of the accumulation process and nature-society relations. I am making a de liberately provocative argumenthere for a simple reason. So long as we continue to view classstructures, state-machineries, geopolitics, industrialisat ion, culturalproduction (and many more besides) as complementedby a specif-ic socio-institutional mode of governing first natures and prima-ry production, we find ourselves in a Cartesian trap. 6 To put itstraight, there is not a social context for ecological change; there

is not an ecological context for social change. There is nocon-text at all! The socio-cultural, the political, the economic merely to take the 19th centurys tripartite vivisection of socialsciencedo not now need to be integrated with a deeper under-standing of biophysical process; the vivisected body itself todaycalls for internment, a higher synthesis birthed.

Nevertheless, to leave the argument at this level of abstractionwould miss a magic opportunity. Let us begin with a broad andmultilayered conception of ecological regimes as those repertoiresof nature-society relations specific to successive phases of worldaccumulation (Arrighi and Moore, 2001; Moore, 2000). Recall ouroperative distinction, that regime, in this sense, opens a new angleof vision on capitalisms ontogenesis: capitalism as ecological re-gime. Rather than engage in a certain rush to premature rigor 7surely amongst the great temptations of value-theoretics I wish

to encourage a certain productive slippage between capitalism as

6 This conception stands, therefore, in dialectic counterpoint to the technocraticcontrivance of socio-ecological regimes and energy regimes, a bsent thesocial relations of production and reproduction! One can read, for instance, of

agrarian sociometabolic regimes with nary a word of peasant-landlord rela-tions. For recent examples, see, inter alia, Beddoe, et al. (2009); Krausmann, etal. (2008); and McNeills (2000, 2008) otherwise exemplary work. 7

To borrow Friedmanns nicely turned phrase (1994).


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ecological regime, and the environmental regime of historical ca-pitalism. Here I think we may find a means of relating metabolicrift approaches (Foster, 1999; Foster, Clark, and York, 2008a, b),agro-food regime theory (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989;McMichael, 2009a; Weis, 2007), resource regime studies (Bunkerand Ciccantell, 2005), energy regime analyses (Podobnik, 2006),and many more besides, with the deep structure of capitalism asecological regime.

By ecological regime, I highlight those relatively durable pat-terns of governance (formal and informal), technological innova-tions, class structures, and organisational forms that have sustainedand propelled successive phases of world accumulation since thelong sixteenth century (c. 1450-1640). Ecological regime, from

this standpoint, signifies the historically stabilized process andconditions of extended accumulation; ecological revolutions markthe turbulent emergence of these provisionally stabilized processesand conditions. The focus is not on the interaction of social andbiophysical essences these are coupled only in the sense thatthe fish in a pond are coupled with the pond itself8but on thesocio-ecological constitution of modernitys strategic relations.This constitutive dialectic extends far beyond the manifoldchanges in the land commonly associated with environmentalhistory: property relations, commodity-centered resource extrac-tion, cash-crop agriculture, energy complexes, and so forth. 9 Theproduction of nature-society relations has been every bit as much

about factories as forests, stock exchanges, shopping centers,slums, and suburban sprawls as soil exhaustion and species extinc-tion.

These ecological regimes comprise, at a minimum, those mar-ket and institutional mechanisms necessary to ensure adequateflows of energy, food, raw material, and labor surpluses to the or-ganizing centers of world accumulation but we should also at-tend to the production complexes that consume these surpluses,

8Pace Berkes, Colding, and Folke (2003), Liu, et al. (2007).9

The phrase is from Cronons classic study of colonial New England (1983).

and set in motion new (and contradictory) demands upon the restof nature. That is to say, the town-country antagonism overlap-ping, but not be confused, with the core-periphery divide is thedecisive geographical relation. Ecological regimes, constitute amatrix of relations governing town (consuming surpluses) aswell as countryside (producing surpluses). Fosters metabolicrift is, then, not merely a particular output of capitalism, but con-stitutive of the capitalist mode of production (1999). Every phaseof capitalism emerges through a revolution in nature-society rela-tions that create new possibilities for the expanded accumulationof capital. What constitutes these possibilities? At base, everygreat wave of capital accumulation has unfolded through and upona greatly expanded ecological surplus, which finds its phenomenal

expression in cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap inputs. To theextent that new labor surpluses can be mobilized through derurali-zation, labor costs can be driven down as well through cheapfood (driving down the minimum wage necessary for social repro-duction) and cheap energy (central to r ising productivity).10

But just what does cheap really mean? The vernacular maybe translated to more precise analytical language. Long wavesemerge only when these ecological surpluses can be produced sig-nificantly below systemwide production costs, those in primary production above all. Britains mid-19th century efflorescence asthe workshop of the world, for instance, was nicely linked upwith the agricultural revolution of the American Midwest. North

American grain replaced, on a extended scale, the relative exhaus-tion of Englands agricultural district in Ireland (c. 1780-1840),and would in time be complemented by new granaries in Russia,

India, and elsewhere. Between the 1846 repeal of the Corn Lawsand the downturn of the 1870s, Britains grain imports increased254 percent. Grain arriving from the United States, however, in-creased forty-fold, from 25,000 tons to over a million, providingmore than half of Britains total grain imports by the end of the

10

On energy and labor productivity, see Jorgenson, 1981, 1984.


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period (calculated from Atkin, 1992: 17-18).11 It is true that grainprices fell only modestly in this golden age of British capitalism(Barnes, 1930: 290), but this is surely a major accomplishment inlight of Englands rapid population growth (16-23 million) andrapid industrialisation (one-third of world manufacturing). Priceswould tumble sharply downwards in the generation after 1873,even as England came to consume 80 percent of its daily breadfrom external sources (Mulhall, 1892: 444; Thomas, 1982: 336;ORourke, 1997)

Long waves of economic growth (accumulation) therefore takeshape when and where the conditions for profitability are re-established after a downturn. But it is not easy to establish theseconditions. They depend not only upon socio-technical ingenuity,

but also upon vast rivers of biophysical wealth without which thenew innovations are useless. Think, for instance, of the puddlingtechniques that allowed for the fertile marriage of mass producedcoal and iron in late 18th century England.12 The Industrial Revolu-tion, to stick with our example, unfolded through the unprecedent-ed collection of cotton, iron, and coal surpluses whose value com-position (the average social labor inscribed in the commodity) wasvery low relative to, say, shipbuilding or watchmaking.13 To besure, there were variable reasons for such low value compositionfavorable geology and canal infrastructure (Welsh coal), the al-luvial soils of the Mississippi Delta (cotton), the deployment ofserf labor and simple manufacture in the Urals (iron).

In other words, inputs and labor power had to be mobilizedcheaply, cheap precisely because they were abundant relativetothe conditions of commodity production and exchange on the eve

of a renewed long wave. Historically, we have seen two key mo-ments in the formation, and successive decomposition, of this re la-tive ecological surplus. In the first instance, recurrent waves of

11 Russian wheat, too, was important, for similiar reasons but still ranked a

clear second to the U.S. (Atkin, 1992: 18).12

Gordon, 2001: 133-34.13 Lloyd-Jones (1990) offers a perceptive and complementary accounting of this

process from a Schumpeterian perspective.

geographical expansion have opened vast opportunities forchanneling a growing share of biospheric wealth into the apparatusof capital accumulation. It has been the genius of capitalism totake advantage of these opportunities in a manner no other civilisa-tion was able to do composing a succession of socio-technicalinnovations that maximized biophysical throughput relative to la-bor, and which continually revolutionized the very nature of the biophysical throughput itself. Simply put, modernity gave rise notsimply to more efficient iron smelters, but to new steam engines;not simply to more efficient steam engines, but to internal combus-tion engines.

