from “The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis”

---

Is Capitalism Natural?

The title of this chapter implies that capitalism has a natural history, which presupposes that capitalism is in some sense natural. If we accept that capitalism is a way of organizing human life on Earth, then this is only logical, for humans and Earth are natural. However, in another sense, capitalism is not natural: It is an inherently expansionary, accumulation-driven economic form, destructive of nature. We have, therefore, an antinomy: Capitalism is natural; capitalism is not natural. This chapter will provide a fresh way to resolve this antinomy by proposing a Marxian natural-historical approach. 

The first step is to recognize that capitalism has been naturalized. We have been taught to think of capitalism as something natural. We are led to believe that capitalism—understood here as a “free-market society,” which is how non-Marxists tend to speak of capitalism—has no real history: It simply exists, or was at least always there, in potential. People have always exchanged things, so a free-market society was inevitable; it was only a question of removing barriers to it—freeing ourselves and our markets. 

Since 1859, this sort of thinking has been justified by two sorts of appeals to Darwin’s theory. One concerns the evolution of the human species. The argument is that humans evolved to thrive as a species under just the sort of conditions that capitalism provides. We evolved to produce and consume, to truck and barter, to compete and accumulate, and so on (the specific qualities vary). Regardless of the specifics, the idea is that humans evolved in such a way that it is only logical that we should live in capitalist societies today. Capitalism provides the true native habitat of the human species; this is proven by the huge increase in the human population after adopting the capitalist form of society. 

From a Darwinian perspective, such thinking is flawed. Humans evolved under social and environmental conditions that diff er significantly from what we live in today. Our species spread around Earth long before adopting a capitalist form; humans have only lived in capitalist societies for around 0.1 percent of our species’s existence. We cannot presume that this particular moment—the one we happen to live in— reflects the telos of our evolution and judge all our varied adaptations retrospectively from that vantage. Even granting such a perspective, there are grounds for skepticism about the idea that prior adaptations prepared humans to thrive under capital. During the short period that humans have lived in capitalist societies, the world has seen the sixth great extinction event, rapid warming, and many regions have departed from the environmental niche within which the human species evolved.¹ Even if capitalism seems like a good fit for humanity today, it is likely to prove problematic for our survival. 

Some invert the argument to make a different claim. Rather than suggest that humans are perfectly adapted to capitalist society, they claim that humanity tried out various social forms and that capitalism proved to be the one for which we were most fit. By this reasoning, what evolves are not individual humans but social formations. This line of reasoning typically presumes a teleology, putting it at odds with Darwin’s theory. We might also wonder whether we may judge capitalism more successful than previous social formations: Capitalism will not last as long as hunter-gatherer societies did. Moreover, this style of thinking departs from Darwin’s model, since there is no equivalent to the mechanism of natural selection (where gains in individual fitness lead to changes in the proportion of offspring that exhibit traits) in the evolution of social forms.

These objections notwithstanding, I do not think we can simply dismiss all talk of social evolution: Better to redirect it into more analytically coherent and politically emancipatory directions.² This was Marx’s approach. If we accept the proposition that capitalism is but one particular socio-ecological form through which our species has come to organize

itself and its relations with nature (HH×HN), then we can better understand how we came to live in capitalist societies while avoiding some common errors of reasoning.

Capitalism—the highest stage of society?

As European societies first began to be transformed by capitalist social relations, intellectuals generated theories about the changes occurring and their origin. Adam Smith’s four-stage model provides a well-known example.³ Smith claims that there is a natural, logical sequence to the development of human societies, which passes through four discrete stages: Aft er hunting, shepherding, and agriculture, human society adopted the highest stage, “market society” (Smith’s name for what we call capitalism). Smith’s evidence and reasoning are weak enough to ignore. The important point is that his framework is teleological. Smith essentially built an argument from a specific presupposition—that all societies would, or should, end up looking like Scotland in the 1770s—and then narrated a story about why this would occur, projecting it backward through all human history.⁴ 

Historians of capitalism today often produce a more sophisticated version of this narrative. Typically, the variables that explain the rise of capitalism are technology (the Industrial Revolution) plus political ideas (which lead to states getting out of the way of markets). The heroes of the story are engineers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs: Men (almost always white men) who create capitalist society through their guile, risk-taking, technology, and competitive spirit. This sort of history may help to plot a certain course of events and provide empirical material to fill in some gaps in our knowledge. But it suffers a fatal flaw: While it can demonstrate that these changes occurred, it cannot explain why (without, as Smith does, presupposing the very thing it seeks to explain). In the words of Ellen Wood, practically all accounts of the emergence of capitalist society have “treated it as the natural realization of ever-present tendencies”:

