Ostula, a Nahua community in the Mexican state of Michoacán, sits within 19,000 hectares of Nahua land running along the Pacific coast and encompassing twenty-two communities. The land has been inhabited since before the conquest but only in 1964 was the Nahuas’ possession officially recognized by the state.1 While their lands had been invaded and were constantly under threat even after official recognition, after the explosion of state and paramilitary violence in Mexico in 2006, the community has found themselves under intense pressure.2 On the northern edge of their territory, mestizo smallholders had invaded their land; mining companies had won concessions to some of these same parcels; and drug logistics organizations were taking over towns to use for drug transport and to ship illegally mined ore and wood to China.3 Ostula was, and is, not alone in facing this threat. At the 2009 National Indigenous Congress, representatives of indigenous groups from 9 states in Mexico signed the Ostula Manifesto, a document declaring the right of indigenous groups to armed self-defense of their lands.4 Two weeks later the community of Ostula founded a community police and defense force and proceeded to recover their lands and expel all paramilitary and drug logistics groups from their territory.5 Through constant vigilance and in spite of frequent attacks, they have managed fend off control and dispossession of their lands, as all around them in Michoacán and across Mexico, territories have been seized, cleared, and opened to capital.

This battle — for the preservation of land and against military and paramilitary violence and control — which the community of Ostula and communities like it around Mexico are still fighting, takes place against the backdrop of what Jason Moore has identified as a signal crisis of capitalism’s world-ecology. As the ecological surplus has fallen, states and capital, hungry for new territories and vistas for exploitation, have gone on the offensive in Mexico seizing lands, distributing death and destruction, and dominating accumulation through violence. Sharae Deckard, building on the analysis of Moore, has described Mexico’s neoliberal ecological regime since the 1980s:

Mexico’s situation over these three decades displays all the hallmarks of the neoliberal accumulation regime as described by Moore: new profit was achieved through the combination of plunder and productivity, in which the enclosure of new geographical frontiers and appropriation of new sources of raw materials, energy (facilitated by Mexico’s oil boom), food (via the institution of a mass agro-food sector) and labor power (through deruralization and the opening of the peasant sector) was joined with scientific-technical advances in labor productivity (the export assembly-plant), while at the same time distinguished by the hegemony of finance capital over the accumulation process, which discouraged long-term productive investment in preference of the short-term profits to be gained from asset-stripping and outright plunder.6

Deckard’s analysis of Mexico’s ecological regime remains an accurate description of the present, even several years into the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration, with one exception: the increasing importance of violence or armed force in the process of accumulation.7 The waves of direct violence, disappearance, and seizures of land and resources at their current scale have no precedent in the neoliberal period in Mexico and as such represent a profound new moment of on-going primitive accumulation joined to an expansion of immiseration. However, there is also newness here in the extent to which violence and paramilitarization have come to organize the entire process of accumulation, including exploitation, as theorists such as Ana Esther Ceceña have noted.8 To understand and explain the longevity of para-military force and terror in accumulation and to make sense of its lived political reality, I argue we must position it within a value theoretical and world-ecological frame.

Before we advance in our discussion it is important to say a bit more about what “violence,” that famously capacious and imprecise term, means here. In this article, I will be using violence to refer to forms of direct violence, often armed, often resulting in death, dispossession, and disappearance.9 Direct, armed, or para-state violence functions, as Dawn Paley argues, as a form of neoliberal war and expanded counterinsurgency in Mexico.10 After a bitterly contested presidential election in 2006 between Felipe Calderón and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the official elections results gave Calderón a lead of less than 1 percent. While López Obrador and his PRD party called for a full recount of votes, Calderón was hastily inaugurated in the Mexican Senate in a ceremony that lasted 5 minutes and ended with fistfights breaking out between legislators. Facing the prospect of trying to govern from a profoundly delegitimated position and facing important social movements and uprisings across the country, ten days later Calderón sent the Mexican Army into Michoacán under the pretext of combating drug trafficking. This was the first operation of what became the stunningly mislabeled “drug war,” which instead of ending violence has seeded it, though unevenly, into every corner of the country. Figures vary but since 2006 more than 350,000 are dead and more than 70,000 disappeared, a catastrophic loss of life and community which is on-going.11 While politics can explain the beginning of this military and paramilitary violence, it cannot explain its longevity—only the usefulness of the violence for state and capital and their ecological projects can do so.

Misconceptions about the nature and meaning of this violence are many. Most pernicious is the common narrative that the violence in Mexico today results from a confrontation between two groups, shadowy drug cartels bent on profit without limits and the state’s military and police forces who are struggling to restore order and peace. As Oswaldo Zavala’s masterful Los carteles no existen (The Cartels Don’t Exist) shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is widespread interpenetration between the state and paramilitary groups, so much that Zavala argues “esa violencia obedece más a las estrategias disciplinarias de las propias estructuras del Estado que a la acción criminal de los supuestos ‘narcos’” [“this violence obeys more the disciplinary strategies of the structures of the state than the criminal acts of the so-called ‘narcos’”].12 As Benjamin T. Smith notes, releasing the military from their barracks did not decrease the amount of violence, it increased it and led to further imbrications between the police and military and drug logistics organizations.13

However, there is another side to this discussion, as Dawn Palely demonstrated in her Drug War Capitalism. The “violence” we often see in the news media appears spontaneous and without reason. What Paley demonstrates is the violence of the “drug war,” which now has spilled over into so many other areas of life, serves to open new areas of accumulation for capital and to discipline, and remove, those who stand in the way.14 This violence comes from both the military and police forces and from drug logistics organizations that are linked with them in complicated, obscure ways. Because of this I will refer to the violence as paramilitary or as para-state and what I mean is that it is both of and alongside the state and its armed forces.

This violence is immanently ecological in two ways: it forms a part of an ecological project to open new territories for accumulation and to discipline labor but it is also driven by the consequences of an on-going ecological collapse. As deforestation, rising temperatures, water scarcity, and contamination proceed and as the global and Mexican economies have stagnated, Mexican and international capital have had to look at marginal, dearly held, or fiercely contested spaces and sites for new inputs and sources of accumulation and have leaned on direct force to oversee the entire process of accumulation.

These dramatic transformations in Mexico need to be positioned within Jason Moore’s world-ecology or his prescient analysis of a world trapped in a signal crisis of the tendency of the ecological surplus to fall. In Moore’ argument, without an ever-expanding stream of cheap resources (including labor) capitalism stagnates. As ecological limits have been hit, prices for key inputs have risen and capitalism has begun to generate “increasingly direct and immediate barriers to the expanded reproduction of capital,” or “negative value” as Moore calls it.15 Moore’s work intervenes into one of the key debates of the present wherein Mexico should be a focal point of discussion: will either capitalism or humanity survive the ecological contradictions of the Capitalocene? Will the signal crisis of capitalism turn into a terminal one? Moore, along with many other Marxist critics, is skeptical of capitalism’s ability to solve the contradictions it has generated. I share in this sentiment but contend that posing these questions in a Mexican context requires their reframing. Instead of an either/or question of capitalism’s survival pitched on a theoretical level, the present and very real world-ecological crisis in Mexico — including the domination of finance, the limits of and damages caused by industrial agriculture and mining, and the outsized role of violence and terror in the accumulation process — put the question in the tense of the present progressive: how are capitalists attempting to extend the life of capitalism in spite of the terrible consequences of its domination of the planet, particularly in hotly contested territories of the global periphery and semi-periphery? What I want to explore in this essay is how para-state violence being used in Mexico to extend capitalism’s life and preserve its disastrous world-ecology can be integrated into Moore’s ecological value theory and how cultural works that center these forms of violence outline an emerging political imaginary of reproduction and self-defense as a response to the present signal crisis.

