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

127 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
gates.” The delivery of heat energy (primarily charcoal), for example, was especially important,
and especially difficult. The history of fuel-intensive industries in this era – in particular,
sugarmaking and metallurgy, the vanguards of commodity production – is one of unceasing
geographical movement in search of cheap energy (Moore 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Williams 2003).
Once the coal-steampower nexus hit critical mass, sometime around 1830, the dominant
crisis tendency shifted from underproduction to overproduction. This was definitively illustrated
by the Anglo-American depression of 1837-42 (Lloyd-Jones and Lewis 1998; Post 1995). The
coal-steampower nexus found creative synthesis with the rationalization and reorientation of
British imperial and financial power to effect a double transformation – a quantum leap in labor
productivity and a quantum leap in the expanse of all nature (humans included) that could now be
freely appropriated at minimal cost. Coal and steampower linked up with capital and empire to
radically extend frontiers of appropriation, and thereby secure a radically augmented ecological
surplus (cheap food, labor, and inputs). There was a significant long-run expansion of consumer
markets as a result. Cheap coal made possible “ever increasing levels of consumption” in a
manner roughly analogous to cheap oil in post-1945 capitalism (Araghi 2009).
The really remarkable story is how the generalization of the fossil fuel revolution kept the
underproduction tendency at bay, right up to the present conjuncture. So successful was “fossil
capitalism” in overcoming the earlier problems of underproduction that most Marxists view the
transition from underproduction to overproduction as a relic of bygone days, rather than a
recurrent tension in the history of capitalism (e.g. Foster 2009; Burkett 2006). Among other
things, such an approach cedes the terrain of scarcity to the neo-Malthusianism of “peak
everything” (Heinberg 2007).
The General Law of Underproduction and the Capitalization of Nature
Marx’s “general law” of underproduction identifies the circuit of capital as a socio-ecological
relation, albeit one whose substance (value) is necessarily blind to “natural distinctiveness” (1967
III:111; 1973:141). In this model, “the rate of profit is inversely proportional to the value of the
raw materials” (1967 III:111). The cheaper the raw materials and energy, the higher the rate of
profit, since constant capital consists of not only fixed capital (machinery that outlasts the
production cycle) but also inputs. These inputs, raw materials and energy used up during the
production cycle are what Marx calls circulating capital. (Not to be confused with the circulation
of capital in its monetary forms.) The dynamism of capitalist production leads the “portion of
constant capital that consists of fixed capital… [to] run significantly ahead of the portion
consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for these raw materials grows more
rapidly than their supply” (ibid:118-119). Here, the “overproduction” of machinery (fixed capital)
enters a dialectical antagonism with the “underproduction” of raw materials (circulating capital)
(Marx 1967 III:119). This law, like the falling rate of profit tendency, is a dialectic of tendencies
and counter-tendencies. (The counter-tendencies are not exogenous to the law’s operation.) The
issue is not overproduction or underproduction. It is how the two movements fit together in
successive eras of accumulation.
Metropolitan capital has been hugely successful in securing cheap inputs since the 19 th
century. This has an awful lot to do with the productive and transport efficiencies enabled by
cheap fossil fuels. Nevertheless, for all their undeniable contributions to the appropriation of
nature’s free gifts, fossil capitalism eased, but did not resolve, the basic contradiction. Marx’s