Almost without exception, accounts of the origin of capitalism have been fundamentally circular: They have assumed the prior existence of capitalism in order to explain its coming into being. In order to explain capitalism’s distinctive drive to maximize profit, they have presupposed the existence of a universal profit-maximizing rationality. In order to explain capitalism’s drive to improve labour-productivity by technical means, they have also presupposed a continuous, almost natural, progress of technological improvement in the productivity of labour. These question-begging explanations have their origins in classical political economy and Enlightenment conceptions of progress. Together, they give an account of historical development in which the emergence and growth to maturity of capitalism are already prefigured in the earliest manifestations of human rationality, in the technological advances that began when Homo sapiens first wielded a tool, and in the acts of exchange human beings have practiced since time immemorial.⁵

For good reason, Wood’s description of this narrative refers to the evolution of Homo sapiens: Since 1859, the older liberal narratives, like Smith’s, have been recast in Darwinian terms. In these histories, capitalism’s emergence is naturalized: “In most accounts of capitalism and its origin, there really is no origin. Capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere; and it only needs to be released from its chains . . . to be allowed to grow and mature.”⁶ The basic problem with liberal historiography of capital, then, is akin to the problem of pre-Darwinian histories of species: They produce detailed descriptions of each species and how it lives in place of a substantive explanation of its becoming. In lieu of an analytical framework for explaining causality, they narrate backward from a telos (which seems to need no explanation). 

Is a nonteleological history of capitalism possible? Certainly. But since we live within capitalist societies, it is difficult not to presuppose the very conclusion that we are trying to explain. (Partly for this reason, the history of capitalism is not generally taught in economics.) Marxist historians have generated powerful criticisms of conservative and liberal histories of capitalism, but vigorously disagree among themselves about alternative explanations. One school of thought, inaugurated by Capital, emphasizes the story of “so-called original accumulation”: Capitalism started whenever people were separated from the means of labor. Some in this first school emphasize so-called original accumulation within England; others expand the horizon of research to link capital’s emergence in Britain with the plunder of the Americas, the colonization of Ireland, the transatlantic slave trade, the formation of early industrial relations in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, and so on. Since the separation of human beings from their means of labor (paradigmatically: The enclosures and the plunder of indigenous lands) is always resisted by the victims, this process always entails state-coordinated violence. Hence these narratives implicitly support the view that capitalism emerged from non-capitalism, via force. Such thinking raises a difficult question: How could anything emerge from what it is not? Posing the question allows us to appreciate its proximity to the question Darwin faced—to explain the emergence of existing species from extinct ones. 

One way to finesse this problem is to focus on explaining how capitalist social relations emerged where they took hold of a society in toto for the first time. Such reasoning leads one to examine changes in social relations in western Europe generally and rural England particularly. A school of thought that has followed this path of research de-emphasizes Marx’s “original accumulation” narrative in lieu of studying how and why producers in rural England came to systematically compete with one another to produce commodities that they could sell profitably. To follow a trend in this literature, I will call this second group “political Marxism.”⁷ A third approach emphasizes consumption and dependence on markets for the social reproduction of life and the reproduction of the labor power commodity. I will call this the “consumption approach.” Even with a simple presentation of these ideas, it should be intuitive that the differences stem from thinking about the emergence of capitalism at different scales and with distinct objects of analysis. Under such conditions, it will be impossible to find a consensus.⁸ My premise is that, if we accept the proposition that capital is a socio-ecological formation— a form recently adopted by our species—it follows that the becoming of capitalism amounted to the reforming of social relations and human relations with nature (HH×HN). From that vantage, all three of the aforementioned approaches have some validity and we need to incorporate them coherently to understand capital’s natural history. This chapter reflects my attempt to do so by applying three general principles:

[1] M-C-M’. It will be helpful to disaggregate capital into distinct processes that constitute it as a differentiated unity, permitting us to study the historical becoming of these processes at different scales of analysis. If we accept Marx’s definition of capital as value in motion, and his general formula for capital, then we can appreciate that a social formation becomes capitalist when it combines commodity production (employing the commodity labor power) with consumption (by proletarians dependent upon the market to acquire commodities) and reinvestment of surplus value realized as productive capital (by capitalists).

