Invisible Exploitation

Eva Swidler is an environmental political economist and social historian. She teaches at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.

The Marxist analysis of work under capitalism has long been associated with a preoccupation with wage labor: waged workers as wage-slaves, industrial workers as the revolutionary proletariat, and factory workers as the vanguard. The labor theory of value has been widely seen as applying to the wage form of work and no other. But Marx’s own writings describe other forms of labor under capitalism, and Marxist theorists have long pushed to expand our understanding of exploitation beyond the classic waged relations of production.

Capitalists have always used more than the wage form alone to extract surplus product from workers. However, this century is particularly distinguished by its growing reliance on alternate methods of extracting surplus. It’s time for Marxists to rethink our preoccupation with the wage and develop a theory encompassing a common ground of exploitation across a wide variety of extractive relations under capitalism. A recognition of that shared exploitation may prove key if the exploited “class-in-itself” is to become a “class-for-itself,” able to unite and act in solidarity.

Marx himself analyzed two major modes of capitalist exploitation of workers outside the wage form: “so-called primitive accumulation” and reproductive labor. Already in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg proposed in The Accumulation of Capital that primitive accumulation (better translated as “original” accumulation) was not a one-time event somewhere in the past, but instead an ongoing process under capitalism. Capitalist growth, she argued, required continual expansion into “non-capitalist” spheres: “accumulation is more than an internal relationship between the branches of the capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment.”¹ It is worth noting here that discussions of original accumulation tend to focus on the material objects of appropriation, such as seized oil fields or privatized water, minerals, or land. But much or even most original accumulation—sometimes also called, accumulation by dispossession or accumulation by theft—appropriates both raw materials and labor simultaneously. When infrastructure such as railroads, produced goods such as ships, tools, buildings, cleared and improved fields and lands, crops, mined metals, and so on are plundered, the labor used to modify and maintain those resources is also seized.

Another form of capitalist labor expropriation, slavery, can likewise be understood as a form of original accumulation, a direct theft of human labor power. The case for capitalism’s foundational need for slavery was made at least as early as 1944 by Eric Williams, although at the time he assumed that slavery was a labor form of the past.² However, from reports of workers padlocked into factories, a global traffic in women for coerced sex work, confiscated passports of domestic servants, and children held to work on cacao plantations, it is clear that unfree labor is not a pre-capitalist relic, but continues to thrive.

In addition to original accumulation, Marx studied the role of reproductive labor in capitalism: the unpaid work needed to reproduce labor power by creating and raising children, and by feeding, clothing, sheltering, and caring for adult workers. However, orthodox Marxism has tended to draw a sharp line between productive and reproductive labor, suggesting that the latter is necessary to capitalism’s function and expansion, but it does not in economic terms generate surplus value for capital. Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist feminists and movements like the Wages for Housework campaign countered this consensus by arguing that women’s domestic work was unpaid but nevertheless commodity-producing work; indeed, it created and sustained the most important commodity of all—labor-power. Women’s “reproductive” work was actually foundational to capitalist exploitation, and very much a productive activity. Yet “women’s work” was and remains largely invisible as labor, instead defined as a naturally occurring “labor of love,” allocated to the private rather than economic sphere. As Maria Mies famously pointed out in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, under capitalism, with the creation of the category of “housewife,” “women’s labor is considered a natural resource, freely available like air and water.”³

In her influential 1988 book If Women Counted, Marilyn Waring brought a feminist critique of conventional economic measurements to a broader audience, arguing that from carrying water to caring for the elderly, the worth of women’s work was unaccounted for in money-based metrics of wages, profits, and productivity. Waring’s work inspired the introduction of new statistical methods, on a national and international scale, that sought to assess the hours and imputed market value of domestic labor, caregiving, and other feminized forms of unpaid work performed by wives, daughters, and mothers. However, in her sophisticated introduction to the second edition of her book (entitled Counting for Nothing in some later editions), Waring notes a double edge to these attempts at an economic account of women’s unpaid work. While arguing for the theoretical and practical importance of recognizing the scope and volume of unpaid labor in the economy, she also makes clear the dangers of attaching narrowly numerical values to women’s work, which has strong qualitative, ethical, and affective dimensions: “what is the cost of ‘visibility’ in a patently pathological value system?” she asks. “Do we want all of life to be commodified in an economic model?”⁴ Waring stops short of wondering whether a recognition of shared capitalist exploitation could provide a common political and strategic ground between house-working women and other exploited parts of the population.

While work on the capitalist exploitation of women’s unwaged labor has flourished in recent decades, versions of this critique can be found much earlier, for instance in an article by the American Marxist Mary Inman entitled “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production,” published in 1940. She presciently observed that “the labor of a woman, who cooks for her husband, who is making tires in the Firestone plant in Southgate, California, is essentially as much a part of the production of automobile tires as the cooks and waitresses in the cafes where Firestone workers eat.… [T]heir labor is as inseparably knit into those tires as is the labor of their husbands.”⁵

This cursory survey shows that throughout the last century, various currents in Marxism have focused on the role of unpaid labor in the creation of capitalist profits, through original accumulation, slavery, and housework-as-labor. Yet for much of that time, most Marxists still placed waged work at the center of their analysis of capitalist exploitation, to the exclusion of other forms of labor. Some even welcomed the expansion of waged relationships into economies where unwaged labor predominated as marking the arrival of “real” capitalism—itself seen as a disruptive but necessary stage in the progress toward socialism.

In the current era of neoliberal globalization, however, original accumulation, slavery, and housework, far from being replaced or superseded by wage labor, have instead continued and even expanded. And now we also see that even more forms of non-waged and sometimes even extra-monetary capitalist exploitation have been created. It could perhaps be argued that more exploitation takes place through these various mechanisms than in the conventional realm of wages and salaries.

While the theories discussed above have made great advances, Marxism as a whole has still yet to fully reckon with its preoccupation with the wage. What follows is an attempt to enumerate just some of the many pathways of capitalist surplus extraction, not only beyond the wage form, but also beyond original accumulation, slavery, and housework, and an argument that these other forms of exploitation are intrinsic and essential to capitalism.

We might for convenience’s sake divide capitalist forms of exploitation beyond the wage into several categories. First, wage work itself is being reorganized so that more of what is demanded of a worker is claimed not to be “work” at all, and is therefore not waged; workers are paid for less and less of their necessary labor time. For instance, precarious waged workers are increasingly expected to log unpaid “on-call” time: Starbucks employees must remain available for constantly changing shift assignments, which daily appear and disappear on their schedules. Similarly, restaurant employees must do prep work before clocking in or clean up after clocking out, home care nurses take home paperwork to finish at night, and white-collar workers check their email in the evenings, on weekends, and on vacation. Although these workers are waged, much of their work is not.

Other familiar forms of labor exploitation that are entirely outside the formal wage model are also expanding. Long recognized in the global South, various kinds of piece work and contract labor have a growing presence in the North as well. These include entirely unpaid or nominally paid labor, such as internships or prison labor, and workers labeled “independent contractors” if their jobs are menial or “freelancers” and “consultants” if they are slightly higher up the economic scale, from adjunct professors and Uber drivers, to TaskRabbit workers and day laborers, to self-employed copy editors and dog walkers.

While “original accumulation” remains an academic term, the phenomenon itself is widely recognized as a form of capitalist profiteering, despite its lack of a wage form. The seizure of natural resources, for example, has never ceased, as in the eminent domain exercised by pipeline construction companies in the United States, or the encroachment on indigenous lands for mineral extraction and other uses, part of a broader privatization of the commons. But original accumulation has also taken on new forms, such as civil asset forfeiture in the United States, which totaled over $5 billion in 2014, according to the Washington Post, and which is set for a revival under Trump’s Department of Justice.⁶ Subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts for large corporations and financial firms, which clearly provide significant and ongoing profits, could also well be categorized as primitive accumulation, an upward redistribution of public money to the capitalist class, without even a gesture to the wider public in return. The age of “too big to fail” has made it entirely clear that these transfers of value are not just occasional windfalls, but are inherent to the very structure of contemporary capital accumulation.

The dizzying and ever-expanding suite of financial and monetary instruments used to drain cash from households are further forms of exploitation. Predatory housing lending and ballooning debts to credit card corporations and student loan companies point to the increasing prevalence of this mode of extraction. For many workers, “financialization” is no abstraction, but instead a daily reality, a ready means of appropriating value by paying with one hand, and taking back that pay with the other, through mounting debt, interest, and fees.

