Finding Value in Empire of Cotton

Abstract

coercion through “the purportedly impersonal but far from impartial social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state.” Beckert is certainly not wrong to identify the necessary role of the state in organizing and sustaining successive regimes of accumulation around the world. Nor, of course, is he incorrect to treat the hard-fought abolition of chattel slavery as a transformative achievement in the history of global capitalism. But the characterization of a progressive transition in which the mediating institutions of the market, the law, and the state “replaced” the social and ecological violence of the slave plantation requires its own startling acts of narrative omission. Excepting a couple of brief remarks about “boll weevils” and “soil exhaustion” in the American South, the conversion of ever more farmland to cotton cultivation appears as a rather straightforward matter of applying new scientific techniques to soil. Missing are the swarms of ravenous insects, rising water tables, and terrifying dust storms that farmers everywhere soon recognized as the modern plagues of monocrop agriculture. At intervals throughout his final chapters, Beckert casts the peasant smallholding as a last redoubt of subsistence techniques and localized production lying beyond the grasp of the world market. This may have been so in some cases. But in many others, from the New South to the Nile Delta, the smallholding endured within the empire of cotton in no small degree because the family norm upon which it rested, with its gendered and generational division of labor, proved so amenable to the cultivation of cheap raw cotton. Perhaps most strange of all, the word “race” (used in the relevant sense) does not appear in the second half of the book; “racism” appears exactly once. 25. Ibid., 280. 26. Ibid., 344, 352. 27. Hannah Holleman, “De-naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Journal of Peasant Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1195375. 28. In listing the “factors which have made Egypt the most perfect cotton-country of the world—a cotton-laboratory would be a better term,” Egypt’s foremost botanist of the colonial era laid special emphasis on the importance of the family smallhold. “In the first place,” he explained, “there is an ample supply of hand-labour at a reasonable price; cotton can be grown with the use of horse-hoes and similar appliances, but it cannot be grown to its highest productivity, because the plants cannot then be set closely together, and the best results can only be got by hand-hoeing between closely planted, closely-set rows; further, the harvest of cotton has to be picked from the open fruits by hand, and where labour is scarce and dear this item may cost half as much as the cotton is worth; the small-holding fellah, incredibly industrious in his patient way, and with a numerous progeny, solves both these labour difficulties automatically.” See William Lawrence Balls, Egypt of the Egyptians (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1916), 193. For a detailed history of child labor in Egyptian cotton cultivation, see Ellis Goldberg, Trade, Reputation, and Child Labor in Twentieth-Century Egypt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 29. In describing the challenges confronting anticolonial nationalisms, he mentions “a thick bulwark of racism that pinned much of humanity to subordinate roles” (Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 423). Finding Value | 119 This content downloaded from 130.058.065.013 on July 28, 2017 10:55:09 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). An inability to explain the arrival of themost severe, protracted, andwidespread economic crisis of the long nineteenth century, a marked agnosticism toward the question of ecological degradation, and a narrative refusal to grapple with the fundamental and constitutive role of racialized and gendered hierarchies not just for high imperialism but for capital accumulation in general are related symptoms of the same analytical problem, namely, a fixation with cotton itself rather than a simultaneous analysis of the value embodied in it. If we begin from the premise that the animating concern of “cotton capitalists” was not, as Beckert’s narrative might suggest, to produce more cotton—C-M-C0—but rather, as Marx would have it, to accumulate more capital—M-C-M0—then the very historical details Beckert’s narrative overlooks begin to point toward a different kind of account, one that grasps the uneven development of capitalism as a social form that is at once produced and reproduced only through particular material histories and at the same time irreducible to them. AN EXPANDED CONCEPT OF THE “COMMODITY FRONTIER” To clarify this distinction, we turn to a body of work that Beckert himself mentions without pursuing its fullest implications for his own arguments. In reconstructing the globe-spanning reconfigurations of commerce and production realized by “war capitalism,” Beckert observes that the Caribbean planters of the eighteenth century “opened up a new ‘commodity frontier’—a new cotton-producing territory—and with it they began a new chapter in the global history of cotton.” He returns to the concept once again in his account of “the new cotton imperialism,” which he explains as the process whereby “the global cotton ‘commodity frontier’ was pushed into even more numerous areas of the world, intensifying what one historian has so aptly termed ‘the great land rush.’” In both instances, Beckert concerns himself chiefly with the vast quantities of fiber exported from such “frontiers,” be they West Indian slave plantations or peasant smallholdings in Togo. But the concept he invokes is more than just a clever turn of phrase for naming peripheral sites of raw materials production. Rather, in the work of Jason W. Moore, from which it originates, the “commodity frontier” provides the very basis for a retheorization of value as “a way of organizing nature.” In Moore’s work, the “commodity frontier” is not just a green rebranding of the dependency theory category “periphery,” nor does it simply name the geographic territories that capital has plundered for forests and fields and subsoil minerals. 30. Ibid., 89. 31. Ibid., 345. 32. Beckert credits Moore directly for the concept (see ibid., 472–73). 120 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES SPRING 2017 This content downloaded from 130.058.065.013 on July 28, 2017 10:55:09 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Rather than a place or location, the “frontier” describes a moving configuration of relations that allow capital to locate and appropriate the diverse forms of unpaid or underpaid work performed by human and nonhuman natures alike. It therefore refers to the boundary between commodified and uncommodified forms of life across which capital is constantly moving. This observation carries echoes of Rosa Luxemburg’s well-known formulation that the historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking into consideration the organic link that exists between what she calls the realm of “pure commodity exchange,” on the one hand, and “capital’s blustering violence,” on the other. The ongoing production of “cheap natures” and their appropriation by capital as “free gifts” is necessary to drive down the value composition of commodity production elsewhere. “The history of capitalism flows through islands of commodity production, developing within oceans of unpaid work/energy,” Moore concludes. “In other words: Value does not work unless most work is not valued.” Why is the production of cheap natures—in the form of food, energy, labor, and raw materials—so central to the workings of capitalism? For an answer, Moore turns to Marx’s Capital, volume 3, to rethink the dynamics of capitalism’s immanent crisis tendencies. Theories of crisis, particularly those focused on the EuroAmerican industrial core, have tended toward a “curious conflation of overaccumulation and overproduction.” Within the Marxist tradition, Moore suggests, many have taken their cues from volume 1 of Capital and its analysis of the ways in which the pursuit of relative surplus value yields a glut of capital, goods, and machinery. What Marx termed the “rising organic composition of capital”—the ratio of “constant capital” (the value embodied in machinery, equipment, and raw materials) to “variable capital” (the value of labor power)—portends a crisis-inducing tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The problem, Moore continues, is that fallingrate-of-profit arguments have tended to overemphasize one moment of constant capital—namely, “fixed” constant capital in the form of labor-saving machinery— at the expense of “circulating” constant capital embodied in energy inputs, wage foods, and raw materials. But as Marx observed in volume 3, the cost of raw materials—cotton fiber and coal, for example—represents an ever-higher proportion of the value composition of a given commodity as labor productivity increases. Consequently, “the rate of profit falls or rises in the opposite direction to the price 33. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (New York: Routledge, 2003), 432–33. 34. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), 54. 35. Ibid., 91. Finding Value | 121 This content downloaded from 130.058.065.013 on July 28, 2017 10:55:09 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). of raw material.” The more bales of cotton a textile mill could process in an hour, the more the cost of that raw cotton would impinge upon the profits of the factory owner. The rising material throughput of industrial