This succession represents a profoundly more discontinuousstory than is often recognized. The transition to coal was punc-

tuated by the Atlantic social revolutions and the Napoleonic wars;the transition to oil, by two great world wars and a mighty worlddepression. One could, I think, quite reasonably read the long his-tory of agricultural and industrial revolutions in the modern worldas a succession of globalizing ecological revolutions that have li-berated accumulation from the socio-ecological fetters of the oldregime. What is so often missed, however, is that the rise and de-mise of successive ecological regimes does not turn on new phasesof biophysical exploitation and thence exhaustion as self-evidentfacts.14 Rather, new agricultural and industrial revolutionsemerged in response to the relative exhaustion of those ecologicalspaces not only occupied by but indeed produced by the oldecological regime.15 The ecological crises of historical capitalismare, in other words, crises of the nature-society relations that ena-ble (or fetter) the endless accumulation of capital. They are crises

of the actually existing relation of socialised nature through thelaw of value, not of an abstract na ture of wilderness one, twice(or even thrice!) removed.

14As with a longstanding literature on soil exhaustion and civilisation (Mont-

gomery, 2007; Hyams, 1952; Whitney, 1925).15

With a nod to Lefebvre (1991).


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I have pitched the tent quite broadly for a deliberate reason.Capitalism does not move through its successive phases of devel-opment by organising new ecological regimes that govern the ex-panded reproduction of food, energy, and materials surpluses. (Al-though these latter are in fact pillars of every ecological regime,and can be fruitfully analyzed through the specification of regimeconcepts for each of these mediations.) Rather, every epochal refa-shioning of the circuit of capital from money to production tocommodities and back again is enabled by, represents, andcreates, a new ensemble of nature-society relations. Capitalismemerges as this accumulation process mobilises through (and re-shapes) the uneven conditions of possibility and constraint drawnby the ecological regime, which finds its geographical limit in the

socially necessary division of labor of the system as a whole.What this means is that transitions from one phase of world

development to another are about cascading bifurcations in the de-cisive bundles of nature-society relations commodity productionand exchange, state machineries and geopolitics, class relations.This is, I think, widely seen, but not recognized. If we look at thetransition from postwar Keynesianism to neoliberalism that beganin the 1970s, for instance, we can see that all the moments of thistransition represented new weaves of nature and society: the end ofBretton Woods and the resurgence of finance capital, energy and

food price shocks, the fearsome imperial valences of the shockdoctrine in Latin America and elsewhere, the globalisation of

agribusiness, a savage employers offensive against core workingclasses from Stockholm to Detroit, the biophysical disasters of thethird world debt regime, de-peasantisation and mega-urbanisation,

the de-industrialisation o f the North and (re) industrialisation of theSouth, just to offer a sampling of the transitions salient move-ments. Some of these are palpably biophysical, while others ap-pear as emphatically social. But is it really possible to explain ei-ther moment in the absence of the other? Was the financial expan-sion set in motion during the 1970s really independent of export-driven agriculture and industry, with their manifold tales of toxicwork and dirty water? (We will return to neoliberalisms environ-

mental history momentarily.) The question could be multipliedwith ease.

To be sure, here is a dizzying array of relational webs. Thebounding choices are not easy. Let us be clear about the implica-tions of our paradigmatic choices. A Cartesian optic leads in onedirection (social forces in one box, biophysical change in another),a dialectical optic, in another (all social relations are ecologicallyconstituted).

Value Theory & the Great Frontier: Capitalism,Ecology, and the World-Historical Method

If everything is ecological because ecology is everything, nev-ertheless we cannot do everything at once. My procedure in thisessay moves strongly against the received wisdom, even withinleft ecology.16 In what follows, I take Marxs lead and begin fromthe expanded reproduction of surplus value (1976). The emergentcontradictions of the accumulation process constitute the point ofdeparture. But these offer only a necessary, not sufficient, explana-tion of historical change.17 The decision stems not from any theo-logical adherence to value theory, but rather from a reading of a

16 Classic points of reference in this tradition would include Altvater, 1993;

Benton, 1989; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Braun and Castree, 1998; Bunker,1984, 1985; Bu rkett, 1999; Enzensberger, 1974; Foster, 1999, 2000; Harvey,1974, 1993, 1996; Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Martinez-Alier, 1987;

OConnor, 1998; Peet and Watts, 1996; Peluso, 1992; Peluso and Watts, 2001;

Perelman, 1975; Schnaiberg, 1980; Smith, 1984; Watts, 1983; Worster, 1990.17 Marx himself pointed out that the abstract scheme of capital development

was not enough to provide any predictions about the actual world. All crises incapitalism must be explained out of the given empirical conditions, out of thereal movement of capitalist production, competition, and credit [Marx, 1905, II:

286]. The value analysis of capital development postulates the possibility of

crises by a mere consideration of the general nature of capital, without regard tothe additional and real relations that form the conditions of the real production

process [Marx, op. cit., 264] (Mattick, 1969: 61).


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double lacuna in left ecology. On the one hand, social construc-tionists have been reluctant to ground their relational ontologies ofSwyngedouws socionature in an interpretation of capitalism asworld-historical process (1999).18 Environmental historians, on theother hand, have been (quite reasonably) focused on landscapechange, energy consumption, pollution, and so forth the surficialexpressions of modern nature-society relations but have beenwary to move from environment to oikeios and back again.19 Aworld-historical working of value theory offers, I believe, a fruitfulway forward without abandoning the insights of either camp. WithMarx, I shall move from the analysis of what makes capital towhat capital makes, from the logic of capital to the history of capi-talism.

Value theories are of course hotly contested, Marxist, green,and otherwise (Harvey, 1996; Daly and Townsend, 1993). My ap-propriation of Marxs theory is to look at value as a means of un-derstanding how such an extraordinary circulation of wealth hascome to move about with such relative autonomy from the practic-es and utilities of everyday life, human no less than extra-humannature. There is an ever-present danger to see ones theory of valueas a sort of Rosetta Stone, relieving oneself of the thorny tasks ofhistorical explanation.

In my reading, the crystallization of value as abstract sociallabor in the capitalist era represents: 1) a fundamental contradic-tion between value and use-value, whose inner contradiction finds

(temporary) resolution in the secular trend towards the commodifi-cation of everything; 2) not merely an objective process of accu-

18Smith takes pains to distinguish his production -of-nature thesis from socialconstructionism, and persuasively so (2007). For my purposes, I wish to bracket

this debate as one unfolding with a broader camp of non-Cartesian left ecology(e.g. Braun and Castree, 1998; Harvey, 1993, 1996; Levins and Lewontin, 1986;Smith, 1984; Williams, 1980).19 Pivots of discussion in environmental history include Cronon, 1983, 1991,1996; Crosby, 1972, 1985; Dean, 1995; Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Grove, 1995;McNeill, 2000; Merchant, 1980, 1989; Nash, 1967; White, 1996; Worster, 1985,

1989, 1990. A good survey may found in McNeill, 2003.

mulation, but equally a subjectiveprojectof world power; and 3) aworld-historical process and project of reordering of the totality ofthe nature-society dialectic, such that one ecological moment isinternalised qua human labor power (reclassified as social) andanother is externalised through the progressive subsumption of therest of nature as a free gift, to use Marxs well-turned (and em-phatically critical) phrase (1967, III: 745). The production of na-ture, in other words, does not represent a phenomenal form, but israther constitutive of capitalisms inner logic the contradictionbetween monetary value and use-value, between nature as laborpower and nature as resource, between competition for endlessgain and cooperation for necessary survival.

