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Articles

Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology

Pages 1-46 | Published online: 13 Jan 2011
 

Abstract

The theory of metabolic rift is among the most dynamic perspectives in critical environmental studies today. This essay argues that the problem with the metabolic rift perspective is not that it goes too far, but that it does not go far enough. I take a ‘use and transcend’ approach that takes metabolic rift theory as an indispensable point of departure in building a unified theory of capitalist development – one that views the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature as differentiated moments within the singularity of historical capitalism. My response unfolds through two related arguments. First, the theory of metabolic rift, as elaborated by Foster, Clark, and York, is grounded in a Cartesian binary that locates biophysical crises in one box, and accumulation crises in another. This views biophysical problems as consequences of capitalist development, but not constitutive of capitalism as a historical system. The second part of this essay moves from critique to synthesis. Drawing out the value-theoretical implications of the metabolic rift – through which capitalism's greatest contradiction becomes the irremediable tension between the ‘economic equivalence’ and the ‘natural distinctiveness’ of the commodity (Marx) – I illuminate the possibilities for a unified theory of capitalist development and crisis over the longue durée. This is the theory of capitalism as world-ecology, a perspective that joins the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity. This perspective begins from the premise that capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through nature–society relations. Capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime.

Notes

1Foster and York teach in the University of Oregon's sociology department, where Clark took his PhD.

2Major points of reference in left ecology include Altvater (Citation1993), Benton (Citation1989), Blaikie and Brookfield (Citation1987), Braun and Castree (Citation1998), Bunker (Citation1985), Burkett (Citation1999, Citation2006), Enzensberger (Citation1974), Foster (Citation1999, Citation2000), Harvey (Citation1974, Citation1996), Levins and Lewontin (1985), Martinez-Alier (Citation1987), O'Connor (Citation1998), Peet and Watts (Citation1996), Peluso (Citation1992), Peluso and Watts (Citation2001), Schnaiberg (Citation1980), Smith (Citation1984), Watts (Citation1983), Williams (Citation1980), Worster (Citation1990). Recently, Panitch and Leys (Citation2006), and Heynen et al. (Citation2007), have collected two important clusters of perspectives within this current.

3I counterpose ideal-type conceptions of capitalism – from the left and the right – in favor of a methodological and theoretical approach that enables the construction of historical capitalism over large space and the longue durée (Hopkins Citation1982, McMichael Citation1990, Tomich Citation2004, Wallerstein Citation1974, Moore Citation2007).

4At the risk of stating the obvious, the production of nature does not mean that humans produce the atmosphere, the evolution of species, geological strata, or any other such foolishness. Rather, the production of nature registers the unassailable fact that humans come to know the rest of nature through conscious and creative life activity.

5Here I adapt Araghi's innovative turn of phrase: ‘labor-in-nature’ (2009).

6To my knowledge, environmental degradation is nowhere conceptualized by Foster, Clark, and York. A working conceptualization would begin by emphasizing capital's utopian project to remake the world in its own image – a world of interchangeable parts. The vision of the biosphere as a great storehouse of ‘natural capital’ is a symbolic rendering of this tendency, materialized in the new genetic technologies of the neoliberal era, and earlier, through the mass production systems of the Fordist era, the cartographic technologies of cadastral grids in North America and elsewhere, cash crop monocultures, and even the ‘standard’ slave, measured in piezas de Indias. Such strategies of ‘radical simplification’ (Worster Citation1990) do not exhaust the possibilities of course. Let us note that every long century of accumulation has been accompanied by qualitative shifts in the toxification of the planet, today transforming human bodies, on an unprecedented scale, into walking toxic waste dumps.

7One might reasonably argue that town and country could be subsumed within the category of imperialism. This would be unwise in my view, for the simple reason that town and country and core and periphery are not synonymous. Nebraska corn farming is agrarian but not peripheral; Mexico City is urban but not a core zone. In the study of historical capitalism, core and periphery implicate value composition and value flows (e.g. capital-intensive vs. labor-intensive production) whereas town and country implicate the geographical moment of the origins and reproduction of conditions for the globalization of value relations (e.g. the ‘urbanization of the countryside’).

8The enclosure of the atmosphere as a trash bin for capital's CO2 emissions, for example, has been a necessary condition of production for capital as a whole in the era since the Industrial Revolution.

9‘Marx himself pointed out that the abstract scheme of capitalist development was not enough to provide any predictions about the actual world. All crises in capitalism must be explained out of the given empirical conditions, “out of the real movement of capitalist production, competition, and credit”[Marx]. The value analysis of capital development postulates “the possibility of crises by a mere consideration of the general nature of capital, without regard to the additional and real relations that form the conditions of the real production process”[Marx]’ (Mattick Citation1969, 61).

10Smith takes pains to distinguish his ‘production-of-nature thesis’ from social constructionism, and persuasively so (2006). 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 Citation1998, Harvey 1993, Citation1996, Levins and Lewontin 1985, Smith Citation1984, Williams Citation1980).

