The Agrarian Question in the Web of Life

Abstract

Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital Jason W. Moore London and New York: Verso. 2025 (First published in 2015). pp. 352 + xxxiii. US$39.95. ISBN 978-1804298329

In 1988, James O'Connor founded the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. Reflecting a time in which radical environmental movements were rapidly growing around the world, as typified by Die Grünen, West Germany's Green Party founded in 1980, O'Connor sought to map out a way in which diverse social movements around the environment, feminism and pacificism could be brought together around a rejuvenated, ecological, Marxism. In the early 1990s, John Bellamy Foster began his project of excavating Marx's ecology, publishing his first important paper in Capitalism Nature Socialism and, over the course of 35 years, establishing that Marx clearly demonstrated his rigorous attention to capitalism's ecology. This was evident even in the young Marx. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1974: 328; orig. 1844), Marx wrote that ‘man is a part of nature … Man lives from nature; ie, nature is his body and he must maintain continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die’. Humans maintain their dialogue with nature through labour, which

With nature providing the material means of life and (some of the) tools needed to access those material needs, the production of goods and the reproduction of the species resulted in energy and materials being appropriated by humans as use-values to satisfy human needs and generating a material by-product, waste. Thus, as Marx (1975; orig. 1845) wrote, ‘the first historical act’ is ‘the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself’. However, Marx is exceedingly clear that ‘labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power’ (Marx 1970: 13, orig. 1875, emphasis in original). Consequently, over the course of his life, Marx was reasonably consistent that nature and social relations were not independent of each other; rather, they co-evolve: ‘the production of life … appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other hand as a social relation’ (Marx 1975). Thus, the ‘“unity of man with nature” has always existed … just like the “struggle” of man with nature’ (Marx 1977: 174). In this way, Marx's dialectical conception was that the way in which human society relates to the natural world makes life and society possible and that this is in turn shaped by the natural world itself.

The development of capitalism ruptures the relationship of human society to the natural world because capitalism commodifies. Commodification requires undermining a ‘whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the … generations’ (Marx 1981: 754 fn 27, orig. 1894). It not only requires commodifying labour by creating labour-power. It also requires commodifying nature: land, materials and tools fashioned from nature and the energy used in the labour process. The process of commodification appropriates and then encloses nature as private property emerges, but the character of nature itself also shapes what is appropriated, what is enclosed and what is rendered as private property. In so doing, enclosure and commodification turn use-values into exchange-values not only as capitalism develops but also as a continual and ongoing process under capitalism (Akram-Lodhi 2007).

Commodification has two crucial implications in Marx's ecology. First, when commodified and then exploited by capital labour is subjected to a process which severs it from its direct relation with nature. As Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, ‘alienated labour alienates (1) nature from man, and (2) man from himself, his own active function’ (Marx 1977: 81–2). Thus, it is under capitalist production that nature becomes alienated from people. Second, capitalism undermines biological balances within nature because of its relentless alienation and commodification. As he states in Capital, the development of private property and hence capital in farm production and the agricultural sector gives rise to an ‘irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself’ (Marx 1981: 949). This is because it

This, then, is Bellamy Foster's ‘metabolic rift’ (2000) between humans and nature, one of the most important concepts recovered by Marxism in the last quarter-century.

At the same time, Marx was exceedingly clear about how the metabolic rift is to be repaired. In Capital, he writes that the need to ‘systematically reestablish’ the metabolism between humans and nature is ‘a governing law of social production and to do so in a form that allows for people to develop fully as human beings’ (Marx 2024: 460). This has within it two implications. The first is that Marx essentially invents the paradigm of human development 120 years before Amartya Sen (Harriss-White 2012a). Second, in emphasizing the need to systematically reestablish the metabolism between humans and nature, Marx develops a preliminary definition of what we now call sustainable development. The need to systematically reestablish the metabolism between humans and nature was reinforced by his reading of Justus von Liebig's understanding of soil fertility and led him to conclude in Volume 3 of Capital that ‘societies … are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations’ (Marx 1981: 911, emphasis added). This is a much more demanding definition of sustainable development than that which is currently used by the United Nations, which popularized the idea of sustainable development, as is stresses the central need not to maintain ecological conditions but to improve ecological conditions.