Why Marxs value theory? Is this not an anti-ecological formu-

lation that explicitly denies natures contribution to capitalist de-velopment?20 Allow me to interweave two responses, one from theperspective of capital, another from the history of capitalism. Wecan begin by clarifying that value, in Marxs hands, represents ahistorically-specific form of wealthwhose original sources areland and labor (Marx, 1976: 638). Taking shape during the longtransition to capitalism, here was a form of wealth that pivoted onendless commodification. During this era, a most peculiar valua-tion emerged, one centered on the activity of that va lue formingsubstance, human labor power (Marx, 1976: 129). This crystalli-zation of value as socially necessary labour time the average so-cial labour time embodied in any given commodity illuminates a

crucial, ever-widening disjuncture in the history of the modernworld, between value and the use-value, the physical body of thecommodity itself (Marx, 1976: 126). In a system such as capital-

ism, driven towards endless accumulation through the surrealcompulsions of ceaseless competition, there unfolds a wideninggap between the accumulation of value and the socio-ecologicalrelations that enable such accumulation.

20 See, inter alia, Bunkers classic critique (1985). A useful review of the value

problem in ecological economics is found in Burkett, 2003b.


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If land productivity was given primacy in pre -capitalist c ivi-lisations, labor productivity became the chosen metric of wealthin the capitalist era. It is a simple, and simplifying, logic. More andmore extra-human nature attaches to every quantum of sociallynecessary labor time. Fewer people produce more stuff. Land issacrificed on the altar of labor productivity. Indeed, a centerpieceof green consciousness since the 1970s is the recognition of (so-called) industrial agricultures colossal energy and nutritionalinefficiency; a recognition amplified by recent research on ethanol(Pimentel, et al., 1973, 2009; Perelman, 1977; Nellemann, et al.,2009; Tilman, et al., 2002; Fargione, et al., 2007). A single kilo-gram of asparagus consumes 73 kilograms of energy in making thetrip from Chile to New York (Friedmann, 2004: 8). But the flip

side of energy inefficiency was a greater than eight fold increase inthe labor productivity of advanced capitalist agriculture between1945 and the mid-1980s (Bairoch, 1989). What the more-or-lessconventional green critique is unable to illuminate is how this co-lossal inefficiency is not merely an output of the system, but con-stitutive of it. For this peculiar valuation of wealth as abstract so-cial labor labor productivity favors socio-ecological develop-ments that reward the rapid exhaustion of nature (inc luding humannature), so long as external supplies can be secured.

We can glimpse the emergence of this peculiar valuation fromthe earliest moments of the transition to capitalism, during Brau-dels long sixteenth century (1450-1648). The genius of early

capitalisms commodity frontier strategy was to raise labor

productivity by treating uncapitalised nature as a substitute formachinery. 21 At every turn, land (forests, silver veins, fertile soils)

was organized by empires, planters, seigneurs, yeoman farmersand many others, as a force of production in servitude to the com-modity form, as a mechanism for maximizing the productivity oflabor. It was precisely the emergence of this value relation driv-ing a growing disjuncture between monetary accumulation on the

21 The natural fertility of the soil can act like an increase of fixed capital

(Marx, 1973: 748).

basis of abstract social labor on the one hand, and the physicalbody of the growing mass of commodities on the otherthat ex-plains an extraordinary shift in the production of nature after 1450.

Civilisations before capitalism transformed landscapes on alarge scale: feudal Europe, the Greek city-states, the Romans, suc-cessive Chinese empires, the Sumerians, and many more. In everyinstance, there were vital clusters of commercial activity andcommodity production that were often quite important in such epi-sodes of transformation. What changed after 1450 were the rele-vant units of time and space. Premodern civilisations transformedregions over the span of centuries. Capitalism transformed region-al landscapes in mere decades, and through the capacities of mone-tary capital to command and indeed to produce space, there

emerged a fundamentally globalising mode of producing wealth,nature, and power centered on the commodity form. Sugar produc-tion moved, in roughly half-century cycles, across the Atlanticworld a fter 1450, from Madeira to So Tom, enclos ing in succes-sive turns Pernambuco, Bahia, Barbados, and thence the wider Ca-ribbean. Silver mining flowered in central Europe, moving res-tlessly from one site to another (Freiberg to Jchymov), then relo-cated through the alchemies of imperial power and finance capitalto Potos, half a world away, only to give way in turn to the greatsilver mines Zacatecas and Guanajuato in the eighteenth century.Commodity frontiers premised on forest products, on fish, on ironand copper, on cereals and flax, moved with the same socio-spatial

rhythm (although as dance, not lockstep), occupying, producing,and exhausting in serialised fashion the ecological formations ofthe North Atlantic, from the shores of Newfoundland to southern

Norway to the banks of the Vistula and the foothills of the Urals(Moore, forthcoming a, b). And far from the facile representationof early capitalism as technologically or socially inert, everymovement of global occupation and transformation signaled a newphase of social organisation, technical deployment, and landscapediscipline. Never before had any ecological regime qua mode ofproduction moved so fast, so far. Something decisive had changed.


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To call that something nature-society relations would merelyrestate the very problem we seek to answer. This is the problemthat confronts recent Marxist approaches to peak oil. It is excee-dingly difficult to argue convincingly for the world-histor ical cen-trality of an energy source in the capitalist era without locating theproduction of energy within the central dynamics of accumulation.One does not need historical materialism to understand that coal,then oil, enhanced the productivity of labor and the mobility ofcapital.22 But if we can accept, even provisionally, that valuetheory identifies a deep structure of historical capita lism thatgives priority to labor productivity and mobilizes extra-human na-ture without regard for the socio-ecological conditions of its re-production, we have more than a simple restatement of the prob-

lem. We have an interpretation of capitalism premised on a fun-damental disequilibrium in the (value) relation of nature and socie-ty that makes the system. If we, moreover, follow Marx and identi-fy the external vent (the frontier) as centralrecall how he movesin successive chapters at the end ofCapital, from the conquestof the national home market to the commercial wars which[have] the globe as its battlefield, to the growth of the interna-tional character of the capitalist regime and its mounting systemiccontradictions (1976: 913, 915, 929) then we may begin to seethe successive resolutions of the disequilibrating tendency as es-sentially finite. And yet, let us be clear, such a formulationimpl[ies] the possibility of crises, though no more than the poss i-

bility (Marx, 1976: 209). To realise this possibility, one mustmove from the logic of capital to the history of capitalism.

