Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology

Abstract

AbstractCapitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In recent decades, the last frontiers have closed, and this astonishing historical capacity has withered. This “withering” is perhaps most evident in capitalism’s failure to offer a new, actually productive, agricultural model—as agrobiotechnology failed to deliver on its promissory notes. Moving from bad to worse, a second set of contradictions is now mediated through climate change. Climate change, one among many ongoing biospheric shifts, is interwoven with the totality of neoliberal agriculture’s contradictions to produce a new contradiction: negative value. This signals the emergence of forms of nature that are increasingly hostile to capital accumulation and that can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasin...