If zoonotic spillover tends to occur at the frontiers of capitalist development, centers of agribusiness have their own hotbeds of pathogenicity. For example, biosurveillance analysts traced the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) to a Smithfield subsidiary in Mexico [that opened after NAFTA]…Wallace (2009b) encourages attention to the deregulation allowing animal agribusinesses to expand into the Global South, taking advantage of cheap labor, cheap land, and lax oversight. Instead of talking about ‘swine flu,’ he suggests, we should be discussing ‘NAFTA flu.’
Metabolic rift: “The term ‘metabolic rift’ originates in work by Marx and Engels, whose concept of a metabolism posited a two-way interaction: nature that constantly shapes human society and culture (while setting certain limits on possibilities) and human activity (especially systems of production) that profoundly transform nature.”
Since Marx’s time, two events have paved the way for a second rift to occur (Foster and Magdoff 2000). First was the widespread availability of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, ushered in by World War I weapons manufacture. With abundant cheap fertilizer, farmers no longer had to plant nitrogen-fixing leguminous crops to maintain soil fertility. These crops, which included clover and alfalfa, had previously gone to feed beef and dairy cows, as well as sheep. With the demand for nitrogen-fixing crops gone, farms could more easily specialize as either crop or livestock operations.
Second was concentration in the animal agriculture industry. As production, processing, marketing, distribution, and retail became increasingly centralized and vertically integrated, geographical and sectoral specialization became two defining features (Heffernan 2000; Hendrickson 2015). In the US, beef feedlots now crisscross the southern Great Plains, while states like Arkansas specialize in poultry, and the Midwest and Carolinas focus on hogs. Meat processing, meanwhile, is often confined to a few large facilities operated by food giants such as Tyson, Smithfield, and JBS.
If the first metabolic rift prevented waste from an increasingly urban human population from returning to the land, the second rift has disrupted cycles of nutrient flows from animals (secondary producers) from reaching plants (primary producers) at the base of the trophic web. This lack of nutrient cycling, in turn, means that ever more synthetic nutrients must be applied to restore fertility to farm soils.
Meanwhile, excess nutrients accumulate at large-scale animal operations, with many documented hazards for human and environmental health (Weis 2013; IATP and GRAIN 2018). Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, global greenhouse emissions, endocrine disruption linked to hormones in the water supply, the rise of antibiotic-resistant microbes, and incubation of avian and swine influenzas that can leap to humans – many of the ills now associated with industrialized agriculture emanate from this double-cleft metabolic rift.
Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as ‘a geographical solution to socio-economic problems’ (1999, 174), showing how California’s prisons like San Quentin were sited on devalued rural land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres. Extending this argument in Golden Gulag (2007), she situates the prison-industrial complex within historical cycles of global capital accumulation that have continuously required and therefore reproduced a carceral system to secure and mobilize surplus land, labor, finance capital, and state power. Penitentiaries and detention centers are stolen landscapes, mutually constituted by Indigenous dispossession, border imperialism, and racial capitalism.
In short, there is a “crisis in crisis” today, one that I think is diagnostic of twenty-first-century American capitalism. The United States exists in a structural contradiction, one drawn from being both a democracy and an imperially inclined superpower: since the 1980s, the federal government has increasingly exchanged domestic welfare programs for mass incarceration and permanent war, rewriting the social contract in foundational ways.
While communication has never been easier and information about matters of collective concern has never been more abundant, the media spaces crafted for always-on information systems deliver largely negative portraits of the present and future.
There is, in other words, a steady invitation in American media worlds to fear the future and to reject the power of human agency to modulate even those systems crafted by industry, finance, or the security state.
This marks the arrival of a new kind of governance, one based not on eliminating fears through the protective actions of the security apparatus but rather on the amplification of public dangers through inaction.
This produces a suicidal form of governance, one that cannot respond to long-standing collective dangers (e.g., climate change) while also generating new ones (such as the poisoning of the public water system in Flint, Michigan, by emergency managers seeking cost savings).
The affective circuit of the counterterror state, for example, privileges images of catastrophic future events over such everyday violences, multiplying fears of the future while allowing everyday structural insecurities to remain unaddressed (Masco 2014).
Thus, the American public can simultaneously know the United States to be an unrivaled military, economic, and scientific superpower, a state with unprecedented capacities, agencies, and resources, and yet feel completely powerless in the face of failed US military, financial, and environmental commitments. Instead of the crisis-utopia circuit that empowered the high modernist culture of the mid-twentieth century, we now have a crisis-paralysis circuit, a marker of a greatly reduced political horizon in the United States.
Put differently, the crisis in crisis today marks a new political modality that can experience repeated failure as well as totalizing external danger without generating the need for structural change. “Crisis,” in other words, has become a counterrevolutionary force in the twenty-first century, a call to confront collective endangerment that instead increasingly articulates the very limits of the political.
These “crises” are thus infrastructural achievements of an American modernity, modes of endangerment that are not necessary forms but rather effects of modern military and industrial systems…Crisis states have become lived infrastructures, linking imaginations, affects, and institutions in a kind of total social formation. The crisis in crisis from this point of view is the radical presentism of crisis talk, the focus on stabilizing a present condition rather than engaging the multiple temporalities at stake in a world of interlocking technological, financial, military, and ecological systems.
Put differently, there are no “natural” disasters any more, as the imbrication of technology, economy, and nature creates ever-emerging conditions for catastrophe, making crisis seem a permanent condition when it is in fact the effect of financial, technological, militaristic, and political processes interacting with earth systems.