In the first part of this essay, I approach Jason Moore’s world-ecology as a theory of crisis to test its utility for making sense of the particular social and political consequences of ecological pressure in contemporary Mexico. I argue Moore’s crisis theory tends towards the monocausal: if capitalism does not expand appropriation more quickly than exploitation (and thus push down the price of labor, energy, raw materials, and food) then crisis sets in. I suggest that in the work of Ernest Mandel we find a dynamic, multi-variable approach to capitalist crisis (and capitalist expansion) which can enrich Moore’s theorization. Mandel’s work centers the role of the extra-economic, particularly violence, in capitalist recovery from crisis which, I argue, allows us to grasp the role of violence in present state and capitalist attempts to maintain and extend accumulation.16 By holding together Moore and Mandel, I build a theory of crises and their overcoming which give us the necessary tools for holding together the way ecological pressures have combined with para-state violence in Mexico.

In the second half of the essay, I turn to the recent documentary films Los reyes del pueblo que no existe [Kings of the Town that Does Not Exist] (2015) and Caminando hacia la autonomia [Walking Towards Autonomy] (2015) approaching them as complex sites where the condensation of ecological and economic pressures in Mexico can be registered. I read these films as a form of “ecological realism,” or a charting of new social forms produced under the pressure of ecological crisis and the para-militarization of accumulation. Through a discussion of these films, I show how ecological pressure and violence twine together to produce a larger crisis of reproduction. In each film we can see communities articulating new forms of social reproduction and learning to live differently in the context of ecological pressure and catastrophe. These films demonstrate how ecological pressure and violence create crises of reproduction, which leads to politics that turn around alternative forms of reproduction. As a result, I argue these films show that any coming ecological politics has to join an understanding of the contradictions of political economy and the mediations of crisis as security as an everyday obstacle to survival. Ultimately, what my analysis illustrates is that ecological catastrophe, crisis, and pressure imply a politics that simultaneously is ecological and abolitionist, one that requires new forms of self-defense and social reproduction.

Prior cultural criticism has taken up Moore’s work in, at least, two important ways. The notion and centrality of commodity frontiers have been used by critics such as Michael Niblett in his masterful World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950 to remap relations between literature and political economy. The idea of capitalism as possessing ecological regimes has been deployed by Sharae Deckard to offer an account of world literature that is “not merely world-systemic but world-ecological in its horizon.”17 In this essay my approach to Moore and the politics of cultural analysis is other. While other critics have utilized Moore’s work to analyze the mediations between political economy and culture, the present essay specifically centers value theory and global value relations. It investigates and intervenes into debates in value and crisis theory to then focus on the mediations between global value relations and cultural production. Its aim is to read the aesthetic modes emerging from ecological pressure and para-militarized accumulation alongside the changes, patterns, and transformations of value and value relations to constitute a materialist cultural theory of value.

World-Ecology as Crisis Theory

One of the most outstanding features of Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life is how it balances Marxist value theory with extensions of it. Value theory in its most basic form sees labor as the site of value production in capitalist societies, but the labor-centrism of some orthodox versions of value theory has been critiqued by feminists, anti-racists, and environmentalists. Moore’s book holds together these two traditions of value theory and its extensions and revisions from allied positions. Moore envisions capitalism as a dialectic between two processes: appropriation, where unpaid work/energy is plundered, and exploitation, where those streams of appropriated work/energy are put to work. Moore, however, inverts the traditional relationship between these two moments:

For if the production of capital has been the strategic pivot of capitalism, to an even greater extent accumulation has unfolded through the appropriation of planetary work/energy. Such appropriation — of cheap resources, yes (“taps”), but also of cheap garbage (“sinks”) — does not produce capital as “value”; but it does produce the relations, spaces, and work/energy that make value possible. Capitalism does generalize commodity relations, but the actual extent of such generalization depends on an even greater generalization: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy.18

For Moore, in other words, appropriation is the key driver of the system; it is, as he says elsewhere, the pedestal on which exploitation sits.19 Moore wants to train our attention on this vast world of so-called appropriation, which includes the realms of unpaid work by women in the home and natural resources ripped from the earth. As Sara Nelson has insightfully observed, “rather than appropriation operating in the service of capitalization (by expanding commodity relations), Moore suggests that capital’s guiding imperative is in fact to expand the sphere of appropriation.”20

Appropriation is imminently cultural for Moore. Work and energy are not just found but rather they must be made available to capital, which requires science, culture, and geopower. Moore productively advances current conversations around on-going primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession by demonstrating how nature must be made legible as a resource through a vast set of cultural practices before it can be appropriated and by clearly specifying how appropriation ties into exploitation.21 To make vast realms of work/energy available to capital, science and scientific revolutions have been paramount in making nature “nature,” that is visible as source, supply, and input. Just as important for Moore’s account are the global devices of culture and geopower — and while Moore does not dwell much on race there is space here in his theory for an account of it.22 For Moore, capitalism is defined by exploitation, but exploitation requires an expanding field of appropriation and for capitalism to function, the zone of appropriation must expand “faster than the zone of commodification.”23 Capitalism needs to secure the acquisition of what Moore calls the “four Cheaps,” labor, food, energy, and raw materials, for as close to free as it possibly can.24 To do so requires a vast cultural apparatus of knowledge and power, including technologies such as mapping, the hard sciences, and the softer sciences of persuasion and control.

Moore’s other intervention is to bring front and center the falling rate of profit, which was once fundamental to Marxist thought but remains a minor current even within the on-going Marxist revival.25 In volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops a theory of how capitalism can enter into, and importantly, exit out of crisis by examining the impact of different variables on the rate of profit. The rate of profit is simply the society-wide average profit of capitalists within a given time frame. Marx argues that if unchecked the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, meaning that over time capitalist enterprises make less and less leading to a potential crisis. In the most basic scenario as capitalists invest in machinery and raw materials (or constant capital), the number or amount of laborers (also known as variable capital) necessary can decline. Because labor is the quintessential source of value, if this changing ratio of machinery and raw materials to labor (known as the organic composition of capital) goes unchecked the overall rate of profit will decline. If it declines enough it leads to a crisis. This very shorthand sketch is one of the versions of crisis theory which we find in Marx’s works. It has been an influential one in different moments of twentieth century Marxism and the concept, if not the details, are central to Moore’s world-ecology.

Moore argues that in order to avoid crisis capitalism must expand appropriation (and push down the price of the four Cheaps) more quickly than the zone of exploitation expands and labor productivity rises. This is a crisis tendency in capitalism that Moore, recovering the term from Marx, calls “underproduction” or “the insufficient flow of labor, food, energy, and materials relative to the demands of value production.”26 This conceptual move frames Moore’s intervention into current debates on whether and if capitalism has a future on this planet. Against green capitalists who argue that market-based solutions can solve the crisis and Marxists who believe that a technological fix is possible, Moore argues that capitalism as a world-ecological project has run up against limits of its own making and entered into a signal crisis — a crisis that is not yet a terminal crisis but one that is on its way to becoming one. As Moore writes:

Understanding the capital relation as co-produced in and through the web of life entails a

conceptualization of capital’s internal crises as co-produced: the rising organic composition of capital, broadly conceived, entails the rising capitalized composition of global nature. The two are distinct expressions for a singular, uneven, historical process. If the former generates a tendency towards a declining rate of profit, the latter not only reinforced the former but also generates a new set of problems. These problems as I will try to make clear, combine the old and the new: in part, resource depletion and rising costs of production, yes. But in part a destabilization of the condition of biospheric stability and biological health that have obtained for centuries, even millennia.27

In other words, with no new frontiers or technological revolutions on the horizon that could increase appropriation, capitalism enters into a twinned crisis of rising organic composition of capital and of capitalized composition of global nature. And at the same time, these two conditions produce a new set of problems, including the present global climate crisis.

