Transcending The Metabolic Rift

The Journal of Peasant Studies
Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2011, 1–46
Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist

world-ecology
Jason W. Moore
The theory of metabolic rift is among the most dynamic perspectives in critical
environmental studies today. This essay argues that the problem with the
metabolic rift perspective is not that it goes too far, but that it does not go far
Downloaded by [Dalhousie University] at 09:52 21 June 2013
enough. I take a ‘use and transcend’ approach that takes metabolic rift theory as
an indispensable point of departure in building a unified theory of capitalist
development – one that views the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power,
and the production of nature as differentiated moments within the singularity of
historical capitalism. My response unfolds through two related arguments. First,
the theory of metabolic rift, as elaborated by Foster, Clark, and York, is
grounded in a Cartesian binary that locates biophysical crises in one box, and
accumulation crises in another. This views biophysical problems as consequences
of capitalist development, but not constitutive of capitalism as a historical
system. The second part of this essay moves from critique to synthesis. Drawing
out the value-theoretical implications of the metabolic rift – through which
capitalism’s greatest contradiction becomes the irremediable tension between the
‘economic equivalence’ and the ‘natural distinctiveness’ of the commodity
(Marx) – I illuminate the possibilities for a unified theory of capitalist
development and crisis over the longue durée. This is the theory of capitalism
as world-ecology, a perspective that joins the accumulation of capital and the
production of nature in dialectical unity. This perspective begins from the
premise that capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through
nature–society relations. Capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an
ecological regime.
Keywords: capitalism as world-ecology; environmental sociology; world-systems
analysis; environmental history; political ecology
The theory of metabolic rift is amongst the most dynamic perspectives in critical
environmental studies today. How can we take the core insights of this perspective,
and at the same time move towards a theory of crisis and development that views the
accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature as
differentiated moments within the singularity of historical capitalism? My response
Very special thanks to Henry Bernstein, Benjamin D. Brewer, and Diana C. Gildea, who read
several drafts of this paper and its predecessors, to Jun Borras for his encouragement, and also
to Holly Jean Buck, T.J. Byres, Jennifer Casolo, Brett Clark, John Bellamy Foster, Harriet
Friedmann, John Gulick, Erik Jönsson, Shiloh R. Krupar, Rebecca Lave, Andreas Malm,
Jessica C. Marx, Phil McMichael, MacKenzie K.L. Moore, Bruno Portillo, Cheryl Sjöström,
Dale Tomich, Richard A. Walker, Eron Witzel, Richard York, Anna Zalik, and the
anonymous reviewers for this journal.
http://www.informaworld.com
2 Jason W. Moore
unfolds through two related arguments. First, the theory of metabolic rift –
especially the ‘Oregon school’ represented by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and
Richard York – is grounded in a Cartesian paradigm that locates biophysical crises
in one box, and accumulation crises in another.1 Environmental degradation, in this
view, is a consequence of capitalist development, an output of the system. But it is not
constitutive of capitalism as a historical system. Nature and society appear as a
binary; the dialectical relation is reduced to the examination of ‘how these positions
[‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘society’’] interact and transform each other’ (Clark and York 2005a,
396, emphasis added). This emphasis on the interaction of positions confuses the
results of the dialectic of human and extra-human natures with the dialectic itself.
This dialectic, what I call the oikeios, gives rise to the singular abstractions of
‘nature’ and ‘society’ in their specifically capitalist forms.
The point of critique is synthesis. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the
problem with the metabolic rift perspective is not that it goes too far, but that it does
not go far enough. Drawing out the value-theoretical implications of the metabolic
rift – through which capitalism’s greatest contradiction becomes the irremediable
tension between the ‘economic equivalence’ and the ‘natural distinctiveness’ of the
commodity (Marx 1973, 141) – I illuminate the possibilities for a unified theory of
capitalist development and crisis over the longue dureé. This is the theory of
capitalism as world-ecology, a perspective that joins the accumulation of capital and
the production of nature in dialectical unity. This perspective begins from the
premise that capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through
nature–society relations (Moore 2000a, 2000b, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2007, 2008,
2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2010d). Capitalism does not have an ecological
regime; it is an ecological regime. The theory of capitalism as world-ecology is built
out, first, through an engagement with Marx’s value theory, rehabilitating his
underappreciated theory of crisis, one rooted in a dialectic of underproduction and
overproduction, both moments rooted in the tendency towards a rising organic
composition of capital. This basic crisis tendency – Marx’s ‘most important law’
(1973, 748) – has been held in check over the history of capitalism by the system’s
capacity to appropriate nature’s ‘free gifts’ faster than it has capitalized their
reproduction. This dialectical antagonism of accumulation by appropriation and
accumulation by capitalization is central to understanding the conditions for a
revival of accumulation in the present conjuncture.
Capitalism as world-ecology, or, the oikeios as dialectic

‘We have mixed our labor with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be
able to draw back and separate either out’, Raymond Williams first argued in 1971
(1980, 83). In an extraordinary essay, Williams directs his critique towards those
‘singular abstractions’ – society and nature – that confuse and obscure the historical
relations between humans and the rest of nature. But this is only part of what makes
Williams’ argument so extraordinary. While we may perceive (or fail to perceive) the
‘products’ of humanity’s ‘complex dealings with the physical world’, Williams
outlines an approach that would demolish the fictions inscribed in these singular
abstractions, and deliver ‘not only a more sophisticated, but a more radically honest,
1
Foster and York teach in the University of Oregon’s sociology department, where Clark took
his PhD.
The Journal of Peasant Studies 3
accounting’. This alternative accounting is one premised on relations rather than

‘products’:
We ourselves are products: the pollution of industrial society is to be found not only in
the water and in the air, but in the slums, the traffic jams, and not these only as physical
objects but as ourselves in them and in relation to them . . . The process . . . has to be seen
as a whole, but not in abstract or singular ways. We have to look at all our products and
activities, good and bad, and to see the relationships between them which are our own
real relationships. (Williams 1980, 83–4, emphasis added)
Too often in environmental studies, we are riveted to the consequences issuing

from society’s footprint on nature. And this is the way that many would put it (York
et al. 2003, Jorgenson 2003, Wackernagel and Rees 1996, Wackernagel et al. 2002,
Altvater 2007). Debt leads to deforestation. Neoliberal programs drive cash-crop
monocultures. Industrialization causes CO2 emissions. Are these not reasonable
causal statements?
The short answer is yes and no at the same time. All social research must explain
change over time, necessarily implicating some mix of cause and effect. But the
nature of the story changes according to the ingredients of each moment. One’s point
of departure – nature? society? the relations between them? – shapes the range of
possible destinations. What I wish to highlight in this essay is an uneasy fracture
within a broadly conceived left ecology.2 On the one hand we find a set of
sophisticated arguments that nature and society make a dialectical whole. On the
other, a set of empirically rigorous arguments that social causes (capitalism,
industrialization, globalization) drive biophysical consequences (deforestation, CO2
emissions, pollution). A relational ontology in the realm of social theory rubs elbows
with a mechanical ontology in the realm of social history. (Although ‘social’ may no
longer be the way to put it!) The problem is not with the attention to ‘social’ drivers
or to ‘environmental’ consequences, or with causal statements as such. Rather, a
difficulty emerges with the elevation of these ‘singular abstractions’ to the status of
actor and acted-upon, foot and footprint, as the conventional metaphor would have
it. In this metaphor, we see a symbolic enclosure (and alienation) at work, which
effects an idealized separation of producer and produced, manifest in a purified
social repertoire of agents and a purified bundle of environmental effects. It is an
eminently Cartesian way of seeing, one that accounts for capital’s depredations upon
the ‘environment’ in the same way that capital surveys, accounts, and quantifies
nature’s utility for accumulation. It is an ontology that produces a critique of the
social domination of nature while valorizing its inner logic. It is a line of critique, in
other words, that reproduces the very alienation of nature and society it seeks to
transcend.
If not the singular abstractions of society and environment, what? The shortest
answer, as Williams suggests, is to adopt a method premised on the dialectical
movement and interpenetration of the (so-called) social and the (so-called) natural.
2
Major points of reference in left ecology include Altvater (1993), Benton (1989), Blaikie and
Brookfield (1987), Braun and Castree (1998), Bunker (1985), Burkett (1999, 2006),
Enzensberger (1974), Foster (1999, 2000), Harvey (1974, 1996), Levins and Lewontin
(1985), Martinez-Alier (1987), O’Connor (1998), Peet and Watts (1996), Peluso (1992), Peluso
and Watts (2001), Schnaiberg (1980), Smith (1984), Watts (1983), Williams (1980), Worster
(1990). Recently, Panitch and Leys (2006), and Heynen et al. (2007), have collected two
important clusters of perspectives within this current.
4 Jason W. Moore
There is nothing new itself in this answer, so long as one remains with the spheres of
social theory and the study of regional transformation. And what about our stories
of the modern world? Translating this relational method from social theory to world
history has been an enduring challenge. That is to say, ‘green’ social theory has not
(yet) given rise to a ‘green’ history of capitalism. Now, it is certainly true that today
we enjoy a vast and enormously rich literature on environmental history. But an
inspection of this literature, especially its world-historical component, reveals a series
of narratives whose motive forces are irreducibly social – the great thrusts of
European colonialism, of commercializing imperatives, of civilizing projects large
and small (e.g. Ponting 1991, McNeill 2000, Richards 2003).
This sort of social determinism was indeed where I began (Moore 2000a). Nearly
a decade ago, I argued that ‘environmental crises’ and long ‘systemic cycles’ of
environmental transformation complemented capitalism’s phases of development. It
was clear, for instance, that the rise of monopoly capitalism in the later nineteenth
century entailed a set of far-reaching agroecological transformations, from the

wheatfields of the American Midwest to the copper mines of Chile and the rubber
plantations of southeast Asia. I soon found that one could travel only so far with
such a model. It was an approach that proceeded from a set of a priori constructions
ontologically prior to the relations I wanted to discern: the game was rigged, the
outcome determined in advance. The rise of monopoly capitalism, in this scheme of
things, caused changes in ‘the’ environment. But such a view begs an important
question. To wit, How does the nature–society relation ask for a rethinking of
capitalism and its phases of development? Perhaps even more important: What can a
socio-ecological method reveal about capitalism that was previously underappre-
ciated or mis-recognized?
This was a much more intriguing line of questioning. I appreciated the flood of
critical scholarship that accounted for capitalism’s environmental depredations, but
after a certain point, I wasn’t learning anything that most of us didn’t already know:
Capitalism is bad news for the birds and bees, the water, the soil, and pretty much all
living creatures on the planet. Empirical evidence might be amassed to verify this or
that ‘environmental’ impact, but within the limits of the Cartesian scheme, the socio-
ecological constitution of capitalism itself remains unexplored. It is not that we don’t
need an analysis of impacts. Rather, the problem is that Cartesianism narrows,
rather than expands, the kinds of impacts under investigation – farming is important,
and so are CO2 emissions, but not global finance and its mania for securitization, or
the Washington Consensus, or the dollar as world currency.
In an expansive sense, the big question turns on how we think capitalism, or if you
prefer, modernity, industrialization, imperialism, and the many other possible ‘master
processes’ (Tilly 1984) of world-historical change. The alternative is between differing
‘ways of seeing’ – between, say, a capitalism (or modernity, or industrial society) that
acts upon nature, and one that develops through human and extra-human natures. We
have, I believe, arrived at a powerful eductive moment – one that allows us to erase
old boundaries and open new vistas, and one where we can reconstitute each of these
processes on the historical basis of the nature–society relation.3
3
I counterpose ideal-type conceptions of capitalism – from the left and the right – in favor of a
methodological and theoretical approach that enables the construction of historical capitalism
over large space and the longue dureé (Hopkins 1982, McMichael 1990, Tomich 2004,
Wallerstein 1974, Moore 2007).
Easier said than done! From this perspective, the call for ‘integrating’ human and
natural history is very much to be welcomed (Costanza et al. 2007, Beddoe et al.
2009). I worry, however, that in the absence of synthesis – relative to integration – we
are left with models that cobble together multiple observed trends without explaining
their interrelations. The ‘interplay’ of factors is recognized as decisive, but the
constitutive relations, underpinning the descriptive trends, remain something of a
black box. Costanza and his colleagues, for instance, characterize the twentieth
century as a ‘Great Acceleration . . . [whose] engine . . . is an interlinked system that
consists of population increase, rising consumption, abundant cheap energy, and
liberalizing political economies’ (2007, 525). As such, the argument for causation in
global environmental change tends to fall back on social drivers – rather than socio-
ecological relations.
And yet, everything need not be ‘deep history’. There is much to be learned from
an examination of the interplay of distinct long waves (and distinct temporal logics)
framing the rise and fall of world hegemonies, financial complexes, and yes, specific
forms of ‘environmental’ change in the modern world. But the relations of the whole
cannot be reduced to the sum of these interactions, and interactions look different
from the standpoint of the whole. A mass of evidence indicting capitalism (or
modernity, or industrial society) for its manifold environmental stressors and stresses
does not explain how these stresses are generated (and how they are generative), how
they turn into crises, and what kinds of crises they implicate.
The problem that I faced in seeking to extend my original argument can be stated
simply enough. To say that every phase of capitalist development is complemented by
a specific regime of environmental transformation makes about as much sense as
saying that every phase of capitalism is complemented by new bourgeoisies, new
imperialisms, new socio-technical innovations. But where the generative capacities of
new bourgeoisies, imperialisms, and innovations in the making of successive
capitalist orders have been self-evident, the hegemony of Snow’s ‘two cultures’
(1964) obscures still the socio-ecological relations constituting capitalism as a whole.
Simple enough, perhaps, and also profoundly disruptive of our received
analytical categories, even within Marxism. The enduring legacy of the ‘two
cultures’ is an analytical vocabulary that reproduces the Cartesian divide, and
occludes the messy bundle of relations that give rise to what we call ‘nature’ and
‘society’. If Nature and Society are the results of this messy bundle of relations, what
do we call the bundle itself? My term for it is the oikeios, coined by the philosopher–
botanist Theophrastus ‘to indicate the relationship between a plant species and the
environment’ (Hughes 1994, 4, emphasis added). It is an imperfect term, and
doubtless one with which I have taken some interpretive liberties. Nevertheless,
taking the oikeios as our point of entry draws attention to the constitutive relations
that give rise to the problematic, a priori, categories of Nature and Society and their
cognates.
Ecology, in what follows, signifies the relations of the whole. The shorthand,
‘ecological’, crystallizes the matrix of human and extra-human natures, and the
historically-specific ways through which symbolic and material relations are
interwoven and provisionally stabilized in the modern world-system. Ecology qua
oikeios stands in sharp contrast to scholarly vernaculars of environment and nature as
one pole of a Cartesian binary. The problem with most scholarly deployments of ‘the
environment’, as noun or adjective, is the a priori narrowing of the field of inquiry.
The ‘environment’ is taken as largely exogenous, and primarily defined in terms of
6 Jason W. Moore
extra-human nature; alternatively, in some promising initiatives (Sellers 1999), this

definition extends to the body as a site of environmental history. But many of the
most important aspects of the ‘environment’ in the modern world-system, for
humans and the rest of life on the plant, can be found in what are typically regarded
as ‘social’ forces and relations: financial markets, scientific revolutions, cartographic
technologies, new forms of business organization such as the vertically-integrated
corporation, colonial governments, property-rights, warmaking. Cutting into both
‘environmental’ moments – forests and financialization – as a differentiated unity
calls for a conceptual vocabulary and methodological approach that jettisons the
‘preconceptualized’ biases of the Cartesian binary (Haila and Heininen 1995). So if
the oikeios is a linguistic distinction in part, it is also a conceptual one that opens the
possibility for a holistic perspective on the organism-environment/society-environ-
ment relation, through which each dialectical moment is actively constructed by (and
through) the other (Levins and Lewontin 1985).
I have therefore refrained from the language of environmental crisis (pace Moore
2000a), and embraced that of ecological transformation. I do so because a singular
object, the environment, ‘does not exist and . . . because every species, not only the
human species, is at every moment constructing and destroying the world it inhabits’
(Lewontin and Levins 1997, 98). And yet, if new vernaculars are needed, the old ones
cannot be simply ignored. So I retain the phrasing of ‘nature and society’ and ‘socio-
ecological’ but signal here that these are the results of an underlying relation, the
oikeios. Such a perspective poses different questions from the Cartesian model.
Rather than write a history of capitalism’s impact on the environment, then, we
might investigate a generative relation between ‘endless accumulation’ and the
‘endless production of nature’.4 Instead of a method that identifies ‘society’s’
footprint on the rest of nature, we might well ask how the provisionally stabilized
relations between these two end-points create, simultaneously, a ‘footprint’ on
society no less than upon the so-called ‘environment’. It is the difference between the
‘capitalism and nature’ ontology of the metabolic rift perspective and the theory of
capitalism-in-nature.5 The accumulation of capital and the production of nature are
distinct rather more than discrete categories, so intertwined as to make the one
unthinkable without the other.
If these are distinctive moments within a dialectical unity, what are the
methodological frames and conceptual premises necessary to illuminate these
relations? The theory of metabolic rift, so long as it is taken as a methodological
premise rather than falsifiable proposition, offers one promising point of departure
for a fruitful response to this dicey question.
The theory of metabolic rift