It would be mystifying to say that the limits of capitalism are

ultimately determined by the biosphere itself, although in an ab-stract sense this is true. More to the point, the possibilities forovercoming the socio-ecological antagonism inscribed in the valueform itself are determined by capitalism as a system, that web of

22See Huber, 2008; Altvater, 2007 for the Marxist interpretation; see Burke,

2008; McNeill, 2008 for the non-Marxist perspective. Aside from an explicit

critique of capitalism, I am unable to see the difference between the two groups.

relations interconnecting the accumulation of value and the socio-ecological relations that variously enable and limit the endless ac-cumulation of capital. Most fundamental, the historical conditionsthrough which a series of ecological revolutions have been realisedeach yielding a quantum leap in the mass of physical bodiesavailable for commodity productionmay be understood as essen-tially non-substitutable, or at best, substitutable only within verydefinite limits. Capitalism has moved from peat and charcoal tocoal to oil, from the breadbaskets of the Vistula, southern England,the American Midwest, from labor frontiers in Europe and Africa,Latin America, and South and East Asia. These are not repeatableevents. Substitutability does not unfold through infinite time andspace.

Here is a decisive methodological choice indeed. Marxs con-ception of value seems to offer a useful way to cut through themass of appearances and to discern not merely the patternedmovement of nature-society relations, but the logic animating theemergence and evolution of those patterns. I have called this me-thod eductive because we are locating value as a gravitationalcenter, to borrow Shaikhs nicely turned phrase (2004). The pa t-terns themselves move at once in quasi-linear and contingent fa-shion. Premised on the dialectical antagonism of monetary accu-mulation (into which all commodities dissolve themselves) andmaterial transformation in commodity production (where moneydissolves itself into all commodities),23 and a recognition of cap-

ital accumulation as both objective process and subjective project,Marxs value theory o ffers a most promising po int of departure forcomprehending the inner connections between accumulation, bio-

physical change, and modernity as a whole.Upon this analytical terrainbetween the theory o f capital and

the history of capitalism we find an extraordinarily productivetension. It is a tension that we can explore by building upon, andpushing the limits of, the theory of metabolic rift, arguably themost dynamic perspective in critical environmental studies today.

23

Quotations from Marx, 1973: 142.


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In Fosters original formulation (1999, 2000), capitalism is dialec-tically bound to an epochal shift in the town-country division oflabor Marxs urbanisation of the countryside (1973: 479). Inthis reading, the separation of the direct producers from the meansof production and the progressive liquidation of seigneurialpower in the countryside implies a new geography of wealth andpower. The emergent disciplines of the law of value directed allmanner of biophysical wealthlaboring bodies and the cheap foodto nourish them, above alltowards urban spaces. In the transitionto capitalism, the rift appeared as these original sources ofwealth were largely produced in agrarian spaces, but increasinglyconsumed in urban spaces. Absent a systemic mechanism to en-courage the recycling of urban-industrial wastes to the countryside

as was the case, for instance, with the night soil traffic of LateImperial China or Tokugawa Japan (Xue, 2005) historical capi-talism produces a specifiable tendency towards nutrient depletionin the countryside, and pollution in the cities. The secular trendtowards escalating biophysical exhaustion and pollutionFostersabsolute general law of environmental degradation (1992) hasbeenpunctuated by a series ofsuccessive, historical breaks in nu-trient cycling(1999: 399; also Moore, 2000). Highlighting the riseof industrial agriculture after World War II, followed by theemergence of large-scale feedlots and the global feedstock sourc-ing in recent decades, Foster and his colleagues have illuminatedthe constitutive relations between capitalism, its geographical pat-

terns (the metabolic rift), and the systems immanent tendency to-

wards biophysical degradation (Foster and Magdoff, 1998).In my reading, the central contribution of the metabolic rift

perspective is to locate socio-ecological contradictions internal tothe development of capitalism. But the conceptualisation follows adifferent road than OConnors theory of the second contradiction,which we will consider momentarily (1998). The distinctive ex-planatory power of the metabolic rift rests on three cruc ial connec-tions: 1) primitive accumulation imposes value relations on thecountryside, compelling rising labor productivity in primary pro-duction, and establishing the conditions for geometrically rising

throughput relative to labor there is no capitalistmetabolic riftwithout agricultural revolution; 2) the subsequent generalization ofvalue relations, implying a powerful contradiction between thenatural distinctiveness of commodities and their economicequivalence, 24 presupposes and indeed necessitates the progres-sive urbanisation of the countryside; and 3) the tension betweenthe country and the city is therefore central, not simply as empiri-cal fact, but as the geographical pivot, of value accumulation, me-diating biophysical flows from farm to factory through the builtenvironments of the circuit of capital. In this view, town andcountry, no less than bourgeois and proletarian, emerges as arelational expression of the underlying contradiction between val-ue and use-value in historical capitalism.

My objection is not that the theory of metabolic rift has gonetoo far, but rather that it has not gone far enough. There is, itseems to me, a rift within the metabolic rift perspective, onemovement holding fast to a nature-society divide, another seekingto transcend the underlying Cartesianism of modern socialthought. In the first place, we can identify a tendency to moveaway from the centrality of the town-country dialectic in Marx andEngels understanding of capitalism (esp. 1970), and in Marxsthinking about the emergence of an irreparable rift in the interde-pendent process of social metabolism (1981: 949). Thus do wesee the metabolic rift as a description of how capitalism disruptsthe exchange betweensocial systems and natural systems (York,2007; also Mancus, 2007: 277; Clausen and Clark, 2005; Clark

and York, 2005a). In Clark and Yorks hands, the town-countrydialectic appears as a particulargeographical manifestation of themetabolic rift, which may be dissolved into the latters general properties (2005a: 400, 391, emphasis added). From these con-ceptions, capitalism becomes a socially-constituted subject, thatcreates an exogenous crisis of ecological sustainability throughthe disruption of natural cycles (Foster, 2001: 473; Clark and

York, 2005a: 406; Clark and York, 2005b). The social logic of this

24

Marx, 1973: 141.


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ecological crisis tendency is found in an uneasy pastiche of Marx-ist and neoclassical political economy, with pride of place given tothe neoclassical logic of the Jevons Paradox: technological in-novation drives down unit prices for inputs, thereby widening thesphere input consumption and amplifying resource exhaustion(Foster, 2000; Jevons, 1865, 2001; Clark and York, 2008). It is aperspective that locates accumulation crisis in one sphere and thecrisis of the earth in another (Foster, 2009, 1997; Burkett, 1999,

2003a, 2005; Foster and Magdoff, 2009). There is a relation be-tween the two, but one that strikes me as rather more Cartesianthan dialectical.25

Such Cartesianism is, however, only one tendency. Indeed, thedialectic method has been central to the metabolic rift project.

While I am less convinced than Clark and York in their certitudethat such a thing as society exists, they are assuredly correct inarguing that, while social history cannot be reduced to naturalhistory, it is a part of it (2005b: 21). The crucial question posedby our shared commitment to a dialectical method is this: How isthe metabolic rift directly given in the concept of capital itself(Marx, 1973, 408)?