Moore’s world-ecology blends then a thoroughly culturalist account of capitalist accumulation with one based in Marxian value theory, where the tendency of the rate of profit and of the ecological surplus to fall play a critical role. Moore rehabilitates Marx’s crisis theory of a declining rate of profit by recasting it within an ecological frame where appropriation necessarily must outpace exploitation to stave off crisis. The point of difference I have with Moore is in how his theory takes the theoretical richness of Marx’s value and crisis theory and tends to reduce it to a narrative of predominantly one variable: the end of limitless appropriation or the closure of the Great Frontier. As he writes: “The great secret and the great accomplishment of capitalist civilization has been to not pay its bills. Frontiers made that possible. Their closure is the end of Cheap Nature — and with it, the end of capitalism’s free ride.”28 There is an ambiguity here: at times it sounds like Moore believes capitalism might simply collapse without frontiers and, consequently, that the end of the Great Frontier means simply that capitalism might expire without being pushed.29

The root of this ambiguity is that Moore’s wants to hold onto historical richness but also to make a winnowing theoretical claim. In other words, as Michael Neblitt has helpfully noted, “The difficulty Moore faces … is in combining his account of large-scale historical and economic change with his otherwise value-relational approach to the contradictory unity of exploitation and appropriation.”30 Perhaps the most generous reading one could make of Moore is that his stand-alone essays (both before and after the publication of his book) do more of the work of combining a value theoretical and historical account — but even having said this there has yet to be a full synthesis of these two aspects of his work, particularly of the present and particularly at the level of value theory.31 Moreover, one can find examples in more recent work of the tendency to privilege appropriation and the ending of frontiers as the key, and at times, only, variable for understanding crisis. Take for example, this passage from a 2019 interview:

Negative-value, then, can be understood as a barrier to capital accumulation that cannot be fixed on the “business as usual” model of the past five centuries. The end of the Holocene, ushered in by capital’s radical carbonization of the atmospheric commons, is a paradigmatic example (but not the only one). The technical means for an immediate transition to renewable energy exists - as the brilliant Andreas Malm (2018) and others have shown. And yet such a transition is nowhere on the horizon. Why? Because the five century model of capitalism is ruthlessly anarchic and competitive.32

Because of the centrality of the exhaustion of the Great Frontier has for him, Moore discards a sudden shift of capital into an energy transition as impossible. Even if, from the perspective of the present, a full commitment seems unlikely, certainly we have to note that Green New Deal energy has a number of adherents and bet-hedgers.33 If such a transition kicked in, perhaps it would not create an expansionary wave but certainly it would deepen the new commodity frontier around lithium and possibly provide a momentary stabilization and slowing of the downturn. From within Moore’s narrowed approach to value relations, however, there often isn’t space to see or to explore the potential impact of these shifts.

There are then two salient arguments for keeping in play other variables in the conception of how capitalism will respond to the present. First, the emphasis on the closure of the frontier and negative value means Moore’s perspective on contemporary capitalism is largely negative: that is, focused on the strategies that Moore believes will no longer work. This can obscure the point that capitalists and states will, of course, pursue strategies to restart or increase accumulation, and that this will look different depending on where one is on the globe. We need a means of tracking these strategies and that means is a more expansive account of value relations. Second, even if no upturn is possible, there is still a need to pay attention to all the variables at play, because they will determine the political ground, which will not only or necessarily be defined by the closing of the frontier, negative value, or the end of Cheap Nature. Because we can’t know which variables or which set of tactics to forestall, a declining rate of profit will be the most salient politically in a given moment; we have to have an account of the present that holds these variables, tactics, and plans together in their totality and interconnectedness. In protests against high bread prices like those of 2008, we are able to draw a straight line between the great frontier closing and the political form. But in Mexico, there is no such clear and direct mediation between Moore’s primary crisis variables and the present political forms, and this demands of us a different accounting.

To accomplish this, I turn to the work of twentieth-century Marxist theorist Ernest Mandel. Mandel’s work is concerned precisely not just with the question of how capitalism enters into crisis but with how capitalism has successfully exited crises in the past. On my account, Mandel provides us with a dynamic account of crises and recoveries. Moreover, one of the key variables he touches on is that of violence. My goal in the next section is not to substitute Mandel for Moore but rather to synthesize aspects of them to produce a more robust theory that can help us grasp not to just the centrality of para-state violence in Mexican accumulation but what this will mean for a political struggle against and within capitalism’s world-ecological signal crisis.

Ernest Mandel and Capital’s Countervailing Tendencies

Of twentieth-century Marxists, Ernest Mandel was the theorist who most seriously investigated and defended the analytic of the falling rate of profit. The corpus of Mandel’s work spans more than half a century, so for the purposes of this essay I will focus on his Long Waves of Capitalist Development which is the last major formulation of his theoretical concerns and deals with precisely some of the same questions which drive Moore’s own work. A recurrent concern for Mandel was how and why do booms and crises occur; early in his career the critical question was how to explain the post-war boom and, in the latter stages, the crisis of the 1970s. Mandel positioned his work against other Marxists who argued that, in fact, there was no post-war boom and against economists of all kinds who argued that the post-war boom signified that capitalism had entered into a new stage and had solved the contradictions which previously plagued it. The first position was stuck in an overly deterministic fidelity to Marx: the orthodox Marxist position was that capitalism was marked by a secular declining rate of profit, so there could be no actual upturn. The second position was marked by an overly determined apologetic for capitalism and an unrealistic belief that no downturn could ever be possible. Against both, Mandel argued for a Marxist approach to booms and crises which centered the tendency for the rate of profit to fall but which was equally attentive to the historical fact that capitalism had, several times, reversed this tendency and to the economic and non-economic variables which made upturns and downturns possible. Mandel’s theory was what he called “an accumulation-of-capital theory … or rate-of-profit theory”34 (author’s emphasis) and his research was directed at determining how to explain “long-term upsurges in the average rate of profit at certain historical turning points, in spite of the cyclic downturn of that same rate of profit at the end of each industrial cycle, and in spite of the secular decline pointing to the historical limit of the capitalist mode of production” (author’s emphasis).35

In Long Waves, Mandel’s approach to these turning points is two-fold. On the one hand, he centers economic variables which exist in a “complex dialectical interplay”36 and which, in dynamic and overlapping ways, push and pull on the average rate of profit. Mandel saw five factors as predominating, including the rate of surplus value, the organic composition of capital, the turnover rate, the mass of surplus value, and the movement of capital into sectors and geographies with lower organic compositions of capital:

In other words, a sharp increase in the rate of surplus value, a sharp slowdown in the rate of increase of the organic composition of capital, a sudden quickening in the turnover of capital, or a combination of several or all of these factors can explain a sudden upturn in the average rate of profit. In addition, Marx indicated that among the forces dampening the effects of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline are an increase in the mass of surplus value and a flow of capital into countries (and, we should add, sectors) where the average organic composition of capital is significantly lower than in the basic industrial branches of the industrialized capitalist countries.37

For Mandel, no one of these variables could explain a significant upturn or downturn in the rate of profit. Rather it was only when these countervailing or reinforcing forces worked together in a “synchronized way”38 could the rate of profit be shifted off its trajectory. If the countervailing forces were weak then the “tendency of the average rate of profit to decline will assert itself with full force”39 and a sustained period of depression would follow.

