ABSTRACT
This chapter examines agriculture as a nexus of capital and nature, particularly the ways in which it may be said that a production process based in nature poses both obstacles and opportunities for capital. It argues that what have been construed to be obstacles have in fact comprised distinctive opportunities for capitalist investments and appropriations. The chapter focuses on the role of credit as the system that mediates the relations between nature and capital in and between different space-times. Confining the issue of capital-ism's relation to agriculture to the question of the perpetuation of non-wage forms of rural labor leaves out some of the very crucial ways in which capital is actually present—and present precisely because of "nature". Where one form of capital seeks to gain from transformations of nature, in another form capital extracts profits based on nature's resistance to being transformed.
