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

129 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
composition of capital (1967). Cheap energy, in other words, powerfully checks the falling rate of
profit.
Before turning to the falling rate of profit as a world-ecological dynamic, let us take a
moment to consider the capitalization and appropriation of nature. Capitalized nature depends on
the circuit of capital – crudely, either M-C-M+ or M-M+ – for its daily and inter-generational
reproduction. For these natures, including humans, the circuit of capital directly determines the
rules of reproduction. A good example is the capital-intensive family farm that first developed in
the U.S. after 1865, and which was progressively globalized as the Green Revolution model after
World War II. An Iowa corn farm producing for ethanol refineries is highly capitalized
biophysical nature. As for highly capitalized human natures, these can be found in the
proletarianized households of metropolitan accumulation – households that depend on wages for
most income.
Accumulation by appropriation signifies a range of processes through which capital
appropriates the oikeios to maximize labor productivity, without however capitalizing the
relations of reproduction for those webs of life. At its core, appropriation is less about the
mechanism of extraction – neoliberal privatizations, colonial taxation, enclosures old and new –
and more about how capitalism reduces its basic costs of production: food, energy and raw
materials, labor. Appropriation and capitalization, then, are not directly implicated in the share of
machinery relative to labor power in production (Marx’s technical composition of capital). The
capital-intensive farming of the American Midwest developed through the epoch-making
appropriations of cheap water, cheap soil, and cheap oil. These appropriations are now coming to
an end (Weis 2010), as the cost of securing these vital inputs moves closer to the systemic
average. Costs rise because appropriation imposes a peculiar temporal logic on nature. This
temporal discipline, tightly linked to the spatial remaking of nature into a storehouse of
interchangeable parts, undermines the daily and inter-generational reproductive conditions by
enforcing the systemic disciplines of “socially-necessary turnover time” (Harvey 2001:327). The
spatio-temporal compulsions of the law of value drive capital to accelerate the extraction of usevalues,
but at the cost of destabilizing the webs of relations necessary to sustain such value
production in the first place. This temporal revolution was present from the origins of capitalism,
revealing itself in rapid and large-scale landscape changes – such as deforestation – that moved in
decades, not centuries, as was the case for feudalism (Moore 2007, 2010b). Interestingly enough,
as Marx recognizes in his treatment of the working day (1976:377-378), these frontiers of
appropriation have been as necessary for labor power as they have been for energy, food, and raw
materials.
By driving down the capitalized share of world nature and increasing the share that can
be freely appropriated, ecological revolutions have worked in two major ways. First, they
expanded the relative ecological surplus specific to the ongoing transformation of production (e.g.
coal for steam engines). Second, they produced new configurations of global nature, as in the
“massive taxonomical exercise[s]” of early capitalism that culminated with Linnaeus (Richards
2003:19).These taxonomical and other symbolic revolutions were crucial to successive
reimaginations of global nature as a warehouse of free gifts. Identifying and quantifying new
sources of extra-human wealth, these successive scientific, cartographic, and metrical revolutions
enabled that crucial achievement of world-ecological revolutions: an increase in the share of
appropriated relative to capitalized nature (the capitalized composition of global nature). By
reducing the systemwide capitalization of production through global appropriations, allowing a