There are limits, however, to what these purely economic variables can explain. Mandel argues that the internal laws of capitalism can explain two phenomena: “the cumulative nature of each long wave, once it is initiated” and “the transition from an expansionist long wave to a stagnating long wave” (author’s emphasis).40 What these purely internal capitalist laws of motion cannot explain is the sudden, long-term uptick in the rate of profit. Mandel is saying, in a sense, that Marx was right, that capitalism suffers from a tendency for the rate of profit to decline. Nonetheless, there have been at least three times (1848, 1893, and 1940) that sustained expansionary waves have followed moments of deep depression in which many believed capitalism had finally hit a historical limit. To explain this, Mandel argues sustained upturns are the result of non-economic factors and explaining the sustained recovery of the rate of profit requires us to include a wider range of dynamics in our analysis:41

This upturn cannot be deduced from the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production by themselves. It cannot be deduced from the operation of “capital in general.” It can be understood only if all the concrete forms of capitalist development in a given environment (all the concrete forms and contradictions of “many capitals”) are brought into play. And these imply a whole series of noneconomic factors like wars of conquest, extensions and contractions of the area of capitalist operation, intercapitalist competition, class struggle, revolutions and counterrevolutions, etc. These radical changes in the overall social and geographic environment in which the capitalist mode of production operates in turn detonate, so to speak, radical upheavals in the basic variables of capitalist growth (i.e., they can lead to upheavals in the average rate of profit).42

There is a lot here, but what I want to focus right now is how Mandel centers a wide set of countervailing tendencies or variables that can shift the direction of the rate of profit and gives us an expansive account of the role of the non-economic.43 To be sure, Mandel and Moore start from a similar place: their projects are motivated by critiques of crisis theories which invest too heavily in the purely economic. For Moore, this takes the form of centering appropriation as the pedestal on which exploitation takes place. For Mandel, this takes the form of centering non-economic factors as the explanatory force for upturns and in the overcoming of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. If we want to think about how states and capitalists might work through the contradictions of climate and ecology, we can already see that Mandel provides us with a broad canvas to work with, but we haven’t established what might be useful about that. So let’s turn there now.44

Long Waves is a fascinating book partially because of how it and its author are positioned historically. In Mandel, we have a thinker whose work had been directed, at least in part, for over fifty years at trying to understand why capitalism enters into crisis and how it has been so successful at saving itself from the brink of ruin. In Long Waves Mandel is grappling with the very questions which Marxist crisis theorists today are trying to think through. Two questions here are key: first, how, if there has been no major upturn, has capitalism managed to survive since the 1970s and, second, given this history, what means are available to the capitalist system now to try to restart accumulation in the midst of an epochal crisis of climate? In the latter half of Long Waves, Mandel addresses from the perspective of the mid-90s essentially the same question that Moore is asking in his work for the present: could there be a sustained upturn given the prevailing conditions or has capitalism hit a historical limit? It is worth spending a moment with Mandel’s answer.

He writes that a “new expansionist wave that would significantly increase the rate of economic growth above the average levels of the 1970s 1980s, and 1990s would require an explosive increase in the rate of accumulation and therefore in the average rate of profit and a no less remarkable expansion in the market for capitalist commodities.”45 Mandel’s shorthand for expansionary waves is that the market for goods has to expand (meaning as the expansion produces more things those things have to be bought by someone) and labor militancy has to be broken (driving down the cost of labor and lessening the pressure of the organic composition of capital on the rate of profit). Imperialism has been a common means by which markets have been expanded, but clearly that was no longer an option in the 1990s. What Mandel very presciently notes is that for an expansion of market to happen “there would have to occur a huge credit explosion, which would involve several hundreds of billions of dollars.”46 Few writing in 1990 could have foreseen the possibility that countries such as Brazil would have consumer debt problems rivaling the United States in 2020 but Mandel could imagine debt as a countervailing tendency that capitalism could have recourse to in order to sustain the rate of profit.47

In terms of breaking labor militancy, Mandel has this to say: “[I]n order to drive up the rate of profit to the extent necessary to change the whole economic climate, under the conditions of capitalism, the capitalists must first decisively break the organizational strength and militancy of the working class in the key industrial countries.”48 While this is something that capitalists most certainly have done, particularly in the United States, unionized labor does still exist in certain critical industries and there is still a wage differential between the minimum wage and unionized wages and benefits. But in imagining what the full defeat of labor would entail Mandel makes an interesting point concerning the role of extra-economic violence:

The important point to stress is that such a drive would imply radical curtailment of the democratic freedoms currently enjoyed in most of the imperialist countries. The numbers of representative spokespersons of the capitalist class who have confirmed this have become impressive. The previously quoted speech of Sir Charles Carter stated unequivocally that unemployment caused by new technology, coupled with continual inflation, could result in a breakdown of law and order and collapse of the present political system. W. W. Rostow claimed no less unequivocally that the solution lies in a middle way between the welfare economy and the warfare economy. And most ominous of all are the trends spelled out in the report of the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy, which reflect the convictions of a significant sector of the top leaders of international monopoly capital. They imply a direct attack on “excessive democracy,” and they express the conviction that the types of decisions that will have to be taken in the coming years (in the interests of the capitalist system, obviously) and the very “governmentability” of the imperialist countries will depend on curtailment of democratic freedoms.49

Taking Mandel’s synoptic variables of market expansion and labor discipline as our guides, we can see that in the subsequent years there has been no sustained expansion, but capitalists have used the levers indicated by Mandel to keep the system from entirely collapsing. Credit expansion has served as an outlet for the consumption of goods and labor has been disciplined along a number of vectors including the rollback of political participation and liberal democratic norms (which is to say nothing about true democracy). While there is a place for ecology amongst Mandel’s countervailing tendencies, he doesn’t center it and the best he can do is note: “We leave aside the question whether or not mankind’s environment can support another fifty, not to say one hundred, years of economic growth.”50 Nonetheless, I contend that Mandel in partnership with Moore has something valuable to offer us as we attempt to think through what the relationship between ecological crisis and capitalism will look like in the coming years and, more importantly, the conditions under which organizing against crisis and capital will take place. Specifically, Mandel’s wider array of countervailing factors and emphasis on forced-based non-economic factors (such as counter-revolution, state violence, and attacks on political freedoms) give us not only a map of possible levers capitalists will use but also allows us to see how such levers are connected to ecological and economic pressure. However, this has to be combined with Moore’s revelatory value-theoretic approach to capitalist world-ecologies, their internal dynamics, and historical formations and regimes.51 In a sense, my aim here is simply to use Mandel to make Moore’s account of value relations as supple as it imagines itself to be.