Just as the exploitative forms of primitive accumulation and piece work are common to the global North and South alike, financialization as a form of bleeding workers prevails across the globe. International debt—including its attendant interest payments, budget rules, and monetary restrictions—is one obvious means of using finance to extract value from workers in the global South. Less discussed today, but still important, is the global system of unequal exchange, first named in the early 1960s by the economist Arghiri Emmanuel.⁷ The subject of much theorization and debate, unequal exchange might be summed up as a phenomenon in which international trade conditions and foreign exchange relations tend to value (or undervalue) labor in a way that transfers profits to capitalists in the North. Any tourist in the global South who has noticed the lopsided value of the U.S. dollar or the euro vis-à-vis the currencies of former colonies and neo-colonies has experienced unequal exchange firsthand.

Still other forms of exploited labor appear less obviously as work, or even as mechanisms of exploitation. Housework has already been mentioned, but feminist economists, along with scholars studying peasant societies, have expanded the discussion of housework to include all kinds of subsistence work that support and subsidize capitalism.

The socially necessary wage, in Marx’s conception, was the amount required for workers to survive and reproduce themselves under prevailing social conditions. The unpaid labor of women and other subsistence workers, by producing essential use values at no cost to capital, serves to lower that necessary wage. When women cook meals for free, or raise children at home rather than send them to day care, or care for ill household members—all as unpaid “labors of love” —they provide direct economic subsidies to the socially necessary wage. If workers had to pay for those services, their wages would need to be far higher. Similarly, if women or other household members grow food in kitchen gardens or fields, or repair houses and make their own clothes, as they often do in the global South, this subsidy, combined with variations in living standards and labor conditions, enables even lower wages, and therefore higher profits. To use Maria Mies’s formulation, this unseen labor represents the submerged bulk of an iceberg, of which formal waged work forms only the tip.

Another form of unwaged exploitation is often called “shadow work”— something we all engage in and often loathe, yet usually do not think of as work, or even a means of exploitation. Coined by the philosopher Ivan Illich, shadow work encompasses unpaid labor created by capitalist enterprises, yet which in itself is entirely unproductive, with no purpose other than to service profit-making enterprises, for free—casting a kind of “shadow” outside the economy. Examples include activities novel enough to still draw our attention and frustration, such as slogging through endless automated phone trees to argue with health insurance companies, or installing endless updates to computer systems. Older forms of shadow work that we now take for granted include time spent paying bills, or checking bank accounts.⁸

In short, the capitalist exploitation of labor outside and beyond the wage form has been well documented for many years. Yet many Marxists continue to focus on the wage as the singular embodiment of capitalist exploitation. An expanded Marxist understanding of capitalist exploitation is long overdue. This is not merely an academic question, but a problem with profound implications for anticapitalist movements and organizations around the world.

Centuries ago, to become a waged worker was to suffer a steep decline in status, a condition that workers fought against as they clung to self-provisioning and self-organized, subsistence-based work. As original accumulation proceeded, the means of both subsistence and production were privatized, and access to those means of production was denied to all but the capitalists. At this point, wage work slowly rose to a status of relative privilege among the working classes, and “access to the wage” became access to more power than was available to other workers.⁹ When a worker was waged, he (for it was usually a “he”) and his work were at least acknowledged, and the terms of engagement with bosses could be perceived, delineated, and contested.9

Meanwhile, workers who labored under other, non-waged terms were reclassified as “economically backward,” and sometimes were defined as not-even-working. For familiar historical examples, think here of tenant farmers framed as a kind of feudal holdover, or the bourgeois creation of the housewife. Even when their low position in the capitalist hierarchy was acknowledged, unwaged workers came to be seen as “marginalized” or at best as “oppressed,” rather than as exploited. In fact, far from being peripheral to capitalism, the labor of unwaged workers is central to both the production and maintenance of capitalist profits.

This preoccupation with waged labor, and the associated perception that modern economics could not explain the supposedly vestigial and non-economic oppression of women or sharecroppers, may partly explain why many communities began to see a politics of identity, rather than economic solidarity, as their best path to public visibility and progress. Access to the wage foregrounds some workers while obscuring the laboring reality of others, fracturing the potential for unity across the multiple working classes. The wage has been used to divide us.

Every day shows us the advancing and expanding grip of capitalism, as it invades and commodifies ever more areas of personal life and experience. Yet at the same time, the number of conventionally waged workers is shrinking, with the rise of temporary contracts, piece work, informal jobs, and other precarious forms of employment. An insistence on wage work as the hallmark of labor under capitalism cannot make sense of this scenario; it must be clear now that the sphere of capitalism has far surpassed the sphere of waged work.

The orthodox Marxist vision has long been that workers would meet and unite in an industrial workplace, with the experience of shared exploitation in a shared productive endeavor fostering solidarity and class consciousness. Capitalists have always had other plans. And with the neoliberal assault on unions, labor protections, and the welfare state, new capitalist strategies have emerged to further expand the existing realm of unwaged work. For the working classes—waged and unwaged alike—to recognize their shared condition, the assumption that wages represent the totality of capitalist labor relations must be rejected. Workers of all kinds must focus on the underlying reality of the extraction of their surplus labor, whether shrouded by wages, piece work rates, unpaid shifts spent waiting to be called in, usurious interest payments, subsistence labor, or unpaid care work. The constantly proliferating variety of novel labor forms has proven an effective distraction from the task of building unity. It is the task of intellectuals to help reveal the hidden connections among seemingly disparate modes of exploitation. Additionally, we are well equipped to draw on the long and rich history of workers’ struggles under the many different work regimes of capitalism and to find and create new models and possibilities, both for resistance and for the creation of independent, worker-based economies.

As capitalism retreats from the wage form in the twenty-first century, it is time to widen our understanding of capitalist exploitation to include both centuries-old forms of extraction and those now being invented or newly deployed: the status of independent contractor, intern, or consultant; the shadow work of ever-lengthening commutes; and parasitic financial mechanisms. It is time to connect the dots among these many methods of surplus appropriation, and begin to build an intellectual foundation for a resurgent and unified working-class movement, before it is too late.

Notes

1. ↩Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 417.
2. ↩Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
3. ↩Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986).
4. ↩Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), xxiv.
5. ↩Mary Inman, “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production,” reprinted in Viewpoint 5 (2015), http://viewpointmag.com.
6. ↩Christopher Ingraham, “Law Enforcement took More Stuff From People Than Burglars Did Last Year,” Washington Post November 11, 2015.
7. ↩Arghiri Emanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
8. ↩Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London: M. Boyars, 1981).
9. ↩Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM, 2012).

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Coffee Shops: Exploring Urban Sociability and Social Class in the Intersection of Public and Private Space

Rose Pozos-Brewer (2015)

Coffee has developed a certain image in the United States. We take “coffee breaks” at work, we “go grab a cup of coffee” with friends or for a first date, we are well acquainted with Starbucks, we incorporate coffee shops into popular media, as in the TV show, Friends, and line up to see a pop-up replica of Central Perk. Coffee itself is a very popular commodity, generating more trade than any other trade good except petroleum and is the most popular legal drug. Even those of us who do not drink coffee or do not actively participate in coffee culture are affected by it. Coffee culture in this thesis refers to specific habits and social interactions that revolve around coffee and coffee shops. Inviting someone out for coffee, getting coffee “to go” before work in the morning, spending free time and/or working in coffee shops, and joking about coffee addictions are all examples of coffee culture

“The worldwide coffee culture is almost a cult,”. “There are blogs and news groups on the subject, along with innumerable websites, and Starbucks outlets seem to populate every street corner, vying for space with other coffeehouses and chains.” Coffee shops indicates how a big portion of coffee culture comes from the coffee shop. Coffee shop chains grew more than 10% annually between 2000 and 2004, which was before the increase in independent coffee shops in the recent decade. The coffee shop has been hailed as a “third place,” or the place one frequents that is not work or home. It also has a rich history with roots in the early coffeehouses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which have passed down the ideals of the coffee shop as a place for public discourse and the formation of a democratic public sphere. This study traces the development of the coffee shop from the first coffeehouses and how the coffee shop has become a center for urban sociability. In order to contextualize and unpack the social meaning and uses of a coffee shop, I use theories of public and private place, placemaking, and sociability, with an emphasis on third places and their role in the urban public sphere.

