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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:
Following Smith, political economy began from individual exchanges and the division of labour, moved to local markets and extended to long-distance trade. Polanyi overturned that logic: ‘In the light of our present knowledge we should almost reverse the sequence of the argument: the true starting point is long-distance trade, a result of the geographical location of goods.’ 15 Exotic, addictive goods arrived from distant markets. New tastes developed, new habits and fashions, and, eventually, a love of novelty for its own sake. Global trade, the international division of labour and the law of comparative advantage had little in common with the specialisation that had impressed Smith in the pin workshop. They followed, rather, from the geographical distribution of resources and delivery routes.
A live monster
Writing his Capital in London, Karl Marx was financially supported by a Dutch relative who imported colonial commodities from overseas and by his German friend who owned a cotton mill in Manchester. The latter, Friedrich Engels, is better known, but the former, Lion Philips, was no less inspiring. A converted Jew, he did not own plantations but established a tobacco factory and coffee distribution in Holland. Processing gave better returns than extraction and accrued lower risks. Philips died a rich and happy man – Marx noted his ‘fine Voltairian irony’. 16 His grandson and heir established Philips, the largest manufacturer of light bulbs in the world, but a little share of that coffee and tobacco was also converted into the text of Capital .
Marx saw trade as something that people carry out but do not understand. Smith believed in its ‘invisible hand’; for Marx, trade was also full of queer secrets and mystical apparitions. ‘To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities … is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value.’ For his part, Marx thought that nature played no bigger role in the creation of value than in fixing the course of currency exchange. For those who disagreed, Marx wrote that people fetishise nature instead of understanding the role of labour.
Any item, for example a coat, combines two elements within it – matter and labour. Marx doesn’t deny the materiality of the coat but accepts it as a dull fact of life, which labour is able to overcome and transcend. Marx tried out and discarded several metaphors to clarify these relationships between natural material and human labour. Labour ‘uses’ or ‘devours’ raw material. Labour ‘comes to fruition’ in the commodity. Raw materials without labour are useless, and even the strongest are perishable: iron rusts, wood rots, cotton spoils. Only labour can save them: ‘living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep.’ Labour both devours raw matter and resurrects it into new life. ‘Bathed in the fire of labour …, made alive for the performance of their functions in the process’, things are transformed from raw material into valuable products. 17 In this context, Marx uses biological metaphors, such as metabolism, as frequently as religious ones, such as resurrection. 18
In the chapter called ‘The Labour-Process’, Marx takes a new step. Labour creates a third thing which is neither labour nor matter. Seeking a metaphor which will help the reader understand this process, Marx turns to the idea of William Petty, the early English mercantilist. Labour is the father and the earth is the mother of use-value, quotes Marx from Petty. How to define the process of their intercourse without reverting to ‘fetishism’? Looking for still another metaphor, Marx proposes one that transfers agency from the person to the raw material. The function of matter, for example cotton or coal, is to ‘absorb’ (aufsaugen ) human labour. ‘The raw material serves now merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of work.’ Yarn, for example, is ‘nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton.’ Labour consumes raw material, nature absorbs labour – this produces a kind of symmetry. In their application to matter and labour, metaphors of ingestion – to devour, absorb, feed on – appeal to Marx more than the idea of sexual intercourse which he found in Petty. It takes six hours of manual labour for a spinner to create 10 pounds of yarn: cotton thus absorbs these hours of work in order to become yarn. Then this yarn absorbs still more hours of work to turn into a coat. In the same way a load of coal absorbs a certain number of hours of a miner’s labour. In commerce, goods interact and multiply. This creates capital, which has a life of its own – it invests and devours, destroys and resurrects, and multiplies again. Marx’s final formula is startling in its splendour: ‘… incorporating living labour with … dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster who begins to “work” as if he has love in his body.’ *
The live monster, the capitalist Leviathan, sends us back to Hobbes. However, does the ruling monster have ‘love in his body’? Are we to understand Marx’s capital as a live but lonely monster that ‘works’ on himself, as if masturbating? Is this solitary but explosive action the secret of the ‘value big with value’? Marx put ‘work’ in quotation marks, and they add a bit of irony to the picture. * The grotesque image of the monster state pleasuring itself, and thus endlessly creating capital, helped Marx to move away from the sentimental ‘mother-nature, father-labour’ model of his predecessors. That model gave too big a role to natural matter, to dead substance and to the finite universe.
Two pumps
The enlightenment of the lower classes, their sweet refinement, gave that stimulus to mass consumption without which capitalism would have been limited to aristocrats exchanging luxury items (see chapters 4 and 8 ). This internal side of the process was crucial. We know a lot about mercantilism as a system of trade relations between empires and colonies; the question is, how did this high policy translate into relationships inside every village, smallholding and, ultimately, family?
The mercantile system led to a major resource crisis – the shift from grain to wool. Polanyi describes how the English state both initiated and tried to slow down this transformation. The poorest of the rural poor received food subsidies that allowed them to survive. Pioneered in 1795, the Speenhamland system was an early version of agricultural subsidy, with the difference that this relief was given to landless labourers. Local parishes distributed aid among the needy. The profit from overseas colonies was redistributed in favour of the English rural poor. This early recognition of the ‘right to live’ resulted in the formation of a class of paupers – people who were deprived of land and didn’t see any point in work. The brightest minds of the era wrote about them; Malthus and Burke were both against subsidy; Bentham suggested replacing it with panoptical workhouses. A market in land could have helped the paupers, but it didn’t yet exist: if the impoverished smallholder could have sold his land the landlords would not have needed to enclose it, and he would have had some money.