Moore, for his part, tends not to center or highlight violence or direct coercion.52 The closest he comes is in his definition of appropriation when he writes, “Accumulation by appropriation involves those extra-economic processes — perhaps directly coercive, but also cultural and calculative — through which capital gains access to minimally or non-commodified natures for free, or as close to free as it can get. If appropriation is partly about primitive accumulation, it is equally about the cultural hegemonies and scientific-technical repertoires that allow for unpaid work/energy to be mobilized.”53 There are, of course, reasons for this. Moore’s intervention is against classic accounts of primitive accumulation as primarily driven by direct coercion. As an astute theorist working after the cultural turn, Moore wants to highlight how important science, knowledge, and cultural power was and are to the project of appropriation. Nonetheless, this helpful intervention means that violence gets abstracted in his theoretical apparatus (though less so in his historical account).54 In Moore, then, violence and direct coercion are subsumed into a technics of appropriation that are equally, or depending on the passage, predominantly, cultural and scientific. A strength of Mandel is that his work allows us to see violence and the extra-economic as potential and autonomous partial responses to long-term economic and ecological pressures and as more than adjuncts to a process of primitive accumulation.55

Having said all this, both Moore and Mandel (if we extrapolate his argument forward) would agree that an upturn in the present seems unlikely, although each would give a different account of why. Without a doubt, Moore’s work enables us to see, in a longue durée, how and why a return of cheap inputs is unlikely (in ways Mandel’s work could never do). Moore, unfortunately, can’t take us any further than this into the political and social realm of the present decline, as his work doesn’t have much to say about how capitalists might try to restart accumulation, or the specific social and political forms crisis might take. For those thought experiments, we need a theorist of the upturn and violence as an autonomous variable: enter Mandel. For precisely what we see around us, particularly in Mexico, is that direct, armed force, now more than ever, is critical, not to jump starting a new wave of expansionary accumulation, but to counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. Although there are many problems with GDP as a metric, between 2010 and 2018, Mexico’s GDP grew 3.0% per year as waves of violence washed across regions of the country, and in technologically advanced sectors of the economy the returns have been higher.56 Being able to account for violence as a partially autonomous variable in accumulation is critical since we are starting to see, as discussed in the next section, that organizing against ecological crisis will also have to be, and perhaps first of all, organizing against state and capitalist violence. What we see in Mexico today is that ecology from below and to the left will have to walk hand-in-hand with truly democratic forms of security, self-defense, and abolition.

Violence and Reproduction in Contemporary Mexican Documentary

In the years since Mandel’s book crises of capital and ecology have only continued to accumulate. There has been no new expansionary wave, while the rate of profit has been kept afloat with a combination of financial schemes, attacks on labor and dispossession, and the internationalization of the system of production. Alongside this, as Moore demonstrates, ecological crises and pressures have accumulated to the point that today the question is not if future generations will witness sustained ecological damage but how they might withstand it. As the global rate of profit continues to decline and ecological pressures continue to mount, their repercussions are present everywhere but in particularly acute ways in the periphery and semi-periphery of global capitalism. What does it look like, and what might it look like in the near future, to live through such pressures? In two contemporary Mexican documentaries, Los reyes del pueblo que no existe (2015) and Caminando hacia la autonomía(2015), we can already see the critical role violence plays in mediating ecological predicaments. In each documentary, what at first appears as a situation of ecological pressure — flooding resulting from a new dam in the case of Los Reyes and illegal logging in the case of Caminando— turns out to be layered with para-state violence, and, moreover, this violence is a significant mediation which political organizing is responding to.

Since the early 2000s, there has been a boom of documentary film production in Latin America, to the point where in Argentina documentary films count for almost 40% of all films made.57 Mexico has also seen a significant increase — due in part to the demand of streaming platforms but also to the curation of major festivals.58 The same is true for critical work on film. Where once documentary was the oft overlooked cousin of fiction filmmaking, the last decade has seen a number of important edited collections addressing this gap in theorization, including Miriam Haddu and Joanna Pages’ Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (2009), Antonio Traverso and Kristi M. Wilson’s Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (2014), and María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara’s Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium(2016).59

While the aesthetic strategies of Los reyesand Caminando are vastly different, they are both examples of what Julianne Burton calls the “social documentary” tradition in Latin America as their aim is to document social conditions and political struggles.60 However, each represents a departure from the dominant contemporary trend in documentary filmmaking which Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara have termed “the subjective turn,” or the inclusion of first-person perspectives and reflexive aesthetic strategies which “allow filmmakers to more easily introduce a critical point of view and to deconstruct the narratives that shape individuals and modern societies.”61 Both Los reyesand Caminando adopt a more traditional documentary film style of “objective” observation, allowing subjects and editing to do the work of presenting a narrative and providing the viewer with access to a situation and environment.

As mentioned above, the aesthetic strategies of the films, while they do share a broadly objective style of documentary presentation, are radically different. Los reyes takes its cues from art house filmmaking traditions, blending sumptuous shots; clever, cerebral editing; and overtones of cinematic horror to produce a captivating visual odyssey into a town destroyed by a dam’s construction and the people who resist and refuse to leave. Caminando is a much more straightforward example of Mexican political documentary, similar to films such as Granito de arena (2005) and Recuparando el paraíso (2017), which have sought to record important social movements in Mexico before they have had a chance to be repressed or forgotten. It employs head-shot interviews, voice-over, and footage of key events to construct an overview of the community of Cherán’s struggle against illegal logging and armed domination.

Despite differences in aesthetic approach, I read these films as forming part of what, building on Badia, Cetinić, and Diamanti’s notion of “climate realism,” I call “ecological realism.” In their discussion of climate realism, Badia, Cetinić, and Diamanti note the present is marked by the proliferation of realisms (speculative, indigenous, capitalist, etc.) and they argue this proliferation is indicative of the fact that “figurative mediations of climate will prove as necessary to climate realism today as the scientific facts that mark its reality.”62 They define climate realism as “a reparatory concept that foregrounds the political and ecological contradictions inherent in capital’s facility with energy” and note that “[t]he core suggestion of Climate Realism, then, is that weird weather today is not weird just because it is unseasonable, but also because it names features of the present that strain the epistemological and historical underpinnings of meteorology, philosophy, realist aesthetics, cultural criticism, and the physical sciences — namely, it erodes traditional distinctions that have stabilized disciplinary work in both the arts and sciences.”63 As is apparent, their definition foregrounds weather as a site of increasing weirdness which pushes at epistemological limits and calls for new realisms and new means of description and imagination.

Neither Los reyesnor Caminando is a film about weather specifically; however, each foregrounds the production of new means of living in common and new forms of social reproduction or a community’s means of producing the day-to-day conditions of its survival.64 The newness or weirdness of each is located not in weather but rather in a proliferation of new forms of human relation in the face of para-military violence driven by the ecological pressures of capitalist accumulation. Instead of climate realism, we could see them as exercises in “ecological realism”: each film represents an attempt to map the improbable and strangely beautiful forms of human community and resistance that have spread in Mexico as the traditional norms of governance and accumulation have shifted under the weight of para-militarized strategies of accumulation. Ecological realism, then, as it makes available to perception these new social forms is a direct response to the expansion of para-state violence across the accumulation process as a means to stabilize and elevate the rate of profit. At the same time, these two particular ecological-realist works demonstrate how, as Nancy Fraser argues, “Social reproduction is … intimately entwined with ecological reproduction, which is why so many crises of the first are also crises of the second — and why so many struggles over nature are also struggles over ways of life.”65

Los reyes del pueblo que no existe most explicitly foregrounds the strangeness of its community, as it opens with a shot from a camera affixed to the front of a boat. In the distance are buildings half-submerged in water but no voice or text clarifies for us where we are or why. The film, which traffics in such liminal states and indirection, uses interviews to slowly reveal the town, San Marcos, is partially submerged during portions of the year because of a new dam that was built. Through interviews with the remaining residents the film pulls the curtain back on a world of alternate social reproduction, of people learning how to live differently after an environmental catastrophe. A man faithfully paddles a boat out to a cow stranded on an island because of the floods to feed it. Another resident compares himself and his wife to “tordos” —birds who live in other birds’ nests — implying that he and his wife have occupied someone else’s house in the village. A couple cook outside at night over a fire with a flashlight—improbably the town still has electricity but it has gone out. The film doesn’t explain or narrate or frame these scenes in a particular way — it allows them to exist in their strangeness and in so doing allows the viewer to do the cognitive work of trying to understand what is happening in this peculiar town. What the film slowly discloses over the course of 83 minutes is the emergence of new forms of life in the midst of an on-going ecological disaster.