For Marx, transcending the metabolic rift and facilitating the reestablishment of the metabolism between humans and nature were inconsistent with capitalism. In Volume 3 of Capital, he wrote that ‘freedom … can only consist in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way … with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’ (Marx 1981: 959). For Marx, this was not compatible with capitalism, because nature had been alienated. The application of industrial methods to farming created pressures to maximize returns and thus became ‘the means of exhausting the soil’ ‘at heavy expense’ (Marx 1981: 949–950); so, the deepening of the metabolic rift is intrinsic to capitalism. There can be little doubt that for Marx, the reestablishment of the metabolism between humans and nature required socialism; it is only by examining Marx's ecological materialism that this can be unpacked. Indeed, at the beginning of Capital, Marx stresses that ‘labor isn't the lone source responsible for the use-values it produces, or for material wealth; it is their father, … and the earth is their mother’ (Marx 2024: 21). As Frederick Soddy later commented, ‘Marx's disciples … forgot all about the mother’ (quoted in Harriss-White 2012b: 102).

Marx's ecology has clear implications for the agrarian question. Historical materialist agrarian political economy understands the development of capitalism in farming and agriculture as a process of dispossessing small-scale peasant households from the land by commodifying land and labour, facilitating the emergence of capital in farming, and the establishment of the capital–labour relation. In this regard, peasants can be thought of as nuclear or extended households of men, women, and children. These households obtain at least part of their livelihood by farming and the rearing of livestock. Households use land that they are able in some way to control and use mostly members of the household as the principal source of the labour needed to work the land. For the most part, peasants have very limited amounts of land, basic tools, and equipment. The production and consumption of the household are situated within a larger capitalist economy, but the household is only partially integrated into labour and product markets, which work highly imperfectly (Akram-Lodhi 2019; Ellis 1992). Finally, peasants usually derive a collective identity from the landscape within which they live and work (Akram-Lodhi 2025). So, peasant households allocate small stocks of both assets and labour into their production process, which has as an important objective the meeting of at least some of the needs of the household and so their behaviour is not completely governed by the market imperative (Wood 2009). As such, peasants are ‘petty commodity producers’, operating within capitalism as both a petty capitalist of little consequence and as a worker with little power over the terms and conditions of their employment (Bernstein 1991; Gibbon and Neocosmos 1985). Petty commodity producing peasants need not be homogenous; even small differences in stocks of assets, inputs and labour can result in social differentiation by class (Akram-Lodhi 1995). Given that there are 510 million farms of two hectares or less across the countries of the global South (Lowder et al. 2021), peasant petty commodity production has not become an ‘historical anachronism, unable to survive the dynamics of the capitalist development of agriculture’ (Veltmeyer 2006: 445).

Marx identified three ‘paths’ of transition from pre-capitalist farming (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2016). One is that which was published in the first volume of Capital (Marx 2024). There, the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ that was witnessed in England used dispossessory enclosures by predatory feudal landlords, later supported by the state, to reconfigure the relations of production to physically expel a relatively prosperous rich peasantry from land that they did not own. This created a property-less class of rural waged labour that faced a class of capitalist tenant–farmers, beneath the dominant landlord class (Byres 2009).

The second path was that of peasant class differentiation, identified in volume 3 of Capital, which is witnessed when:

Thus, peasant petty commodity producers can stratify into distinct classes based upon their position as net buyers or net sellers of labour–power, a process that is driven by the market imperatives of capitalism to exploit labour, improve productivity and cut the costs of production (Wood 2009).

The third path of agrarian transition identified by Marx would witness the peasant community collectively slowly transforming itself into ‘an element of collective production on a national scale’ (quoted in Shanin 1983: 106). For this to occur, land would have to be held in common, all community members would have access to the land necessary to produce their subsistence, membership of the community would not be based solely on kinship, and collectivism must be capable of overriding private property. In such settings, peasant communities witnessed ‘dualism’ (ibid.: 104) between, on the one hand, land that was owned in common, such as pastures and forests, and on the other hand individual peasant plots. With the emergence of capitalism, communal areas were being encroached upon, and it was this that the peasant community could collectively prevent. As a result, the third path had a set of social relations that unevenly combined the progressive features of capitalism with a set of features derived from historically adaptable peasant social relations. Conditional on the emergence and introduction of new technologies that developed the forces of production in a way that sustained the position of small-scale peasant farming, and conditional on state support for small-scale peasant farming, cumulatively, these social relations would allow the community to ‘reap the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched humanity without passing through the capitalist regime’ (ibid.: 112).