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Coffee and the Ottoman Social Sphere

Marita Ervin (2014)

Sharing a cup of coffee has become nearly synonymous with the exchange of information. Coffee has the ability to act as a social unifier and a catalyst for intellectual interaction. Recent decades have experienced a dramatic increase in coffee culture which has resulted in a revival of the social café atmosphere. This revitalization has taken hold in numerous cultures that have transformed the beverage by adopting new processes of brewing and new tools for serving. Within this transformation coffee’s connection with the exchange of social conventions has remained a constant. The integration of social ease and scholarly thought began within the confines of coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire.

A significant amount of historical research has been devoted to European coffeehouses which were adopted from the Ottomans. Within this research Ottoman coffeehouses and their development of safe, social spaces have been largely ignored. The complex cultural exchange between the Ottomans and the Europeans was complicated by European ignorance rooted in the Ottoman acquisition of Constantinople. In 1453, Turkish tribes under the rule of Mehmet II overthrew Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine Empire, and subsequently occupied the city. The Turks renamed the port city Istanbul and designated it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.

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Capitalist Faultlines and Subterranean Resistances: Traces of Struggle in the Work of Ferruccio Gambino

Dylan Davis
November 5, 2019

The following interview with Ferruccio Gambino was conducted over a series of meetings in Padua in April and May 2019. It includes discussions that, apart from serving as a point of entry into Gambino’s important body of work and political trajectory, illustrate the depth of his commitment to militant inquiry. The scope of the questions posed, taken with the precision and intensity of Gambino’s reflections, makes this conversation particularly valuable for anyone interested in the politics of radical solidarity and its renewal today. What might such a project look like? Gambino helps us see the force this question obtains when working-class confrontations against exploitation erupt on a larger plane, and what is at stake in those instances (it would be more appropriate to say periods) where they do not. Indeed, if we think in terms of Gambino’s own itinerary, we can glimpse a unique attempt to render these confrontations and practical acts legible in an expanded register, to push them “against the grain” of more provincialized concerns, and to enlarge the sphere of attention paid to class struggles past and present. Collective aspirations, even if they are often submerged or subterranean, always exist. 

These aspirations over the course of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, broadly communist in orientation, have attracted much attention in the last decade. What has gathered considerably less interest, however, is their connection to a broader international dimension, expressed by a small but cohesive grouping of revolutionaries who sought to analyze working class struggle not from the perspective of its potential stewardship, but in the concrete expression of its needs. Gambino was a part of this cohort beginning in the 1960s, though its origins can be traced back much farther. It is in his early encounter with particular internationalist current that the elaboration of such an experience begins to come into view.¹ 

After completing his dissertation on Joseph Conrad, Gambino traveled to the United States in 1966, where he was first exposed to the “ecologismo” of Murray Bookchin, at the latter’s apartment in New York City. In Detroit, subsequently joined his lifelong friend and mentor George Rawick in the Facing Reality group, while his introduction to Marxist-Feminism came, at the behest of Jessie Glaberman, through washing dishes at the end of their meetings.² Back in Italy, under the impact of the explosive events of the late 1960s, Gambino’s initiatives in Potere Operaio contributed to clarifying what was at stake internationally, articulating distinct resonances with other sites of struggles, however remote they may have seemed. These various strands and layers are still present in his thinking today.

Gambino gives priority to adopting the longer view of history. Despite the persistence (not only in Italy) of an overwhelming forgetfulness, he accentuates the lessons that movements – like the trans-Atlantic struggle for black freedom, or those internationalist currents in the European left which drew inspiration from it – continue to transmit. Attending to the process of transmission of ideas, strategies, and struggles can then become, under the right conditions, a kind of lesson in its own right. Perhaps this accounts for why much of his speech here has a certain pedagogical quality, and why his teaching has had such a profound effect on generations of students at Padua (where he is often referred to simply as “maestro”) and beyond. This is owed, in part, to the vigilance of his memory, which does not so much guard the experience to which he was privy as to keep it open, capable of thinking with the present. 

The perspective of the longer view also makes possible a serious inquiry into the history of work: within the capitalist mode of production, long hours, wretched conditions, and high rates of turnover constitute the rule, a veritable law of development. What is often obscured even as it is conceded in the dominant forms of analysis (historical and otherwise), is the weight of this perennial misery. Marx’s quip about the production process, where “no admittance except on business” is permitted, remains taken for granted but now often functions as a positive prescription, rather than a particular ideological blindspot. As a counterpoint to this historical amnesia, conformism, and seclusion, Gambino offers an important corrective: a serious consideration of working conditions irreducibly requires workers themselves, who possess the capacity to modify this terrain (or irrevocably alter it), as much as they are shaped or subordinated by it.

If it has been the latter image that has held sway in recent memory, it need not continue to be. In a recent essay with Devi Sacchetto, Gambino asks, “Where are the fault-lines in this landscape of widespread subjugation?”³ While this question is posed to the histories of slavery and servitude in what they call, “the shifting maelstrom” of the global economy, it is clear the question resounds in the contemporary moment. For Gambino, the answer remains the same as when he first discovered it in the thought of C.L.R. James: in the “everyday resistance” of waged and unwaged workers, that is, in human subjects. Because of the diverse experience of the production process, the sequences of accumulation that are extended and intensified globally by capital, we must first of all view this processes expansively, in a multilayered fashion, seeking to understand potential openings today through the actions of those who resist as well as the robust or tenuous links they make with others. What forms of resistance, then, are on the horizon today? 

For Gambino and Sacchetto, struggles over the mobility of labor are not new historical phenomena, either: 

What has proven socially and politically decisive is the message conveyed by those who resist the vortex of a productive process that sees capital striving to maximally de-subjectivise the labour-force, turning it into a mere carrier of the capacity for work: from the fugitive-slave in the Americas to all those whose struggle against the dictates of capital-accumulation has taken in the form of migration. Those typically considered “normal” or “economic” migrants are quite capable of ‘shaking the tree’ and upsetting the social conditions in which nonmigrants exist. Today as in the era of the fugitive-slaves, the strongest expression of individuality coincides with the most powerful manifestation of collective action. It is within this nexus that the possibility of overthrowing the barriers of discrimination is situated.⁴

The question, again, is how to see the possibility of individuality and processes of individuation beyond the denial of subjectivity in a given labor regime, in legal and extralegal force, and collectivity outside of prevailing representations of victimhood, to which the state serves as guarantor. Fortunately, there are numerous precedents. In From Sundown to Sunup, George Rawick, to whom this image of a collective “re-subjectivized” is tied, examines the particular “network of communications” that prepared the ground for emancipation and fundamentally transformed American society, namely those built by slaves, fugitive or not.⁵ Elsewhere, Gambino reminds us that in the United States, “it took the black people slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, peonage, ghettoization, and urban revolts in this century to put the two words ‘capital’ and ‘wages’ irreversibly together, and to open a new stage in the struggle of the wageless against the state as collective capitalist.”⁶ This was neither a simple nor guaranteed development, but an admixture of countless battles over the content of self-determination, one that, irrespective of its permutations, is very much still ongoing.⁷

It would seem, therefore, that the question of movement is always on the table, however dormant or inoperative in a given setting; though its visibility and potential efficacy may be only a part of the story. As he states in the interview, moving from “the territoriality of the working class to its mobility” is thus not simply a belated conceptual shift, an alternative standpoint on the part of theoreticians of the workers’ movement, but a strategic advance against the longstanding counterattack mounted by multinational capital. While one of Gambino’s central concerns has been reframing the field of possibility of workers, the collective “underground or overground streams of unrest” that continue to call into question the prevailing organization of work, his multinational orientation to this history and subjectivity serves as a novel intervention in Marxist scholarship, and Italian workerism in particular, emphasizing these lines of contact and action. Over the last five decades, this has illuminated a number of different pathways forward.⁸ 

It is no secret that the economic and political command of migrant labor is today, just as it came to be for Gambino in the 1970s, of paramount concern. This theme is present, for instance, in his investigation of shopfloor dynamics at British Ford Motor Company plants during the 1960s and 1970s, where resistance to speed-ups and the disciplinary hierarchy of the wage took the form of insubordination among West-Indian migrants. It also appears in Gambino’s more recent work on the interconnection of labor regimes in firms like Apple and Foxconn today — where the demand for coltan mining has ensured that the history of electronics in China will be “written in letters of blood in Africa.” Gambino has extended his focus on the latter domain to questions around the ecological contradictions of capitalism. As shown by his work in co-translating the book Dying for an iPhone (Morire per un iPhone), Gambino holds open the prospect that a real limit to these mechanisms of human and environmental degradations might one day be imposed from below.⁹