In Foster’s original formulation (1999, 2000), capitalism is dialectically bound to an
epochal shift in the town–country division of labor – Marx’s ‘urbanization of the
countryside’ (1973, 479). The point is crucial, for the category of metabolic rift is
4
At the risk of stating the obvious, the production of nature does not mean that humans
produce the atmosphere, the evolution of species, geological strata, or any other such
foolishness. Rather, the production of nature registers the unassailable fact that humans come
to know the rest of nature through conscious and creative life activity.
5
Here I adapt Araghi’s innovative turn of phrase: ‘labor-in-nature’ (2009).
now widely understood as the ‘separation’ or ‘disruption’ of surficially ‘social’ and

surficially ‘natural’ systems (McMichael 2009, Clark and York 2005a). In my view,
however, the town–country division of labor does not produce a metabolic rift; it is a
metabolic rift, and one that continually (if unevenly) drives successive recomposi-
tions of capitalist space (Moore 2000a, 2007, 2010a, 2010b). In Foster’s early
conceptualization, the separation of the direct producers from the means of
production – and the progressive liquidation of seigneurial power in the countryside –
implies a new geography of wealth and power. The emergent disciplines of the law of
value directed all manner of biophysical wealth – labouring bodies and the cheap
food to nourish them, above all – towards urban spaces. In the transition to
capitalism, the rift appeared as these ‘original sources’ of wealth were largely
produced in agrarian spaces, but increasingly consumed in urban spaces. Absent a
systemic mechanism to encourage the recycling of urban-industrial wastes to the
countryside – as was the case, for instance, with the ‘night soil’ traffic of Late
Imperial China or Tokugawa Japan (Xue 2005), or even the Dutch Republic of the
seventeenth century (de Vries and van der Woude 1997, 202–4) – historical
capitalism tends to produce nutrient depletion in the countryside, and pollution in
the cities. The secular trend towards escalating biophysical exhaustion and pollution
– Foster’s ‘absolute general law of environmental degradation’ (1992) – has been
punctuated by a ‘series of successive, historical breaks in nutrient cycling’ (Foster
1999, 399; also Moore 2000a). Highlighting the rise of ‘industrial agriculture’ after
World War II, followed by the emergence of large-scale feedlots, and global
feedstock sourcing in recent decades, Foster and his colleagues have illuminated
important connections between capitalism, its geographical patterns (the metabolic
rift), and the system’s immanent tendency towards biophysical degradation (Foster
and Magdoff 1998, Clark and York 2008).6
The central contribution of the metabolic rift perspective is to locate socio-
ecological contradictions internal to the development of capitalism. But the
conceptualization follows a different road than O’Connor’s theory of the second
contradiction, which we will consider momentarily (1998). The distinctive
explanatory power of the metabolic rift rests on three decisive, spatio-temporal
connections: (1) primitive accumulation imposes value relations on the countryside,
compelling rising labor productivity in primary production, and establishing the
conditions for geometrically rising throughput relative to labor – there is no
capitalist metabolic rift without agricultural revolution; (2) the subsequent general-
ization of value relations, implying a powerful contradiction between the ‘natural
distinctiveness’ of commodities and their ‘economic equivalence’, necessitates the
progressive ‘urbanization of the countryside’ (Marx 1973, 141, 479); and (3) the
6
To my knowledge, environmental degradation is nowhere conceptualized by Foster, Clark,
and York. A working conceptualization would begin by emphasizing capital’s utopian project
to remake the world in its own image – a world of interchangeable parts. The vision of the
biosphere as a great storehouse of ‘natural capital’ is a symbolic rendering of this tendency,
materialized in the new genetic technologies of the neoliberal era, and earlier, through the
mass production systems of the Fordist era, the cartographic technologies of cadastral grids in
North America and elsewhere, cash crop monocultures, and even the ‘standard’ slave,
measured in piezas de Indias. Such strategies of ‘radical simplification’ (Worster 1990) do not
exhaust the possibilities of course. Let us note that every long century of accumulation has
been accompanied by qualitative shifts in the toxification of the planet, today transforming
human bodies, on an unprecedented scale, into walking toxic waste dumps.
8 Jason W. Moore
tension between the country and the city is therefore central, not simply as empirical
fact, but as the geographical pivot of value accumulation, mediating biophysical
flows from farm to factory through the built environments of the circuit of capital. In
this view, ‘town and country’, no less than ‘bourgeois and proletarian’, emerges as a
relational expression of the underlying contradiction between value and use-value in
historical capitalism.
My objection is not that the theory of metabolic rift has gone too far, but rather
that it has not gone far enough. There is, it seems to me, a rift within the metabolic
rift perspective, one movement holding fast to a nature–society binary, another
seeking to transcend the underlying Cartesianism of modern social thought. In the
first place, we can identify a tendency to move away from the centrality of the town–
country dialectic in Marx and Engels’ understanding of capitalism (1970), and in
Marx’s thinking about the emergence of an ‘irreparable rift in the interdependent
process of social metabolism’ (1981, 949). Demoting the town–country dialectic to
the status of a secondary contradiction allows York, for instance, to formulate the
metabolic rift as the way that capitalism ‘disrupts the exchange between social
systems and natural systems’ (York 2007, emphases added; also Mancus 2007, 277,
Clausen and Clark 2005, Clark and York 2005a). In Clark and York’s hands, the
town–country dialectic appears as a ‘particular geographical manifestation of the
metabolic rift,’ which may be dissolved into the latter’s ‘general properties’ (2005a,
400, 391, emphasis added). From these conceptions, capitalism becomes a socially-
constituted subject, one that creates an exogenous ‘crisis of ecological sustainability’
through the ‘disruption’ of ‘natural cycles’ (Foster 2001, 473, Clark and York 2005a,
406, Clark and York 2005b). The systemic logic of this ecological crisis tendency is
found in an uneasy pastiche of Marxist and neoclassical political economy, with
pride of place given to the neoclassical ‘Jevons Paradox’: technological innovation
drives down unit prices for inputs, thereby widening the sphere of input consumption
and amplifying resource exhaustion (Foster 2000, Jevons 1906, Clark and York
2008). It is a perspective that locates accumulation crisis in one sphere, and the ‘crisis
of the earth’ in another (Foster 2009, 1997, Burkett 1999, 2003, 2006, Foster and
Magdoff 2009). There is a relation between the two, but one that strikes me as rather
more Cartesian than dialectical.
Such Cartesianism is, however, only one tendency; my point is that the metabolic
rift perspective has been enacted in ways Cartesian and dialectical, at the same time.
There is no denying that the dialectical method has been central to the metabolic rift
project. While I am less convinced than Clark and York in their certitude that such a
thing as ‘society’ exists, they are assuredly correct in arguing that, ‘while social
history cannot be reduced to natural history, it is a part of it’ (2005b, 21). The
difficulty lays in the recasting of modernity’s meta-categories – capitalism, in their
view, has a metabolic rift. But the central question posed by our shared commitment
to a dialectical method and historically-grounded theory is this: How do we think
capitalism differently as a result of metabolic rift investigations? In what ways can
we see the metabolic rift as ‘directly given in the concept of capital itself’ (Marx 1973,
408)?
Surely part of the answer is directly given in Foster’s reading of Marx himself. In
this interpretation, Marx’s critique of capitalism emphasized how ‘bourgeois
society’s . . . domination of humanity’ rested on its ‘domination of the earth’,
especially in the form of large-scale landed property (Foster 2000, 74). The endless
accumulation of capital is, in other words, the endless commodification of nature.
But rather than corral accumulation crisis in one pen, and biospheric crisis in
another, might we instead begin from the relations that connect the two? I am
therefore concerned that the particular distillation of the metabolic rift into ‘general
properties’ loses sight of the whole as a ‘rich totality of many determinations and
relations’ (Marx 1973, 100). For Clark and York, in their groundbreaking
exploration of capitalism’s enclosure of the atmosphere (2005a), the town–country
dialectic becomes a particularity dissolved into a general whole. This marks a retreat
from the geographical promise of the metabolic rift perspective. In substituting a
contradiction between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ exogenous to the spatiality of society
and nature (town and country), they produce a crisis theory that is, quite literally,
‘lost in space’ (also Magdoff and Foster 2010). Where Clark and York see the
relations of town and country as empirical facts, would it not be more fruitful to see
town and country as one of several decisive internal relations ‘directly given in the
concept of capital itself’?7
So when I argue that the metabolic rift has not gone far enough, I am saying that
the socio-ecological contradiction (as oikeios) goes much deeper than even Foster,
Clark, and York acknowledge. Part of this stems from an imprecise deployment of
nature as analytical concept. Clark and York (2005a, 408), for example, rightly point
out that value represents an alienated appropriation of human nature (qua ‘abstract
social labor’), surficially divorced from extra-human nature. In the same breath,
however, they argue that ‘money mystifies the relation between labor and nature’ (p.
408). A tiff over words? Possibly. But I think it is more than this, with definite
implications for bounding the phenomena under investigation. For Clark and York,
the ‘exploitation of nature’ emerges as discrete process alongside the exploitation of
labor. This occludes the inner relation between the labor process – including science
as a way of knowing the rest of nature (Young 1985) – and the reproduction of the
oikeios. It is this occlusion that gives rise to a Cartesian separation of ‘accumulation
crisis’ and ‘environmental crisis’ (e.g. Foster 2009).
If we look beyond the binary of labor and nature in favor of ‘labor-in-nature’
(Araghi 2009), we can see this binary resting on the (Cartesian) re-coding of human
labor power as ‘social’. But is not human labor power eminently socio-ecological?
The intergenerational (re)production of labor power is itself a ‘natural cycle’ whose
socialized flows are registered in the determination of socially necessary labor time
(Seccombe 1992). From biorhythms (proliferating shift work) to bioaccumulation
(rising toxicity), on closer inspection we find it challenging indeed to determine the
boundaries of the allegedly social and the seemingly natural.
Within the metabolic rift perspective, Burkett (1999) has gone farthest in this
direction, rooting the analysis in the theory of value. Demonstrating that Marx’s
value theory is unthinkable in the absence of the contradiction between the ‘natural
distinctiveness’ and ‘economic equivalence’ that constitutes the commodity form,
Burkett’s pioneering analysis shows how the metabolic rift might be theoretically
7
One might reasonably argue that town and country could be subsumed within the category of
imperialism. This would be unwise in my view, for the simple reason that town and country
and core and periphery are not synonymous. Nebraska corn farming is agrarian but not
peripheral; Mexico City is urban but not a core zone. In the study of historical capitalism, core
and periphery implicate value composition and value flows (e.g. capital-intensive vs. labor-
intensive production) whereas town and country implicate the geographical moment of the
origins and reproduction of conditions for the globalization of value relations (e.g. the
‘urbanization of the countryside’).
10 Jason W. Moore
re-situated within the theory of value. Just as it unclear how the circuit of capital
links up with actually existing technological and environmental change in Clark and
York’s account, it is unclear how Burkett’s now-classic ‘red–green’ accounting of
Marx’s theory of capital translates into the history of capitalism. The challenges
confronting the theory of metabolic rift therefore represent a particular instanciation
of the broader problem of translating ‘green’ social theory into a ‘green’ theory of
socio-ecological change.
Extending the key insights of the metabolic rift perspective, we might posit the
accumulation of capital – in its manifold relations with actually existing regimes
governing energy, labor, food, agriculture, and resources (inter alia) – as an
ecological crisis-generating, and crisis-attenuating, formation. If there are many
possible forms of ‘ecological crisis’ in the modern world, the relations underpinning
these forms are found in a many-layered process through which the dynamics of
accumulation link up with the nature–society relations that are value’s point of
departure, and point of return. Here the essential limits of expansion are ‘external’
only in a highly abstract sense, since the external can only be discerned through the
labor process (Young 1985, Levins and Lewontin 1985). (This hardly denies that
limits exist!) The guiding thread on offer opens up an analysis of these limits as
internally constituted by the contradictions of humans with the rest of nature forged
through the globalization of value relations. These contradictions, while highly
variable across the time and space of historical capitalism, find their common ground
in the inner contradiction of the value form itself – between value and use-value,
between the commodity in ‘general’ and the commodity in ‘particular’ (Marx 1973,
141). Whereas the former moment (in general) presumes limitless expansion, the
latter (‘in reality’) drives the contradiction to a series of crises on an ever-‘higher
scale’, combining the ‘highest development of productive power’ with the ‘most
straitened exhaustion’ of human and extra-human nature (Marx 1973, 750).
From this vantage point, the metabolic rift can be read as a methodological
premise that allows us to move from the theory of capital to the history of capitalism,
rather than a generalizable proposition about capitalism’s tendency towards the
exhaustion (underproduction) of extra-human nature. This means, for instance, that
one may understand references to ‘successive, historical breaks in nutrient cycling’, not
primarily as a falsifiable hypothesis and particular historical claim, but as a
methodological statement on the significance of biophysical rents in the history of
capitalism – rents that include the bonanza of ‘cheap’ food, energy, and water that are
now widely acknowledged to be exhausted in the present conjuncture.
From here we may begin to puncture the myths of infinite substitutability on
offer from neoclassical economics, and pose new questions about how the
accumulation of capital over the longue dureé has been a spectacular moment of
temporal deferment, one realized through the widening and deepening of capital’s
hegemony.
Crisis, what crisis? Capitalism and nature, or, crises of the capitalist world-ecology?
At some point, these strategies of temporal deferment reach a point of diminishing
returns, and then we begin to speak of crisis. These days, we are treated to an
especially promiscuous use of this grand signifier, ‘crisis’. The term itself has become
more slogan than explanatory concept, and nowhere is this more clear than in the
axiomatic formulation that capitalism drives ecological crisis, conceptualized as
unfolding or potential ‘catastrophic problems’ (Magdoff and Foster 2010, Foster