Surely part of the answer is directly given in Fosters readingof Marx himself. In this interpretation, Marxs critique of capital-ism emphasized how bourgeois societys. . . domination of hu-

manity rested on its domination of the earth, especially in theform of large-scale landed property (2000: 74). The endless accu-

mulation of capital is, in other words, the endless conquest of the

earth. But rather than corral accumulation crisis in one pen, andbiospheric crisis in another, might we insteadbegin from the rela-tions the connect the two? I am therefore concerned that the par-

25 Clark and York, for instance, argue for a Cartesian feedback-loop approach:the metabolic approach [addresses] both sides of the dialectic between societyand n ature, considering the processes that take place in each realm, as well asexamining how thes e positions interact and transform each ot her (2005: 396,emphases added). Notice the e mphasis on th e interaction of pos itions rather thanupon the generative qualities of a contradictory relation, that gives rise to these

positions.

ticular distillation of the metabolic rift into general propertiesloses sight of the whole as a rich totality of many determinationsand relations (Marx, 1973: 100). For Clark and York, in their

groundbreaking exploration of capitalisms enclosure of the at-mosphere (2005a), the town-country dialectic becomes a particu-larity dissolved into a general whole. This marks a retreat from thegeographical promise of the metabolic rift perspective. In substi-tuting a contradiction between society and nature exogenousto the spatiality of society and nature (town and country), theyproduce a crisis theory that is, quite literally, lost in space.Where Clark and York see the relations of town and country asempirical facts, would it not be more fruitful to see town and coun-try as one of several decisive internal relations directly given inthe concept of capital itself?

So when I argue that the metabolic rift has not gone farenough, I am suggesting that the ecological contradiction (as oi-keios) goes much deeper than even Foster, Clark, and York haveacknowledged. For instance, Clark and York argue that the valueof oil has nothing to do with nature or natural cycles (2005a:408). If we look deeper, however, we can see that such a viewrests on the (Cartesian) re-coding of human labor power as so-cial. But is not human labor power eminently socio-ecological(Harvey, 1998)? The intergenerational (re)production of labor

power is itself a natural cycle whose socialised flows are regis-tered in the determination of socially necessary labor time (Sec-

combe, 1982). From biorhythms to bioaccumulation, on closer in-

spection we find it challenging indeed to determine the boundariesof the allegedly social and the seemingly natural.

Within the metabolic rift perspective, Burkett has gone farthestrooting the analysis in the theory of value (1999). Demonstratingthat Marxs theory of value is unthinkable in the absence of thecontradiction between the natural distinctiveness and economicequivalence that constitutes the commodity form, Burkett pointsstrongly towards a new synthesis of the metabolic rift. The stum-bling block in moving towards such a synthesis appears, however,in an overemphasis on the theory of capital, at the expense of the


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history of capitalism. Burkett therefore inverts Clark and Yorksoveremphasis on the historical approach to capitalism, at the ex-pense of the logic of capital. Just as it unclear how the circuit ofcapital links up with actually existing technological and environ-mental change in Clark and Yorks account, it is unclear how Bur-ketts now-classic red-green accounting of Marxs theory of cap-ital translates into the history of capitalism. The challenges con-fronting the theory of metabolic rift therefore represent a pa rticularinstanciation of the broader problem of translating green socialtheory into a green theory of social change.

Extending the key insights of the metabolic rift perspective, wemight posit the accumulation of capital, in its manifold relationswith actually existing socio-ecological complexes, as an ecological

crisis-generating, and crisis-attenuating, formation. If there aremany possible forms of ecological crisis in the modern world,

the relations underpinning these forms are found in a many-layered process through which the dynamics of accumulation linkup with the nature-society relations tha t are values point of depar-ture, and point of return. Here the essential limits of expansion areexternal only in a highly abstract sense. Rather, the guidingthread on offer opens up an analysis of these limits as internallyconstituted by the contradictions of nature and society that capital-ism makes, propelled by the inner contradiction of the value form,between value and use-value, between the commodity in generaland the commodity in particular (Marx, 1973: 141). Whereas the

former moment (in general) presumes limitless expansion, the lat-

ter (in reality) drives the contradiction to a series of crises on anever-higher scale, combining the highest development of pro-

ductive power with the most straitened exhaustion of humanand extra-human nature (Marx, 1973: 750). From this standpoint,we may begin to puncture the myths of substitutability, and posenew questions about how the accumulation of capital over the lon-gue dure has been a spectacular moment of temporal deferment,one realised through the widening and deepening of capitals he-gemony.

The classic debate over this temporal deferment (it has contin-ued ever since) was sparked by Luxemburgs famous argumentthat capitalism could not survive on the basis of internal consump-tion alone. (Let us be mindful, that in her scheme even much of theearly 20th century German market was external.) Whatever diffi-culties may arise in her treatment of expanded reproduction andthe realisation of values, my sense is that Luxemburgs enduringcontribution lies in her historical account of capitals incessantdrive to expand frontiers for a much different kind of consumptionnot consumergoods, but producerinputs, not least labor power(1968: 361-362). Within mature capitalism, the natural propaga-tion of the workers and the requirements of accumulating capitalinvariably entered into a dynamic contradiction that propelled the

incessant transition to ca pitalism towards non- and semi-capitalist zones, including those within early 20th century Europe(Luxemburg, 1968: 361-362). On the matter of natural resources,Luxemburg is even more emphatic. Cost-cutting in the extractionand production of the elements of constant capital has compelledthe unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facil ities affordedby nature (1968: 347). If capitalist production (strictly defined)were somehow to be rendered:

dependent exclusively on elements of production obtaina-ble with [the] narrow limits [of the temperate zones], itspresent level and indeed its development in general would

have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms

and laws of capitalist production aim to co mprise the entireglobe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to

appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation,ransacks the whole globe, it procures its means of produc-tion from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessaryby force, from all levels of civilization and from all formsof society. The problem of the material elements of capital-ist accumulation, far from being solved by the materialform of the surplus value that has been produced, takes onquite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital


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progressively to dispose ever more fully of the wholeglobe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of produc-tion, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to findproductive employment for the surplus value it has rea-lised... The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodicas it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas ofraw materials (1968: 358, emphasis added).

What, then, of ecological crisis? Let me offer a simple state-ment that I will take as my guiding thread. Historical capitalismdoes not create ecological crises so much as it has been createdthrough them. It is the relation between social power and biophys-ical process that has given rise to such crises. (Keeping in mind

that the symbolic distinction itself becomes possible only throughthe forcible separation of the direct producers from the means ofproduction; that the two cultures devoted to the study of natureand society drip with blood and dirt neither less nor more than ourlanguage of bourgeois and proletarian.)

Of these ecological crises, two great forms can be readily ob-served epochal and developmental ecological crises. We maybriefly consider these in turn. First, capitalism, from its origins inthe long sixteenth century, emerged out of an epochal ecologicalcrisis (Moore, 2007). This was the crisis of the long fourteenthcentury, which marked the end of European feudalism. Far froman ecological crisis narrowly conceived, the late medieval transi-

tion was a multivariate crisis in which the nature-society relation

played a pivotal role. Ecological crisis, in this formulation, was notso much a cluster of consequences (demographic collapse, soil ex-

haustion) as constitutive ofthe eras manifold crises of states, ofclass structures, of markets.

Second, since the long sixteenth century, capitalism has devel-oped through successive developmental ecological crises. That isto say, the world capitalist system has developed through the cyc-lical emergence of ecological crises, not in spite of them. Everygreat wave of capitalist development has emerged through a newcrystallization o f nature-society relations, stabilized after some pe-

riod of turbulence and conflict. Oil, for instance, emerged as thefossilized pivot of the systems energy regime only after two worldwars and a mighty world depression.