Students of “operaismo,” and whatever afterlives its reception continues to produce, would do well to take heed of one of Gambino’s most persistent “workerist” (Gambino himself is somewhat ambivalent about such designations) demands: that we seriously consider the self-activity of proletarians, their orientation within and beyond the workplace, as well as the on-going practices and desires that seek, through an array of means, to resist or escape the most brutal and banal impositions put forward by capital. This is no simple prescription, a potential supplement to an otherwise sound analysis. For Gambino, it is the very presupposition of political thinking, and its impulse is thoroughly materialist. We are inevitably led back to the ways in which the conditions of production, the conflictual terrain of work and the rhythm of the working day, are themselves navigated. In the absence of such an analysis, as Massimiliano Tomba and Riccardo Bellofiore argue, “attention to the real characteristics of capitalist restructuring, to the effective and efficacious modes of political intervention against the class of workers, is missing as well.” Left with “a total blindness to what is authentically new in contemporary capitalism,” profoundly disarming conclusions will follow.¹⁰ 

If we look beyond the hazy subject of the multitude, Gambino’s propositions can help us to see working-class activity unfold once more in networks of solidarity, however embryonic or short-lived. He indexes other threads in workerism that have largely been neglected or isolated, but deserve to no longer be. In this interview, one begins to get a glimpse of a number of figures rarely encountered in Anglophone accounts on the subject. Here names like Luciano Arrighetti, Mario Dalmaviva, Gianfranco Faina, Licia de Marco, and Augusto Finzi occupy diverse (generationally as well as regionally within Italy) but central roles, articulating alternative organizational frames that extend working-class struggles into new domains. The formation of a different kind of power, like the Workers’ Committee and Autonomous Assembly at Porto Marghera with whom Gambino was closely associated, serves as one such model. In challenging the terms of the working day, the division between mental and manual labor (as well as the patriarchal division of labor), and the noxiousness (nocività) of working conditions and their dramatic effects on working class communities, they sought to clarify a competing social and intellectual reality, the legacy of which deserves to be reconstructed.¹¹ 

These innovations in militancy, however, came at great cost. Many Italian radicals faced heavy sentences in the April 7th proceedings of 1979, and were for years held at high-security prisons like Asinara, Rebibbia, and La Spezia. Gambino, who was spared in the early 1980s only by going into exile, was presented with a quite different punitive dilemma, first in the United States, and then Mitterrand’s France (where it was not uncommon to encounter undercover Italian police). He once told me that returning to Italy in the mid-1980s was like stepping into a cemetery, a profoundly disorienting experience given the events of the preceding decade. But even cemeteries have a way of preserving traces of another time. A different development, as it happened, was already underway. One of the first people Gambino sought out upon his return was Primo Moroni, who served as a kind of radical bridge figure between a melancholic landscape and an alternative tradition of militancy. With the development of projects like altreragioni in the early 1990s, some of these former energies were rekindled for a new era among a generation of young intellectuals, many of whom are still active today. These circuits of political knowledge – one can call them political cultures, systems of struggle, grassroots communication lines – are never permanently closed. 

Though the movement in which gave rise to these pursuits took place has in many respects ended, the aspirations which animated it have not. What lessons might be learned through a more thorough examination of the links established there today? These connections are all present in this interview, offering what I take to be a useful point of departure for thinking through this complex history, in Italy and beyond, once again. The possibility of a real intervention into the vast landscape of contemporary exploitation, however, should not be discounted in advance. Gambino, ever attuned to future prospects, continues to search for openings: “Once mobilization proves that it can be done, it becomes possible elsewhere.”

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viewpointmag.com/2019/11/05/capitalist-faultlines-and-subterranean-resistances-traces-of-struggle-in-the-work-of-ferruccio-gambino/

Misrepresenting Marx’s Ecology: A Response to Daniel Tanuro’s “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”

John Bellamy Foster

January 14, 2020

Daniel Tanuro is an agricultural engineer and leading socialist activist who has made numerous contributions to ecosocialist thought and practice, most notably, in his book Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work.⁽¹⁾ Yet, this has been coupled with persistent claims that there are “fundamental flaws” in Karl Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism.⁽²⁾ Tanuro has previously charged that Marx failed to recognize the centrality of fossil fuels to capitalist industrialization, and that Marx discounted peasant/indigenous knowledge by rejecting French agronomist Léonce Lavergne’s notion that forage crops were capable of obtaining all the nutrients they needed directly or indirectly (through manure) from the atmosphere.⁽³⁾ These and other criticisms of Marx by Tanuro were refuted by Paul Burkett and myself in our book Marx and the Earth (2016).⁽⁴⁾

Tanuro has now shifted his argument in a number of ways, requiring a further response. In his recent review “Was Marx an Ecosocialist: A Reply to Kohei Saito,” on Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Tanuro has dropped his accusation that Marx and Engels ignored the role of fossil fuels—something that did not hold up in the face of the mass of evidence to the contrary. Instead, he now faults Marx for being unaware even in the context of his time of the global energy imbalance caused by the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.⁽⁵⁾ He follows this up with the charge that Marx incorrectly denied that some plants could obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere, while coupling this with the observation that Marx also neglected the role of earthworms and other soil fauna in soil fertility.⁽⁶⁾ Tanuro asserts that both of these were parts of traditional peasant knowledge, which Marx “disdained.” Additionally, the role of earthworms, he notes, was emphasized in Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881).⁽⁷⁾ Finally, Tanuro claims that Marx and Engels’s well-known failure to develop a full critical analysis of the expropriation of women’s unpaid domestic labor is related to these general ecological failures.

Marx’s ecological conceptions were naturally limited by the nineteenth-century material conditions and knowledge. Marxian ecology does not rest simply on what Marx and Engels knew or didn’t know about concrete ecological problems, relative to our own time, but rather on their overall critical method. Nevertheless, it is important to scrutinize the “orrery of errors” that Tanuro himself manufactures in his misrepresentation of Marx’s ecological views.⁽⁸⁾

Marx and Nineteenth-Century Ecological Knowledge

In “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?” Tanuro deftly underscores the importance of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift as explored most recently in Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Yet, he criticizes Saito for “exaggerating” the importance of Marx’s ecological critique. This is followed by an attempt to single out certain ecological shortcomings in Marx’s argument. Tanuro’s initial criticism of Marx is to say, “As far as I know, the possibility of a global energy imbalance in the Earth due to the burning of fossil fuels did not catch his [Marx’s] attention. It could have been otherwise—John Tyndall discovered the radiative power of CO₂  and other atmospheric gases in 1859. But Marx’s interest in science was mostly focused on other areas of research. (Let’s add that [Carl] Fraas [whom Marx studied] was talking about local climate change caused by deforestation, not global warming.)”⁽⁹⁾

In saying that “it could have been otherwise,” and that Marx could have recognized both the earth’s energy imbalance and global warming if his interests in science had not been “mostly focused on other areas of research,” Tanuro is in effect suggesting that Marx is to be judged not by his understanding of the science of his day, but rather by his failure to supersede it. Here a few facts are in order. Although Tyndall had empirically demonstrated that carbon dioxide played a role in producing a greenhouse effect, neither he nor anyone else in Marx’s lifetime put forward the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. This had to await the Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius in 1896.⁽¹⁰⁾ Marx, it is worth noting, attended some of Tyndall’s lectures at the time that the latter was presenting his experiments in relation to solar energy and carbon dioxide. Marx was also aware of general speculations with respect to the role of human production in earth warming—though lacking any clear scientific basis—from his studies of the work of the early Marxist ecological economist Sergei Podolinsky.⁽¹¹⁾

There was in fact no such thing in Marx’s day as a developed theory of the energy balance of the Earth System. The concept of energy itself (as distinct from force, motion) was still fairly new in the mid-nineteenth century—having been introduced in the context of the scientific revolution associated with the development of thermodynamics, to which Marx and Engels paid close attention.⁽¹²⁾ It was not until the 1958, that Mikhail I. Budyko in the Soviet Union published the first estimates of global energy balance in his Heat Balance of the Earth System.⁽¹³⁾ The concept of the Earth System itself was thus a late twentieth-century creation.⁽¹⁴⁾