2009). I will use ‘crisis’ in two historically-specific ways, first, to specify turning
points from one mode of production to another (epochal crises), and second, to
illuminate qualitative transitions from one phase of capitalism to another
(developmental crises).
The difficulty in formulating a world–ecological theory of crisis of capitalism is
reinforced by a Cartesian, and social-determinist, way of seeing that views
qualitative biophysical transformations (e.g. global warming, species extinction) as
theoretically independent of the accumulation process. In this scheme of things,
environmental degradation may lead to partial, but never general, crises of the
system. This is particularly the case with Foster, but with implications that extend
well beyond the metabolic rift perspective.
Let me offer a simple statement that we can take as a guiding thread. Historical
capitalism does not create ecological crises so much as it has been created through
them. It is the relation between social power and biophysical process (the oikeios)
that has given rise to such crises. As I have noted, the problem of language is
inescapable. The symbolic distinction itself – ‘social power’ and ‘biophysical process’
– becomes possible only through the forcible separation of the direct producers from
the means of production and its symbolic expressions, emerging during and
constitutive of the rise of capitalism (Moore 2007, Crosby 1997). Not for nothing did
Merchant call the origins of this symbolic distinction, codified in the Scientific
Revolution, ‘the death of nature’ (1980).
Of these crises, two great forms can be readily observed – epochal and
developmental ecological crises. We may consider these in turn. First, capitalism,
from its origins in the ‘long’ sixteenth century, emerged out of an epochal ecological
crisis (Moore 2000, 2003a, 2007). This was the crisis of the long fourteenth century,
which marked the end of European feudalism. Far from a narrowly-conceived
biophysical crisis, the late medieval transition was a multivariate transition in which
nature–society relations were pivotal. ‘Ecological crisis’, in this formulation, was not
so much a cluster of consequences (demographic collapse, soil exhaustion) as
constitutive of the era’s manifold crises – of states, of class structures, of markets.
Soil exhaustion was indeed a consequence of feudalism’s socio-ecological contra-
dictions, but so was the proliferation of peasant revolts and the escalation of warfare
(see Moore 2003a).
Second, since the long sixteenth century, capitalism has developed through
successive developmental ecological crises (Moore 2007, 2009, 2010c). That is to say,
the world capitalist system has developed through the cyclical emergence of
ecological crises, not in spite of them. Successive long centuries of accumulation
emerged through new crystallizations of nature–society relations that extend from
agricultural revolutions to new centres of world finance.
How we periodize capitalism has everything to do with how we understand the
system, and shapes how we analyze the present conjuncture of possibilities and
constraints. Of these latter, surely the apparent ecological moment looms large as we
confront a series of challenges that reads like a page torn from the Book of
Revelations: global warming (Monbiot 2006), species extinction (Leakey and Lewin
1995), peak oil (Heinberg 2003), water scarcity (Barlow 2008), unpredictable new
disease patterns (Davis 2007, Davis 2005). But the relations that underpin these
trajectories are not at all apparent in this list; the construction of an ‘ecological crisis’
driven by, but not constitutive of, capital accumulation hardly makes things better.
12 Jason W. Moore
Identifying a ‘crisis of the earth’ may be a reasonable way to cut into the problem
(Foster 1997), but it begs the question, If endless accumulation is the strategic
mediating relation of humans and the rest of nature in the modern world, how do we
know the crisis of the earth except through this relation?
The problem, for left ecology, is that our constructs of capitalism as a historical–
geographical formation, and of its phases of development, are scarcely rooted in the
relations between human- and extra-human nature in the capitalist oikeios. Instead,
we tend to view today’s biospheric challenges as consequences of capitalism – rather
than constitutive of the capitalist mode of production.8 Capitalism has been premised
on a fragmented relation of nature, pivotal to its expanded reproduction: the
internalization of nature qua human labor power (reclassified as ‘social’) and the
externalization of nature as ‘free gift’, to use Marx’s well-turned (and emphatically
critical) phrase. (As we shall see, these free gifts include human nature.) A
periodization of capitalism premised on just one of these moments is manifestly
insufficient to the challenges of the present conjuncture. Amongst the crucial

questions are these: How does the history of capitalism look different from the
standpoint of the nature–society dialectic? In what ways might these differences lead
us to (re)think capitalism in ways that inform our analysis of, and our political
responses to, the present crisis?
In posing such questions, my intention is push the broadly constructionist
perspective on nature–society relations onto the terrain of actually existing capitalism.
The task immediately calls for a grasping of the deep structures connecting
accumulation crisis and ecological crisis, as conventionally understood. If the
alienation of nature and society has been de-stabilized in social theory (e.g. Braun
and Castree 1998, Dickens 1992, Redclift and Benton 1994, Barry 1999, Foster 1999),
social reductionism remains secure in its hegemony over the theory of social change,
represented by a broadly defined historical sociology (Moore 1966, Wallerstein 1974,
Wolf 1982). Here I refer to the categories bounding, and the analytical narratives
emerging from, modernity’s ‘master processes’ (1984) – commercialization, indus-
trialization, demographic movements, social revolutions, development, imperialism,
financial expansions, geopolitics, the accumulation of capital.
Perhaps most fruitful has been O’Connor’s notion of a ‘second contradiction’
(1998). O’Connor’s innovation was to attempt a synthesis of the capital–labor
antagonism (a ‘first contradiction’ of overproduction) and the capital–ecology
antagonism (a ‘second contradiction’ of underproduction). For O’Connor, rising
costs issuing from the degradation of the conditions of production has set in motion
a dynamic that will fetter accumulation from the supply-side. This contradiction
reinforces difficulties the system already faces in the realization of surplus value
through the sale of commodities. I have characterized the second contradiction as a
dialectical antagonism of capital and ecology (not nature, not environment) for a
specific reason. The second contradiction is emphatically not a narrow theory of
‘environmental’ degradation but rather one of the degradation of the socio-
ecological relations and conditions (the oikeios, in my terms) necessary for the
vigorous accumulation of capital. This might take the form of soil exhaustion or
deforestation; but it might also take the form of defunding public education or the
8
The enclosure of the atmosphere as a trash bin for capital’s CO2 emissions, for example,
has been a necessary condition of production for capital as a whole in the era since the
Industrial Revolution.
deterioration of vital infrastructures. However provisionally, O’Connor’s great

contribution is to lay out a guiding thread for excavating and connecting the socio-
ecological relations inscribed in both contradictions. Whatever the pitfalls of
O’Connor’s innovation, the act of bringing ‘political ecology’ and ‘political
economy’ together into a unified theory of accumulation crisis can only be
applauded.
The challenges of weaving together such a unified theory are considerable. To
help us in the task, we may turn to the great divide between the theory of
accumulation and the production of nature in the work of John Bellamy Foster and
David Harvey – two of our leading theorists of accumulation and (but not in) the
environment (inter alia, Foster 1992, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2009, Foster
and Magdoff 2009, Harvey 1982, 1989, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2005). We may begin with
the observation that the production of nature enjoys little traction in either scholar’s
theory of accumulation. Foster, heir to Baran and Sweezy’s (1966) monopoly
capital theory, has had little to say about the political ecology of the ‘tendency of the
surplus to rise’ and ‘normality’ of stagnation in late capitalism. Harvey’s enduring
contribution is the theory of spatial fix (1982), highlighting the irreducibly
geographical character of crisis formation and crisis resolution in metropolitan
accumulation. And yet, the theory of spatial fix remains at some distance from the
elegant simplicity of his argument that all social projects are ecological projects and
vice-versa (Harvey 1996). What is the political ecology of the spatial fix, of time–
space compression (Harvey 1989), of the body as accumulation strategy (Harvey
1998b)?
How do we bring together these mighty contributions, such that accumulation
becomes a bundle of socio-ecological relations? Such that, to paraphrase Williams
(1980, 83), we have mixed these two moments so deeply that the relation between
them is always visible?
The landscape of crisis theory is treacherous ground. Crisis theories are
fundamentally predictive enterprises. They build up and out from the analysis and
experience of previous crises. At their best, they discern underlying forces that have
not generated crisis, but will do so if they continue unchecked. Foster (2002a)
criticizes O’Connor on the grounds that while rising costs from environmental
degradation may have some purchase on regional developments, the theory of the
second contradiction cannot account for the stagnation of the world-economy since
the 1970s. Criticizing any tendency to define ‘ecological Marxism’ as a narrow crisis
theory confined to the second contradiction, Foster rejects the possibility that the
capitalist remaking of world nature might fetter accumulation. He puts the matter
baldly: ‘there is no such feedback mechanism [as O’Connor would have it] – at least
for capitalism as a whole’ (Foster 2002a; also Burkett 2003). Capitalism, contends
Foster, will not likely be fettered by ‘the most blatant ecological destruction’.
Underproduction crises, in this reckoning, belong in the past, not the future, of
capitalism:
Logically . . . rising raw material costs and other costs associated with natural scarcity
could undermine profit margins and generate economic crisis. This factor played a role
in nineteenth century accumulation crises, as reflected in the classical theory of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It is always important to capital that such costs,
associated with natural scarcity, be kept down. Yet, there is no evidence that such costs
constitute serious, insuperable barriers to accumulation for the system as a whole today.
(Foster 2002a, emphasis added)
14 Jason W. Moore
There is a problem here, however. O’Connor’s theory of the second

contradiction does not posit ‘natural scarcity’ as the prime mover. Foster has
projected his own binary onto O’Connor’s theory and reduced the diversity of the
‘conditions of production’ into rising input costs from natural scarcity. Quite
understandably, from his Cartesian perspective, Foster confuses one of the
phenomenal forms of the second contradiction with its inner logic. This logic,
capitalism’s tendency to degrade the conditions of production necessary for its
own survival, plays out in finance no less than farming, a matter to which we turn
presently. The second contradiction, in other words, is not centrally about
resource exhaustion as commonly understood. Rather, it is about capitalism’s
tendency to fetter the provision of the human labor power, built environments,
and resources necessary for expanded accumulation.
In these terms, Wall Street is a way of organizing nature. The financial
speculation that reinforced underlying contradictions in the production of food,
energy, and metals in the period 2003–2008 was a decisive moment of the
‘degradation of the conditions of production’, every bit as much as soil exhaustion or
toxification. It makes no difference to capital if it is financialization, geological
depletion, or ‘resource nationalism’ that undermines cheap oil. This is no mere
quibble. Foster’s Cartesianism prevents him from noting that the large-scale
penetration of finance capital into the global reproduction of human and extra-
human nature represents a new phase of nature–society relations in historical
capitalism. From the agrofood sector to working class households that depend on
credit cards to pay medical bills, global nature (as oikeios) has become dependent on
a circuit of capital that has surficially liberated itself from the direct production of
physical commodities – M-Mþ rather than M-C-Mþ (van der Ploeg 2010, Labban
2010, Moore 2010c). Finance capital in the neoliberal era has penetrated Braudel’s
‘structures of everyday life’ (1981) and in so doing has sought to remake human and
extra-human nature in its own image. Beginning in the 1970s, finance capital has
decisively reshaped the rules of reproduction for the totality of nature–society
relations – extending, horrifically, to the molecular relations of life itself (McAfee
2003). The ‘time–space compression’ immanent to capital’s drive to reduce turnover
time (Harvey 1982, 1989) has not only led to a frantic and frenetic expansion of
fictitious commodities (collateralized debt swaps and the like) and their global trade.
The latest round of time–space compression has also realized a gruesomely peculiar
mixture of the speed-up in the production of all nature: the shift from the 45- to the
57-second ‘minute’ in autowork (Moody 1997, 88); faster-growing transgenic salmon
(Kelso 2003); faster-milking, hormone-injected cows (DuPuis and Geisler 1988); and
perhaps most spectacularly, the transition from the 73-day chicken in 1955 the
42-day chicken in 2005 (Boyd 2002, 637, Weis 2007, 61).
If accumulation unfolds through the production of nature–society relations – in
factories and financial centers no less than forests and fields – Foster’s critique may
generate more heat than light. Foster rightly objects to any excessively narrow
conception of biophysical crisis that derives its motive power from a narrow
conception of accumulation crisis. But this objection goes only so far. Deconstruc-
tion calls for reconstruction. What unifies the ‘rich totality’ of accumulation crisis
and biophysical tipping points? If O’Connor’s second contradiction tracks the
emergence of a new crisis tendency within late capitalism – and in part, the
reassertion of an older, underproductionist crisis tendency that ruled the roost
during the formative centuries of early capitalism (Moore 2007) – then one would
expect the accumulation crises emerging from the second contradiction to be slow in
building, rapid and explosive in their detonation.
A theory of capitalism that identifies the convergence of rapidly moving and
explosive contradictions need not succumb to catastrophism. (A word that runs like
red thread though Foster’s work.) Harvey (1998a) rightly observes that a perspective
premised on ‘the view that environmental catastrophe is imminent is a sign of
weakness’. But invoking catastrophe and theorizing crisis are distinct. Harvey is
surely amongst our most powerful exponents of a relational ontology of nature–
society relations and a groundbreaking theorist of accumulation crisis. And yet, in
his recent accounts of neoliberalism, the connection between the two is unclear
(Harvey 2003, 2005). We are treated to a social reductionist narrative that, however
brilliant, leaves behind nature–society relations as an organizing principle. My point
here is to underscore the enormity of the larger challenge, that of translating
relational ontologies into narratives of modern world history – of moving from a
red–green social theory to a red–green theory and method of world–historical

change. As I will show later, Harvey provides a big part of what is needed to meet
this larger challenge. For in Harvey’s (1982) theory of spatial fix, the initial flexibility
of capital and acceleration of turnover time achieved through a ‘built environment’
favorable to capital in one era becomes a fetter upon accumulation in the next. In
this way, the remaking of nature–society relations in successive eras liberates
accumulation only to imprison its ‘future paths’ (Harvey 1991).
If we can agree that civilization today is moving through a transition that will
compel fundamental revisions in the organization of all life on this planet, any
attempt to grasp the whole of this transition implies a transcendence of the structures
of knowledge implicated in the crisis itself. There are of course many necessary
points of departure in such a process, and on offer is only one. This is the case for
grasping the origins and development of capitalism’s crisis tendencies in their
totality, differentiated and contingent, yet unified, as oikeios. I have drawn upon
O’Connor, Foster, and Harvey for this radically reconstructive purpose; to identify
the synthesis that is now possible (and necessary!) on the basis of these accounts of
crisis. O’Connor’s unified theory of accumulation crisis points towards, but does not
provide, a history of capitalism. Foster’s brilliant history of capitalism (1994) points
towards a ‘red–green’ world-historical synthesis, but elides the possibilities for such a
synthesis offered in the theory of accumulation crisis. Harvey pioneered a historical–
geographical materialism whose core principles are the irreducibly spatial character
of accumulation ‘fixes’ and crises, and the irreducible socio-ecological nature of all
‘social’ relations, but has yet to systematically combine these. How do we mobilize
the potentialities inscribed in these mighty contributions?
With Foster and Harvey, we begin by returning to Marx. For Marx, thinking
capitalism consists of two dialectical movements. The first is the theory of capital, as
we see in the first volume of Capital (1976). The second is the history of capitalism,
such as we see, quite early, in The German ideology (Marx and Engels 1970). The
productive tension between the two moments is central to the present exploration. It
is no mere happenstance that Marx reordered the ‘general law of capitalist
accumulation’ (theory of capital) and the discussion of ‘primitive accumulation’
(history of capitalism) into a single concluding part of Capital in the last edition (the
French, 1882) he prepared before his death (Dunayevskaya 1982). This dialectic,
between the theory of accumulation crisis and a historical account of capitalism as
ecological regime, has scarcely been explored in left ecology.
16 Jason W. Moore
Taking value as an eductive method acknowledges the increasing centrality of

value relations in the modern world-system over the past five centuries. My point of
departure for such a method proceeds from the irreducibly socio-ecological
constitution of ‘value’ itself (as process and project) – its internalization of human
nature through commodified labor power, and its externalization of extra-human
nature through the treatment of nature as a free gift. Value emerges in and through
Braudel’s ‘market economy’ (1982), weaving together the ethereal valences of finance
capital and the prosaic routines of everyday life in new world-historical crystal-
lizations of power and profit, pivoting on the commodity. In this light, the
apparently external relations of capitalism to nature – codified in the metabolic rift
and its closely linked theory of dual crises (Magdoff 2002) – are revealed as inner
relations (capitalism-in-nature), constitutive of new, and profoundly restless, socio-
ecological configurations.
In order to move from value as eductive method to a world-historical, and world-
ecological, theory of value as guiding thread, I now turn first to Marx’s theory of
value, and then to a neglected aspect of Marx’s theory of crisis premised on the
underproduction of circulating capital (raw materials and energy) in the accumulation
process.
Value as method: capital, capitalism, and the commodity frontier