[2] HH×HN. Too often, histories of capitalism leave nature out entirely. A generation of environmental history and ecological Marxism has shown the inadequacy of such exclusions.⁹ Capitalism has not only changed how humans live on this planet; it also came into being because humans changed how we live on this planet. Since these processes have played out differently in space and time, a multi-scalar approach is useful. And, since the processes that comprise capital have distinct effects on HH×HN, it helps to consider them separately (though in reality they intertwine).

[3] Being and becoming. Historicizing capital is complex because it is not a material thing that we can define objectively, but a socio-economic formation, comprising a set of form-determined relationships, with no final endpoint. Even societies that are obviously capitalist (such as the USA today) continue to become more thoroughly capitalist through time. By implication, it will be useful to track both the being of capital (a complete circuit of capital manifest in a predominantly capitalist society) and the becoming of capital (the imminent emergence and deepening of specifically capitalist social relations). This will help to address the geographical puzzle that while capital’s becoming requires a transcontinental perspective, we can also assert that capital achieved hegemony first in England.

Before proceeding, a qualification. This chapter contains no new empirical evidence, and I do not expect to resolve the debates among Marxists on the history of capitalism. My aim is more modest: To present a conceptual, Marxist, natural-historical vantage upon the emergence of capital. By decomposing capital into three processes and examining each as an element in capital’s natural history, I hope to contribute to a more coherent narrative of capital’s becoming. Doing so should also help us to understand Capital better. Capital does not provide the final word on capital’s emergence (Marx certainly did not see it that way). By my reading, in Capital there are two different styles of arguments about the emergence of capitalism, which diff er not only in terms of temporality (when the transition begins, how long the process takes, and so on) but also—going back to Hegel—in terms of the category of history on off er (refl ective-critical versus philosophical). On one hand, Marx presents the emergence of capitalism as a logical process that developed over the course of centuries and which may be explained rationally. On the other hand, Marx shows that the becoming of capital is essentially irrational and contradictory: For, by the time the world becomes capitalist, it will have undermined its conditions of possibility. (Marx’s claim that the true barrier to capitalism is capital itself, and his prediction that capital would beget communism, express the second style of historical reasoning.) The distinctive politics of these styles of historical interpretation are complex and cannot be resolved here. I simply want to try to present both views coherently. Bringing nature into the picture—which the young Marx scolded Hegel for failing to do—will help us.

---

1. Chi Xu, Timothy Kohler, Timothy Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Marten Scheff er, “Future of the human climate niche,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 21 (2020): 11350–5. ↩︎
2. Cf. Yanis Varoufakis’s defense of studying economic history through evolutionary models of systemic change: “The problem with evolutionary social theory is neither that its origins are biological nor that its predictions follow trivially from its assumptions. It is rather that, in accordance with neoliberal thinking ([including] mainstream economics. . .), it tends to stay firmly within the confines of a canonical (that is, primitive) evolutionary model in which the individual is frozen in time and change occurs only at the level of the social. The study of history requires a deeper analysis”: Varoufakis, “Capitalism according to evolutionary game theory: The impossibility of a sufficiently evolutionary model of historical change,” Science and Society 72, no. 1 (2008): 63–94.
   ↩︎
3. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R. Meek, D. Raphael, and P. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); cf. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso Books, 2009). ↩︎
4. Decades later, Hegel did something similar with his philosophy of history: See chapter 1. ↩︎
5. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso Books, 2002), 4–5. Those “Enlightenment conceptions of progress” still run deep among liberals. ↩︎
6. Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 5. ↩︎
7. The name “political Marxism” is odd because none of these schools of thought are unpolitical. Like many misnomers, this one started from an insult, when Guy Bois accused Brenner and Wood of giving Marxist historicism an unjustified political inflection by focusing on (ostensibly political) class relations rather than (ostensibly economic) forces of production: See Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy,” Past and Present 79, no. 1 (1978): 60–9. I thank Maïa Pal for this insight. ↩︎
8. Complete consensus in historical scholarship is neither possible nor desirable. However, for the sake of effective social and political communication, Marxist historiography could do better in countering conservative and liberal histories of capitalism.
   ↩︎
9. As Jason Moore has noted repeatedly: “The Modern World-System as environmental history? Ecology and the rise of capitalism,” Th eory and Society 32 (2003): 307–77; “Transcending the metabolic rift : A theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2003): 1–46; Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2015). ↩︎