How we periodize capitalism has everything to do with howwe understand the system, and shapes how we analyze the presentconjuncture of possibilities and constraints. Of these latter, surelythe apparentecological moment looms large, as we confront a se-ries of challenges that reads like a page torn from the Book of Re-velations: global warming (Monbiot, 2006), species extinction(Leakey and Lewin, 1995), peak oil (Heinberg, 2003; Foster,2008), water scarcity (Barlow, 2008; Pearce, 2006), unpredictablenew disease vectors (D. Davis, 2007; M. Davis, 2006), and soforth. But the relations that underpin these trajectories are not at all

apparent in this list; the construction of an ecological crisis dri-ven by, but not constitutive of, capital accumulation hardly makesthings better. Identifying a crisis of the earth may be re asonablepoint of departure, but it begs the question. If endless accumula-tion is the strategic mediating relation of humans and the rest ofnature, how do we know the crisis of the earth except through thisrelation?

The problem, for left ecology, is that our constructs of capital-ism as a historical-geographical formation, and of its phases of de-velopment, are scarcely rooted in the relations between socialpower and biophysical process. Instead, we tend to view todaysbiospheric challenges as consequences of capitalism rather thanconstitutive of the capitalist mode of production. This has not beenthe result of some Promethean blindness, as some critics ofMarx would have it (Kolakowski, 1978, I: 412-414; Giddens,

1981: 59-60). Rather, capitalism has been premised on a frag-mented relation of nature, pivotal to its expanded reproduction: theinternalization of nature qua human labor power (reclassified associal) and the externalization of nature as free gift, to useMarxs well-turned (and emphatically critical) phrase. A periodi-zation of capitalism premised on just one of these moments is ma-nifestly insufficient to the tasks of the present conjuncture. Thecrucial question, as I see it, is this: How does the history of capital-


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ism look differentfrom the standpoint of the nature-society dialec-tic? In what ways might these differences lead us to (re)think capi-talism in ways that inform our analysis of, and our political res-ponses to, the present crisis?

What on Earth is an Ecological Crisis? If we are indeed living through the midst of profound turning pointin human affairs, then our central question becomes, What kindofturning point is this? An epochal ecological crisis? A developmen-tal ecological crisis? Perhaps, even, a crisis of human civilisation

as we have known it since the Neolithic Revolution?In posing such questions, my intention is push the broadly con-

structionist perspective on nature-society relations onto the terrainof actually existing capitalism. The task immediately calls for a

grasping of the deep structures connecting accumulation crisis andecological crisis. If the alienation of nature and society has beende-stabilized in social theory (e.g. Braun and Castree, 1998; Dick-ens, 1992; Redclift and Benton, 1994; Barry, 1999; Foster, 1999),social reductionism remains secure in its hegemony over thetheory of social change. Here I refer to the categories bounding,

and the analytical narratives emerging from, modernitys master processes (Tilly, 1984) commercialization, industrialization,demographic movements, social revolutions, development, colo-

nialism, financial expansions, geopolitics, the accumulation ofcapital.26

Perhaps most fruitful has been OConnors notion of a secondcontradiction (1998). OConnors innovation was to attempt asynthesis of the cap ital- labor antagonism (a first contradiction ofoverproduction) and the capital-nature antagonism (a second con-tradiction of underproduction). For OConnor, rising costs issuingfrom the degradation of the conditions of production has, since the1970s, set in motion a dynamic that will fetter accumulation from

26 A representative sampling of this literature includes: Anderson, 1974a, b; B.

Moore, 1966; Skocpol, 1979; Wolf, 1982; Wallerstein, 1974; Tilly, 1990.

the supply-side, reinforcing difficulties the system already faces inthe realisation of surplus value through the sale of commodities.That is to say, OConnor sought to uncover the nature-society rela-tions inscribed in both movements overproduction and under-productionandto unearth the conditions through which the lattercrisis tendency would assume primacy, at some point in the (not-

too-distant) future. What I wish to underscore is the effort to bringbiophysical transformation into the theory of accumulation crisis.Whatever the pitfalls of OConnors innovation, the act of bringingpolitical ecology and political economy together into a holistictheory of accumulation crisis is exactly the kind of theoretical in-novation needed, if we are to come to grips with the specificitiesof ecological cr isis today.

In this respect, I think we may re-read the great divide betweenaccumulation crisis theory and ecological crisis theory in two ofour greatest political economistsJohn Bellamy Foster and DavidHarvey who are also amongst our leading theorists of nature-society relations (inter alia,Foster, 1992, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,2009; Foster and Magdoff, 2009; Harvey, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2000,2003, 2005). Foster, perhaps best-known for the theory of meta-bolic rift (1999), is also heir to Baran and Sweezys monopolycapital theory. Baran and Sweezys great innovation was to arguethat the increasingly centralization of capitals had qualitativelytransformed the conditions of competition, such that the tendencyof the surplus to rise had displaced the tendency of the rate of

profit to decline (1966). Foster has so far refrained, however, from

explaining how the production of nature matters to this scheme. 27Harveys enduring contribution is the theory of spatial fix

(1982), highlighting the irreducibly geographical character of cri-sis formation and crisis resolution in metropolitan accumulation.And yet, the theory of spatial fix remains at some distance fromthe elegant simplicity of his argument that all social projects are

27 But see Dowd, 1989. Clark and York, writing from a monopoly capital pers-pective, emphasize the centrality of waste frontiers in capitalist development,without however specifying the specific contribution of monopoly capitalism

(2005).


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ecological projects and vice-versa (1993, 1996).28 What is the po-litical ecology of the spatial fix, of t ime-space compression (1989),of the body as accumulation strategy (1998)?

How do we bring together these two mighty contributions,such that accumulation becomes a bundle of socio-ecological rela-tions? Such that, to paraphrase Williams, we have mixed these twomoments so deeply that the relation between them is always visi-ble?

The landscape of crisis theory is treacherous ground. Crisistheories are fundamentally predictive enterprises. They build upand out from the analysis and experience of previous crises. Attheir best, they seek to discern the underlying forces that have notgenerated crisis, but will do so if they continue, all things being

equal. OConnor has seen the day of reckoning coming, but thesecond contradiction cannot tell us just when that day might arrive.Foster criticizes OConnor on these grounds, acknowledging that

rising costs from ecological degradation may have some purchaseon regional developments, but that in itself, the theory of thesecond contradiction cannot account for the stagnation of theworld-economy since the 1970s (2002). The global ecological cri-sis threatens humanity but is not, Foster seems to be arguing, im-plicated in the ripening of accumulation crisis. There are two log-ics, related for sure, but largely in mechanical ways. If, however,accumulation crises unfoldthroughthe production of nature, Fos-ters critique may generate more heat than light. Foster rightly ob-

jects to any excessively narrow conception of biophysical crisis

that derives its motive power from a narrow conception of accu-mulation crisis. But this objection goes only so far. Deconstruction

calls for reconstruction. What unifies the rich totality of accumu-lation crisis and biophysical tipping points? IfOConnors secondcontradiction t racks the emergence of a new crisis tendency withinlate capitalismor possibly, the reassertion of an older, underpro-ductionist crisis tendency that ruled the roost during the formative

28 It is however clear that this is the direction in which he moving, albeit cau-

tiously (Harvey, 2006).

centuries of early capitalism (Moore, 2007) then one would ex-pect the accumulation crises emerging from the second contradic-tion to be slow in building, rapid and explosive in their detonation.

