Social-ecological reproduction and the substance of life in commodity frontiers

Newfoundland fisheries in world market shifts

Bibliographic Data

ID5143902
AuthorsPaul Foley (0000-0001-8012-0173, Memorial University of Newfoundland, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume43
Issue4
Pages543-560
Publication date2019-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCapital & Class (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0309-8168 • E-ISSN: 2041-0980
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0309816819880786
OpenAlexW2982049960
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited43

The purpose of this article is to deepen analyses of life production relations that are of central concern to the feminist global political economy frameworks around which this special issue is organized. While the original approach recognized ecological relations in its methodological synthesis of power, production, and social reproduction, most subsequent research engaging the approach focuses on areas such as household labor, health care, education, migration, and macroeconomic governance. Much less work, however, analyzes relations between capital accumulation and ecological life-producing relations that ultimately sustain human and non-human life. The article draws on elements of a 'world-ecology', commodity frontier perspective, to argue for the integration of primary - ecological - production of the substance of life into the power, production, and social reproduction global political economy framework. The article draws on this synthesis to conduct a long-term analysis of one of the earliest commodity frontiers in capitalist history, Newfoundland fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Through an analysis of changing patterns of ecological production, household and community reproduction, state enclosure of ocean life production, and world market shifts, the article suggests that we need to move beyond narrow consequentialist analyses of the role of capital accumulation in ecological exhaustion toward broader, integrated analyses of change that reveal dynamic and perhaps more hopeful struggles and potential for sustainable and progressive conditions of intergenerational social-ecological reproduction

Biology · Commodity · Ecological economics · Economics · Market economy · Political science · Politics · Relations of production · Reproduction · Social capital · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Sustainability · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Mining and Resource Management · Ecology

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