At the same time, the film, using its indirect style, presents another element of this new world: violence. Again and again in the interviews, dark shadows emerge and ominous events are referred to but not directly explained. The form of the film mirrors the circumspection of its protagonists: there are many things which can’t be directly said or presented and are best gestured to by pointed silences. The couple who were cooking over a fire mention feeling scared. One says, “If there was something we would have left by now” and the other replies, “Let’s hope they never come.” One begins to talk of soldiers visiting and the other says, “Let’s not talk about it … Like you say, the walls have ears.” Later in the film, we get another story but this time with more detail. A man describes being chased and shot at in his truck, escaping only by driving on the rims of his car after his tires were shot out. He notes that this wasn’t as bad as what other people went through and concludes darkly that “life doesn’t have any handles, nothing to hold on to. We’re just floating through the universe.” What we see is that this is an abandoned town but one filled with violence, and we begin to question whether people fled from the water, the armed violence, or both. Finally at the very end, in a set of intertitles, the film reveals its truth. The film is dedicated to those community organizers who fought and were killed organizing for justice in the aftermath of the dam project.66 In other words, what the film has captured is a classic example of paramilitary violence used to discipline resistance, in this case to a megaproject resulting in ecological damage to the town of San Marcos. In fact, so successful have the comuneros of San Marcos been in their resistance that as of writing the government has still not fully and legally appropriated their land and, even though the face of the dam has been built, it is still not fully functional.67

Caminando hacia la autonomía registers a similar overlay between ecology and para-military violence. The film documents the struggle of the Pur’épecha community of Cherán to secure their community land holdings against illegal logging. The film narrates how one morning, after years of having their lands stripped, a group of women stopped a truck transporting stolen trees, and the city erupted in a struggle to prevent further logging. Residents set up and kept watch at nightly blockades and bonfires all around the city. When representatives of political parties and police tried to stop this process, residents expelled them and organized themselves to return town governance to usos y costumbres or governance by assembly and Indigenous common law. In so doing, Cherán became a symbol of resistance to the imbrication of the government with drug logistics organizations in Mexico and proof that other ways of living are still possible. The documentary registers the community’s process of struggle and the social forms and relations that were produced alongside it. As it tracks the selection of the first council and the other deliberative bodies (such as a women’s group) that emerge during the process, the film shows us all the work that goes into producing this new political formation. We also see the importance of different informal public spaces, like the bonfires, where people come together to share ideas, plan, and build new social relations.

At the same time, Caminando presents a community with an anti-capitalist relationship to land. The Cherán community holds in common 17,000 hectares of land, much of which is forested. The community has used this land for generations to supply its needs and the community has carefully taken care of it, replanting trees, tending to the forests, and living in a symbiotic relationship with it. As one interviewee explains, “We don’t look at a tree like money … it is a source of life.” It is this deep relationship, as the film shows us, which provoked the initial uprising. In recent years in Mexico, drug logistics groups have diversified their income streams, turning to kidnapping, extortion, and resource capture.68 In Cherán these groups saw an unspoiled resource that could be plundered. After almost half of their land was deforested in only a few years, community members felt called to defend the land and their custodianship of it. Lest we think Cherán is a small village isolated from global capitalism, one interviewee helpfully notes there is a direct connection between the logging, narco-gobierno in Mexico and foreign investors or, in other words, the search for new streams of profit under the pressure of a declining global rate of profit.

While Los reyes shows the effects of para-state violence as it has spread across Mexico and gestures to resistance, Caminando shows us people actively organizing against it. Before the uprising, Cherán was terrorized by armed violence and after they sustained serious threats and attacks from para-state groups. This intimate relationship with para-state violence gives community members an insightful relationship to it. The documentary opens with a young women’s voice explaining what it means to live and fight in such a situation. She says, “People who think that peace can be accomplished through peace, must be people who have never lived through a situation of violence …. The only way to achieve peace is by first hitting back, and getting rid of the people who wish to destroy us.” Both Caminando and Los reyes show alternative social worlds, experiments in living differently with ecological pressure and under threat by para-state violence which wants to secure areas for accumulation and erase any opposition from them. In Caminando the need to solve a security crisis and repel attacks on alternative social reproduction is present in the immediate foreground; it is a struggle of life or death. However, we can see it in Los Reyes as well: to find ways of living in the wake of the dam project means not just learning to live with water but also to solve the violence aimed at those who resist.

Both films also demonstrate communities learning to live differently in the context of ecological pressure and catastrophe. In each, we see communities articulating new forms of social reproduction, or ways and means of securing the reproduction of a community and its individuals over time. And in both cases, learning to live differently or resisting the state and capital-imposed mandates of how to live properly leads to violent repression. Perhaps most importantly, each of the journeys into new forms of social reproduction is set off by a unique ecological situation: the dam in Los Reyes and illegal logging in Caminando. In each, these ecological crisis situations are connected in specific ways to global capitalism. As deforestation continues globally and in Mexico, logging pressure is applied to areas which previously were exempt from it. As oil prices rise, states and capital have turned to renewable energy projects, such as dams, which lead to displacement and their own set of problems.69 The violence in each situation is not aleatory but is itself linked to on-going crises and downturns in the global economy. Mega-projects, and other public-private partnerships, are a way for construction and infrastructure companies to pad their bottom-lines with state support and the logging in Cherán is one of many examples of what Paley argues is violence to open up previously off-limits areas to exploitation. In short, what each film shows us in a different way is that capitalist and para-state violence in Mexico is a current and future means for maintaining accumulation in the face of dwindling investment opportunities, rising environmental costs, and the new forms of social relations and social reproduction that are emerging in its midst.

While each film deploys different techniques, at the center of each is an ecological realist charting of new social forms developing from Mexico’s crucible of declining ecological surplus and para-militarized accumulation. Aesthetically, we can see the films as two different experimentations with techniques for apprehending and presenting these phenomena. Los reyes draws on traditions of art house cinema and adds tonalities from the horror genre, while Caminando turns to the resources of classic political documentary. As a result, the shape of the intervention in each is different. Los reyes through its combination of objective documentary and suspenseful editing centers the lived experience of violence in Mexico today — the uncertainty, the silences, the fear and its effects on institutions and social relations. For its part, Caminando highlights the process of struggle, centering the presentation of everyday tools and strategies used to produce and rebuild community. We can read each film as an investigation into the utility of the aesthetic tools of different filmmaking traditions for the cultural work of ecological realism or of mapping the improbable yet necessary forms of human community and resistance that have spread in Mexico in the face of para-militarized strategies of accumulation.

What these contemporary Mexican documentaries can help us see is how political responses to conditions resulting from a declining ecological surplus are both ecological and abolitionist in nature, centering both self-defense and new forms of social relations and reproduction. Abolitionist in this context means calling for the end, not just of police violence and policing institutions, but military and paramilitary violence and military institutions as well — which has been a long-standing demand of indigenous groups in Mexico. It also means that these demands, and the practices of self-defense, communal care, and transformational justice which move alongside them, are in clear dialogue with the best spirit of the abolitionist tradition. Moreover, in these documentaries we can see that ecology and abolition, self-defense and new social relations, require and imply each other. If in advance of or on the heels of ecological catastrophe, crisis, and pressure we find state and capitalist violence, then politics must directly concern itself not only with ecological matters but with the cessation and abolition of this violence. This means, on the one hand, the abolition of the repressive forces and institutions, and, on the other, self-defense or the building of capacity for generating new forms of security and justice. Learning to live the ecological relation differently, as well as producing new forms of security and justice, means learning to sustain and reproduce a different society and developing and mastering new forms of social reproduction.

