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

ECOLOGY, CAPITAL AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES 132
possibilities of recasting the inner contradictions of capital accumulation as dynamic socioecological
forces (Burkett 1999). These possibilities can be realized by treating Marx’s
“progressive tendency” towards a “gradual fall in the general rate of profit” (1981:318-319) as a
historical proposition on the long-run relation between the overproduction of machinery and the
underproduction of inputs. This illuminates a decisive point of fracture in the longue durée of
historical capitalism, locating biophysical disequilibria within the circuits of capital. In so doing,
it provides a basis for a much broader conceptualization of cyclical and cumulative crises in the
modern world-ecology than hitherto possible.
Could it be that since the 1830s, capitalism’s technological dynamism has forged agroextractive
complexes capable of outrunning the tendency towards the underproduction of inputs?
If a sufficient mass of cheap energy and raw materials can be mobilized, the rising organic
composition can be attenuated; especially if “capital saving” innovations run strongly alongside
labor saving movements. 22
This not only checks, but (for a time) reverses, the tendency towards a
falling rate of profit.
A similar argument can be made for variable capital (human nature.) If a sufficient
volume of cheap food can be supplied to workers the rate of surplus value may be augmented in a
manner roughly analogous to wage freezes and technical innovations. The most spectacular
booms in the capitalist era have combined cheap labor and cheap inputs – think of English
industrialization with its heavy reliance on cheap energy (coal) and cheap calories (sugar)
(Wrigley 1988; Mintz 1985).
I have argued that underproduction and overproduction are dialectically bound, and that
our investigations ought to focus on their shifting configurations. The late 19 th century’s long
depression offers a promising illustration of the possibilities. World prices for raw materials
imported by Britain began to rise sharply during the 1860s and ‘70s, at the very moment of its
peak industrial supremacy (Hobsbawm 1975; Rostow 1938; Mandel 1975). This inflationary
moment was quickly turned inside-out, as prices in general declined quite sharply (Landes 1969).
At the same time, an inflationary undercurrent was at play. The era was punctuated by successive
(if partial) moments of underproduction in such key raw materials sectors as cotton, indigo,
rubber, palm oil, copper, nickel, lead, tin, jute, and sisal (Headrick 1996; Mandel 1975; Brockway
1979; Bukharin 1929; Magdoff 1969:30-40). These inflationary undercurrents were set in motion
by the rise of new industrial powers, Germany and the United States above all. They were
amplified further still by the qualitative shifts of the “second” industrial revolution, premised on
the auto, steel, petrochemical, and electrical industries (Barraclough 167:45-63; Landes 1969).
The underproductionist tendency was consequently checked, but not abolished, by the
second industrial revolution. Insofar as we restrict our attention to the new industrializers, the
inner contradiction between value accumulation and the production of inputs was intensified. The
contradiction was resolved through the dialectic of plunder and productivity characteristic of
capitalism’s successive global ecological fixes: 1) the radical enlargement of the geographical
arena, with the rapid acceleration of colonial and white settler expansion; and 2) the “massive
penetration of capital into the production of raw materials,” especially in the newly-incorporated
zones (Mandel 1975:61). There is no question that steam power augmented the capacities of
capitalist agencies to transform space. A modest amount of capital mobilized a relatively vast
22
Between 1980 and 2005, for example, the “relative price of capital goods” declined 25-40 percent in the
U.S. and Japan (BIS 2006:24).