If everything is ecological because ecology is everything, let us be clear from the
outset that the search for unified theory of crisis in historical capitalism – grounded
in the contradictory mass and mess of the oikeios – does not entail the collapsing of
distinctions. Far from it! Rather, the approach on offer opens up the very possibility
foreclosed by the Cartesian theory of dual crises – the construction of relational,
rather than substantialist, distinctions.
In what follows, I take Marx’s lead and begin from the production of value
(1976). Mine is, as Bernstein rightly notes (2010), a capital-centric approach that
brackets the necessary questions of class struggles and social movements. Alas, we
cannot do everything at once. The emergent contradictions of the accumulation
process constitute the point of departure for a larger project that unifies the history
of capitals, natures, and class struggles as mutually relational movements in the
modern world-system; only the barest outlines can only be suggested at this moment.
Capital-centrism is not by nature capital-reductionism. Certainly, these contra-
dictions provide only a necessary, and not sufficient, explanation of historical
change.9 The law of value itself emerged only as class struggles in late medieval
Europe propelled the expansion of commodity production and exchange overseas
(Moore 2003a, 2007). The contradictions of value, embodied in the commodity form,
are variously enabled and constrained by the contest of classes ‘from above’ and
‘from below’. These contradictions and contests have intertwined with the
9
‘Marx himself pointed out that the abstract scheme of capitalist development was not enough
to provide any predictions about the actual world. All crises in capitalism must be explained
out of the given empirical conditions, ‘‘out of the real movement of capitalist production,
competition, and credit’’ [Marx]. The value analysis of capital development postulates ‘‘the
possibility of crises by a mere consideration of the general nature of capital, without regard to
the additional and real relations that form the conditions of the real production process’’
[Marx]’ (Mattick 1969, 61).
production of nature from the beginning of capitalism – the German Peasants’ War
(1525) was in great measure a class struggle over the forest commons, retreating
quickly at the time as metallurgical capitalism advanced rapidly in Central Europe
(Blickle 1981, Moore 2007, chapter two).
My decision to begin from value theory emerges from three observations. First,
the law of value, established through capital’s ruthless drive to commodify
everything existing, establishes the durable and pivotal ‘stakes of the game’
(Bourdieu 1990, 110) that have been struggled over since the sixteenth century.
Just as the history of class struggle in the feudal era emerges in and through the
contest over the rate of seigneurial levy (Bois 1978), so the struggles of capitalism
unfold through the contest over the rate of surplus value. I do not mean to suggest
that this is the end of the story; but it is hard to begin the story without reference to
these stakes.
Second, value as world-historical project presupposes something false, that all
of nature can be reduced an interchangeable part; at the same time, it powerfully

effects the partial transformation of nature into simplified spaces, such as cash-
crop monocultures. Perhaps most significantly, the emergence and development of
the law of value as historical–material movement is inconceivable without the
symbolic and scientific revolutions that ‘discovered’ the homogeneity of time and
space in early modern Europe (Crosby 1997). Progressively consolidated as the
metric of wealth in the modern world – after 1450 there would be no systemic
reversals of commodification – the value form enabled all manner of ‘metrical
revolutions’ outside the immediate circuit of capital (Scott 1998), but clearly
homologous to value’s simplifying thrust. Foucault’s biopolitical ‘power of
regularization’ (2003) is unimaginable except in a symbolic–material world
orbiting around value’s fantasies of homogenizable time and space. Indeed,
successive revolutions in the ‘measurement of reality’ (Crosby 1997) have been the
necessary precondition for subsequent movements of widening and deepening the
commodification of all life.
Finally, I begin with a historically-grounded approach to value because we have
a situation where, on the one hand, advocates of a relational ontology of society-in-
nature have been reluctant to move towards an interpretation of capitalism as world-
historical and world-ecological process.10 Environmental historians, on the other
hand, are (quite reasonably) focused on landscape change, energy consumption,
pollution, and so forth – the surficial expressions of modern nature–society relations
– but have been wary to move from ‘environment’ to oikeios and back again.11 A
world-historical recuperation of value theory offers, I believe, a fruitful way forward
without abandoning the insights of either camp. With Marx, I will move from the
analysis of what makes capital to what capital makes, from the logic of capital to the
history of capitalism.
10
Smith takes pains to distinguish his ‘production-of-nature thesis’ from social
constructionism, and persuasively so (2006). For my purposes, I wish to bracket this debate
as one unfolding with a broader camp of non-Cartesian left ecology (e.g. Braun and Castree
1998, Harvey 1993, 1996, Levins and Lewontin 1985, Smith 1984, Williams 1980).
11
Pivots of discussion in environmental history include Cronon (1983, 1991, 1996), Crosby
(1972, 1986), Dean (1995), Gadgil and Guha (1992), Grove (1995), McNeill (2000), Merchant
(1980, 1989), White (1995), Worster (1985, 1990). McNeill (2003) and Hughes (2006) offer
impressive surveys.
18 Jason W. Moore
Value theories are of course hotly contested, Marxist, green, and otherwise
(Harvey 1996, Daly and Townsend 1993). My deployment of Marx’s theory takes
value as a means of understanding how such an extraordinary circulation of wealth
has come to move about with such relative autonomy from the practices and utilities
of everyday life, human no less than extra-human nature (the sources of all wealth, as
Marx emphasized). In my reading, the crystallization of value as abstract social labor
in the capitalist era represents: (1) a fundamental contradiction between value and
use-value, whose inner contradiction finds (temporary) resolution in the secular trend
towards the commodification of everything; (2) not merely an objective process of
accumulation, but equally a subjective project of world power; and (3) a world-
historical process and project of reordering the totality of the nature–society dialectic,
such that one biophysical moment is internalized qua human labor power (reclassified
as ‘social’) and another is externalized through the progressive subsumption of the
rest of nature as a free gift to capital. The production of nature, in other words, is
constitutive of capitalism’s inner logic – the contradiction between monetary value

and use-value, between nature as labor power and nature as resource, between
competition for endless gain and cooperation for necessary survival.
Why Marx’s value theory? Is this not an anti-ecological formulation that
explicitly denies nature’s contribution to capitalist development?12 Allow me to
interweave two responses, one from the theory of capital, another from the history of
capitalism. We can begin by clarifying that value, in Marx’s hands, represents a
historically-specific form of wealth – whose ‘original sources’ are land and labor
(Marx 1976, 638). Taking shape during the long transition to capitalism, here was a
form of wealth that pivoted on endless commodification. During this era, a most
peculiar valuation emerged, one centered on the activity of that ‘value forming
substance’, human labor power (Marx 1976, 129). This crystallization of value as
socially necessary labor time – the average social labor time embodied in any given
commodity – illuminates an ever-widening disjuncture in the history of the modern
world, between value and use-value. In a system such as capitalism, driven towards
endless accumulation through the surreal compulsions of ceaseless competition,
there unfolds a widening gap between the accumulation of value and the socio-
ecological relations that enable such accumulation. When this gap widens too far,
developmental ecological crises occur.
If ‘land productivity’ was given primacy in pre-capitalist civilizations, ‘labor
productivity’ became the metric of wealth in the capitalist era. It is a simple, and
simplifying, logic. More and more extra-human nature attaches to every quantum of
socially necessary labor time. Fewer people produce more stuff. Land is sacrificed on
the altar of labor productivity. I would go so far as to say that an intuitive (and
certainly indirect) sense of Marx’s value theory has been a centerpiece of green
consciousness since the 1970s: the recognition of (so-called) ‘industrial’ agriculture’s
colossal energy- and nutritional-inefficiency (Perelman 1977, Pimentel et al. 1973).
Indeed, capital-intensive agriculture has become more, not less, central to rising
energy consumption in the Global North, contributing a stunning ‘80 percent of
energy flow increases’ in the US between 1997 and 2002 (Canning et al. 2010, 1). The
flip side of such profligate energy consumption was a greater than eightfold increase
in the labor productivity of advanced capitalist agriculture between 1945 and the
12
See, inter alia, Bunker’s classic critique (1985). A useful review of the ‘value problem’ in
ecological economics is found in Burkett (2006).
mid-1980s (Bairoch 1989). What the more-or-less conventional green critique is

unable to explain is how this colossal inefficiency is not merely an output of the
system, but constitutive of it. For this peculiar valuation of wealth as abstract social
labor – labor productivity – favors socio-ecological developments that reward the
rapid exhaustion of nature (including human nature), so long as external supplies can
be secured.
We can glimpse the emergence of this peculiar valuation from the earliest moments
of the transition to capitalism, during Braudel’s (1953) ‘long’ sixteenth century (1450–
1648). In this era, value, as world-ecological process, began to take shape out of the
global extensions of commodity production and exchange, stretching from the silver
mines of Saxony and Potosı́, the sugar plantations of Brazil and Barbados, the timber
frontiers of Scandinavia and the Baltic. This was early capitalism’s ‘commodity
frontier’ strategy, and it was decisive to an epochal shift because it raised labor
productivity by treating uncapitalized nature as a substitute for machinery. At every
turn, land (forests, silver veins, fertile soils) was organized by empires, planters,
seigneurs, yeoman farmers and many others, as a force of production in servitude to the
commodity form, as a mechanism for maximizing the productivity of labor. It was
precisely the emergence of this value relation – driving a growing disjuncture between
monetary accumulation on the basis of abstract social labor and the ‘physical body’ of
the growing mass of commodities – that explains an extraordinary shift in the
production of nature after 1450 (Moore 2007, 2010a, 2010b).
Civilizations before capitalism transformed landscapes on a large scale: feudal
Europe, the Greek city-states, the Romans, successive Chinese empires, the
Sumerians, and many more. In every instance, there were vital clusters of commercial
activity and commodity production that were often quite important to such episodes
of transformation. What changed after 1450 were the relevant units of time and space.
Premodern civilizations transformed regions over the span of centuries. Capitalism
transformed regional landscapes in mere decades. Through the capacities of
monetary capital to command, and indeed to produce, space, there emerged a
fundamentally globalizing mode of producing wealth, nature, and power centered on
the commodity form. As central to its era as railroads or automobiles to others, sugar
production moved, in roughly half-century cycles, across the Atlantic world after
1450, from Madeira to São Tomé, enclosing in successive turns Pernambuco, Bahia,
Barbados, and thence the wider Caribbean. Silver mining flowered in central Europe,
moving restlessly from one site to another (Freiberg to Jáchymov). It then relocated
through the alchemies of imperial power and finance capital to Potosı́, half a world
away, only to give way in turn to the great silver mines Zacatecas and Guanajuato in
the eighteenth century. Commodity frontiers premised on forest products, on fish, on
iron and copper, on cereals and flax, moved with the same socio-spatial rhythm
(although as dance, not lockstep), occupying, producing, and exhausting in serialized
fashion the ecological formations of the North Atlantic, from the shores of
Newfoundland to southern Norway to the banks of the Vistula and the foothills of
the Urals (Moore 2010a, 2010b). And far from the facile representation of early
capitalism as technologically or socially inert, every movement of global occupation
and transformation signaled a new phase of social organization, technical
deployment, and landscape discipline. Never before had any ecological regime qua
mode of production moved so fast, so far. Something decisive had changed.
To call that ‘something’ nature–society relations would merely restate the very
problem we seek to answer. But if we can accept, even provisionally, that value theory
20 Jason W. Moore
identifies a ‘deep structure’ of historical capitalism that gives priority to labor

productivity, and mobilizes extra-human nature without regard for the socio-ecological
conditions of its (uncapitalized) reproduction, we have more than a simple restatement
of the problem. We have an interpretation of capitalism premised on a fundamental
disequilibrium in the (value) relation of nature and society that makes the system. If we,
moreover, follow Marx and identify the external vent (the frontier) as central – recall
how he moves in successive chapters at the end of Capital from the ‘conquest’ of the
national ‘home market’ to the ‘commercial wars . . . which [have] the globe as its
battlefield’, to the ‘growth of the international character of the capitalist regime’ and its
mounting systemic contradictions (1976, 913, 915, 929) – then we may begin to see the
successive resolutions of the disequilibrating tendency as essentially self-limiting. And
yet, let us be clear, such a formulation ‘impl[ies] the possibility of crises, though no more
than the possibility’ (Marx 1976, 209). To realize this possibility analytically, one must
move from the logic of capital to the history of capitalism.
It would be mystifying to say that the limits of capitalism are ultimately

determined by the biosphere itself, although in an abstract sense this is true. More to
the point, the possibilities for overcoming the antagonism inscribed in the value form
itself are determined by capitalism as a system, that web of relations interconnecting
value accumulation with the socio-ecological relations that variously enable and
limit the endless accumulation of capital. Most fundamental, the historical
conditions through which a series of ecological revolutions have been realized –
each yielding a quantum leap in the mass of ‘physical bodies’ available for
commodity production – may be understood as essentially non-substitutable, or at
best, substitutable only within very definite limits. Capitalism has moved from peat
and charcoal to coal to oil, from the breadbaskets of the Vistula, southern England,
the American Midwest, from labor frontiers in Europe and Africa, Latin America,
and South and East Asia. These are not repeatable events. Substitutability does not
unfold through infinite time and space.
Marx’s conception of value seems to offer a useful way to cut through the mass of
appearances and to discern not merely the patterned movements of nature–society
relations over the longue dureé, but the logic animating the emergence and evolution
of those patterns. I have called this method eductive because we are locating value as
a ‘gravitational center’, to borrow Shaikh’s (2004) nicely turned phrase. The patterns
themselves move at once in quasi-linear and contingent fashion. Premised on the
dialectical antagonism of monetary accumulation (‘into which all commodities
dissolve themselves’) and material transformation in commodity production (where
money ‘dissolves itself into all commodities’) (Marx 1973, 142), and a recognition of
capital accumulation as both objective process and subjective project, Marx’s
value theory offers a promising way to comprehend the inner connections between
accumulation, biophysical change, and modernity as a whole. From this vantage
point, we may begin to formulate a provisional theorization of capitalism’s tendency
towards underproduction as a missing constitutive moment in the theory of capitalist
crisis.
Marx’s theory of underproduction, part I: capitalization, appropriation, and the

