Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser

Author:Nancy Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Socioecological Regimes of Accumulation

To this point, I have elaborated capitalism’s tendency to ecological crisis in structural terms, as if it existed outside of time. In reality, however, this tendency finds expression only in historically specific forms, or, as I shall call them, “socioecological regimes of accumulation.” I use that phrase to designate the various phases whose succession forms capitalism’s history. Each regime represents a distinctive way of organizing the economy/nature relation. Each features characteristic methods of generating energy, extracting resources, and disposing of waste. Likewise, regimes exhibit distinctive trajectories of expansion—ways of annexing previously external chunks of nature through historically specific mixes of conquest, theft, commodification, nationalization, and financialization. Finally, regimes develop characteristic strategies for externalizing and managing nature: methods of off-loading damages onto families and communities that lack political clout and are deemed disposable; and schemes for distributing responsibility for mitigation among states, intergovernmental organizations, and markets. What makes a regime distinctive, then, is where it draws the line between economy and nature, and how it operationalizes that division. Equally important, as we shall see, are the concrete meanings a regime ascribes to nature—in both theory and practice.

None of these matters is given once and for all with the advent of capitalism. Rather, they shift historically, often in times of crisis. Those are times when the long-brewing effects of capitalism’s ecological contradiction become so apparent, so insistent, that they can no longer be finessed or ignored. When that happens, the established organization of the economy/nature relation appears dysfunctional, unjust, unprofitable, or unsustainable and becomes subject to contestation. The effect is to incite broad struggles among rival political blocs with competing projects aimed at defending or transforming that relation. When they do not end in stalemate, such struggles may install a new socioecological regime. Once in place, the new regime provides provisional relief, overcoming at least some of its predecessor’s impasses, while incubating new ones of its own, whose effects will become apparent later, as it matures. That outcome is guaranteed, alas, insofar as the new regime fails to overcome capitalism’s built-in tendency to ecological crisis and merely defuses or displaces it, however creatively.

That, at any rate, is the scenario that has prevailed to date. As a result, capitalism’s history can now be viewed as a sequence of socioecological regimes of accumulation, punctuated by regime-specific developmental crises, each of which is resolved provisionally by the successor regime, which in due course generates a developmental crisis of its own.4 Later, we shall consider whether this sequence may now be coming to an end, thanks to a deeper dynamic that subtends it: namely, the epochal, trans-regime progression of global warming—cumulatively escalating, seemingly implacable, and threatening to stop the whole show. Whatever we say about that, there is no denying that the economy/nature division has mutated several times in the course of capitalism’s history, as has the organization of nature. My principal aim in this section is to chart these shifts and the crisis dynamics that drive them.

The historical career of capitalism’s ecological

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