Marx therefore argued that processes of capitalist development could, in agriculture, create ‘peasant dispossession by displacement’, or enclosure, ‘peasant dispossession by differentiation’, or sustain a ‘hybrid’ form of peasant subsumption to capital that maintains and sustains peasant communities where collective tendencies dominate because ‘smallholding … production … proceeds without being governed by the general rate of profit’ (Marx 1981: 946; Araghi 2009: 118). Explaining the specificities of these paths requires identifying three critical aspects of the agrarian transition (Bernstein 1996/97, Byres 1996). The first aspect is ‘accumulation’: that when agriculture produces food and nonfood output and financial resources above its consumption, reproductive, rental and cultural requirements, this ‘agricultural surplus’ can be used to support the substantial resource costs of structural transformation. The second aspect is ‘production’: how is petty commodity producing peasant labour being transformed—or not—into its commodified form, labour–power, through both the restructuring of rural labour processes, shifts in the technical coefficients of production and the resulting processes of peasant class differentiation. The third aspect is ‘politics’: the balance of class forces impacts upon political forms and processes because shifts in technical coefficients of production and their impact upon accumulation can shape and be shaped by rural struggle. Together, these have become the terrain of what Karl Kautsky called the ‘agrarian question’, which he defined when he asked: ‘whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and of property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones’ (Kautsky 1988: 12).

Since it was first published in 2015 Jason W. Moore's magisterial Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital has developed ‘world-ecology’ as ‘the study of historical change— including the history of the present—as if nature matters’.¹ Stressing a need to transcend a ‘Cartesian dualism’ (Moore 2025: 20) that fragments the world into the separate spheres of ‘nature’ and ‘society’, world-ecology investigates historical change from a perspective that insists that human institutions are producers and products of ‘the web of life’. Moore's central analytical argument is that, beyond the ‘conventional’ historical materialist understanding of commodified labour-power being exploited by capital, accumulation also requires the noncommodified work of humans and the work of nature because ‘the exploitation of wage-labour works only to the degree that its reproduction costs can be checked’ (Moore 2025: 16). Reducing the costs of reproduction requires ‘massive contributions of unpaid work, outside the commodity system but necessary to its generalization’ (Moore 2025: 16–17). A key component of unpaid work that is necessary for the commodity system to operate is the reproductive labour of social reproduction carried out within households and communities. However, ‘the domain where unpaid work is produced for capital’ is not ‘a narrowly human affair’ (Moore 2025: 17). Unpaid work ‘also involves the unpaid work of extra-human natures’. Moore (ibid.) ‘names those extra-economic processes that identify, secure, and channel (human and extra-human) unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital’ ‘appropriation’. Thus, for Moore, capitalism is ‘a set of relations through which the “capacity to do work”—by human and extra-human natures—is transformed into value’ (Moore 2025: 14). So, capitalism works through nature and—critically—nature works through capitalism.

I must confess that this key aspect of Moore's point of departure—the ‘work’ of extra-human natures—took me a long time to comprehend. I conceptualized work as any activity you can theoretically pay someone else to perform, as originally argued by Margaret Reid (1934) and incorporated into the United Nations System of National Accounts. However, in writing about the English enclosures of the late Middle Ages, the geographer Nicolas Blomley centres his argument on the social power of hedges. The argument is so interesting that it is worth noting at length:

Tania Murray Li (2014) makes the same point in the excellent Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. There, she argues that capitalist relations were not imposed upon the Indigenous Lauje highlanders of central Sulawesi, Indonesia, but rather emerged within a specific conjuncture; the introduction of ‘new tree crops did the transformative work’ (Li 2015: 89) of excluding kin, crossing social boundaries between spatially distinct groups of farmers, and facilitating ‘state validation’ (Li 2015: 109) of the claims of some highlanders, all of which was necessary to bring about enclosure. This had the eventual effect of terminating the supply of land that could be enclosed: land's end.

This conception of the ‘work’ of nature is in fact implicit in Marx (2024: 20):

Perhaps it was, in part, the extent of the correspondence between the work of humans and the work of nature that led Marx to privilege the word ‘labour’ over the word ‘work’.² It is also important to note that workers draw ‘constantly on natural forces to carry out this labor of reshaping’ (Marx 2024: 21); Foster and Burkett (2016: 215) explicitly argue, correctly, in my view, that these ‘natural forces’ are energy (Akram-Lodhi 2021). Foster and Burkett (2016: 217) argue that under capitalism, the development of the productive forces requires ‘an increase in the quantity of natural forces and objects that capital must appropriate as materials and instruments of production’ to foster the increase in labour productivity necessary ‘to achieve any given expansion of value’ by valorized labour–power. However, this ‘growing throughput of matter and energy per labour hour’ (Foster and Burkett 2016: 160) results in increasingly profligate resource and energy consumption, diseconomies of scale are generated, and entropy is witnessed as capitalism exhausts ‘the historical relation that enabled it to appropriate the work of nature with such extraordinary and unprecedented power’ (Moore 2025: 295).³

