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

123 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
exhaustion of the relations governing the reproduction of biophysical and human natures initiated
by the old accumulation regime.
This allows for a theory of accumulation crises as transitions within the specifically
capitalist oikeios. The world-ecological limits that precipitate these transitions are historical and
endogenous. Broadly speaking, crises materialize as a system’s capacity to maintain homeostasis
breaks down. In critical environmental studies, this moment of breakdown is often framed in
language of “natural limits” (e.g. Clark and York 2008). Presumably, this is paired with “social
limits,” but it is far from clear how we might discern the two in a non-arbitrary way. This is
especially true for the history of agriculture, where great revolutions in earth-moving have been
bound up with fiercely contested moments of class restructuring and world market formation
(Moore 2008; 2010c). The enduring “social” conflict between peasant moral economies and
capitalist political economies is in fact a contest over whose valuation of nature – human nature
included – will govern socio-biological reproduction and the distribution of surpluses. Is this not
at the heart of the global conflict today between advocates of a democratic and polycentric “food
sovereignty,” and those of a “food security” defined by market participation (McMichael 2005)?
There is an even more problematic aspect to the Cartesian binary of limits. If “natural
limits” are often conceptualized as capitalism’s tendency to “overshoot” something resembling a
global carrying capacity (Catton 1980) – itself a deeply problematic concept (Sayre 2008) –
“social limits” are conceptualized as internal. This also strikes me as arbitrary. In worldecological
perspective, all “social” and “natural” limits are irreducibly socio-ecological. These
limits assume multiple forms, from state regulation and antisystemic movements to deforestation
and climate change. The point – and this is what Marx underscores in arguing that the limit of
capital is capital itself 16
– is that all limits are historically constituted through the relations
between human- and extra-human natures. The problem is not the “separation” of humans from
extra-human nature but rather how the two fit together. These configurations emerge through
specific human projects to remake all of nature. To say that such projects inevitably encounter
limits that emerge through the inner contradictions of these projects is much different from
invoking “natural necessity” and “absolute limits” (Foster 2008:125, 129).
Recall that for Arrighi, accumulation crises occur when the organizational structures
formed at the onset of a systemic cycle exhaust their capacity to generate rising returns to capital.
The question is one of the exhaustion of the relations organized at the beginning of the cycle.
While Arrighi’s account is resolutely sociological, there is every reason to resituate his favored
axes of change – geopolitical rivalry, inter-capitalist competition, and class conflict – as partial
totalities within the oikeios of historical capitalism. This is a far cry from “adding on”
environmental factors. World hegemonies did not merely organize resource and food regimes; the
hegemonies of historical capitalism were socio-ecological projects. Dutch hegemony emerged
through a world-ecological revolution that stretched from Canada to the spice islands of
Southeast Asia; British hegemony, through the coal/steampower and plantation revolutions;
16 Marx does use the language of “natural limits” (1973:399) and “natural barriers” (1976:785).
Interestingly enough, Marx often deploys this language in reference to human nature. For instance, the selfexpansion
of capital, in the “infancy” of capitalist production, “came up against a natural barrier in the
shape of the exploitable working population; this barrier could only be swept away by the violent means we
shall discuss later,” that is to say, by primitive accumulation (1976:785). Here, Marx locates this “natural
barrier” exogenous to capital’s self-expansion, and at the same time, endogenous to capitalism.