As Tanuro partly acknowledges, Marx was influenced by the work of the German scientists Carl Fraas and Matthias Schleiden, who documented climate changes in ancient societies. Marx and Engels were also aware of the environmental effects of colonialism on islands like St. Helena (and even in parts of India). Thus, they referred a number of times to local climate change associated with deforestation. Marx carefully took notes from the work of geologist Joseph Beete Jukes on the movement of isotherms due to paleoclimatic change and their effects on species extinctions in geological time over tens of millions of years.⁽¹⁵⁾

In addition to questioning Marx’s understanding of Earth System changes, Tanuro goes on to challenge Marx for his criticisms of Lavergne’s Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (1853). Marx derided what he called Lavergne’s “fairy story” with respect to forage plants and soil fertility. Tanuro contends that this amounted to a denial of nitrogen fixation in the soil on Marx’s part. Thus, Tanuro points to what he takes to be:

the fact that Marx considered the notion that certain plants could fix nitrogen from the air in soils as a fable…. I think there is little doubt that Marx…expresses a disdain [for this reason] for what he sees as the superstitions of peasants (and those of indigenous peoples). We find a trace of this scientism in Marx’s admiration for Liebig’s theory that chemical nutrients are the main explanation for soil fertility: it is certain that peasants knew the role of earthworms and other organisms of soil fauna—a role confirmed by Darwin in 1881—but peasant knowledge did not hold the attention of Marx.⁽¹⁶⁾

Tanuro is alluding here to Marx’s objection to Lavergne’s extraordinary claim that “Forage plants derive from the atmosphere the principal elements of their growth, while they give to the soil more than they take from it.”⁽¹⁷⁾ In fact, Marx was entirely correct in treating this as a bourgeois nursery tale, indicating that both parts of Lavergne’s statement were fallacious. It is not true that forage plants, even in the case of legumes, derive from the atmosphere all the principal elements of their growth. Like all other plants they depend largely on nutrients from the soil. For most plants only carbon dioxide plus atmospheric oxygen (which plays a secondary role in removing the waste electrons in the respiratory process and does not enter directly into plant growth) are obtained from the atmosphere. The remainder of the sixteen essential chemical elements have to be obtained by most plants from the soil, including nitrogen. However, legumes (such as clover, peas, and beans) can utilize atmospheric nitrogen and fix it in the soil (with the help of bacteria at their roots). But even legumes are dependent on the soil in order to obtain all the other essential chemical elements in plant growth (aside from carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen). And all plants exhaust the soil, requiring soil chemicals to be recycled. Lavergne’s contention that legumes give to the soil more than they take from it is therefore wrong—as Marx contended.⁽¹⁸⁾

Nowhere in all of this does Marx go so far as to deny that some plants (legumes) are capable of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere and fixing it in the soil (a fact that had been demonstrated by Jean-Baptiste Boussingault in 1836, though the exact mechanism by which it occurred was not known until 1880). Moreover, Marx makes no reference at all to nitrogen in this context, so there is no basis for Tanuro’s charge that he denied the existence of nitrogen fixation. Logically, to challenge, as Marx did, the “fairy story” that forage plants get from the atmosphere all of the “principal elements of their growth” is not the same as to adopt the fallacious notion that they get none of these chemicals from the atmosphere. Nor does this say anything about nitrogen specifically. Liebig, who was Marx’s principal source on soil chemistry, had concluded by the third edition of his Agricultural Chemistry in 1843 that the nitrogen that plants obtained from the atmosphere was “quite sufficient” (a position, however, that did not distinguish legumes from plants in general) so that additional nitrogenous fertilizer was unnecessary. Although this conclusion was rightly questioned at the time by farmers and scientists, Marx, would have had little reason on this score to doubt the reality of nitrogen fixation.⁽¹⁹⁾

Marx’s wider opposition to Lavergne was based on the latter’s advocacy of English high farming with its emphasis on meat-based agricultural system geared to the consumption of the rich, as opposed to a cereal- or grain-based agricultural system geared to the consumption of workers. Far from denying peasant knowledge in this sphere, Marx, as one would expect, was questioning the new, meat-based system of English industrialized agriculture and generally siding with the common people (the people of the commons) and their traditional agricultural practices.⁽²⁰⁾

But what of Marx’s neglect of earthworms and other soil fauna in his treatment of the soil? Here Tanuro is undoubtedly correct that this received no attention from Marx,  mainly because major advances in science in this area required the study of soil microorganisms, which had not yet occurred in Marx’s day. It is true, as Tanuro points out, that Darwin published his book on earthworms in 1881, but this was a mere two years before Marx died (one year before Darwin’s own death). Still, it is hardly possible to argue on this meager basis, as Tanuro does, that Marx had “a disdain for what he sees as the superstitions of peasants (and those of indigenous peoples),” or that he was guilty of “scientism.”⁽²¹⁾ One has only to look at Marx’s very detailed treatment of the forms of spade cultivation practiced by the Irish peasantry, including their management of the subsoil, to disprove the allegation of his disdain for peasant cultivation.⁽²²⁾ Moreover, Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and writings on the indigenous more generally contain numerous detailed investigations into indigenous agricultural methods.⁽²³⁾

With respect to gender, Tanuro throws out logic altogether, contending that Marx’s famous statements in Capital and in the Critique of the Gotha Program that nature and labor are the two sources of wealth constitutes a direct indication that Marx took “into account neither the reproductive work mainly performed by women, nor the specific exploitation of female employees.”⁽²⁴⁾ This seems to be based on two presumptions strangely attributed to Marx: (1) women’s reproduction in the household does not belong to the categories of either corporeal nature or social labor, and cannot be seen as producing real wealth in the form of use values; (2) labor in industry is mainly to be identified with men and excludes women. In contrast, Marx recognized the importance of the reproduction of labor power within the family (while failing to investigate this sufficiently) and could not even have conceived of the idea of reducing all of social labor to capitalist commodity production, which would have undermined the entire basis of historical materialism. Moreover, he indicated in Capital that women were the bulk of the laborers in the main value-generating sector, particularly textiles, in the Industrial Revolution. He carefully examined the specific conditions of women’s labor, as in the chapter on “Modern Domestic Industry” in volume 1 of Capital.⁽²⁵⁾

There is no question that Marx and Engels only tangentially dealt with the problem of domestic labor and the fact that women’s contributions to social reproduction in the household were not compensated within the capitalist system. This then is a clear shortcoming in their political-economic analysis. True, there were historical reasons for this in their time, since proletarian women were not stay-at-home housewives in this period—even if they still carried on their backs the main household tasks—but spent the majority of their hours slaving in factories (together with men and older children). The result was that the working-class family was in a state of dissolution, giving rise to the protectionist movement that subsequently relegated women increasingly to the home. Nevertheless the theoretical gap in the analysis of the social reproduction of labor power constituted a crucial weakness in Marx’s critique of capitalism.⁽²⁶⁾ Marx’s fundamental methodology, together with the recognition of the shortcomings of his analysis in this area, however, has opened the way to the revolutionary development of social reproduction theory over the last half-century, and particularly in the last decade or so.⁽²⁷⁾ One of the results of this analysis is the growing recognition that capitalism has to be understood in terms of a dialectic of exploitation and expropriation, with the latter including the robbery of both domestic/subsistence labor and nature.⁽²⁸⁾

The Centrality of Marx’s Ecological Critique

Tanuro concludes that Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism though important is “exaggerated and counterproductive” in its contention that the thrust of Marx’s critique was to put ecological contradictions increasingly at the center of the analysis. Yet, in understandably asserting that the exploitation of labor power was more important to Marx than the expropriation of nature, Tanuro artificially divides what Marx thought was a dialectical unity, the robbing of both “the soil and the worker,” failing to understand that, as a materialist, Marx invariably went to the root of the problem: the metabolic rift generated by capitalist production, which was at the same time the ultimate manifestation of the alienation of human species-being.⁽²⁹⁾ “The irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” was not to be viewed as a separate reality, but rather as the deepest material consequence of the alienation of human labor.⁽³⁰⁾ It is this unified critical outlook that makes Marx’s work an indispensable starting point for understanding capitalism’s creative destruction of the earth as a place of human habitation.