Moore's understanding then is that in capitalism ‘value operates through a dialectic of exploitation and appropriation. The relations of exploitation produce abstract social labour. The relations of appropriation, producing abstract social nature, enable the expanded accumulation of abstract social labour’ (Moore 2025: 16) and hence surplus value. So important is this interrelationship that a ‘rising rate of exploitation’, which drives capital accumulation, ‘depends upon the fruits of appropriation derived from Cheap Natures, understood primarily as the “Four Cheaps” of labour–power, food, energy and raw materials’ (Moore 2025: 17). This leads Moore to offer a sweeping panorama of historical capitalism and historical natures that situates the origin of capitalism not in the industrial revolution but in the period after 1450 and carries the story through to the present day. As Bernstein (2010: 33) puts it, Moore's ‘ambitious project aims to account for … [a] … longer history of capitalism in terms of the connections between patterns of accumulation, their increasingly extensive geography of “commodity frontiers” (in farming, forestry, mining, energy) and ecological change’.

In some ways, Moore is offering a radical re-reading of a strand of historical materialist political economy that can be traced back to Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg (1968: 365; orig. 1913) had argued that ‘capitalism in its full maturity … depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organisations existing side by side with it … [T]he accumulation of capital becomes impossible … without non-capitalist surroundings’. However, whereas Luxemburg focuses upon the interrelationships between capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production, Moore's approach is to offer a periodization of capitalist development that reflects shifting access to, use and depletion of ecological stocks and how such stocks in and of themselves ‘work’ to shape capitalist development.

Moore has convinced me that my failure to properly account for ecological stocks, flows and surpluses and their role in the development of capitalism in farming and agriculture has led to significant errors of omission that require correcting in the research that I have done. It was my reading of Moore in the years leading up to the initial publication of Capitalism in the Web of Life that led me back to John Bellamy Foster and the metabolic rift. One does not have to agree with the totality of Moore's argument, just as one does not have to agree with the totality of Foster's arguments, but their different theoretical perspectives have significant complementarities and are, in my view, persuasive that historical materialism without ecology is not fit for purpose.

In light of this, it has become reasonably obvious that ‘the creative, generative and multilayered relation of species and environment’ Moore (2025: 4) must be integral to any agrarian question because farming and agriculture not only use soil, water, plants and other elements of nature to grow crops and rear animals for direct use or for trade but are themselves shaped by the nature, landscapes and territories within which they are situated. For Moore, then, it is necessary to situate any agrarian question within the oikeios: ‘the relation through which humans act—and are acted upon by the whole of nature—in our environment-making’ (Moore 2025: 4). In other words, (farm) production works in and through nature and nature works in and through (farm) production.

Therefore, the agrarian question must be located within the specifics of the world-ecological context within which it is asked, because these contexts are predicated upon a specific configuration of the forces and relations of production within a historically constructed nature that is ‘both producers and products of capitalist development’ (Moore 2025: 19). The production, accumulation and politics of the agrarian question shape and are obviously shaped by the ecology of farm production: The landscape of farming by definition must directly impact upon the process of production, whether it be in the assets that are available to rural producers, the adoption of techniques and technologies that are or are not suitable to the landscape and in the food and nonfood products that are eventually produced using the resources that flow from the land. In this way, the landscape shapes production, just as production shapes the landscape.⁴ In so doing, the web of life, whether expressed in monetary values or not, can contribute to or constrain the process of accumulation even as the process of accumulation shapes the stocks, flows and surpluses of the web of life. Furthermore, the balance of class forces and the operation of the formal and informal rural political institutions that result from this balance shape and are shaped by a set of ecological relations between people and nature through which individual and collective agency are refracted.

In this way, a failure to address the ecological dimensions of production, accumulation and politics renders any understanding of the agrarian question, at best, quite limited. The agrarian question must critically investigate the character of ecological relationships and the ways in which they impinge upon and alter the resolution or otherwise of the agrarian question and in so doing address contradictions of class and ecology if it is going to offer a well-rounded account of social change in contemporary rural settings. In this light, the second printing of the excellent Capitalism in the Web of Life should be welcomed by all of those engaged in agrarian political economy.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.