ecological surplus
We have become accustomed to thinking that crises in historical capitalism are
overproduction crises. David Harvey, for instance, identifies the 1840s as the
occasion of the ‘first’ capitalist crisis (2003, 42). If this is so, such crises are a very
recent development in the history of capitalism. So powerful is the sense that
capitalism’s fundamental crisis tendency is overproduction, that the decisive passage
in the Penguin translation of the third volume of Capital (1981) reads ‘over-
production’ when it should read ‘underproduction’.13
The major crisis tendency of early capitalism, from the 1450s to the early
nineteenth century, was underproduction – the insufficient flow of food, energy, and
materials relative to the demands of value production. Early capitalism’s greatest
problem centered on the delivery of cheap food and inputs to the factory gate, not in
selling the commodities that issued from manufacturing centres. The Dutch Republic
was the ‘model capitalist nation’ of the seventeenth century (Marx 1976, 916)
because it organized and led a world-ecological regime that delivered cheap grain
(from Poland), cheap energy (from domestic peat), and cheap timber (from Norway
and the Baltic) to the northern Netherlands (Moore 2010a, 2010b). When this regime
faltered, definitively by the 1760s, the British married technical ingenuity with
geological good fortune to move from increasingly expensive woodfuel to
increasingly cheap coal. This marriage inverted the dialectical primacy of under-
production and overproduction in favor of the latter, setting the stage for two
centuries of remarkable expansion. But take note that we are dealing with a matter
of dialectical primacy, not a transcendence of early capitalism’s inner logic; both
crisis tendencies are always present. The international crisis of 1847, to stick with
Harvey’s example, was driven by the ‘excessive expansion’ of the railroads, an
overproduction crisis that was facilitated by a moment of underproduction, as crop
failures swept through northwestern Europe and cereal prices moved sharply
upwards in 1845–47 (Mandel 1971, 1972).
Marx’s theory of underproduction crisis – he calls it a ‘general law’ of
accumulation – holds that ‘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. And yet, 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’ (pp. 118–119). Here, the
‘overproduction’ of machinery (fixed capital) finds its dialectical antagonism in the
‘underproduction’ of raw materials (circulating capital) (Marx 1967 III, 119).14
Thus, an enduring priority of capitalism has been to drive down the share of
circulating relative to fixed capital, driving down the value composition of inputs and
energy while simultaneously expanding the material volume of commodity
production. Hence the centrality of frontiers of appropriation throughout the
history of capitalism. Not only has capital sustained itself on the basis of cheap
13
‘The more capitalist production is developed, bringing with it greater means for a sudden
and uninterrupted increase in the portion of constant capital that consists of machinery, etc.,
the greater is the relative overproduction of machinery and other fixed capital, the more
frequent the overproduction [sic] of plant and animal raw materials, and the more marked the
previously described rise in their price and the corresponding reaction’ (Marx 1981, 214,
emphasis added).
14
I have stuck to convention and spoken of material inputs to production as ‘raw material’.
The category itself is part of the problem I am addressing: ‘‘‘Raw materials’’ is a euphemism,
because in the world of human beings no materials are truly raw. They are all ‘‘cooked’’ in
some degree. There is simply no such thing for humans as ‘‘nature in the raw’’’ (Young 1985).
22 Jason W. Moore
inputs, but by revolutionizing the socio-ecological relations of production on a

systemwide level, it has mobilized a succession of ‘great leaps forward’ in the relative
ecological surplus. (About this surplus, I will have more to say presently.) These
great leaps forward in the relative ecological surplus are perhaps most apparent in
the great energy transitions of the modern world, with their resplendent free gifts:
from peat and charcoal (1450s–1830s), to coal (1750s–1950s), to oil and natural gas
(1870s–present). They were great expansions of the relative ecological surplus
because the appropriations of nature’s free gifts were sufficiently massive to induce
the rising productivity of labor while reducing the capital intensity of production in
general. But I would caution against the conventional view that sees a ‘structurally
invariant’ capitalism (or industrial society) incorporating new external resources (e.g.
Heinberg 2003). These energy sources did not make capitalism so much as capitalism
remade itself through their incorporation.15 To paraphrase Marx, coal is coal. It
becomes fossil fuel ‘only in certain relations’ (1971, 28, emphasis added).
That is, every phase of capitalism marks not only an upward ratchet in material
throughput, but also produces and confronts a historically-specific ‘nature’. Industrial
capitalism gave us Darwin and the Kew Gardens; neoliberal capitalism, Monsanto
and biotechnology.16 This dialectic of quantitative and qualitative variation in
humanity’s engagements with the rest of nature is important for historically-grounded
theory. A cornerstone of neoclassical thought, I would note, rests on an ahistorical and
nature-blind paradigm that views humans and the rest of nature as essentially
interchangeable and inexhaustible – this is the theory of substitutability (Perelman
2007). Strikingly, some of the most widely circulated conceptual tropes in critical
environmental studies – the ‘ecological footprint’ and ‘ecologically unequal exchange’
– engage in the same flattening of nature’s diversity. It is a fetishized nature that moves
through time and space but not history and geography; through ‘economies’ but not
the socio-ecological relations of capital and capitalism.
Ecological revolutions, then, revolutionize the specifically capitalist oikeios, and
in so doing, revolutionize both human nature (‘society’, ‘economy’, ‘culture’, and so
forth) and extra-human nature. The cumulative development of the capitalist world-
ecology unfolds through qualitative ruptures in humanity’s symbolic and material
engagement with the web of life. By driving down the capitalized share of world
15
‘‘‘[R]esources’’ can be defined only in relationship to the mode of production which seeks to
make use of them and which simultaneously ‘‘produces’’ them through both the physical and
mental activity of the users. There is, therefore, no such thing as a resource in abstract or a
resource which exists as a ‘‘thing in itself’’’(Harvey 1974, 265).
16
Yes, there is a ‘nature’ that exists independently of what one thinks of it. But the fact remains
that our best guide to the relation between signifier (nature) and signified (the biological,
geological, etc.) is historically-grounded theory. Young cuts to the heart of the issue: ‘[N]ature
exists apart from us, but only as a noumenon, a category of the last instance, without any
qualification or characterization. For [capitalism], nature is an object of labor, a resource, a
manifold, an attic, or a cellar, or a boxroom to be ransacked . . . It is a potential to be
actualized by different epochs with different goals, different priorities, different cosmologies,
different world views and agendas. The metaphysical basis of reality, of experience, of
investigation, changes. Ontologies change, epistemologies change, methodologies change. At a
more mundane academic level, there are paradigms, research programmes, disciplines, grand
theories – all of which are formed and constituted by the contradictions and moving resolution
of class forces of different epochs. This is a dynamic, dialectical historical process, born in
conflict and struggle. At any point in time science and technology, medicine and philosophy,
art and the theatre reflect the existing state of tension of the historical forces at work’ (Young
1985, emphases added).
nature and increasing the share that can be freely appropriated, these revolutions of
the capitalist oikeios ‘work’ by expanding the relative ecological surplus. This surplus
finds its chief phenomenal expressions in cheap labor power, food, energy, and non-
energy inputs such as metals, wood, and fibers – cheap, in a world-historical sense, to
the degree that they issue a downward revision of systemic capitalization relative to
appropriation.
‘Ecological surplus’ is the share of world surplus value produced through two forms
of accumulation by appropriation, one pivoting on processes of biophysical
reproduction (labor power, forestry, agriculture), the other, on geological extractions
(energy and minerals). In ecological revolutions, both forms raise labor productivity
above the prevailing systemwide average without a corresponding increase in constant
capital (machinery and inputs). They also reduce the costs of reproducing labor power
in highly capitalized zones of the system – cheap energy, for instance, made possible the
highly suburbanized and automobilized working classes of North America (Huber
2009). We may consider these in their respective turns. The first comprises the
appropriation of socio-ecological relations whose reproduction is relatively autono-
mous of the circuit of capital. This is of course one of the great storylines of capitalism’s
long history of depeasantization. Labor power ‘produced’ by peasant formations
within reach of capitalist power, but not yet subordinated fully to the law of value, is
labor power with a low value composition. If capitals and empires can secure new
frontiers with bountiful supplies of such cheap labor power (which necessarily rest upon
extra-human webs of reproduction), the effect on the accumulation process is
tantamount to a global wage cut or a rising rate of exploitation. In the rise of
capitalism, when peasantries within much of Europe proved capable of resisting feudal
restoration, the African slave trade, eastern Europe’s ‘second serfdom’, and colonial
labor regimes such as Peru’s mita played a similar role to the dispossession of
peasantries (Moore 2007, 2010a, 2010b). The same story can be told, with different
backdrops and casts of characters, for all manner of ‘biological’ commodity frontiers –
the great forests of North America and Atlantic Brazil, whaling grounds and fisheries,
cash-crop agricultures such as sugar and cotton historically, and even soybeans today.
The second great moment of appropriation pivots on ‘non-renewable’ resources,
and above all energy. From the standpoint of world accumulation, the phase of
appropriation spans that era when the production of ‘strategic’ resources drives
down the value composition of systemwide commodity production. Such strategic
resources are mass commodities, ‘markers for entire historical epochs’ (Retort 2005,
39). Silver and iron, coal, then oil have served this function in successive long
centuries of accumulation. Energy sources are especially important because they
hold a special kind of labor productivity bonus; rising energy prices and stagnant
labor productivity growth are closely linked (Jorgenson 1981, 1984). Although
geological conditions are obviously crucial, this form of appropriation is not
essentially (but only relationally) a geological affair. This is the interpretative
problem with the ‘Hubbert’s Peak’ approach – turning on lagged discovery-
production curves – underpinning the notion that ours is an era of ‘peak everything’
(Heinberg 2007). Coal, for example, was epoch-making because it facilitated
productivity and plunder in the long nineteenth century. It boosted labor
productivity dramatically, and, thanks to steampower on land and sea, it opened
vast new frontiers for the appropriation of ecological reproduction, whose free gifts
included massive depeasantized labor flows from China, India, and eastern
Europe to North America, the Caribbean, and white settler zones worldwide
24 Jason W. Moore
(Northrup 1995, Wolf 1982). From this perspective, recent discussions of impending
‘peak coal’ are surely misplaced (e.g. Höök and Aleklett 2009), because the only
‘peak’ that capital as a whole cares about is peak appropriation – the point of
maximal reduction of the value composition of all moments of commodity
production (variable, circulating, and fixed capital within any accumulation cycle).
For coal, this point was reached sometime before World War I, driven partly by a
strong global movement towards oil as Middle Eastern production came of age,
partly by strong mineworker unions in the leading coal producing states (UK and
US), and partly by rising capital intensity (mechanization), itself driven forward by
geological depletion and worker militancy (Podobnik 2006).
For oil, arguably the decisive ‘mass commodity’ of the postwar era, we can safely
say that peak appropriation is now passed. I think this is the kernel of truth in the
popular expression, ‘The end of cheap oil’ (Campbell and Laherrère 1998). It is not
that the oil business has somehow become unprofitable; rather, production is
increasingly financialized in ways that undermine the world oil sector’s capacity to
deliver the goods – to deliver enough cheap oil to capital as a whole to check the
rising organic composition of capital. Depletion certainly plays a role in the rising
costs of production for petro-capitalists, and therefore influences oil commodity
prices. But financialization is the decisive socio-ecological vector here. The rising
attractiveness of M-Mþ , in full swing since the mid-1980s, induced a decades-long
‘underinvestment’ in the extractive apparatus proper (IEA 2008).17 Financialization
not only exerts upward pressure on oil prices and encourages market volatility. To
the extent that activities associated with M-Mþ are more profitable than investing in
exploration and extraction, financialization renders the latter insufficiently profit-
able, an effect homologous to (and reinforcing) the rising costs of production
stemming from depletion. Financialization’s logic has, moreover, given rise to all
manner of cost-cutting, now horrifically evident at the time of writing (June 2010) in
the Gulf of Mexico. For oil, gas, and coal, the transition from appropriation to
capitalization has brought with it a monstrous turn towards toxification on a
gigantic scale – from unprecedented oil spills to the ‘hydraulic fracturing’ of natural
gas exploitation to coal’s mountaintop removals, energy production in late
capitalism increasingly manifests as a qualitative leap forward in the erosion of
the conditions of human, never mind extra-human, well-being.
Ecological revolutions, then, set in motion an ecological surplus that benefits
capital as a whole by ‘freeing’ a critical mass of appropriated nature sufficient to
reduce the value composition of systemwide production. This has been important in
order to offset problems issuing not only from the rising capital intensity of
production within the metropolitan centres (the falling rate of profit), but also from
the rising capitalization of all life within these centres (the rising cost of inputs and
17
By 2008, the global oil sector had experienced more than two decades of ‘investment famine’
(The Times 2008). The top five supermajors spent just one percent of total expenditures on
stock buybacks in 1993, and nearly 14 percent on exploration. By 2006, they were spending 37
percent on equity repurchases, and just 5.8 percent on exploration (Jaffe and Soligo 2007, 21).
In 2004–2005, stock buybacks by the six largest firms jumped 60 percent (Mouawad 2005). Far
from limited to the private sector, the same logic underpinned a 75 percent decline in OPEC’s
spare capacity in the quarter-century after 1979 (Jaffe 2004). The revival of financial markets
after the 2008 meltdown has only exacerbated the tendency, with the International Energy
Agency estimating a 21 percent decline in global oil and gas investment between 2008 and 2009
(Lawler 2009).
labor power). The problem is that rising capitalization in the absence of rising
appropriation entrains the rising costs of production, tendencies which can be
counteracted by a massive enlargement of accumulation by appropriation on a
world-scale. Productivity-maximizing technologies (capitalization) revive system-
wide accumulation when it sets in motion the large-scale appropriation of
uncapitalized nature. This is why early capitalism was propelled by the ‘proto-
industrial’ appropriation of peasant labor power (human nature); and why twentieth
century Fordism was unthinkable without the North American and Middle Eastern
oil frontiers (extra-human nature). The class offensives of metropolitan ruling strata
after the downturn of the 1970s, the acceleration of dispossession and its shock
doctrines, and the ensuing financial expansion were of a piece – all aimed at
redistributing wealth in the face of the progressive dilapidation of metropolitan ‘real
economies’, manifested in the non-appearance of the ‘third’ scientific–technological
revolution and its promise of a quantum leap in labor productivity (Balakrishnan
2009, Harvey 2003, 2005, Moore 2010c, Petras 2002, Philips 2008). The savage
nature of this neoliberal counter-revolution surely owes something to the exhaustion
of opportunities for appropriation sufficient to counteract the rising costs of human
and extra-human nature induced by rising capitalization.
The long history of colonialism, enclosure, and ‘accumulation by dispossession’
– aimed at mobilizing abstract social nature without the costs and risks associated
with M-C-Mþ – may be understood in this light. The ecological surplus is
therefore a relational movement in multiple readings of the term: between capital
and labor, between metropoles and frontiers, between capitalization and
appropriation. If the value of any given commodity is determined by its abstract
social labor, and if this average quantum of social labor embedded in commodities
determines price movements over the long run, then high labor productivity is the
first priority of any capitalist enterprise. High labor productivity allows the
capitalist, via the market, to capture the surplus value of competing production
units with lower productivity. The great catch to this, which we will explore
momentarily, is that rising labor productivity is often mediated through rising
capital intensity, and this sets in motion the tendency towards a falling rate of
profit (Marx 1981). If, however, a means can be found to increase labor
productivity without a corresponding increase in constant capital, a new set of
possibilities emerges.
These possibilities take shape through vast frontiers of appropriation – a
relatively high share of appropriation in world value production constitutes a high
ecological surplus – that have characterized capitalism’s greatest waves of
accumulation. By reducing the systemwide capitalization of nature through global
appropriations that enabled a rising volume of nature’s bounty to attach to a given
unit of capital, these ecological revolutions have checked the tendency towards the
rising organic composition of capital. Directly, such revolutions cheapened raw
materials (circulating capital) and, indirectly, reduced the value composition of
fixed capital itself. Cheaper steel, for example, rendered the mass production of
fixed capital cheaper as well. In so doing, these revolutions created the necessary
conditions for new long waves of accumulation. Marx once observed that the
‘natural fertility of the soil can act like an increase of fixed capital’ (1973, 748),
and is this not equally true for the wealth of forests, of peat bogs, of coal seams
and oil fields? Once English capitalism was forced to rely on managed forests
(coppices) for a critical share of its iron production, it faced a situation of
26 Jason W. Moore
declining labor productivity and rising costs for fuel – and therefore, a rising value
composition for circulating and variable capital – sure signs of a declining
ecological surplus (Moore 2007, chapter two). The ensuing large-scale movement
towards coal via steampower represented the opening of a new large-scale frontier
of appropriation.
These movements of appropriation have spanned the history of capitalism. They
are the underappreciated moment of socio-technical innovation. The history of
‘capital-intensive’, epoch-making innovations – the early modern shipbuilding-
cartographic revolution, the nineteenth century steam engine, and the internal
combustion engine of the twentieth century among others – has been characterized
by important technical advances that ratcheted upwards the capital-intensity of
production in specific places, above all in the heartlands of the Dutch, British, and
American hegemonies. But these innovations were successful because the new
technologies operated through ecological regimes that expanded the opportunities
for the appropriation of human and extra-human nature. Indeed, socio-technical