A theory of capitalism today that identifies the convergence ofrapidly moving and explosive contradictions need not succumb tocatastrophism. (A word that runs like red thread though Fosterswork.) Harvey rightly observes that any perspective premised onthe view that environmental catastrophe is imminent is a sign ofweakness (1998). But invoking catastrophe and theorizing crisisare distinct. Harvey is surely among our most powerful exponentsof a relational ontology of nature-society relations and agroundbreaking theorist of accumulation crisis. And yet, in his re-cent accounts of neoliberalism the connection between the two is

unclear (2003, 2005). We are treated to a social reductionist narra-tive that, however brilliant, leaves behind nature-society relationsas an organizing principle. My point here is to underscore the

enormity of the larger challenge, that of translating relational on-tologies into narratives of modern world history. As I suggest inthe conclusion to this essay, Harvey provides a big part of what isneeded to meet this larger challenge. For in Harveys theory of

spatial fix (1982), the initial flexibility, and acceleration, of turno-ver time achieved through a built environment favorable to cap i-tal in one era, becomes a fetter upon accumulation in the next. Inthis way, the remaking of nature-society relations, in successiveeras, liberates accumulation only to imprison its future paths(1991).

If we can agree that civilisation is indeed living through an eraof transition that will compel fundamental revisions in the organi-

zation of economic life, biophysical process, and social power,amongst the most pressing tasks is this. In order to understand thecrisis today we need to understand the origins of these crisis ten-dencies in their historical and geographical specificities. And Iwould say this is what is missing from these signal contributions tothe political ecology of capitalism OConnor, Foster, Harvey,and many others. While we have an ecologised theory of accumu-

lation crisis from OConnor, there remains a lacuna, located in the


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overemphasis on accumulation itself. For Marx, we may recall,thinking capitalism consisted of two dialectical movements. Thefirst is the theory of capital, as we see in most of the first volumeofCapital. The second is the history of capitalism, such as we see,quite early, in The German Ideology (Marx and Engels, 1970). I t isno mere happenstance that Marx reordered the general law of capitalist accumulation (theory of capital) and the discussion ofprimitive accumulation (history of capitalism) into a single co n-cluding part ofCapital, in the last edition (the French, 1882) heprepared before his death (Dunayevskaya, 1982). This dialectic,between an ecologised theory of accumulation crisis and a histori-cal account of capitalisms political ecology, has been scarcely ex-plored in left ecology.

From this standpoint, what is needed is a theory that views theincreasing centrality of value relations over the past five centuriesas an ecological project. (That is, a project that transcends its so-

cial and biophysical moments.) Such a reconstruction of ecologicalcrisis qua accumulation crisis would lay emphasis on the irreducibly ecological constitution of value itself(as process andproject) its internalization of nature through labor power, and itsexternalization of nature through the treatment of nature as a freegift. Value emerges in and through Braudels market economy(1982), weaving together the ethereal valences of finance capitaland the prosaic routines of everyday life in new world-historicalcrystallizations of power and profit, pivoting on the commodity. In

this light, the surficially external relations of capitalism to nature

are revealed as constitutive of new, profoundly restless, socio-ecological configurations.

To illustrate, let us take the most powerful instanciation of ca-pitalisms Cartesian logic, the quantifying logic of finance capital.In ecohistor ical perspective, the emergence o f successive financialcenters in the history of capitalism from the Amsterdam Bourseto the City of London to Wall Street becomes legible as theemergence of new modes of ecological transformation. The Ams-terdam Bourse as shaped and shaped by the transformation of theVistula Basin and southern Norway (Moore, forthcoming, a, b);

the City as constituted by, and constitutive of, the cash crop fron-tier expansions of the 19th century (Cronon, 1991; Brockway,1978); Wall Street as inseparable from the Green Revolution inboth core and periphery (Perkins, 1997). Whereas a social reduc-tionist approach would view the financial centers as causal; and anecological reductionist approach would begin from the conse-quences of these financial webs, we might use both premises andlook for a higher synthesis. This would reconstitute the history ofcapitalism, in this instance, as the crystallization of successive fi-nancial-ecological complexes, through which one or another mo-ment enters into a determinative position in the lifecourse of thesecomplexes. Would it be possible to do the same, we might ask, forthe grander movements of world accumulation over the past six

centuries?

Ecology & Accumulation Crisis: The Dialectic of

Underproduction and Overproduction

We have become accustomed to thinking that crises in histori-cal capitalism are overproduction crises. David Harvey, for in-stance, identifies the 1840s as the occasion of the first capitalistcrisis (2003: 42). If this is so, overproduction crises are a very re-cent development in the history of capitalism. In fact, the long his-

tory of capitalist transition, from the 1450s to the early 19th cen-

tury, was one of recurrent underproduction crisesthat it is to say,the insufficient flow of food, energy, and materials relative to the

demands of value production. Indeed, this is why Marx views thewhole era as one of successive bursts of primitive accumulation(1976: Part 8), and why Byres, in the same spirit, views the GlobalSouth of the 1960s as wracked by under-accumulation, an in-sufficiency of the means of production (2005: 86).

It is often forgotten that Marx offered a theory ofunderproduc-tion alongside one ofoverproduction. So powerful is the sense thatcapitalisms fundamental crisis tendency is overproduction, that


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the decisive passage in the Penguin translation of the third volumeof Capital (1981) reads overproduction when it should readunderproduction.29 What I wish to suggest is that capitalism maywell be headed towards the reassertion of underproduction crisesas the dominant crisis tendency. Let us, at any rate, hold this pos-sibility as an open question.

Marxs theory ofunderproduction crisishe calls it a generallaw of accumulation argues that the rate of profit is inverselypro portional to the value of the raw materials (1967, III: 111).(All things being equal.) And yet, the very dynamism of capitalist

production leads the portion of constant capital that consists offixed capital [to] run significantly ahead of the portion consis t-ing of organic raw materials, so that the demand for these raw ma-

terials grows more rapidly than their supply (ibid: 118-119). ForMarx, the crucial dialectic consists of the overproduction ofmachinery on the one hand, and the underproduction of raw

materials on the other (Marx, 1967, III: 119). 30 Thus, an enduringpriority of capitalism has been to drive down the cost of inputswhile simultaneously expanding, in geometrical fashion, the ma-terial volume of commodity production. Hence the centrality o f thefrontier. Not only has capital sustained itself on the basis on cheapinputs (the quantitative moment), but by revolutionizing the eco-logical relations of production on a systemwide level (the qualita-tive moment), it has mobilized a succession of great leaps for-ward in the relative ecological surplus. These great leaps forward

29The more capitalist production is developed, bringing with it greater means

for a sudden and uninterrupted increase in the portion of constant capital that

consists of machinery, etc., the greater is the relative overproduction of machi-nery and other fixed capital, the more frequent the overproduction [sic] of plantand animal raw materials, and the more marked the previously described rise in

their price and the corresponding reaction (Marx, 1981: 214, emphasis added).30 In this instance, I have stuck to convention and spoken of material inputs toproduction as raw materials. The category itself is part of the problem I am

addressing. Young (1985) states the issue quite well: Raw materials is a e u-phemism, because in the world of human beings no materials are truly raw.They are all cooked in s ome degree. There is simply no such thing for humans

as nature in the raw (1985).

are perhaps most evident in the great energy transitions from peatand charcoal (1450-1830), to coal (1750s-1950s), to o il and naturalgas (1870-present). These energy sources did not make capitalismso much as capitalism remade itself through their incorporation.To paraphrase Marx, coal is coal. It becomes fossil fuel only incertain relations (1971: 28, emphasis added).