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Notes

1. ↩ Daniel Tanuro, Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work (London: Merlin, 2003).
2. ↩ Tanuro, Green Capitalism. Tanuro’s views reflect what has often been called “first-stage ecosocialism,” see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword,” in Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), vii-xiii.
3. ↩ Léonce de Lavergne, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1855).
4. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 15-33.
5. ↩ Daniel Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?: A Reply to Kohei Saito,” International Viewpoint, January 12, 2020; Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
6. ↩ Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
7. ↩ Charles Darwin, The Formation of the Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (London: John Murray, 1881).
8. ↩ E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
9. ↩ Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
10. ↩ Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5-8.
11. ↩ Sergei Podolinsky, “Human Labour and the Unity of Force,” Appendix 2 in Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 262-87. Marx may have seen this more developed version of Podolinsky’s argument. He was certainly acquainted with (and took notes on) earlier versions. Here see Sergei Podolinsky, “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces,” Appendix 1 in Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 243-61.
12. ↩ See J.B.S Haldane, “Introduction,” in Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940), ix-x.
13. ↩ John Bellamy Foster “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 7.
14. ↩ Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 29-32.
15. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1-17, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 9-10.
16. ↩ Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
17. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 769; Lavergne, Rural Economy, 50-51.
18. ↩ Foster and Burkett, Marx and the Earth, 28-29. On the soil nutrient cycle see Fred Magdoff and Harold Can Es, Building Soils for Better Crops (Waldorf, Maryland: Sustainable Agricultural Publications, 2009), 69-76, 213-30.
19. ↩ William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166-67; James N. Galloway, Allison M. Leach, […], and Jan Willem Erisman, “A Chronology of Human Understanding of the Nitrogen Cycle,” Philosophical Transactions B (July 5, 2013), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
20. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx as a Food Theorist,” Monthly Review 68, no 7 (December 2016): 13-17.
21. ↩ Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
22. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 69-70: Eamonn Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish Soil,” MUSSI Working Paper Series 3 (January 2018).
23. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 1-19; Karl Marx, Ethnological Notebooks (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1974).
24. ↩ Tanuro, “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 134. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 3.
25. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” Monthly Review 69, no. 8 (January 2018): 3-4.
26. ↩ Foster and Clark, “Women, Nature, and Capital, in the Industrial Revolution,” 1-13.
27. ↩ On social reproduction theory see the following: Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), Tithi Bhattacharya, “Liberating Women from ‘Political Economy,’” Monthly Review 71, no. 8 (January 2020): 1-13. See also the special September 2019 issue of Monthly Review on social reproduction theory celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy  of Women’s Liberation” with contributions by Benston, Silvia Federici, Martha E. Gimenez, Selma James, Leith Mullings, Marge Piercy, and Vogel.
28. ↩ See Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 60.
29. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 636-39.
30. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.

Source

Culturalism, Naturalism, and Social Metabolism

Peter Critchley

November 5, 2019

Ecology and Social Monism: The Subsumption of Nature

Karl Marx’s metabolic analysis and concept of the metabolic rift have received increasing attention in recent years for their power and depth in explaining the contradictory socioecological dynamics of the capital system. (Burkett 1999; Foster 1999, 2000; Foster, Clark, and York 2010; Saito 2017). These views have generated perspectives within Marxism that have troubling implications. In this piece, I critically examine the work of those contemporary theorists whose criticisms of the metabolic conception involve positions that are at variance with Marx’s materialist conception at key points. In eliminating the idea of nature as possessing any independent significance apart from human practice, such thinking loses the materialist ontology (natural and social) at the basis of Marx’s emancipatory critique, effectively reverting to an idealist position. The problem with confining the dialectic to human history and society is that it precludes the possibility of an “objective dialectics of nature,” or the relevance of Marxist modes of thought to such an inquiry. (Foster, Clark, York, 2010). It leaves practice adrift in a world of its own making (or, adrift from nature, its own unmaking). To overcome this, I affirm the centrality of metabolic interaction between society and nature in Marx’s work.

The metabolic conception is of both theoretical interest and practical political significance given the extent to which academic and political responses to the crises afflicting the modern world have remained largely within the confines of the capital system, evincing a combination of neoliberal economics and technocratic politics so as to co-opt environmental concerns within the corporate form.

In Of Gods and Gaia (Critchley 2012), I criticized the planetary engineering envisaged as an environmental solution under the guise of ecomodernization. This approach downgrades and marginalizes the field of practical reason (politics and ethics) by identifying socioenvironmental problems as technical problems to be resolved by an extension of technocratic market-based solutions (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins 1999). This emphasis on technical solutions is accompanied by a reduction of collective political intervention and action to individualist lifestyle changes and cultural choices. The approach is designed explicitly to be a practicable alternative to the more radical social solutions which locate the root of “existential crisis” precisely in the contradictory dynamics of the capital system. We should, therefore, be alert to a corporate greenwashing that is concerned with steering social and environmental movements in the direction of actions and policies that extend and entrench the corporate form, appropriating concerns about justice and the environment to defuse, divert, and ultimately destroy meaningful social and environmental movements that possess the potential and motivation to deliver system change. In this corporate greenwashing, the central dynamic of capital accumulation driving social and ecological degradation remains firmly in place (Foster 2012).

The world is being seduced by a so-called greening of the very modernization that has brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe. This makes clarity of theoretical analysis and political direction of the essence.

Despite the pertinence of metabolic approach to addressing the converging social and environmental crises of the contemporary world, the concept of the metabolic rift has yet to achieve the centrality it merits. Brian M. Napoletano et al. seek to address this neglect by distinguishing metabolic rift theory from both the production-of-nature thesis and posthumanist world ecology, offering a comparative analysis and assessment that establishes its theoretical merits and political potential (Napoletano, Foster, Clark, Urquijo, McCall and Paneque-Gálvez, 2019).

The argument proceeds from a clear distinction between those who view the socioecological crisis as a cultural and/or ideological problem and those who view it as a materialist-realist one. The former may target issues of anthropocentrism and argue the relative merits of ecocentrism or biocentrism, or address issues of rationalism, mechanicism, and dualism arising from the Cartesian and the Enlightenment tradition (Castree 2000). I argue that this approach is misconceived and serves to generate serious political deficiencies when it comes to addressing the contemporary crisis.

In arguing for the critical realist-materialist approach, I shall show that Marx’s metabolic analysis and concept of the metabolic rift pioneers a materialist-dialectical approach that transcends the “idealism and the false dichotomization of Man versus Nature” (Kovats-Bernat 2001, 73), which generates and sustains a politically debilitating culturalism and naturalism.

I address the theoretical issues at stake in this debate with a keen eye on practical political implications, paying particular attention to certain deficiencies in contemporary “green” thought and to bringing insights from Marxism and metabolic thinking to bear on a transformative environmental praxis.

I shall address the theoretical roots which go some way toward explaining the slow take-up of metabolic rift theory despite its evident potential. To be precise, critics charge the metabolic rift approach with replicating the very idealism and dualism it repudiates (Castree 2015; Napoletano et al. 2018). In seeking to overcome the marginal position of the metabolic conception in the field of environmental geography and sociology, Napoletano, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Pedro S. Urquijo, Michael K. McCall, and Jaime Paneque-Gálvez (2019) undertake a searching comparative analysis of the Marxian approaches in critical environmental geography from which these theoretical differences arise, making the case for a stronger engagement with metabolic rift theory.

Napoletano et al. (2019) point to the deep chasm between geography and other social sciences with respect to political ecology:

On the one hand, Marxian work on the nature-society dialectic within geography (particularly that of Neil Smith) has been described as among ‘the most influential efforts by human geographers to conceptualize the matter of nature’ (Braun 2009, 24) but is ‘little known in Marxist circles’ outside geography (Castree 2000, 24). On the other hand, the metabolic rift has been described as the ‘one Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems [that] has outshone all the others in creativity and productivity’ in the twenty-first century (Malm 2018, 177)—including the awarding of the Deutscher Prize in 2018 to Saito (2017) for his analysis of the evolution of the metabolic rift concept in Marx’s thought—but has received little attention in geography.

This neglect may be considered harmful in theoretical and political terms to the extent that critical environmental geography (including much work in political ecology) comes to be insulated from the growing ecosocialist movement that is mobilizing around the concept of the metabolic rift. That mobilization demonstrates a practical political potential in the metabolic concept, something crucial to transformative environmental praxis concerned with “system change, not climate change” (see ; Wittman 2009; Klein 2015; Angus 2016; Baer 2016).

I therefore argue that the recovery of Marx’s concept of metabolism and his ecological value-form analysis enables a practical-critical understanding of and intervention in the convergent social and ecological crises of our times.