innovations in commodity production have been epoch-making to the degree that
they have been linked with even more dramatic movements of appropriation. For
example, Manchester’s textile mills were dialectically bound to the American South’s
cotton frontier, this frontier was in turn was bound to Whitney’s cotton gin, enabling
the revolutionary expansion of short-staple cotton, and this was possible through the
globalizing credit chains pioneered by Scottish factors and the City of London’s
financial institutions (McMichael 1991). This angle of vision brings into focus the
combined and uneven development of highly capitalized pockets of production and
the globalizing appropriation of all nature as a dialectical unity. ‘Technological’
revolutions became epoch-making through their generative relations with hegemonic
projects, revolutionizing world-ecological space. In these three great hegemonic eras,
timber, coal, and oil were freely appropriated, with relatively minimal capital outlay.
Each epoch-making innovation has therefore joined together productivity and plunder in
a world-historical act that drives down the share of world nature directly dependent on
the circuit of capital.
The greatest of these movements was the railroad revolution of the ‘second’
nineteenth century, roughly between 1846 and 1914, the apogee and belle e´poque of
British hegemony (Headrick 1988). While railroad construction absorbed gigantic
amounts of capital – greatly attenuating the tendency towards overaccumulation
crisis (Baran and Sweezy 1966) – its greatest accomplishment was the radical
extension of the geographical arena for the appropriation of world nature as a free
gift. The epoch-making capital formation of railroadization turned on its capacity to
radically extend the appropriation of world nature. The rise of American capitalism
turned on the annihilation of space by time, materialized through those continent-
devouring ribbons of steel, appropriating the soil, water, forests, and metals of
North America into feedstock for monopoly capitalism (Moore 2002). But the
process was hardly limited to US ascent. Through railroadization – and later,
automobilization – vast ecological surpluses could be won from the minimally-
capitalized extraction of mineral resources, cereal cultivation, and so forth.18 Today,
in contrast, quite modest surpluses are now won from maximally-capitalized
extraction and cultivation.
18
Bunker highlights the indispensable role of transport revolutions in the modern world-
system (see Bunker 2005, for a useful synthesis of nearly two decades of conceptual work).
Marx’s theory of underproduction, part II: the combined and uneven development of the
capitalist world-ecology
We may now return to the dialectic of overproduction and underproduction. On the
one hand, competition drives capitalism to expand geographically, to zones where
extant commodification is low, and the opportunities for appropriation high. To the
degree that capital can ‘jump scale’ in this way, always in some concert with
territorialist agencies, it can drive down the cost of inputs and labor power, and in so
doing, increase the rate of profit. On the other hand, competition compels individual
capitals to innovate through rising capital intensity, such that relatively less human
nature (labor) and relatively more biophysical nature is embedded in every
commodity. This accelerates the uptake of human and extra-human natures into a
geometrically expansive production process, which intensifies the drive towards
geographical expansion. In this fashion, the quasi-linear movement of ‘time–space
compression’ finds its dialectical counterpoint in the quasi-linear movement of ‘time–

space appropriation’, the reworking of external spaces through the imposition of
capitalist time (Harvey 1989, Hornborg 2006).
For Marx, rising capital intensity – the rising organic composition of capital –
places downward pressure on the general rate of profit. The operative assumption
here is that aggregate profit, on balance, flows from aggregate surplus value, which is
generated and distributed unevenly (Marx 1976, 1981). Walker (1998) nutshells the
underlying tendency with typical verve:
Why [do] profit rates fall? The argument is simple. It is because the numerator in the profit
equation, surplus value, is outrun by the denominator, capital stock (both measured in
annual terms) . . . That is, too much capital stock builds up in factories and equipment
around the world, pitting companies against each other in an ever-fiercer competitive
brawl for markets. This holds prices down, leads commodity output to outrun demand at
prevailing prices, and/or lowers capacity utilization rates – thereby lowering profit
margins, leaving goods unsold and running equipment at less efficient levels.
If expansion across space (appropriation) represents one fix to the falling rate of

profit, innovation through time (capitalization) represents the second. The first
moment extends the net of energy-resource consumption ever more widely and
deeply, driving down the costs of circulating capital (inputs); the second
accomplishes the production of more commodities with fewer workers in less time,
driving down the costs of variable capital (labor power). Neither can be amplified
endlessly. Global space is not only relational, but asymptotic and finite from the
standpoint of endless accumulation. And although in theory, ‘constant capital’s
material volume’ may be augmented without limit (Marx 1981, 317), the rate of
exploitation operates within a much stickier field of power.
How does profitability revive? Marxists usually respond by emphasizing the role
of crises in propelling creative destruction by (1) devaluing fixed capital (such as
factory shutdowns), over the short-run; (2) increasing the rate of exploitation
through technical innovation; and (3) increasing absolute surplus value through
wage freezes or reductions (Walker 1998, Harvey 1982).
There is, of course, enormous debate over the relation between accumulation
crisis and the falling rate of profit.19 For the purposes at hand, I would prefer to
19
Useful surveys can be found in Mandel (1981) and Choonara (2009).
28 Jason W. Moore
bracket these, and simply point to a fourth moment. This turns on circulating
capital (inputs), but with important implications for variable capital as well. What
I wish to underscore is that Marx’s (1973, 748) ‘most important law’ can be more
fully grasped – and its explanatory power radically extended – by taking as a
whole the contradictions between ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature (inputs relative to
machinery) as well as those within second nature (constant relative to variable
capital). In what follows, I treat Marx’s ‘progressive tendency’ towards a ‘gradual
fall in the general rate of profit’ (1981, 318–9) as a historical proposition on the
long-run relation between the overproduction of machinery and the under-
production of inputs. I am concerned less with a precise operationalization of this
proposition at a sectoral or national level, and rather more with its heuristic
utility for illuminating a decisive point of fracture in the longue dureé movement
of historical capitalism.
I am tempted to say that the crucial weakness in falling rate of profit arguments
has not been the theory itself, but rather an overemphasis on one moment of
constant capital – on fixed rather than circulating capital. Could it be that since the
1830s, capitalism has forged agro-extractive 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 of capital can be
attenuated – especially if ‘capital saving’ innovations run strongly alongside labor
saving movements20 – and the tendency towards a falling rate of profit not only
checked but (for a time) reversed.21
The same logic applies to variable capital. If a sufficient volume of cheap food
can be supplied to workers – and cheap food’s biophysical costs externalized, for the
time being – 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 woven these two moments together – think of English
industrialization with its heavy reliance on cheap energy (coal) and cheap calories
(sugar).
One may well object that underproductionist tendencies, at least since the 1830s,
have been swept into the dustbin of history by the competitive–technical logic of
capitalism (e.g. Burkett 2006). There’s a kernel of truth here. The ‘great depression’
of the late nineteenth century is arguably the paradigmatic example. World prices for
raw materials imported by Britain began to rise sharply during the 1860s and 1870s,
at the very moment of its peak industrial supremacy (Hobsbawm 1975, Rostow
1938, Mandel 1975). The inflationary moment was, as we know, quickly turned
inside-out. World market prices generally declined quite sharply after 1873 (Landes
1969). At the same time, an inflationary undercurrent was at play, manifested in
episodic and uneven movements 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, Barraclough 1967, Bukharin 1915,
Magdoff 1969, 30–40). These inflationary undercurrents were set in motion by the
rise of new industrial powers, Germany and the US. They were amplified further still
20
Between 1980 and 2005, the ‘relative price of capital goods has declined by between 25 and
40%’ in the US and Japan (BIS 2006, 24).
21
Harvey (2003, 150, 139; 2005), as if to prove the point, views the ‘release’ of cheap raw
materials as ‘just as important’ as other strategies in reviving accumulation, but pays it little
attention in his recent analyses of neoliberalism.
by the qualitative shifts inscribed in the ‘second’ industrial revolution’s production of

nature, premised on oil and petrochemicals, the auto, steel, and electrical industries,
and the first synthetic plastics (Barraclough 1967, 45–63).
The underproductionist tendency was therefore checked, but not abolished, by
the second industrial revolution. At the dawn of the long twentieth century,
Malaysian rubber and tin, Chilean copper, Australian gold, and Canadian nickel all
entered the world-historical stage as key moments in an ecological revolution that
was ‘far quicker, far more prodigious in its results, far more revolutionary in its
effects on people’s lives and outlooks’ than anything known before in the history of
capitalism (Barraclough 1967, 44). The tendency towards underproduction was
moderated through the dialectic of productivity and plunder characteristic of
capitalism’s successive global ecological fixes. In the first place, industrial capital –
German, and especially American and British, firms – moved strongly into raw
materials production (Mandel 1975, 61). Metals such as copper were especially
important to late nineteenth century industrialization, and the pace of technological

innovation was fast and furious. What bears emphasizing is that this moment of
‘productivity’ (capitalization) was enabled by one of ‘plunder’ (appropriation). That
is, this ‘massive’ flow of investment (Mandel 1975, 61) was possible because the rapid
geographical expansion of the capitalist world-ecology signified the rapid expansion
of opportunities for accumulation by appropriation. The biophysical ‘rents’ enjoyed
by industrial capital in this era were remarkably high. And yet, for all the dynamism
of production and the restlessness of commodity frontiers, the tendency towards
underproduction would not go away. Copper production surged tenfold between
1870 and 1914 without any price decline. This despite massive capital investment and
a dynamic commodity frontier that reached from sub-Saharan Africa to Chile and
the American West (Bridge 2009, Frederiksen 2009, Schmitz 1986). One needn’t take
a resource-determinist view of the ‘new imperialism’ of the nineteenth century to
understand that the reorganization of world-ecology – at times coercive-intensive, at
times capital-intensive – was central to the trajectory of power and progress in the
long century that followed.
From the standpoint of world accumulation, the challenge has been to strike the
right balance between regularizing supply (which is always rising) and making those
supplies cheap enough to permit expanded accumulation. Rising capital intensity
tends to regularize supply but does so by accelerating the place-specific exhaustion of
the conditions of profitability. Capitalism has been remarkably adept at finding ways
to overcome the basic tendency. Through capital intensification and innovation,
capitalist agencies have found ways to make more out of less in the short- to middle-
run. More out of less, however, is not something for nothing. The counterpoint to the
underlying tendency of input underproduction has therefore been a frontier
movement. From the sixteenth century, the appropriation of biophysically- and
geologically-rich frontiers, combined with cheap labor and sufficiently mobile capital,
has periodically resolved the underlying contradiction.
It is far from clear that another great burst of appropriation sufficient to a launch
a new golden age of accumulation, is possible today. Where will the next phase of
capitalism find reservoirs of uncapitalized nature comparable to that offered up by
conquest of the Americas, the incorporation of Africa, the subordination of India?
Let us recall for the moment the unusual expansiveness of neoliberalism’s
appropriations, captured in a long series of phrases now part of the everyday
parlance of critical scholars: ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003),
30 Jason W. Moore
‘biopiracy’ and the new ‘enclosures’ (Shiva 1997), ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein 2007), a
new ‘scramble for Africa’ (Watts 2006), resurgent ‘resource wars’ (Klare 2001), and
many more. From this, neoliberalism may be understood as an ecological regime
premise on taking, first, and making, second. This is an epochal shift in the history of
capitalism that expresses the (asymptotic) exhaustion of frontiers, and with it, the
promise of renewed accumulation offered – and delivered – over the past five
centuries.
Capital’s great need is for low-cost energy, food, and raw materials. The response
to this imperative has been endless geographical expansion and endless innovation.
They are not independent. They are in fact so closely connected that the technical fixes
of capitalism have always been intertwined with movements of global expansion. This is
what I call the pairing of plunder and productivity in world accumulation. The pattern
can be reduced to a two phase process: (1) skimming the most easily-won surpluses,
such as Amazonian rubber tapping prior to Malaysia’s plantation revolution in the
early twentieth century (Brockway 1979, Tucker 2000); and (2) reorganizing a
widening sphere of world nature on an increasingly capitalist basis, such as the
progressive rationalization of forest-product industries worldwide since the end of the
nineteenth century (Rajala 1998). But it would be a mistake to see this simply as a
logical–historical succession. The capitalization of nature that characterizes this
second phase issues short-run windfalls, to be sure. It is an eminently modern variant
of the ‘yield honeymoon’ that early modern planters enjoyed when their slaves planted
Eurasian cane on New World soils (Dark and Gent 2001, Moore 2007). The concert of
favorable biophysical conditions with cutting edge agronomy issues yield bursts that
invariably turn bust over the course of 50–75 years. (Perhaps more quickly in late
capitalism.) Thus, the very innovations that create yield booms invariably undermine
supply conditions over the middle-run. From the standpoint of the oikeios, the
contradictions are unified, while their expressions diverge, comprising ‘social’
transformations in, say, the global agrofood regime no less than ‘biophysical’
feedbacks in weed control. As these contradictions unfold in ways that limit
accumulation, the search for new frontiers reappears with savage power. If frontiers
are unavailable, ferocious acts of redistribution are visited upon those populations
least able to offer effective resistance – from poor to rich (as in neoliberalism), or from
peasantries to heavy industrialization (as in Soviet collectivization).
The rising organic composition of capital, as we have seen, drives a contradiction
between the overproduction of machinery and the underproduction of inputs. But
rising capital intensity in the technical division of labor enters into dialectical tension
with a distinctive, if broadly homologous, process within the social division of labor.
This process is the rising capitalized composition of world nature. Capital is compelled to
capitalize an ever-growing share of world nature, whose free gifts can only be enjoyed
to the extent that they remain uncapitalized. The ‘coercive laws of competition’ drive
capital to remake the rest of nature according to the temporal logic of ‘socially-
necessary turnover time’, a far cry from the reproduction time of forests and fields, not
to mention mines, oilfields, and aquifers (Marx 1976, 44, Harvey 2001, 327).22 In order
22
‘Marx was not necessarily wrong to prioritize time over space. The aim and objective of
those engaged in the circulation of capital must be, after all, to command surplus labor time
and convert it into profit within the socially-necessary turnover time. From the standpoint of
the circulation of capital therefore, space appears in the first instance as a mere inconvenience,
a barrier to be overcome’ (Harvey 2001, 327).
to keep this ecological face of socially-necessary turnover time from getting out of
control, and radically undermining the conditions of production (e.g. resource
exhaustion) or the conditions of profitability (rising capital intensity), the system has
historically extended the sphere of capitalized nature in recurrent, great bursts of
global expansion – hence, every great era of capitalist development has been
accompanied by a ‘new’ imperialism. There is, then, a tension between that quantum of
socio-ecological relations dependent on the circulation of capital and that which
remains within the gravitational pull of accumulation, but whose reproduction is not
yet capital-dependent. Just as capital prefers to employ workers located in semi-
proletarian households (where a decisive share of income is located outside the wage
relation) (Smith and Wallerstein 1992, Wallerstein 1983), so capital prefers to mobilize
biophysical natures capable of reproducing themselves relatively autonomously from
the circuit of capital.
There is a clear homology with Marx’s account of the relation between the active
and latent strata of the reserve army of labor. It is, in my reading, a theory of
capital’s tendency to drive human nature beyond its limits – to turn ‘blood into
capital’ (1976, 382). This tendency takes shape through the systemic imperative to
appropriate human nature (itself historically contingent), by continually drawing
uncapitalized (yet exploitable) reservoirs of labor power into its field of power. ‘It
would seem’, Marx observes (1976, 377), ‘that the interest of capital itself points in
the direction of a normal working day’. A longer and more intensive working day
‘shortens the life of the . . . worker’, which would seem a costly venture of capital, as
‘the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to
reproduce power-power’. But there is a crucial geographical caveat to this surficial
logic. Enter the frontier. If such labor power can be ‘supplied from foreign preserves’
– appropriated, in our terms – from zones where the reproduction of labor power
does not pivot on the accumulation of capital
. . . the duration of [the worker’s] life becomes a matter of less moment than its
productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-
importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the
human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost of exertion that it is capable of
putting forth. It is in tropical culture, where annual profits often exceed the whole
capital of plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed . . . Mutato nomine te
fabula narratur [The name is changed but the tale is told of you!]. For slave trade, read
labor-market, for Kentucky and Virginia [in the slave trade], Ireland and the
agricultural districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany. (Marx
1976, 377–78)
For labor power, read nature. Mutato nomine te fabula narratur!

