Social-ecological reproduction and the substance of life in commodity frontiers: Newfoundland fisheries in world market shifts

Abstract

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