Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

ECOLOGY, CAPITAL AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES 110
These questions are especially relevant to the task of interpreting the ongoing crisis of
neoliberalism. Is it probable, possible, or unlikely that the world-system’s leading territorial and
capitalist powers will re-establish the conditions for a new long wave of accumulation? Arrighi’s
Three Questions provide an indispensable means of exploring, and answering, this question.
What are the secular trends within which innovations in the relations between humans and the
rest of nature might deliver a new material expansion? What are the cyclical movements of socioecological
innovation, especially in agriculture and energy, indicating possibility and constraint
for such a renewed expansion? In what ways does the recent history of socio-ecological
innovation indicate continuity with older patterns, and in what ways have we witnessed a rupture
with longstanding cyclical and cumulative movements?
My response to these questions emphasizes the ontological, methodological, and
conceptual-historical elements of a theory of capitalism that unifies the accumulation of capital
and the production of nature. The argument is organized in three movements. I begin with a
consideration of world-systemic investigations of environmental change, pointing to the
possibilities offered by transcending the Cartesian binary of “world-system and environment.”
This alternative views the meta-concepts of “social” change as socio-ecological. The ambition is
to rethink capitalism as world-ecology… and not capitalism only. My intention is to implicate the
widest range of meta-processes in the modern world as socio-ecological, from family formation
to racial orders to industrialization, imperialism, and proletarianization. From this perspective,
capitalism does not develop upon global nature so much as it emerges through the messy and
contingent relations of humans with the rest of nature.
The second section engages Arrighi’s supple handling of time, space, and accumulation
in The Long Twentieth Century. My reading of Arrighi’s history of capitalism in world-ecological
perspective highlights its methodological implications. Especially relevant are his arguments for a
“structurally variant” capitalism, and the theory of organizational revolution and exhaustion, as
fruitful ways to construct a theory of capitalism as ecological regime.
In the final section, I conceptualize accumulation and its crises as world-ecological
process. 3 The outlines of this crisis theory take shape through Marx’s account of underproduction
crises (1967 III). Historically, I argue, capitalism has been shaped by a dialectic of
underproduction (too few inputs) and overproduction (too many commodities). Today, capitalism
is primed for a re-emergence of underproduction crises – early capitalism’s dominant crisis
tendency – characterized by the insufficient flow of cheap food, fuel, labor, and energy to the
productive circuit of capital (M-C-M+) (Moore 2010c, 2011a, 2011b). Far from the
straightforward expression of “overshoot” and “peak everything,” the likely resurgence of
underproduction crises is an expression of capitalism’s longue durée tendency to undermine its
conditions of production. 4
The ecological limit of capital, it appears, is capital itself.
3
In a companion essay, I place this model of accumulation and crisis in the capitalist world-ecology into
dialogue with rise and ongoing signal crisis of neoliberalism (Moore 2011b; also Moore 2009a, 2010c).
4
Beyond Marx, the original sources for this perspective include also Polanyi (1957), Worster (1990, 1992),
and O’Connor (1998).