Far from an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, this tendency was in motion
from the earliest moments of capitalism. The environmental history of the rise of
capitalism turned decisively on the centralisation of economic power combined with
‘economies of speed’ (Chandler 1977). While accumulation was sustained through
geographical expansion and therefore early capitalism’s ecological regime is rightly
called extensive, the uneven synergies of generally rising demand translated to agro-
extractive strategies of hit-and-run. Hit where the ecological wealth was most
accessible (cheapest), extract it as fast as possible, then move as quickly as possible
once declining biophysical returns (and therefore rising capitalization) registered a
significant contraction of profitability. But far from merely plunderous, early
capitalism’s appropriations were enabled by significant technological advances,
32 Jason W. Moore
especially conspicuous in the sugar plantation complex, one of the birthplaces of the
modern factory system (Moore 2007, Mintz 1985).
The contradiction between the overproduction of machinery and the under-
production of inputs can, therefore, be overcome to the extent that the inner
contradiction finds an outer vent. The rising organic composition of capital, quite
independently of the appearance of underaccumulation crisis, instanciates an
immanent tendency towards socio-ecological disequilibrium, whose systemic
expression is the rising capitalized composition of world nature. To the extent that
this rising capitalization of nature is not offset by special stimuli that appropriate
significant social ecologies, there is a clear crisis tendency: the tendency of the
ecological surplus to fall. This can be counteracted, as we’ve noted, through
geographical expansion. But take note of the relational process. It is not simply that
a large mass of use-values is now easily skimmed once geographical expansion
reaches critical mass. More to the point, once critical mass is reached, the quantum
of socialized nature dependent on the cash nexus declines. This was the case in the
long sixteenth century, and at the beginning of the long twentieth century, in the
classic instance of the ‘new imperialism’.
The extension of capitalist power into new frontiers works to propel world
accumulation so long as two conditions hold: (1) the newly incorporated formations
reproduce themselves relatively independently of capital, but deliver sizeable
contributions to the ecological surplus; and (2) the mass of use-values taken up is
sufficiently large, relative to value accumulation, so as to reduce the capitalized share
of the commodity production in general. As geographical expansion slows, relative
to rising capitalization, the quantum of socialized nature dependent on the cash
nexus increases. At some point (and as capital drives the acceleration of turnover
time ever closer to the speed of light, this point approaches ever more quickly), the
quantitative advance of commodification reaches a tipping point within any given
socio-ecological formation. At this point, socialized natures give way to capitalized
natures, representing the moment of capitalist transformation at which neither
governing structures nor production systems nor the (newly transformed) forests,
fields, households, and other ecologies can reproduce themselves except through
deepening participation in the circuits of capital on a world-scale.
The more that social ecologies – fields, forests, fisheries, and so forth – become
capitalized ecologies, the more their reproduction is entrained within the reproduc-
tion of capital. Rising capitalization tends to produce short- and medium-run
windfalls, but undermines systemic conditions of accumulation in the middle- to
long-run. This issues, first, from rising capital intensity itself (independently of soil
exhaustion, deforestation, etc.), and second, from the progressive exhaustion of the
ecological regime as its reservoirs of uncapitalized land and labor become dependent
on the circuit of capital. If the ‘natural fertility of the soil can act like an increase of
fixed capital’ (Marx 1973, 748), and therefore can check the tendency towards a
falling rate of profit, soil exhaustion and resource depletion can set the stage for a
dramatic reversal of profitability – an underappreciated moment of the boom/bust
cycle of extractive regimes. The rising organic composition of capital and the rising
capitalized composition of world nature are therefore dialectically bound – one
operating in the technical division of labor, the other, in the social division of labor.
In the first instance, competition compels capital to increase the productivity of labor
through the installation of new machinery; to the extent that it is unable to increase
the rate of exploitation faster than the rising composition of dead labor (a more
daunting challenge), there is a strong tendency towards a declining rate of profit. At

the same time, competition compels capital to find ways to drive down the costs of
circulating capital such as energy and other raw materials. To the extent that
sufficiently cheap energy sources and other inputs are secured, this favors a rising
rate of profit. The best way to do this is to extend to the geographical field. The new
technologies, invariably facilitated by territorial power, work on a large scale insofar
as they appropriate nature’s free gifts so effectively that they reduce the costs of
production not only for the sector in question, but on a systemwide basis. The five-
fold rapid increase in world oil consumption at declining prices after World War II
(1950–70) is a good example (Hoogeveld 1997, 47). The very effectiveness of these
technologies rests on their rapid appropriation, and ensuing depletion, of the natures
in their grasp. This undermines the very conditions of success that they initially
served to create. Resource exhaustion under the law of value is the rising organic
composition of capital. For fractions of capital – one thinks of the oil – this tendency
can be overcome through property rights that confer ‘surplus profit’ in Marx’s sense
(1981), and may allow that fraction’s leading firms to secure value produced
elsewhere. To the extent that the resource in question is crucial to the expanded
reproduction of capital as a whole, however, the gains of one fraction can undermine
the systemwide conditions that would maintain or revive profitability.
Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of capitalism as ecological regime

Foster’s understanding of the metabolic rift took shape out of his intellectual history of
Marx’s materialism (2000), and the effort to provide a ‘classical foundation’ for
environmental sociology (1999). With Clark, he has deployed the category to narrate
capitalism’s environmental depredations (e.g. Clark and Foster 2009, Foster and Clark
2003), but the narratives themselves have not moved far beyond a grafting of
dependency theory onto environmental history. Although replete with references to
accumulation and the ‘pursuit of profit’, there is little effort to ground these terms in
global value relations. Indeed, there is little to show that the theory of metabolic rift has
any traction at all in Foster’s theorization of monopoly capitalism – environmental
change is consequential, but it is not constitutive. The theory retains its Cartesian way of
seeing, embracing ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ (with its reification of production
relations) and an ‘environmental footprint’ approach that posits the key issue as one of
‘demands placed on ecosystems’ (Clark and Foster 2009, 314).
My earlier formulation (Moore 2000a) comes closer to the present argument, but
retains a Cartesian distinction – albeit a much softer one than Foster – in the notion
that ‘systemic cycles of agroecological transformation’ complemented Arrighi’s
(1994) ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’. In my 2000 essay, I highlighted many of the
decisive elements of successive phases of world environmental change in the capitalist
era, rooting these in Arrighi’s language of ‘declining returns’. Descriptively, the
theory provides a way of making linkages, but refrains from specifying the inner
relations between the two systemic cycles. I offered an ensemble of elements – new
rural built environments, such as railroads, or new productive organizations, such as
the nineteenth century family farm – as decisive factors in establishing the conditions
for new waves of accumulation. But I left to the working out of the metabolic rift the
socio-ecological mechanisms for growth and crisis. The metabolic rift’s common
sense reckoning of resource depletion, as nutrients flowed from agrarian to urban
spaces, and returned only in exceptional cases, was necessarily partial. I did not
34 Jason W. Moore
explain the ways that ‘depletion’ translates to rising difficulties in world

accumulation. And this is exactly what Marx’s conception of global value relations
and the dialectic of overproduction and underproduction helps to explain.
My early world-historical engagement with the metabolic rift pointed in the
right direction, but did not go nearly far enough. Capitalism does not have an
ecological regime; it is an ecological regime. Or rather, capitalism is constituted
through a succession of ecological regimes that crystallize a qualitative
transformation of capital accumulation – for instance the transition from
manufacture to large-scale industry – within a provisionally stabilized structuring
of nature–society relations. Ontologically speaking, historical capitalism emerges
through the dialectic of the accumulation process and nature–society relations. I
am making a deliberately provocative argument here for a simple reason. So long
as we continue to view class structures, state-machineries, geopolitics, industria-
lization, cultural production, interalia, as complemented by a specific socio-
institutional mode of governing ‘first’ natures and primary production, we find

ourselves in a Cartesian trap.
Nevertheless, to leave the argument at this level of abstraction would miss a
magic opportunity. Ecological regime, in this sense, opens a new angle of vision on
capitalism’s ontogenesis: capitalism as ecological regime. Far from seeking to flatten
the system’s constitutive socio-ecological relations, a theory of capitalism as
ecological regime opens up a means of relating and constructing a deeper, and
more differentiated, complex of metabolic rifts, food regimes (Friedmann and
McMichael 1989, McMichael 2009, Weis 2007), resource regime studies (Bunker and
Ciccantell 2005), energy regime analyses (Podobnik 2006), and many more beyond.
By ecological regime, I highlight those relatively durable patterns of governance
(formal and informal), technological innovations, class structures, and organiza-
tional forms that have sustained and propelled successive phases of world
accumulation since the long sixteenth century (c. 1450–1640). Ecological regime
signifies the historically stabilized process and conditions of extended accumulation;
ecological revolutions mark the turbulent emergence of these provisionally stabilized
processes and conditions. The focus is not on the interaction of social and
biophysical essences – these are ‘coupled’ only in the sense that the fish in a pond are
‘coupled’ with the pond itself.23 Rather, proceeding from value relations as our
guiding methodological principle, our focus is the socio-ecological constitution of
modernity’s strategic relations. Such an eductive approach opens up a field of
investigation that extends far beyond the manifold ‘changes in the land’ commonly
associated with environmental history (Cronon 1983): property relations, commod-
ity-centered resource extraction, cash-crop agriculture, energy complexes, and so
forth. In world-ecological perspective, environmental history is every bit as much
about factories as forests, stock exchanges, shopping centers, slums, and suburban
sprawls as soil exhaustion and species extinction.
These ecological regimes comprise, at a minimum, those market and institutional
mechanisms necessary to ensure adequate flows of energy, food, raw material, and
labor surpluses to the organizing centers of world accumulation. But the story does
not end here. We should also attend to the production complexes that consume these
surpluses and set in motion new (and contradictory) demands upon the rest of
nature. That is to say, the town–country antagonism – overlapping, but not be
23
Pace Berkes, et al. (2003).
confused, with the core-periphery divide – is the decisive geographical relation.

Ecological regimes constitute a matrix of relations governing ‘town’ (consuming
surpluses) as well as ‘countryside’ (producing surpluses). Foster’s ‘metabolic rift’
becomes, as we have seen, not merely a particular output of capitalism, but
constitutive of the capitalist mode of production (1999). Every phase of capitalism
emerges through a revolution in nature–society relations that creates new possibilities
for the expanded accumulation of capital. What constitutes these possibilities? At
base, every great wave of capital accumulation has unfolded through and upon a
greatly expanded ecological surplus, which finds its phenomenal expression in cheap
food, cheap energy, and cheap inputs. To the extent that new labor surpluses can be
mobilized through deruralization, labor costs can be driven down as well – through
cheap food (driving down the minimum wage necessary for social reproduction) and
cheap energy (central to rising labor productivity).
But just what does ‘cheap’ really mean? The vernacular may be translated to
more precise analytical language. Long waves emerge only when these ecological
surpluses can be delivered significantly below systemwide production costs, those in
primary production above all. Britain’s mid-nineteenth century efflorescence as the
‘workshop of the world’, for instance, was nicely linked up with the agricultural
revolution of the American Midwest. North American grain replaced, on an
extended scale, the relative exhaustion of England’s ‘agricultural district’ in Ireland
(c. 1780–1840), and would in time be complemented by new granaries in Russia,
India, and elsewhere. Between the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and the downturn of
the 1870s, Britain’s grain imports increased 254 percent. Grain arriving from the US,
however, increased 40-fold, from 25,000 tons to over a million, providing more than
half of Britain’s total grain imports by the end of the period (calculated from Atkin
1992, 17–18). It is true that grain prices fell only modestly in this golden age of
British capitalism (Barnes 1930, 290), but this is surely a major accomplishment in
light of England’s rapid population growth (16–23 million) and rapid industrializa-
tion (one third of world manufacturing). Prices would tumble sharply downwards in
the generation after 1873, even as England came to consume 80 percent of its daily
bread from external sources (Mulhall 1892, 444, Thomas 1982, 336, O’Rourke 1997).
Long waves of accumulation take shape when and where the conditions for
profitability are re-established after a downturn. But it is not easy to establish these
conditions. They depend not only upon socio-technical ingenuity, but also upon vast
rivers of biophysical wealth without which the new innovations are useless. (This is
why new technologies often languish for a time before their generalization.) Think,
for instance, of the puddling techniques that allowed for the fertile marriage of mass
produced coal and iron in late eighteenth century England (Gordon 1996, 133–34).
The Industrial Revolution, to stick with our example, unfolded through the
unprecedented collection of cotton, iron, and coal surpluses whose value
composition (the average social labor inscribed in these commodities) was very
low – relative to, say, shipbuilding or watchmaking. To be sure, there were variable
reasons for such low value composition – favorable geology and canal infrastructure
(English coal), the alluvial soils of the Mississippi Delta (cotton), the deployment of
serf labor and simple manufacture in the Urals (iron). (Would we expect otherwise
from the combined and uneven development of capitalization and appropriation?)
In other words, inputs and labor power had to be mobilized cheaply, ‘cheap’
because they were abundant relative to the conditions of commodity production and
exchange on the eve of a renewed long wave. Historically, we have seen two key
36 Jason W. Moore
moments in the formation, and successive decomposition, of this relative ecological

