workers who apply labor to that machinery (and
in the bodies of their families), in the houses and
consumer goods that allow the laborer to repro-
duce her- or himself, and in the commodities
themselves. Capital only begets more capital if it
circulates (Harvey, 1982). But capital can only
circulate if some portion of capital does not. At
each stop on the path of circulation, at each
moment capital is frozen, at each location where,
in fact, labor is dead, risks accrue: commodity
prices could tumble, new innovations by com-
petitors could make production practices obso-
lete, labor could strike, finance capitalists could
pull out and seek greater returns elsewhere, and
in agriculture, pests could invade.
Crucially, as Mann-Dickinson posits, and as
Henderson (1999: Chapter 2) explains so well,
capitalist production is not oneprocess of circu-
lation, but many. Capital circulates in and out of
workers’ hands in the form of wages and com-
modities purchased. It circulates in and out of
financial markets. It circulates in and out of
land and machinery. Marx makes a distinction
between ‘work time’ (the time that labor is actu-
ally applied to the production process), ‘produc-
tion time’ (the time that capital is wrapped up in
producing a commodity), and ‘circulation time’
(the time involved in getting commodities to
market, selling them, and receiving payment in
return) (Henderson, 1999: 35). The various cir-
culation times – work, production, and circula-
tion itself – organized in the production process
(up to and including marketing) are highly
uneven. They do not mesh easily, or often well.
This is especially the case in agriculture,
where production time is highly discontinuous
(crops, after all, take time to mature in the fields,
and that lengthened time is a time of great risk)
and therefore so too is labor time. Laborers’ needs
and desires, however, are not so discontinuous.
The reproduction of agricultural labor power,
therefore, is, in many if not all respects, qualita-
tively different from the reproduction of labor
power in other more continuous industries. Since
planting, weeding, and other non-harvest jobs
often take considerably less labor than the har-
vest itself, agricultural labor is highly seasonal.
Farmworkers are needed in huge numbers for
often relatively short periods of time, but after
that time, when little or no work is available, they
become a burden, more a hindrance to capital
circulation than its enabler. Solutions to this
problem of uneven circulation times are many,
but include the retention of family and peasant
labor systems, the expansion of sharecropp-
ing (which shifts both risks and reproduction
costs from financiers to poor, small-time farm-
ers), and, particularly in California, increasedcirculation– of laborers – by making agriculture
both more seasonally intensive and more region-
ally diverse.
That is to say, the solution to uneven agricultural
circulation times in the California landscape is,
and long has been, in large part increased mobil-
ity, not so much on the part of capital (though that
has been important), but crucially on the part of
migratory workers, who have found migratory
circuits both expanded and speeded up.^8 Immobi-
lized workers become an unacceptable barrier to
the circulation of capital. The solution is to set
workers in motion, to mobilize them, to keep
them moving (as we will soon see in more detail).
One of the things the landscape is for, then, is the
establishment of patterns of circulation, patterns
of production and reproduction, or, most simply
in California, patterns of crops and labor that are
profitable. But that merely begs the question: just
what isthe landscape?What landscape isThe landscape is a concretization or reification
of the social relations that go into its making. It
is the phenomenal form of the social processes
and practices of production, consumption, and
exchange, as complex as those may be. In theo-
retical terms, the landscape is a ‘structured per-
manence’, which Harvey, drawing on Whitehead
(1925), defines as a relatively stable, solid
‘thing ... that we daily encounter in the world
and without which physical and biological life
would not and could not exist as we know it’
(1996: 50). However, such ‘permanences’ may
not be, indeed usually are not, naturally neces-
sary. Rather, permanences, ranging from the
institutional apparatus of the state to a child’s red
playground ball, are historically contingent,
developed to solve some problem or fill some
need (trumped up or not). The landscape is, in
these terms, a ‘complex moment in a system of
social reproduction’ (Mitchell, 1996: 35) – the
social reproduction of capital and the social
reproduction of people. ‘Moment’ is an impor-
tant term because it indicates that any structured
permanence remains permanent only to the
degree that it is continually reproduced, and hence
any moment can become a site of struggle. Indeed
it is, by definition, a site of struggle, since it is an
internalization (and concretization) of social
relations (Harvey, 1996; Ollman, 1990). The
question, then, is how these permanences, these
complexes of social relations (like the land-
scape), are given form and sustained over time.
How (by what social processes and struggles)
does the ‘varied terrestrial scene’ come to be?240 LANDSCAPE3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 240