“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity” [Marx, 1967 Capital, Volume 1 first paragraph (International Publishers, New York)]. As Marx moves beyond the first paragraph of Capital, he famously argues that value makes the commodity a ‘hieroglyphic’. But his own opening is also a sort of hieroglyphic: it rings true for bourgeois economy as it does for his critique of that economy, but for entirely different reasons. The purpose of Capital is to obliterate this apparent corroboration, yet a hieroglyphic quality is maintained throughout, as Marx subjects his own successive claims to iterative, immanent critique. This chain cannot be said to be indefinite for Marx, but neither is it complete. Here, I hark back to Marx's opening gambit to ask: in capitalist society, what else accumulates besides commodities proper? The paper proceeds iteratively, offering a series of revised opening claims that mimic yet spiral away from Marx's original. I argue specifically that, although devaluation (decommodification) inheres in the production and circulation of value, it has its own accumulation logic. The example is of food banking. I explore this activity as simultaneously material, representational, and political, and examine the constitutive force of each of these modalities. I treat food banking, therefore, as a form of commodity afterlife, through which devaluation becomes (imperfectly) a positivity.

Capitalism is produced in part through its own production of nature, but it has been argued that nature also poses certain obstacles to capitalist development. Political economists and rural sociologists have argued that in certain instances agriculture, as a form of production based in nature, has proven resistant to capitalist transformation. The Mann–Dickinson thesis still stands as one of the best such formulations. This essay argues for turning the Mann–Dickinson thesis on its head so as to ask how it is that an obstacle for one set of capital comprises an opportunity for other capitals. The essay therefore examines agriculture as a nexus of nature and circulating capital. It argues that what has been construed as a primary obstacle (the disunity of working and production time and the cumulative effects thereof) has been poorly appreciated as comprising a distinctive opportunity for capitalist investments and appropriations through the credit system. Credit, by no means an exogenous or anachronistic force, develops along with production and constitutes a social relation of production along with other such relations. These contentions are borne out in a critique of the nature‐as‐obstacle argument and then in a discussion of late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century agriculture in the United States, especially in California. In the latter discussion, I focus on the role of credit as the system that mediates the relations between nature and capital in and between different space–times. Credit, I argue, was necessarily constituted spatially and was contingently tied to the rise of agrarian formations in the American West.

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Hard upon the heels of a philosophy which glorifies success must follow a philosophy which rationalizes failure. 1 Commodities borrow their aesthetic language from human courtship; but then the relationship is reversed and people borrow their aesthetic expression from the world of the commodity. 2The problem . efore the current era of large-scale water management in the American west, the Colorado River had two final options: either pour itself into the Gulf of California, or at the last minute swing northward across its own delta and plunge into a below-sealevel, exitless trough called the Salton Sink.' Most often the river ran gulfward, but periodically it ended up in southernmost California as the inland Salton Sea. The last time of note that this happened was in 1905, a year that would have been lost to socalled natural history, had not the West's largest private irrigation and landdevelopment venture to date slipped up, while turning the Salton Sink into the Imperial Valley.Because of the political economic origins of this flood in the corporate control of water, it became a lightning rod for debates over the ideals and practices of capitalism and agrarianism as they were taking shape in the rural arid West. Contrary to the 'myth of the garden' having been shattered by economic distress, I shall argue that it was incorporated into a discourse about the relative powers of capital and Nature to sustain agro-economic growth.' Water and irrigation reverberate throughout the historiography of the EuroAmerican arid West. Students of that West have long been aware that insofar as theirs is a field in American history, they have been confronting a rupture in American patterns of economic and cultural development. To Marc Reisner the very word 'conservation' marks this rupture. In the humid East conservation is synonymous with the preservation of Nature; in the arid West it signifies manipulation and control, not only of water but of political favours. Walter Prescott Webb championed an extreme