Now, it has been such an enduring challenge to drive down thecost of inputs because capitalism is not only a spatial system butalso a temporal one the production of space and time are boundtogether. Capitalism not only accelerates the extraction of energybeyond the capacity of biophysical nature to regenerate. Throughthe escalation of control efforts, capitalism accelerates the evolu-tion of biophysical nature itselfpesticide resistance is in this re-

spect merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Over the long run,the tendency of market competition and geopolitical rivalry hasincreased the geographical reach of commodity-centered extrac-

tion. Sometimes this global reach has extended horizontally, acrossspace, and at other times it has stretched vertically, to grasp thewealth of coal veins, oil fields, and aquifers. The same competitivelogic that compels such widening of commodity relations alsocompels a powerful moment of deepening. This movement re-veals itself in rising capital intensityMarxs rising organic com-position of capital (1976, 1981) and this accelerates the extrac-tion of ecological wealth beyond the capacity of nature to regene-rate.31 More free gifts from nature could be absorbed into the body

of capital only through the acceleration of this capital-metabolism

itself. This was evident from the first sixteenth century (c. 1452-1557), as the sugar planting and silver mining commodity frontiers

in the Atlantic Islands and Central Europe were exhausted, only togive rise to the Brazilian sugar and Andean silver revolutions of

31Perelman (1996: 73) goes so far as to argue that Marx deployed the organiccomposition of capital as a code for scarcity, and that, in the back of Marxs

mind, scarcity was responsible for the falling rate of profit. Or perhaps it is

better to say,partially responsible.


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the second sixteenth, century (c. 1545-1648) (Moore, 2003a,2003b, 2007).32

Re-reading Marx in this fashion may help us take one step fur-ther Wallersteins longstanding argument about rising costs andaccumulation crisis (2004). For Wallerstein, three movements inthe history of capitalism have propelled a secular rise in the sys-temwide costs of production: 1) the rising costs of labor powerapace with proletarianization, as a growing share of world house-holds come to depend on wage, relative to non-wage, remunera-tion; 2) the rising costs of taxation, as democratization compelsrising expenditures on education, health care, and other social pro-grams; and 3) the rising costs of inputs, as the infinite expansion ofcapitalist production outstrips the finite qualities of biophysical

nature (2004). How have these tendencies been constrained, evenat times temporarily reversed, in the history of capitalism? Surelywe can identify a series of interlinked responses in the most recent

phases of capitalist development the reassertion of coercive-intensive income redistribution from poor to rich (Klein, 2007;Dumnil and Lvy, 2004; Harvey, 2005), the industrialization ofthe Global South (Amsden, 1990; Arrighi, Silver and Brewer,2003), the temporal deferments of financialization.

These responses, I want to suggest, are implicated in an under-lying crisis tendency. On the one hand, competition drives capital-ism to expand geographically, enabling capital to drive down thecost of inputs, and in so doing, to increase the rate of profit. On the

other hand, competition compels individual capitals to innovate

through rising capital intensity, such that relatively less labor andrelatively more nature is embedded in every commodity. This ac-

celerates the uptake of first natures into a geometrically expansiveproduction process, which intensifies the drive towards geographi-cal expansion. In this fashion, the quasi-linear movement oftime-space compression finds its dialectical counterpoint in the quasi-

32

The notion of a f irst and s econd sixteenth century is Braudels (1953).

linear movement of time-space appropriation, the reworking ofexternal spaces through the imposition of capitalist time. 33

At the level of the social economy, rising capital intensity Marxs rising organic composition of capital places downwardpressure on the general rate of profit. The operative assumptionhere is that aggregate profit, on balance, flows from aggregate sur-plus value, with is generated and distributed unevenly (Marx,1976, 1981). Walker nutshells the underlying tendency with typi-cal verve (1998):

Why [do] profit rates fall? The argument is simple. It is be-cause the numerator in the profit equation, surplus value, isoutrun by the denominator, capital stock (both measured in

annual terms)That is, too much capital stock builds up infactories and equipment around the world, pitting compa-nies against each other in an ever-fiercer competitive brawl

for markets. This holds prices down, leads commodity out-put to outrun demand at prevailing prices, and/or lowerscapacity utilization ratesthereby lowering profit margins,leaving goods unsold, and running equipment at less effi-cient levels.34

If expansion across space (global conquest) represents one fix tothe falling rate of profit; innovation through t ime (capital intensifi-cation) represents the second.35 The first moment extends the net

of energy-resource consumption ever more widely, driving down

the costs of circulating capital (inputs); the second accomplishesthe production of more commodities with fewer workers in less

time, dr iving down the costs of variable capital ( labor power). Ne i-ther can be amplified endlessly. Global space is not only relational,

33 Hornborg, 2006: Harvey, 1989.34 A rather more rigorously explicated, if less streamlined, version is on offer in

Walker, 1999.35

In the capitalist era, rising productivity is simply another way of saying that arising material volume (in commodity form) is moving through the hands and

minds of workers in the sa me s pan of time.


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but asymptotic and finite from the standpoint of endless accumula-tion. And although in theory, constant capitals material volumemay be augmented without limit (Marx, 1981: 317), the rate ofexploitation operates within a much stickier field of power.

How does profitability revive? Marxists usually respond byemphasizing the role of crises in propelling creative destruction,through: 1) devaluing fixed capital (such as factory shutdowns),over the short-run; 2) increasing the rate of exploitation throughtechnical innovation; and 3) increasing surplus value through wagefreezes or reductions (Walker, 1999; Harvey, 1982).

There is, of course, enormous debate over the relation betweenaccumulation crisis and the falling rate of profit.36 For the presentargument, I would prefer to bracket these, and simply point to a

fourth moment. This turns on circulating capital (inputs), but withimportant implications for variable capital as well. What I wish tounderscore is that Marxs most important law (1973: 748) can be

more fully grasped and its explanatory power radically extended by taking as a whole the contradictions between first andsecond nature (machinery relative to inputs) as well as thosewithin second nature (constant relative to variable capital). Indeed,I am tempted to say that the crucial weakness in falling rate ofprofit arguments has not been the theory itself, but rather an over-emphasis on the wrong moment of constant capitalon fixedrather than c irculating capital. Could it be that since the 1830s, capitalisms technological dynamism has forged agro-extractive

complexes capable of outrunning the tendency towards the under-

production of inputs?37 If a sufficient mass of cheap energy andraw materials can be mobilised, the rising organic compos ition can

36 Useful surveys can be found in Mandel (1981) and Choonara (2009). See the

recent debate between Harman (2007) and Kincaid (2008).37 In the United States during the neoliberal era, energy expenditures declinedfrom 13.7 to 7.2 percent of GDP between 1981 and 2000 (WUTA, 2004); the

composite industrial mineral price index from about 130 to 100 between 1975and 2000 (Sullivan, et al., 2000); and generally (if unevenly) declining foodexpenditures as share of household income between 1980 and 2000 (Elitzak,

1999).

be attenuated especially if capital saving innovations runstrongly alongside labor saving movements38and the tendencytowards a falling rate of profit, not only checked but (for a time)reversed.39

The same logic applies to variable capital. If a sufficient vo-lume of cheap food can be supplied to workers and cheap foodsbiophysical costs externalised, for the time being the rate of sur-plus value may be augmente

ecology and accumulation neoliberalism

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