This paper develops an exchange between two important strands of research within contemporary human geography. One concerns the matter of socionatures; the other concerns the operation and establishment of power within liberal, capitalist social formations. Through mobilising some of the recent writings on the political ecology of water, we seek to show how an engagement with Gramscian and Foucauldian work on power could be mutually beneficial for both areas of research. In so doing, we seek to mobilise some of the tensions, as well as the points of engagement, between Gramscian and Foucauldian approaches. Through opening up the ways in which water contributes to the survival of liberal capitalist formations and also to the production of distinctive subjectivities, this dialogue provides new inroads into the politics and praxis of everyday life.

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By now it is well established, even in the mainstream press, that the history and geography of capitalism is riven with periodic downturns, some serious enough to warrant the term "crisis." Considerable difference of opinion, however, persists when it comes to understanding these episodes of stagnation and devaluation, and whether and how the more serious ones can and do lead to qualitative transformations in the way capital accumulation "works." Within these debates, remarkably little scholarship (certainly within the geography literature) has systematically developed what we might call the political ecology of capitalist crises, that is the role of specific socio-natural transformations (both material and semiotic, political, and ecological) in constituting and resolving (if temporarily) periodic paroxysms in the uneven historical geography of capitalism. And yet, in the Anthropocene, the scope of the climate change problem continues to broaden, posing disquieting questions about global governance (Wainwright and Mann, 2012) the intensification of industrial cultivation systems in agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture more tightly couples the production of biological life with capital accumulation, with attendant political-ecological ramifications (see e.g. Fargione