Nature and Fictitious Capital

The Historical Geography of an Agrarian Question

Bibliographic Data

ID10962139
AuthorsGeorge Henderson (0000-0002-9672-0867, University of Arizona, corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume30
Issue2
Pages73-118
Publication date1998-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntipode (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-8330.00069
OpenAlexW2038541930
LanguageEN
Citations received47
References cited31

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

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Argument (complex analysis · Capital (architecture · Capital accumulation · Capitalism · Capitalist mode of production · Economic system · Economics · Human capital · Ideology · Market economy · Neoclassical economics · Nexus (standard · Obstacle · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Relations of production · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism