Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Historical Geography of an Agrarian Question

Abstract

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.

Scaling-up local foods: Commodity practice in community supported agriculture (CSA)

“…More generally, as Henderson (1998) andGuthman (1998; have noted, nature's obstacles are at the same time opportunities. Henderson (1998) showed how seasonal rhythms in Californian agricultural production presented an opening for finance capital to lend money to farmers before they could cash their crops in. In CSA, seasonality can be an opportunity if not for financial capital, then for entrepreneurial farmers.…”

“…In their take on the agrarian question, Mann and Dickinson (1978) argued that the the capitalization of agriculture and, specifically, the employment of wage labor were made difficult by the seasonal nature of farming, plants' unique ability to assemble themselves, and the immobility of land (but see also Mooney 1982;Henderson 1998). What Mann and Dickinson illustrate is that the supply and application of labor to grow crops for market are unique challenges farm enterprises have to account for.…”

Downsizing Nature: Managing Risk and Knowledge Economies through Production Subcontracting in the Oregon Logging Sector

“…These disruptions act not to block or prevent capital accumulation per se, but as has also been described in relation to agriculture, to shape and constrain industrial development -including production relations -in important ways (Goodman, et al, 1987). Thus, natural "obstacles" become the vehicles or organizing principles around which firm strategies and organizations coalesce (Boyd, et al, 2001;Henderson, 1998). The contract in particular can be understood as a key instrument or building block by which capital has imposed discipline and subordinated labor in the context of highly specific "biological and geographic peculiarities" (Watts, 1994, p. 71), achieving in the process a form of flexibility in production.…”

‘Accomplished by methods which are indefensible’: Electric utilities, finance, and the natural barriers to accumulation

“…This work, while providing important insights into credits ability to direct production, has been extended in two important ways. The first is theorization on the 'natural' limits of capital accumulation, especially the work of Henderson (1998). The second extension comes from a more robust theorization of the role of the state in solving capitalist crises, something Harvey points to in Limits on numerous occasions, but never considers fully.…”