11Pivots of discussion in environmental history include Cronon (Citation1983, Citation1991, Citation1996), Crosby (Citation1972, Citation1986), Dean (Citation1995), Gadgil and Guha (Citation1992), Grove (Citation1995), McNeill (Citation2000), Merchant (Citation1980, Citation1989), White (Citation1995), Worster (Citation1985, Citation1990). McNeill (Citation2003) and Hughes (Citation2006) offer impressive surveys.

12See, inter alia, Bunker's classic critique (1985). A useful review of the ‘value problem’ in ecological economics is found in Burkett (Citation2006).

13‘The 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 machinery and other fixed capital, the more frequent the overproduction[sic] of plant and animal raw materials, and the more marked the previously described rise in their price and the corresponding reaction’ (Marx Citation1981, 214, emphasis added).

14I have stuck to convention and spoken of material inputs to production as ‘raw material’. The category itself is part of the problem I am addressing: ‘“Raw materials” is a euphemism, because in the world of human beings no materials are truly raw. They are all “cooked” in some degree. There is simply no such thing for humans as “nature in the raw”’ (Young Citation1985).

15‘“[R]esources” can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to make use of them and which simultaneously “produces” them through both the physical and mental activity of the users. There is, therefore, no such thing as a resource in abstract or a resource which exists as a “thing in itself”’(Harvey Citation1974, 265).

16Yes, there is a ‘nature’ that exists independently of what one thinks of it. But the fact remains that our best guide to the relation between signifier (nature) and signified (the biological, geological, etc.) is historically-grounded theory. Young cuts to the heart of the issue: ‘[N]ature exists apart from us, but only as a noumenon, a category of the last instance, without any qualification or characterization. For [capitalism], nature is an object of labor, a resource, a manifold, an attic, or a cellar, or a boxroom to be ransacked … It is a potential to be actualized by different epochs with different goals, different priorities, different cosmologies, different world views and agendas. The metaphysical basis of reality, of experience, of investigation, changes. Ontologies change, epistemologies change, methodologies change. At a more mundane academic level, there are paradigms, research programmes, disciplines, grand theories – all of which are formed and constituted by the contradictions and moving resolution of class forces of different epochs. This is a dynamic, dialectical historical process, born in conflict and struggle. At any point in time science and technology, medicine and philosophy, art and the theatre reflect the existing state of tension of the historical forces at work’ (Young Citation1985, emphases added).

17By 2008, the global oil sector had experienced more than two decades of ‘investment famine’ (The Times Citation2008). The top five supermajors spent just one percent of total expenditures on stock buybacks in 1993, and nearly 14 percent on exploration. By 2006, they were spending 37 percent on equity repurchases, and just 5.8 percent on exploration (Jaffe and Soligo Citation2007, 21). In 2004–2005, stock buybacks by the six largest firms jumped 60 percent (Mouawad Citation2005). Far from limited to the private sector, the same logic underpinned a 75 percent decline in OPEC's spare capacity in the quarter-century after 1979 (Jaffe Citation2004). The revival of financial markets after the 2008 meltdown has only exacerbated the tendency, with the International Energy Agency estimating a 21 percent decline in global oil and gas investment between 2008 and 2009 (Lawler Citation2009).

18Bunker highlights the indispensable role of transport revolutions in the modern world-system (see Bunker Citation2005, for a useful synthesis of nearly two decades of conceptual work).

19Useful surveys can be found in Mandel (Citation1981) and Choonara (Citation2009).

20Between 1980 and 2005, the ‘relative price of capital goods has declined by between 25 and 40%’ in the US and Japan (BIS 2006, 24).

21Harvey (Citation2003, 150, 139; 2005), as if to prove the point, views the ‘release’ of cheap raw materials as ‘just as important’ as other strategies in reviving accumulation, but pays it little attention in his recent analyses of neoliberalism.

22‘Marx was not necessarily wrong to prioritize time over space. The aim and objective of those engaged in the circulation of capital must be, after all, to command surplus labor time and convert it into profit within the socially-necessary turnover time. From the standpoint of the circulation of capital therefore, space appears in the first instance as a mere inconvenience, a barrier to be overcome’ (Harvey Citation2001, 327).

23 Pace Berkes, et al. (Citation2003).

24With a nod to Lefebvre (Citation1991).

25Not to mention geographical depth, as modes of extraction have plunged ever deeper into the earth itself. Geographical expansion itself comprises both horizontal and vertical movements, the latter overlapping, but not to be confused, with the socio-spatial intensification of rising capital intensity at a system-wide level.

26Even many Marxists regard the long nineteenth century as decisive because of the generalization of the wage-labor relation, when in fact the share of world households within capitalism's division of labor was no greater (and probably lower) in 1914 than it was in 1763.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason W. Moore

Very special thanks to Henry Bernstein, Benjamin D. Brewer, and Diana C. Gildea, who read several drafts of this paper and its predecessors, to Jun Borras for his encouragement, and also to Holly Jean Buck, T.J. Byres, Jennifer Casolo, Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, Harriet Friedmann, John Gulick, Erik Jönsson, Shiloh R. Krupar, Rebecca Lave, Andreas Malm, Jessica C. Marx, Phil McMichael, MacKenzie K.L. Moore, Bruno Portillo, Cheryl Sjöström, Dale Tomich, Richard A. Walker, Eron Witzel, Richard York, Anna Zalik, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal.

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