Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital by Jason W. Moore

Author:Jason W. Moore [Moore, Jason W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-09-14T21:00:00+00:00

Second, in Harvey’s broader theory of spatial fix, the initial flexibility of capital, and acceleration of turnover time, achieved through a “built environment” (urban spaces) favorable to capital in one era, becomes a fetter upon accumulation in the next. But does not the logic of this argument extend well beyond built environments? The historical natures created to liberate accumulation also serve to “imprison the future paths of capitalist development.”63

Arrighi and Harvey point towards a theory of capitalist development that illuminates the socio-ecological conditions of capitalist boom and bust over the longue durée. To Arrighi, we may add that the organizational revolutions and technical innovation unfold through the oikeios. To Harvey, we may say the same thing about the spatial fix, and that “dispossession” works to the degree it facilitates the appropriation of unpaid work/energy and restores the Four Cheaps. In this reckoning, the abstract “limits to growth” give way to the historical conditions and limits of accumulation, directly given in capitalism itself. Successive phases of capitalism have unfolded through ecological revolutions in the dynamics of accumulation (the civilizational project), and the socio-ecological relations within its gravitational field (the historical process). These have been organizational revolutions in the webs of governance enacted by capitalist and territorialist agencies, and revolutions in the built environments of capitalization and appropriation. Their signal accomplishment has been the radical enlargement of the ecological surplus through the radical expansion of opportunities for appropriation relative to capitalization.

To echo Harvey, these world-ecological revolutions at first liberate accumulation. Was not this the world-historical accomplishment of British hegemony in the “first” nineteenth century (c. 1763–1848)? Over time, however, these new ways of organizing historical nature—through political regulation, built environments, industrial organization, agricultural innovation, not to mention class struggles—generate contradictions through the corrosive effects of plunder and productivity, and escalating challenges from ascendant states, capitalists, and dangerous classes. The widening and deepening movements of capitalization undermine the capacities of human and biophysical natures to reproduce themselves independently (or relatively so) from the circuit of capital. Sooner or later, the rules of reproduction change in the direction of capital-dependency. Peasant cultivators become capitalist farmers. Old-growth forests give way to tree plantations. Intergenerational reproduction becomes mediated by the cash nexus. The ecological surplus falls as the capitalization of world nature rises. This undercuts the basis of expanded accumulation, culminating in a developmental crisis.

The ecological regimes emerging out of these developmental crises confronted, and indeed produced, historically specific natures as webs of liberation and limitation. The point can scarcely be overemphasized if we are to take seriously the idea that all “limits to capital” emerge historically, out of the relations of humans with the rest of nature. This historical specification is not idiographic, but rather acknowledges the multi-layered spatio-temporal character of the oikeios. The natures that neoliberalism has produced operate within the epochal nature of historical capitalism, and perhaps even a sort of civilizational nature of humankind since the Neolithic revolution. Such a multi-layered comprehension of historical nature (as oikeios) opens up the possibilities for distinguishing the cumulative, the cyclical, and the genuinely novel in the present conjuncture.

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