The lesson these films have for us is that manifestations of ecological and capitalist crisis are never, and will never be, lived as an ecological crisis alone. This is because, as we have seen in this essay, the value theoretic mediations producing these situations of crisis, pressure, and catastrophe are also multiple. In contemporary Mexico, ecological pressure and devastation and violence twine together producing a larger crisis of reproduction, embodying Nancy Fraser’s characterization of the present as “[a] crisis of ecology, to be sure, but also one of economy, society, politics and public health — that is, a general crisiswhose effects metastasize everywhere.”70 What we can see in both Los reyes and Caminando is that any response to an ecological crisis also often has to be a response to a security crisis. As the rate of profit continues to trend downward and ecological pressures mount, one of the only levers available to states and capitalists to keep accumulation running will be violence. This violence, as we see in these films, can and will take many forms and it will be used not just to dispossess but also to organize broader swaths of accumulation and governance. If these films, and Mexico more generally, are a bellwether for what is to come, and what is already here, any ecological politics will have to walk hand-in-hand with an abolitionist politics of self-defense and social reproduction.

Notes

1. María del Carmen Ventura Patiño, “¡Nosotros queremos la tierra! Despojo y resistencia en la costa nahua, el caso de la comunidad de Santa María Ostula, en Michoacán, México,” Estudios Socioterritoriales. Revista de Geografía 27 (2020) 3.
2. See Alejandra Guillén, Guardianes del territorio: Seguridad y justicia comunitaria en Cherán, Nurio y Ostula (México: Grietas Editores, 2016) 76-9.
3. Subversiones, “Ostula en alerta ante restauración del narcogobierno,” July 9, 2018, https://subversiones.org/archivos/132787 and Luis Hernández Navarro, Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars, trans. Ramor Ryan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) 155.
4. Hernández Navarro, Self-Defense in Mexico 160. As Hernández Navarro notes, contemporary armed self-defense and community policing models have their roots in the Zapatista rebellion.
5. Drug logistics organizations is the term I use to describe groups dedicated to the production, transport, and selling of prohibited substances. I do so to avoid the unhelpful term cartel. For more detail as to why see Brian Whitener, Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) 122-4.
6. Sharae Deckard, “”Mapping the World-Ecology,” https://www.academia.edu/2083255/Mapping_the_World_Ecology_Conjectures_on_World_Ecological_Literature. For critical pre-history to the neoliberal period see Michel Gutelman, Capitalismo y reforma agraria en México (México: Ediciones Era, 1971) and Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). For accounts of transformations in agriculture and food production and consumption during the neoliberal period see Elizabeth Fitting, The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Trangenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Alyshia Gálvez, Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico(Oakland, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 2018); and Gerardo Otero, The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2018). On the shifting nature of rural labor and globalization of labor power, see Gerardo Otero, ¿Adiós al campesinado? Democracia y formación política de las clases en México Rural (México: M.A. Porrúa, 2004) and for histories of Mexico’s energy politics see Jonathan Charles Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1993) and Germán Vergara, Fueling Mexico Energy and Environment, 1850-1950 (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2021). On the contradictions of capitalist ecology in Latin America more generally, see Enrique Leff, Political Ecology: Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life (London: Palgrave Macmilian, 2021) and for an account of neoliberal transformations from a world-ecology perspective at the level of Latin America, see Roberto José Ortiz, “Agro-Industrialization, Petrodollar Illusions and the Transformation of the Capitalist World Economy in the 1970s: The Latin American Experience,” Critical Sociology 42.4-5 (2014) 599-621.
7. While AMLO’s megaprojects, such as the Tren Maya, have the potential to significantly shift the form of accumulation in Mexico (not in any way for the better), they need to be completed before a full evaluation can be undertaken. Because of this, I do not address his presidency in great detail in this essay. What is clear from his presidency is that he has not followed through on his campaign promise to return the army to their barracks and, instead, through the creation of the Guardia Nacional, as well as handing control over significant infrastructure projects to the military, increased the power and impunity of the armed forces. He has as well classified projects and certain resources as critical to “national security” further militarizing ecological matters. See Dawn Paley, “AMLO Has Been a Disappointment to the World—for Mexico, He’s Been Far Worse,” https://www.dawnpaley.ca/blog/blog-post-title-one-2ybl9-kjrnn-2ld7y-f4adh-kc4kp and Gloria Leticia Díaz, “Acuerdo de AMLO sobre seguridad nacional acelerará el despojo de los pueblos: ONG,” ProcessoDec 12, 2021, https://www.proceso.com.mx/nacional/2021/12/2/acuerdo-de-amlo-sobre-seguridad-nacional-acelerara-el-despojo-de-los-pueblos-ong-276829.html
8. Ana Esther Ceceña, “Ayotzinapa: emblema del ordenamiento social del siglo XXI,” Observatorio Latinoamericano 15 (2016) 32-33 and “El militarismo,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtuY7Nc76iQ&t=2s. See as well the essays collected in Laura Raquel Valladares de la Cruz (ed.), Nuevas violencias en América Latina: Los derechos indígenas antes las políticas neoextractivistas y las políticas de seguridad (México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2014) and Gareth Williams, Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).
9. My focus here differs significantly from the slow violence perspective of Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis and Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli (eds), Ecofictions, Ecorealities,and Slow Violence in LatinAmerica and the Latinx World (New York: Routledge, 2020).
10. See Dawn Marie Paley, Guerra Neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (México: Libertad bajo palabra, 2020).
11. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/post-opinion/2021/06/14/mexico-guerra-narcotrafico-calderon-homicidios-desaparecidos/
12. Oswaldo Zavala, Los carteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México (Barcelona: Malpaso, 2018) 6.
13. Benjamin T. Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021): 379.
14. Paley refers to this as “paramilitarized extraction.” See Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2014) 151.
15. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015) 276.
16. For a brilliant exposition of a different use of Mandel, see Andreas Malm, “Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital,” Mediations 31.2 (2018) 17-39. Malm uses earlier Mandel to argue that each long wave is underpinned by a new energy source and this source solves the blockages of the prior downturn (but then generates a new set of contradictions).
17. Deckard, “Mapping the World-Ecology,” n.p. Obviously there is a larger group of cultural scholars who have also made use of Moore’s world-ecology within Latin American and Caribbean contexts, including Kerstin Oloff, Chris Campbell, and Claire Westall.
18. Moore, Capitalism 37.
19. Capitalism 27.
20. Sara Nelson, https://antipodeonline.org/2016/03/09/capitalism-in-the-web-of-life/
21. For a more detailed discussion of problems with combining exploitation and expropriation in contemporary theory see Brian Whitener, “Rosa Luxemburg in Mexico,” Critical Sociology44.1 (2021): 75-88.
22. See for example Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy,” Journal of Peasant Studies 45.2 (2018) 237-279 and Jason W. Moore, “Climate, Class & the Great Frontier: From Primitive Accumulation to the Great Implosion” (2021) https://jasonwmoore.com/academicpapers/ 1-35.
23. Capitalism 69.
24. In more recent work with Raj Patel, Moore has expanded the four Cheaps to seven. Since my discussion focuses on Capitalism in the Web of Life in this essay I will use the figure of four Cheaps.
25. Minor perhaps but making a comeback. As Anwar Shaikh notes, “The profit rate is central to accumulation because profit is the very purpose of capitalist investment, and the profit rate is the ultimate measure of its success.” Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 62.
26. Capitalism 92 and 91-94 more generally. It is important to note that when talking of actual crises, and not just tendencies, Moore specifies that the key is how overproduction and underproduction fit together.