Theoretical Rifts

Commenting on the profound disciplinary divide that contributes to the neglect of metabolic rift theory, Napoletano et al. (2019) subject the Neil Smith-Noel Castree production-of-nature thesis (Castree 2002; Smith 2008) and the world-ecology approach advocated by Jason W. Moore (2011), as two of the metabolic rift’s most outspoken Marxian critics in geography, to close analysis and criticism. I shall proceed along the same lines with a view to political issues beyond the question of bridging disciplinary divides.

Foster writes of the opening of “dialectical rifts on the Left” (Foster 2016: 393–421). These theoretical controversies, involving both social monism and constructivism, show the extent to which Marxism is still striving to navigate a path beyond what is dubbed the postmodern turn in theory. In some perspectives, Marx’s concept of social metabolism has been interpreted as entailing a social monism that is centered on the social production of nature, yielding notions of capitalism as constituting a
“singular metabolism” (Moore 2015: 80–81; Smith 2008). I will challenge this view.

Since Bruno Latour is a key influence on the social monism that I criticize, I start with a brief treatment of his views (Latour 1987: 99 258. For a devastating critique of Latour on these points, see Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax [2008: 154–58, 211–16]). In direct contradiction with Marx’s dialectical approach, Latour presents a flat ontology or neutral monism in which all entities and objects are equal and interconnected as assemblages, bundles, hybrids, or networks. The problem here is not one of relationism as such. I develop Marx’s materialist ontology as a dialectical relationism and realism.

The problem is that Latour’s relationism loses the connection with the realism of Marx in that it denies the existence of nature and society as substantive objects. That view is not Marx’s and issues in a social monism in which the social is “reassembled” through a social production (the plasticity of politics and technology in creating, molding, and shaping the world) that is abstracted from prevailing power relations, social forms, and relations. That view loses Marx’s critical focus and, in the process, prepares the ground for an accommodation to existing social arrangements.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Latour’s recent work has been described as a green Schmittianism, a regressive political ecology influenced by the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt. Also unsurprising is the fact that Latour has become a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, a global research center that claims to identify and promote technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges (see thebreakthrough.org). Such thinking is a political and moral evasion that capitulates all too easily to existing capitalist relations; such ecomodernization is an explicitly capitalist modernization, only adding the ecoprefix in order to cover up its ideological purposes (Critchley 2012).

Also deficient is the Latourian idea of the social production or construction of reality, the idea that reality—and people—are plastic and can be shaped and molded by technology as politics (Eagleton 1991; Critchley 1997). I have consistently argued for an essentialist ontology, which holds that things are essentially creatively unfolding in history, as the dominant humanitarian thread connecting Aristotle and Marx and constituting humanity’s best defense against the tyranny of those to whom power and technology give the capacity to construct the “new man” and the “new world” (Critchley 2018b). I consider all socially and materially neutral constructivism as further misadventures in the theoretico-elitist models that have plagued human civilization from the beginning, treating people as passive puppets of expert action, entailing an authoritarian technics imposed against a democratic technics (Critchley 2014; 2012). It is wise to be leery of the notion of philosopher-kings in politics, not least when a failure to appreciate Plato’s relation between principle and practice come to be overlooked to take monstrous form in the idea of scientific-technocratic dictators. Hence the need to ask critical questions with respect to whom legitimately speaks for nature, just what precisely this “nature” is, and what specific conditions are constitutive of ecocitizenship (Critchley 2018a; Critchley 2016). For the same reason, we also need to be cautious of the existence and use of the state and law as an environmental rescue squad, while recognizing that the failure to constitute a democratic ecopublic of responsible, active, and informed citizens may well result in the necessary intervention of some such thing as a condition of human survival. With Marx, I put the emphasis on the changing of circumstances as a self-change, enabling human beings to emerge as ecocitizens in their own right, rather than being engineered into a compulsory ecocitizenship from above and from the outside.

In short, I argue for human beings through the politicization of the environment to come to accept voluntarily the collective self-restraint required to address the collective force of our ecological predicament as against having to accept involuntarily the external constraint of either a full-blown environmental collapse or of an ecoauthoritarian attempt to deal with its effects. These are the only options available to us; there are no others. This leaves us socially and politically bereft. (It is enough to say here that I draw a sharp distinction between the relationism of the likes of Latour and the dialectical relationism of Marx. Marx possesses a materialist ontology which puts his relationism in touch with realism; Latour not only lacks such an ontology, he denies its possibility [Harman 2009, 73–75, 102, 152–56, 214–15; Latour 2014; Latour 2005, 18, 116, 134–47; Latour 2013]).

The big problem is that the thinking of the likes of Latour is influential and has the potential to dissipate critical thinking into a social and ethical vacuity that leaves the existing terrain unchallenged and unchanged. A social monism in which nature is merely a social production begs the question of what the point of critique is, whether critique has ceased to exist, and whether critique is even possible at all. And it begs the question of the nature of reality studied by natural science, the status of scientific facts, and the relation of science to the human-social world. From this perspective, it is easy to see why environmentalism has struggled to make much of a political impact, despite the wealth of science, fact, and research on its side. Nature idolatry comes in many forms, from affirmations of the priority of an independent nature over society and worship of a Mother Nature that does not exist, a mere empty signifier, to a belief in the affective power of natural scientific facts. None of this cuts any ice in the social-natural metabolism within which human beings exist and act.

The loss of a materialist ontology comes at a price, losing the very point and purpose, even the very possibility, of critique. At best, these views develop Marx’s emphasis on the subjective factor (human agency as creative and reality-constituting within specific social relations) but only at the expense of his materialist ontology, so much so that the idea of nature as the universal metabolism (Marx) that exists in its own right, independently of its social use and mediation, is lost from view. The result is a reversion to idealism in the form of a social-constructivist view of reality, a view that is postmodernist, even, in the emphasis on the plasticity of reality. Such a position denies the possibility of a meaningful ecological materialism and political ecology and, as I show, displays a pronounced tendency to present the concern with ecological crisis as apocalyptic or catastrophist. Within this social monism, ecological crisis is reducible to the law of value operating within the prevailing social system. There is no ontological reality independent of that law and hence there is no environmental crisis independent of social power and production. The reality of the climate crisis is something that is rendered secondary to politics and power struggles. The approach is a political cul-de-sac, generating ineffectual demands for change that come to be channeled into a techno-managerial environmental elitism in which nothing changes at the level of societal fundamentals.

The issue is not merely intellectual, not only of academic significance, but is of practical relevance when it comes to identifying precisely the nature of the crises that beset us and their resolution. Is the age we are living in best described as the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene? Is the problem one of human activity in general or the particular activities of particular human beings within certain social relations? The anthropocentrism we need to uproot is itself implicated in the capitalocentrism of prevailing social relations. That parts of the Marxist left have come to appropriate Marx’s social metabolism analysis and interpret it as a social monism that reproduces these very centrisms indicates that something has gone badly wrong in the understanding of Marx’s real dialectic (Moore 2015, 169–92.)

With respect to the Capitalocene and the Anthropocene, the two terms are compatible rather than antithetical once one appreciates the way that Marx related the social and natural metabolisms. The debate as to whether we are living in the Capitalocene or the Anthropocene is based on a false dualism between social and natural metabolisms, ignoring the way that Marx brought them into relation. It is not an either/or: Capitalocene is a social category that refers to the domination of the logic of capital within the social metabolism; Anthropocene is a scientific category that concerns the relation of human beings as such to nature. Both terms are valid interms of the relation that Marx establishes between “social metabolism” and the “universal metabolism of nature.” The big problem is capitalocentrism, indicating the way in which nature has come to be subsumed within the internal logic of capitalist accumulation. That problem tends to be elided when there is a scientistic approach to environmental crises.

The Accusation of Dualism in Metabolic Rift Analysis

To point to the ecological dimension of Marx’s writings, then, begs the question of how the metabolisms of society and nature are related in his analysis. This question has been answered by those advancing metabolic rift analysis. Within Marxism, however, some have criticized metabolic rift theory as expressing a Cartesian binary that, in violation of dialectical logic, conceives nature and society dualistically rather than as existing in dialectical relation (Moore 2011, 1–2, 8, 11; Schneider and McMichael 2010, 478, 482; Stoner 2013, 6–7).

