Capitalism’s market expansion inherently disrupts soil and displaces subsistence farmers

Evidence

Although the early effects of agricultural improvement were healthy for the soil, built into the emerging capitalist market economy was an inexorably accelerating force of expansion and accumulation, achieved, over the long term, at the expense of the environment and the village community—the natural and human resource bases. The same expanding market force that began in the Netherlands and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the application of organic fertilizers, agricultural improvement, and specialization for market profits, ultimately culminates in today’s agribusiness and the exportation of “green revolution” techniques to developing countries. Today, inorganic nitrate fertilizers and chemical pesticides, which leave long-lasting soil-depleting residues and have unanticipated side effects, the monoculture of high-yield grains subject to large-scale devastation by pests and disease, and the impetus to continually bring new “virgin” lands into cultivation for the market all disrupt established ecosystem balances. Secondly, the tendency toward growth, expansion, and accumulation inherent in capitalism results in the displacement of subsistence farmers from the land and the disruption of traditional patterns of human-land integration (as can be seen in such countries as Mexico, Java, and the Philippines). — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 278

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly serves the eco-justice course thread: traces the sixteenth-century seed of today’s agribusiness, inorganic-fertilizer monoculture, and displacement of subsistence farmers in the Global South — a settler-colonial and environmental-racism throughline.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘metabolic rift’ concept from environmental sociology (Foster on Marx) — commodity circuits that sever human-land nutrient cycles. — connects to: The Great Plains cattle and monoculture economy is failing — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 780; Capitalist profit control of resources harmed environmental quality versus peasant subsistence control. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 254; Capitalism’s birth required peasants to lose autonomous access to common lands. (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism’s birth required peasants to lose autonomous access to common lands. #corroborates (0.82)
• Capitalism’s growth fetish inherently opposes ecological sustainability #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 41