Globalization in American Agriculture: Agro-industrial Revolutions in the Capitalist World-ecology

• In Event: 552 - Section on Political Economy of the World-Systems Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. From Above and From Below: Agency and Structure

Abstract

The following paper explains how American agriculture was a product and producer of global environmental change. It suggests that capitalist agricultural revolutions were central to this development. Utilizing a world-ecology framework, I challenge and extend political Marxists conceptualization of agricultural revolutions on three fronts. First, social property regimes and class relations must incorporate how the extension of the law of value has been a global process to capitalist development. We must consider how global forces conditioned productivity revolutions, and, in turn, how those productivity revolutions reconditioned global forces. Second, historicizing and theorizing agricultural revolutions must include the question of nature. The unpaid work of human and extra-human natures were crucial to reproducing capital’s cheap food model. And third, capital’s golden-ages have been premised on successive agricultural revolutions provisioning cheap food, energy, and raw materials. The succession of agricultural revolutions alludes to how as a productive system agriculture creates and resolves recurring crises and limits. I make these claims based on the forces, patterns, and trends of American agriculture in the world-economy. I argue that the United States engendered three successive agro-industrial revolutions that constituted, and constitutive of, global environmental change.

Author

• Ben Marley, Binghamton University