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Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
Marchants [who are] wandering about the world, search both the land and the sea, to carry such good and profitable things, as are found in their Countreis, to remote regions and kingdoms, and againe to bring from the same … commodities for their owne Countreis … For the God of heaven and earth, greatly providing for mankind, would not that all things should be founde in one region, to the ende that one shoulde have neede of another, that by this meanes friendshippe might be established among all men. 2
But grain, for example, can be grown practically anywhere, although the productivity of the crop varies according to conditions. The most fundamental resources – air, land and water – are still more evenly distributed. These resources are basic necessities. They exist in all inhabited parts of the earth – or, rather, people only inhabit the parts of the earth where these resources exist. But even they can run out; in fact, they constitute the limits to resources of secondary importance, guaranteeing that grain and oil will never run out. In this century, we see very clearly that air will be exhausted sooner than oil and water sooner than land. Only a third of the known supplies of oil will be used by humanity, and only about a third of the planet is suitable for human settlement. The climate crisis tells us that the future consumption of secondary resources such as oil will lead to the destruction of the fundamental resources such as air. This will be irreversible and, from the human perspective, inadmissible. The paradox is that the lack of air, which has no economic value, will leave oil, the very embodiment of this value, unsold and unburnt. The factor that limits economic growth is not the earth but the sky.
In the mid-twentieth century, the historian Karl Polanyi formulated an evident truth: ‘Production is interaction of man and nature.’ Classical political economy, he wrote, did not take natural factors into account; only human labour was deemed worthy of attention (I would add an obvious caveat: not any such labour but only that part which took place in the imperial metropoles). Polanyi was surprised that ‘nature in the physical sense was consciously excluded by Smith from the problem of wealth.’ He explained this by Adam Smith’s ‘broad optimism’; a sceptical acknowledgment of nature’s limits, so characteristic of the French physiocrats, was alien to Smith. 3 Walter Benjamin saw a similar mistake in what he called ‘vulgar Marxism’. Exaggerating the role of labour, this teaching ignored nature, treating it as ‘gratis’. Benjamin called this position naïve; instead, he wished to comprehend the ‘exploitation of nature’ and the ‘exploitation of the proletariat’ as two sides of one process. 4
Following Benjamin, the philosopher Hannah Arendt criticised the ‘glorification of labour’ that she found in ‘modern theory’. It was opposite to ‘the contempt for labour’ in ancient thought, which saw labour as the lot of slaves. From the eighteenth century labour became a source of property (Locke), wealth (Smith) and value (Marx). This glorification of labour went hand in hand with a disdain for nature. In her hierarchical system, Arendt made a distinction between labour and work. Labour is a cyclical exchange between man and nature; like the subsistence farmer, the labourer creates necessary but perishable products that he consumes straight away. Work, on the other hand, transforms nature, creating artefacts which keep their value for years or centuries. Taking matter out of nature, work produces ‘worldly things, whose durability will survive and withstand the devouring processes of life.’ Work, not labour, ‘guarantees the permanence and durability of our world.’ 5 And Arendt also saw a third category – human action, which partly, but never completely, liberates humanity from its dependence on nature .
Notes
1 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion , Vol. 4, p. 40. 2 Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea , Vol. 1, p. 3. 3 Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation , p. 112. 4 Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings , pp. 393–4. 5 Arendt, The Human Condition , pp. 94, 108.
SEVEN
Resources and Commodities
In his History (430 bce ), the Greek author Herodotus related that, while his native Hellas had a climate which was favourable for human beings, ‘the extremities of the inhabited world had allotted to them by nature the fairest things.’ 1 His list was very long. In India, ‘the most easterly country’, there was an incalculable quantity of gold, and her plants grew ‘tree wool’ – cotton, which was better than sheep’s wool. In Arabia, ‘the most southerly country’, there were trees bearing frankincense, but they were guarded by winged serpents. There was also cinnamon – scary birds built their nests of its sticks. Ebony trees grew in Ethiopia, with wood as dark as the people. Tin was brought to Hellas from the most westerly isles that were later called British. In the north of Europe, there was gold, as in India, but it didn’t reach Hellas, remaining as mythical as cinnamon.
The classical idea of the universe was like a map of fabulous resources which surrounded the sphere of civil life, with the storyteller at its centre. Two hostile empires, Hellas and Persia, constituted the inhabited world; the extremities furnished them with their exotic fruits, and the further away these products came from, the more precious they became. The work of the carpenter, the tailor and the blacksmith was limited and easy to understand; but the remote worlds of fishermen and lumberjacks, miners and gold prospectors, were filled with adventure, risk and profit. An anonymous multitude of spinners and weavers created the economies of world empires; but the civilised world admired those who sought the golden fleece and tamed overseas colonies. Raw materials were over there, goods were here. Production was humdrum, extraction was extraordinary. The banality of labour coexisted with the exoticisation of raw materials. The processing of commodities into goods, and of energy into services, are the chief tasks of civilisation, and they are subject to rational understanding and regulation. But real wealth comes only with trade. Distance raises the price, risks bring profits, and an image of adventure is the best decoration for a gold chest – or for a bank note. The double meaning of the English ‘fortune’ conveys this connection better than philosophical treatises.
Reworking this tradition, Karl Marx saw mystery at the very heart of trade. In his Capital , he borrowed the key concept from peoples as distant as those described by Herodotus – fetishists (for Marx, they were a religious rather than a sexual sect). Explicating ‘commodity fetishism’, he used a German word, vertrackt , which is usually applied to sick eccentrics; in English translation it sounds even stronger – queer. ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing.’ 2
‘The old colonial system’, as it was known in the British tradition, did not move too far from Herodotus. The empire consisted of a metropolitan centre, or ‘mother country’, and colonies. Different races lived in them, and different laws applied. The daughter colonies extracted raw materials and delivered them to the mother country; the mother country processed them into manufactured goods which she sold back to her colonies or traded with other empires. The Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire also used this dual model, but it fully developed later in England as mercantilism – the political-economic doctrine that was the ideological foundation of the British Empire.