27. Capitalism 278.
28. Capitalism 94.
29. This is what the Out of the Woods collective is pointing to when they write: “In the weak version, capitalism stagnates in sluggish growth without new frontiers (i.e. cheap natures) to appropriate. Expressed strongly, this claim means that capitalism would cease to exist without them. We agree with the former, but are not fully convinced of the latter, although it is the latter that seems closer to Moore’s own position.” Out of the Woods, “Human Nature” (2016), https://libcom.org/article/human-nature-0. For a critique of Moore’s crisis and value theory from an autonomous Marxist position see Emanuele Leonardi, “Autonomist Marxism and World-Ecology: For a Political Theory of the Ecological Crisis,” https://projectpppr.org/pandemics/autonomist-marxism-and-world-ecology-for-a-political-theory-of-the-ecological-crisis
30. Niblett, World Literature and Ecology 50. This ambiguity is on full display in Moore’s debate with the Monthly Review School over whether capitalism will survive until the last tree is cut. See Jason W. Moore, “World Accumulation and Planetary Life, or, “Why Capitalism will not Survive until the ‘Last Tree is Cut.’” IPPR Progressive Review 24.3 (2017) 185-7. As well, the reduction of historical richness in Moore’s value theory, is, in part, what is at stake when Andreas Malm critiques Moore for reducing value to price: “… [This] leads Moore to stress the price of material substrata as the main vector of socio-ecological – well, shall we say ‘fitting’ – so that, for instance, the transition to steam-power is said to have been caused by the cheapness of coal relative to alternative fuels. Here is an empirically testable hypothesis, and it turns out that it fails to correspond with extant data from the crucial frontlines of that transition …. Entirely different factors were at work. A history of the fossil economy must juggle many more factors than price levels.” Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2018) 191-2.
31. Moore’s most recent work seems to have added a new emphasis on a cyclic connection between climate crisis and opportunities for class struggle. See Moore, “Climate, Class & the Great Frontier” 29-31. But there is also a renewed emphasis on struggle in general and, importantly, the “liberation of all life from the tyranny of capitalist work.” See Jason W. Moore, “Opiates of the Environmentalists? Anthropocene Illusions, Planetary Management & the Capitalocene Alternative,” Abstrakt (2021), https://jasonwmoore.com/academicpapers/ 13.
32. Jason W. Moore, “World-ecology: a global conversation,” Sociologia urbana e rurale120 (2019) 18.
33. See Malm, “Long Waves of Fossil Development” for an account of the limits and possibilities of a switch to green energy.
34. Ernst Mandel, Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation (New York: Verso, 1995) 7.
35. Mandel, Long Waves 9.
36. Long Waves 10.
37. Long Waves 11.
38. Long Waves 11.
39. Long Waves 11.
40. Long Waves 16.
41. Makoto Itoh, “Ernest Mandel on Long Waves and Socialism,” Review of International Political Economy 4.1 (1997) 249-251. Debates of the time over “long-wave theory” were couched in the language of endogenous and exogenous arguments for an expansion turning into a decline and vice versa. Makoto Itoh describes Mandel’s account as an asymmetrical exogenous one; however, we shouldn’t read too much into the endo- and exo- prefaces. Wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions are all inside capitalism at the end of the day — what these terms referred to was whether dynamics internal to capitalism were able to set off an expansionary wave or shut it down.
42. Long Waves 16-17.
43. Mandel was criticized by some in his time for his supposed eclecticism, namely that his system suffered from incoherence. I have never found those criticisms particularly generous and as Malm says, “Mandel’s theory is messy and labyrinthine and intended to be so, because it is, first and foremost, a guide to the study of ‘actual historical dynamics.’” Malm, “Long Waves of Fossil Development” 28.
44. This is not to say that Mandel is absent from Moore’s work; rather Moore clearly builds on Mandel in certain places. See Moore, Capitalism 142.
45. Long Waves 83.
46. Long Waves 91.
47. For more on this see Lena Lavinas, The Takeover of Social Policy by Financialization: The Brazilian Paradox (London: Palgrave Macmilan, 2017) 41.
48. Long Waves 88.
49. Long Waves 88-9.
50. Long Waves 94. Andreas Malm has recently delved deeper into Mandel’s utility for political ecology. See Andreas Malm, “Long Waves of Fossil Development.”
51. As Jim Kincaid has noted, one of the strengths of Moore’s approach over other eco-socialists is how his work makes possible a discussion of counter-tendencies to reverse downward pressure on the rate of profit. See, Jim Kincaid, “Value Theory and the Schism in Eco-Marxism,” https://readingsofcapital.com/2017/04/30/value-theory-and-the-recent-schism-in-eco-marxism/.
52. This holds true for his most recent essays, though certain ones have made a little more space for discussions of violence. See Moore, “Climate, Class & the Great Frontier” 26 and Moore, “Opiates of the Environmentalists?” 10.
53. Long Waves 95.
54. Moore frequently speaks of the violence of abstractions. See Moore, Capitalism 35, 85.
55. Mandel uses the language of “partially independent” or “partially autonomous” variables throughout his work. Mandel, Long Waves 9-10, 121.
56. Computed from World Bank data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=MX
57. María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara, “Introduction: Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium” in María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara (eds), Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) 1.
58. See Stephen Woodman, “Documenting the truth: Documentaries are all the rage in Mexico, providing a truthful alternative to an often biased media,” Index on Censorship47.3 (2018) 18-20 and Andrew Jeffrey, “Netflix and Ambulante launch fund for Indigenous, Afro-descendant filmmakers,” April 19, 2021, https://realscreen.com/2021/04/19/netflix-and-ambulante-launch-fund-for-indigenous-afro-descendant-filmmakers/
59. Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page, Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Antonio Traverso and Kristi M. Wilson, Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2014); and María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara, Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millenium(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
60. Julianne Burton, “Towards a History of Social Documentary in Latin America” in Julianne Burton (ed.) The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) 3.
61. Guadalupe Arenillas and Lazzara, Latin American Documentary Film 6.
62. Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti, Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene (New York: Routledge, 2021) 3.
63. Badia, Cetinić and Diamanti, Climate Realism 4, 5.
64. Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel have recently defined social reproduction as “refer[ing] to the social organization of what Karl Marx would call the reproduction of labor power, and of what some social reproduction theorists have expanded to include the reproduction of human life more generally. Social reproduction, understood as such, is a primary condition of extraction and accumulation under capitalism, and struggles on its terrains are essential to political resistance against them.” See Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel, “The Politics of Social Reproduction. An Introduction,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.2 (2020): 1.
65. Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism,” New Left Review 127 (2021) 105.
66. Part of this story is told in Jesús Antonio Ramírez López, La construcción de la presa Picachos: una visión histórico-socioambiental (Culiacán: Once Ríos Editores, 2008) 117-139.
67. Lidia Lizárraga, “Presa Picachos: obra milonaria en desperdicio” Debate March 28, 2016, https://www.debate.com.mx/mazatlan/Presa-Picachos-obra-millonaria-en-desperdicio--20160328-0130.html
68. Smith, The Dope 385-8.
69. After pulling away Mexico’s investments in green energy and recentering its energy strategy on coal and oil, AMLO has tried to green-wash these moves by declaring the revitalization or authorization of dam projects across the country, even though dam construction requires significant carbon output. One of the dam revitalizations is the Picachos dam protested by the comunerosof San Marcos. See Amy Stillman and Max De Haldevang, “Mexico pouring money into Pemex, at the environment’s expense,” Jan 8 2021, https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/1/8/mexico-pouring-money-into-pemex-at-the-environment-s-expense
70. Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital” 95.