surplus. First, recurrent waves of geographical expansion have opened vast
opportunities for channeling a growing share of biospheric wealth into the apparatus
of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s genius has been to take advantage of these
opportunities in a manner no other civilization was able to do – composing a
succession of socio-technical innovations that maximized biophysical throughput
relative to labor, and which continually revolutionized the very ‘nature’ of the
biophysical throughput itself. Simply put, modernity gave rise not simply to more
efficient iron smelters, but to new steam engines; not simply to more efficient steam
engines, but to internal combustion engines.
This is a much more discontinuous story than is often recognized. It is rarely
appreciated that the rise and demise of successive ecological regimes does not turn on
new phases of biophysical exploitation and thence exhaustion as self-evident facts.
Rather, new agricultural and industrial revolutions emerged in response to the
relative exhaustion of those spaces not only occupied by – but indeed produced by24 –
the old ecological regime. The crises of historical capitalism are crises of the nature–
society relations that enable (or fetter) the endless accumulation of capital. They are
crises of the actually existing relation of socialized nature through the law of value,
not of an abstract nature of ‘wilderness’ one, twice (or even thrice!) removed
(Cronon 1996).
Capitalism does not move through its successive phases of development by
organizing new ecological regimes that govern the expanded reproduction of food,
energy, and materials surpluses. (Although these latter are in fact pillars of every
ecological regime, and can be fruitfully analyzed through the specification of regime
concepts for each of these mediations.) Rather, every epochal refashioning of the
circuit of capital – from money to commodity production and exchange, and back
again – is enabled by, represents, and creates new ensembles of nature–society
relations. Capitalism emerges as this accumulation process mobilizes through (and
reshapes) the uneven conditions of possibility and constraint drawn by the ecological
regime, which finds its geographical limit in the socially necessary division of labor of
the system as a whole.
How might we begin to move from value theory to the history of capitalism, from
capital to capitalism? If the construct of ‘ecological regime’ is to prove useful, it must
be more than a large descriptive category (pace Beddoe et al. 2009). In what sense
can this perspective explain something of the rise and future demise of the modern
world-system? For some measure of guidance, we might turn to Giovanni Arrighi’s
systemic cycles of accumulation perspective (1994), and Harvey’s theory of the
spatial fix (1982).
In Arrighi’s theory of historical capitalism, ascendant world powers have risen to
global preeminence (hegemony) through varied ‘organizational revolutions’ in
the structures of capitalist and territorial power. Such revolutions achieve their
qualitative shifts in response to – and on the basis of – the accumulating
(quantitative) contradictions of the previous era. The systemic crises that are the
occasion of such qualitative shifts are internally constituted – the limits of capitalist
development in any era are registered by the exhaustion of an older organizational
revolution and its regime structures, and the emergence of new ways of knitting
together the capitalist oikeios. Crucially, these new organizational revolutions must
24
With a nod to Lefebvre (1991).
innovate by finding new ways to mobilize, lead and coordinate, vast new additions to
the geography of capitalism. While capital may regard space as an inexhaustible and
infinitely substitutable zone of conquest and commodification, Arrighi reveals each
such great expansion of the world-economy as a constitutive moment of special
stimuli, whose underlying conditions are progressively exhausted over the longue
dureé. And so the crises generated in successive accumulation cycles have called forth
organizing centers of progressively greater geographical breadth – from the Genoese
city-state of the sixteenth century to the American continental-state of the long
twentieth century.25
Harvey’s theory of spatial fix (1982) adds two further connections of the greatest
significance. First is the contention that modernity’s great financial expansions, so
central to Arrighi’s perspective, are dialectically connected with ‘accumulation by
dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). Second, in Harvey’s broader theory of spatial fix, the
initial flexibility of capital, and acceleration of turnover time, achieved through a
‘built environment’ favorable to capital in one era, becomes a fetter upon

accumulation in the next. In this way, ‘environments are created that simultaneously
facilitate but imprison the future paths of capitalist development’ (Harvey 1991, 218,
emphasis added).
Arrighi and Harvey point towards a theory of the capitalist world-ecology and its
developmental phases that illuminates the socio-ecological conditions of accumula-
tion boom and bust over the longue dureé. In this scheme of things, the ‘limits to
growth’ give way to the conditions and limits of accumulation, directly given in
historical capitalism itself. Successive phases of capitalism have unfolded through
ecological revolutions in the dynamics of accumulation (the civilizational project),
and the nature–society relations within its gravitational field (the historical process).
These have been organizational revolutions in the webs of governance enacted by
capitalist and territorialist agencies, and revolutions in the built environments of
world commodity production and exchange. Their signal accomplishment has been
the radical enlargement of the ecological surplus through the radical expansion of
opportunities for accumulation by appropriation relative to accumulation by
capitalization.
To echo Harvey, these globalizing ecological revolutions at first liberate
accumulation. Was not this the world-historical accomplishment of British
hegemony in the ‘first’ nineteenth century (c. 1763–1848)? Over time, however,
these new ways of producing nature – through political regulation, built
environments, industrial organization, agricultural innovation, not to mention
class struggles – begin to generate contradictions through the corrosive effects of
plunder and productivity. The widening and deepening movements of accumulation
by appropriation undermine the extant capacities of human and biophysical
natures to reproduce themselves independently (or relatively so) from the circuit of
capital. Sooner or later, but typically in the ballpark of a half-century, the rules of
reproduction change in the direction of capital-dependency. Peasant cultivators
become capitalist farmers; old-growth timber stands give way to tree plantations.
Inter-generational reproduction becomes mediated by the cash nexus. The relative
25
Not to mention geographical depth, as modes of extraction have plunged ever deeper into the
earth itself. Geographical expansion itself comprises both horizontal and vertical movements,
the latter overlapping, but not to be confused, with the socio-spatial intensification of rising
capital intensity at a system-wide level.
38 Jason W. Moore
ecological surplus falls as the capitalization of world nature rises. This undercuts the
basis of expanded accumulation, culminating in a developmental ecological crisis.
The ecological regimes emerging out of these developmental ecological crises
confronted, and indeed produced, historically-specific natures as webs of liberation
and limitation for the accumulation of capital. The point can scarcely be
overemphasized if we are to take seriously the idea that all the ‘limits to capital’
emerge historically, out of the relations of humans with the rest of nature. This
historical specification is not idiographic, but rather acknowledges the multilayered
spatio-temporal character of the oikeios. The natures that neoliberalism has
produced operate within the epochal nature of historical capitalism, and perhaps
even a sort of civilizational nature of humanity since the Neolithic revolution. Such a
multilayered comprehension of historical nature (qua oikeios) opens up the
possibilities for distinguishing the cumulative, the cyclical, and the genuinely novel
in the present conjuncture. Here I would make an elementary, and I think also
underappreciated point: what constitutes a limit in one mode of production (or phase
of capitalism) ‘may not constitute a limit for another’ mode of production (or phase
of capitalism) (Benton 1989, 79). Thus may we begin to think of successive phases of
capitalism as creating, and created by, an increasingly capitalized world-ecology. The
historical limits of the early capitalist ecological regime – for example, agricultural
exhaustion and relative energy scarcity throughout central and western Europe – had
been reached by the middle of the eighteenth century. These were ecohistorical limits
to capital accumulation as it was then organized. Clearly, they were not absolute
limits.
Arrighi’s systemic cycles approach becomes exceedingly useful in offering a
spatialized sociology of how capitalism’s limits have been transcended over the
course of modern world history. My proposal is an ecohistorical twist on Arrighi’s
(1994, 226) fruitful notion that phases of world development pivot on ‘particular
organizational structure[s], the vitality of which [is] progressively undermined by the
expansion itself’. The resulting ‘increasingly vicious competition’ between and
amongst capitals and states eventually reaches a boiling point, with the ensuing crisis
of profitability resulting in the demise of the very ‘organizational structures on which
the preceding material expansion’ was based (p. 226). If we bring the oikeios into
such a world-historical frame, it becomes clear that something more than escalating
inter-firm and geopolitical competition, and something more than class struggle (as
conventionally understood), undermined the great phases of world economic growth
– one can think of successive ‘golden ages’ of capitalism, c. 1450–1520, 1848–1873,
1947–1973. The very burst of capitalization characteristic of such golden eras
enabled, and was enabled by, even greater busts of appropriation.26 The
‘organizational structures’ specific to these phases of appropriation were progres-
sively exhausted by the very strategies that enabled the delivery of a massive
ecological surplus in the boom decades of successive long centuries of accumulation.
Here is a way to talk about limits without invoking neo-Malthusian conceptions – a
still present danger (even from those on the left) revealed in recent discussions of
peak oil (e.g. Newman 2008).
26
Even many Marxists regard the long nineteenth century as decisive because of the
generalization of the wage-labor relation, when in fact the share of world households within
capitalism’s division of labor was no greater (and probably lower) in 1914 than it was in 1763.
By way of conclusion: towards a unified theory of capitalist development and crisis

By locating today’s socio-ecological transformations within long-run and large-
scale patterns of recurrence and evolution in the modern world – including the
human natures of the capitalist labor process, household reproduction and family
formation, the ‘informal economies’ of the South and much more – we might
begin to illuminate the distinctive contradictions at play in the present crisis. I
write in the midst of neoliberalism’s ‘signal crisis’ (Moore 2010c) – the point
at which a developmental ecological crisis appears first, manifesting in rising,
rather than declining, commodity prices for food, energy, and crucial inputs. This
is a good sign of a developmental ecological regime’s transition from
accumulation by appropriation to accumulation by capitalization. Clearly there
are many novel developments unfolding that complicate the established ways that
one phase of capitalism gives way to another. Is the present conjuncture also a
turning point in historical capitalism: not just a developmental, but an epochal

ecological crisis?
While the left has offered a series of perceptive analyses of the events of 2008
and the unfolding ‘world slump’ ever since (McNally 2009, Foster and Magdoff
2009, Harvey 2009, Kotz 2008, Panitch and Konings 2009, Beitel 2009, Lapavitsas
2009, Rasmus 2009), these analyses have remained largely nature-blind, or have
corralled ‘environmental’ problems outside the core of the accumulation process.
There persists a powerfully Cartesian divide between accounts of (so-called)
‘economic’ crisis and (so-called) ‘environmental crisis.’ This is not only
theoretically untenable and analytically problematic. It is politically counter-
productive. It is impossible to discern, with the necessary clarity, the constitutive
relations between the socio-ecological processes and projects of financialization,
trade liberalization, food security and food sovereignty (and many more beyond
this) without a provisional theory that can guide our analysis of how these projects
not only represent new weaves of human and extra-human nature, but also
constitute a world-ecological whole that is more than the sum of these parts. At
the core of the provisional theory on offer is a theoretical claim about development
and crisis (the dialectics of appropriation and capitalization, overproduction and
underproduction) and a methodological proposition (Wall Street is a way of
organizing nature). If financialization is an ecological project in its own right, the
scarcities induced by it (through commodity booms) are neither more nor less
directly connected to all of nature than crop failures, species extinctions, and
climate shifts.
The theory of metabolic rift stands as one of critical political ecology’s most
powerful ideas. The argument that capitalism’s eco-geographical logic, is immanent
to the system’s rise, development, and ongoing demise is a signal contribution to
world scholarship. How can we amplify and elaborate the essential core of
metabolic rift theory? I have argued two major points: (1) that the perspective of
capitalism as world-ecology, unifying the production of nature and the accumula-
tion of capital, offers a new ‘way of seeing’ the metabolic rift; and (2) that a
historically-grounded reading of Marx’s value theory offers a powerful methodo-
logical proposition for constructing socio-ecological totalities. Taken together,
these offer an alternative to the Cartesian grafting of ‘natural’ and ‘social’
processes and the corresponding alienation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘environ-
mental’ in the history of capitalism. Such a reformulation provides one necessary
40 Jason W. Moore
point of departure – but far from the final word – for rethinking the contradictions
of capitalism as irreducibly socio-ecological, and for imagining, and enacting,
the transcendence of capitalism in favor of new and liberatory world-ecological
projects.
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46 Jason W. Moore
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Jason W. Moore is assistant professor of environmental history in the Department of

Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies at Umeå University in Sweden. He has
published widely on the history of capitalism in Europe, Latin America, and the United States,
from the long sixteenth century to the neoliberal era. His essays have been recognized with the
Braverman Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1999); the Distinguished
Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the

World-System Section (2002); and the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for
Environmental History (2004). He is presently completing Ecology and the rise of capitalism,
an environmental history of the rise of capitalism, for the University of California Press. His
latest research may be found at http://jasonwmoore.com/. Email: [email protected].

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The Journal of Peasant Studies

Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2011, 1–46

Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist

Capitalism as world-ecology, or, the oikeios as dialectic

accounting’. This alternative accounting is one premised on relations rather than

Too often in environmental studies, we are riveted to the consequences issuing

century entailed a set of far-reaching agroecological transformations, from the

extra-human nature; alternatively, in some promising initiatives (Sellers 1999), this

The theory of metabolic rift

now widely understood as the ‘separation’ or ‘disruption’ of surﬁcially ‘social’ and

unfolding or potential ‘catastrophic problems’ (Magdoﬀ and Foster 2010, Foster

insuﬃcient to the challenges of the present conjuncture. Amongst the crucial

deterioration of vital infrastructures. However provisionally, O’Connor’s great

There is a problem here, however. O’Connor’s theory of the second

red–green social theory to a red–green theory and method of world–historical

Taking value as an eductive method acknowledges the increasing centrality of

Value as method: capital, capitalism, and the commodity frontier

of nature can be reduced an interchangeable part; at the same time, it powerfully

constitutive of capitalism’s inner logic – the contradiction between monetary value

mid-1980s (Bairoch 1989). What the more-or-less conventional green critique is

identiﬁes a ‘deep structure’ of historical capitalism that gives priority to labor

It would be mystifying to say that the limits of capitalism are ultimately

Marx’s theory of underproduction, part I: capitalization, appropriation, and the

inputs, but by revolutionizing the socio-ecological relations of production on a

for the appropriation of human and extra-human nature. Indeed, socio-technical

compression’ ﬁnds its dialectical counterpoint in the quasi-linear movement of ‘time–

If expansion across space (appropriation) represents one ﬁx to the falling rate of

by the qualitative shifts inscribed in the ‘second’ industrial revolution’s production of

important to late nineteenth century industrialization, and the pace of technological

For labor power, read nature. Mutato nomine te fabula narratur!

daunting challenge), there is a strong tendency towards a declining rate of proﬁt. At

Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of capitalism as ecological regime

explain the ways that ‘depletion’ translates to rising diﬃculties in world

institutional mode of governing ‘ﬁrst’ natures and primary production, we ﬁnd

confused, with the core-periphery divide – is the decisive geographical relation.

moments in the formation, and successive decomposition, of this relative ecological

‘built environment’ favorable to capital in one era, becomes a fetter upon

By way of conclusion: towards a uniﬁed theory of capitalist development and crisis

turning point in historical capitalism: not just a developmental, but an epochal

Arrighi, G. 1994. The long twentieth century. London: Verso.

Burkett, P. 2006. Marxism and ecological economics. Leiden: Brill.

Costanza, R., et al. 2007. Sustainability or collapse. Ambio, 36(7), 522–7.

Monthly Review, 60(6), 54–63.

Podobnik, B. 2006. Global energy shifts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Seccombe, W. 1992. A millennium of family change. London: Verso.

Worster, D. 1985. Rivers of empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jason W. Moore is assistant professor of environmental history in the Department of

Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the

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