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Abstract
An important, contemporary focus of environmental sociology is on the necessary conditions to promote a sustainable transition. This debate typically centers institutions within a capitalist world-economy, specifically business, government, and civil society, and their capacity to adapt more environmentally friendly production. In a recent review of the field, Clark et al. (2021) note that this within-capitalism research is often idealist, examining changes in values and planning divorced from material reductions in environmental degradation. A materialist and critical counterargument calls into question the capacity of capitalist social structures to bring about a sustainable transition. Instead, noting that the imperative to accumulate and commodify nature within a capitalist world-economy tends to produce an increasingly environmentally degradative relationship, alternative social structures are proposed as possible necessary conditions for a sustainable transition.
Following this call to interrogate alternatives, the objective of this dissertation is to shift emphasis from change within the capitalist world-economy to a comparison between the capitalist world-economy and anti-systemic social structures in relation to rift potential. I utilize world-system analysis to conceptualize three structural conditions, incorporative, delinked, and exile, along with their characteristics. Incorporative represents the processes underlying reproduction of the capitalist world-economy, while delinked and exile represent processes for producing anti-systemic structures. Additionally, I employ social metabolic analysis to operationalize the link between production and ecology as a social metabolic order interchanging matter and energy leading to an inferred outcome, rift potential. Specifically, I focus on agricultural production, and the agrarian social metabolic order, as a strategic research site. I argue that a rift-restitutive potential is more likely as anti-systemic structural conditions breakdown incorporative imperatives that evidence tends to show increase the likelihood of riftmaking potential.
With this theoretical framework, I conduct a comparative-historical analysis of three periods, 1898-1958, 1959-1991, and 1992-2016, within a single case, Cuba. Each period represents distinct structural conditions, conceptualized as social metabolic pathway, based on trade, (de-)commodification, intra-state administration, inter-state administration, and agrarian structure. Agrarian practice and rift potential are based upon land use change, technology, fertilizer application, and pest management. Secondary data was utilized from varied official sources, like the Anuario Estadístico de Cuba. This was supported with secondary historical sources, primarily peer-reviewed articles, and primary sources from an archive.
The results provide evidence for the argument that incorporation into the capitalist world economy increases the likelihood of rift-making potential within agriculture. However, the inverse was nuanced, in that delinked-incorporation demonstrated a similar rift-making potential, even though the capitalist class had been abolished and means of production were decommodified by intra-state administration. So, the existence of an anti-systemic structure is not a sufficient condition for rift-restitutive potential, although it can provide important tools unavailable to a fully incorporated structure. In the third period that mixed incorporation, delinked, and exile, there is a trend toward rift-restitutive potential, showing how anti-systemic structures operate complementary to one another and can maintain partial incorporation while reducing environmental degradation in agriculture. Future research should expand the number of cases and periods compared to validate the results.
