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

ECOLOGY, CAPITAL AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES 120
regarding the constitution, reproduction, and eventual crises of capitalism’s strategic socioecological
relations in successive phases of development.
A second issue is the historical-conceptual task. A critical historical method goes beyond
examining the degree to which our categories appear to explain socio-ecological change. A
reflexive and critical method will also interrogate (and with luck, reveal) the uneven and variable
correspondences and ruptures between our conceptual frames and contemporary structures of
power (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
The uneven development of such a reflexive historical social science is a matter of some
consequence, to critical environmental scholarship no less than to politics, and to the relations
between them. Within environmental and world history, it is difficult to deny a rough-and-ready
correspondence between the meta-theoretical insistence on the primacy of markets (Cronon 1991)
and neoliberalism, or between resource constraint approaches (Pomeranz 2000) and neo-
Malthusian conceptions of peak oil. In observing this homology, my intention is to direct our
focus to the “reflexive” specificity of the concepts deployed, in Bourdieu’s sense. This is what I
have called the historical-conceptual moment, intertwining doxic and heterodoxic moments at
once. Viewed in this light, “ecological footprint” approaches (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) –
installing human exemptionalism as a mechanical and uni-directional impress upon an externallyconstituted
and singular “environment” – may be fertile ground for such reflexive examination.
The Theory of Organizational Revolution: Organizational Exhaustion as Ecological Limit
This methodological rethinking may be fruitfully paired with Arrighi’s theory of historical
capitalism. The general framework runs along these lines. Innovations, centered in and effected
by emergent hegemonic complexes, lead to phases of material expansion. These are phases of
expansion both in terms of the rising physical output of commodities and the geographical
expansion of the system. Characterized by rising returns to capital in the “real” economy, these
phases of material expansion mark the beginning of each systemic cycle of accumulation. Over
time, the material expansion sets in motion new competitors from outside the hegemonic center,
eroding the latter’s surplus profits, equalizing profit rates across the core, and exhausting the
profit-making opportunities within the productive circuit (M-C-M+). Within the hegemonic
center, diminishing returns to capital leads to a rising volume of surplus capital that cannot be
(re)invested profitably in material expansion. As profitability falters, capitalists quite sensibly
reallocate capital from production to finance (M-M+). It is this reallocation that brings about
financial expansions, sustained by the escalating inter-state competition that accompanies the
exhaustion of material expansion. These financial expansions set the stage for a new round of
innovations, brought about by new alliances of territorial and capitalist agencies in geographically
more expansive hegemonic centers.
Two elements of this theory are especially relevant to the present exploration. In both
cases, time and space are recast through the dialectic of world power and world accumulation.
Arrighi’s first contribution brings to the fore the sociology of power and accumulation on a
world-scale. This is no “structuralist” account – if by structure we refer to one pole of a
structure/agency binary. Those long centuries of capitalist development at the center of The Long
Twentieth Century did not just happen; they were made. Systemic cycles emerge and stabilize
through the innovation and generalization of new forms of world leadership and business
organization, revolutionized by specific state-capitalist alliances, after which Arrighi names each