Critics further charge that the idea of a metabolic rift between nature and society denies “the dialectical reciprocity of the biophysical environment” and is therefore “non-reflexive” (Stoner 2013, 7). Stoner writes: “We must be careful about ascribing the theory of the metabolic rift to Marx, since he did not use this terminology, and was not driven to develop a theory based on such terminology.” This statement can be challenged. Marx made enough consistent references to the metabolism of nature and society, including one explicit reference to the “rift” in the social-ecological metabolism, in his work from the Grundrisse in 1857–58 to Capital, including his notebooks from that time, up to the Notes on Adolph Wagner, to warrant Marx’s consideration as a metabolic thinker. Marx’s interactive metabolic conception can therefore be defended against his monist critics.

The dualism purportedly expressed in metabolic rift analysis is considered by critics to issue an “epistemic rift” that affects Marx’s value theory, rendering ecological relations of secondary significance in his writings (Schneider and McMichael 2013, 478–82.) Thus, Schneider and McMichael argue that Marx continually “risks a one-sided representation of the society-nature relationship,” falling prey at times to such methodological dualism since “the abstraction of value and of nature discount ecological relations in capital theory.” This criticism misunderstands Marx radically, accusing him of the very thing he criticized capital for—the systemic neglect of ecology, of natural wealth as true wealth in the realm of use value, through the emphasis on the bottom line in the realm of exchange value.

The Subsumption of Nature under Capital/Society

Marx’s thinking is dialectical rather than dualistic. In critically analyzing the way that capital’s alien wealth dominates society, Marx also draws attention to the emancipatory potential immanent in capitalist development (Marx Gr 1973, 541–42). There is a need to avoid abstraction and the way this invites splits into false antitheses. Marx conceives nature not abstractly as an external, objective datum, but in relation to humanity via the middling term of labor/production. Insofar as Marx discusses nature progressively as it is brought into society by this labor, as an extension of human labor, then his view could be considered to be of a piece with social monism. There is, however, a key difference that separates Marx from social monism. The monists turn Marx’s critical-emancipatory concern into a general methodological statement. This fails to understand the precise nature of Marx’s critique. Marx is not theorizing a social monism in which nature comes to be subsumed within society through labor/production—still less through the alien form of capital—but is specifically engaged in the critique of the value structure of capital itself, criticizing capital precisely on account of its failure to ground its value abstractions in ecological relations. Marx’s critical point is that this neglect is inherent in the nature of capital as an alienated system of production. This is made crystal clear in the way that Marx’s specific target is the distinction between use value and exchange value, distinguishing value under the commodity value form of capital from true wealth, which has its source in labor and the earth (Marx CGP FI 1974, 341). The argument here turns on the key points at the heart of Marx’s critique of political economy, specifically the way that, as a result of the split between use value and exchange value, externalization becomes a structural principle of the capital system. In challenging that principle by seeking to uproot the capital relation itself, Marx seeks to revalue the realm of true wealth, labor and nature, thus overthrowing the tyranny of exchange value and the way that capital is impelled to commodify and monetize the whole of society.

Marx thus critically understood modern capitalist society as a dehumanized (and denatured) society whose roots lie in alienated labor. To those who object that human beings are now healthier and wealthier, better educated, longer lived, and in greater numbers as a result of capitalism, there is a need to point out that Marx’s target was the inherent systemic tendencies of the capital system, its thirst for exchange value in indifference to qualitative wealth and needs within the realm of use value. Marx nowhere denied that that capitalist development was materially progressive and, ironically, has been accused of being a Promethean apologist of progress of the same stripe as capitalist modernizers as a result. The dialectical quality of Marx’s critique of (self-)alienation has been lost from view here, with the result that Marx can come to be lined up on one side or another of a false dualism. Marx’s key point is that within the alienating and exploitative relations of capital, social reality is subject to a reified monism in its relationships, with the constitutive role of human agency coming to be leveled and lost in a fetishistic social world.

Marx, then, is not theorizing a general process of monism in which nature is progressively subsumed into society but is concerned to expose the roots of the contradictory development at the heart of capitalist modernity in order to uproot them and establish the true relation between humanity and labor/production and nature. Marx is criticallyconcerned with the way that human subjectivity has come to encase itself within the alienated forms of social and political life. He is concerned to uproot the monism of the capital system as an alienated system of production. For Marx, alienation is a self-alienation, meaning that human beings as agents of their enslavement to their own social powers retain the capacity to abolish what Max Weber theorized and rationalized as an untranscendable steel-hard cage (Mészáros 2000, 129, 142, 744). Ironically, in the name of Marx, the social monists return us to the irrevocability of Weberian rationalization, placing us back under the shadow of Weber, Marx’s great critic. In contrast to Weber, Marx recovers the human capacity to engage in creative practical activity as a condition of truly human society (on Weber and untranscendability, see my piece on Mészáros, Critchley 2018c).

Idealism and Monism—Culturalism vs. Naturalism

These left critics of metabolic analysis ignore the fact that Marx is engaged in a critique based on the distinction between use value and exchange value. They thus take capital’s subsumption of all things under its accumulative imperatives—the very thing that Marx sought to uproot—as an argument not for the alienating role of the capital system in the humanity/labor-production/nature relation but for its unifying role with respect to material life. This amounts to a rejection of Marx and his critique of alienation in favor of Weber’s position on rationalization, leading to a world irrevocably enclosed within the alien forms of the capital system. Whereas Marx sought to liberate human subjectivity from the alien forms within which it had come to be encased, the social monist position renders this encasing within Weber’s iron cage a permanent condition. This position effectively rejects Marx for Weber’s notion of the untranscendable complexity of the capital system. The rationalizing and ideological character of the monist argument becomes clear in some of the statements made by the social monists. Thus, the likes of Moore go so far as to claim that capitalism is constitutive of the web of life itself. In opposing a social monism to the allegedly dualistic nature of ecological Marxism, the monist approach effectively turns Marx’s critique of an alienated system of production into a capitalist apologetics.

This distortion of Marx’s critical-emancipatory project has its epistemological roots in Western Marxism’s categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature, which can be traced to Georg Lukács’s critical comments on Engels in a footnote he wrote in History of Class Consciousness, comments that he contradicted in that book and repudiated later (Lukács 1971, 24). The loss of the dialectics of nature severed the connection to Marx’s materialist ontology, removed the ground from under the possibilities for developing a Marxist ecological materialism on the basis of Marx’s metabolic conception, and invited the reversion to idealism in the form of culturalism, historicism, and social constructivism. The problem is that the rejection of the dialectics of nature, in confining the dialectic to the social and historical reality produced by human agency, had the effect of distancing Marxist philosophy from nature as an object of analysis and from the findings of natural science, restricting the dialectic to the human world and thereby inviting a reversion to idealism. The result was a split between culturalism and naturalism that is far removed from Marx’s dialectical realism and that traps us within false antitheses (Jacoby in Bottomore, ed., 1983, 523–26; Merleau-Ponty 1973).

The rejection of the dialectics of nature—a reaction against the reversion to a mechanical, determinist materialism during the time of the Second International—developed as a Western Marxism that emphasized culture, consciousness, and idealism concerning the subjective factor in history, which in turn came later to issue in social constructivist and postmodernist modes of thought (Timpanaro 1975). One half of Marx’s “metabolic interaction” went missing (Colletti 1973, 191–93; Jacoby 1983, 524; Merleau-Ponty 1973, 32; Sartre 2004, 32; Marcuse 1960, 314; Schmidt 1971, 59–61; Vogel 1996, 14–19). As a result, Marx’s social-natural ontology was lost from view and with it the possibilities of an ecological Marxism.

The door was opened, then, to a one-sided reading that turned Marx’s critique of the way that the capital system absorbs labor and nature into a theorization and rationalization of the world as a social construction. The result is an anthropocentric social monism in which “society”—under the sway of capital as its principal agency—completely appropriates nature into itself. What, to Marx, had been a criticism of capital has now become a point of principle, a capitalist apologetics and Weberian rationalization delivered in Marx’s name!

How this turning of critique into rationalization could take place can be seen through a critical examination of Marxist geographer Neil Smith’s production-of-nature thesis. Castree posits the inconsistencies of Smith’s thesis as “productive ambiguities” rather than weaknesses, cautioning that to attempt a coherent assessment of his thesis would “risk overlooking important aspects of [Smith’s] thinking” (Castree 2015, 280). While I highlight some of these aspects, there is a real sense in which Smith’s “ambiguities” are more destructive than productive, particularly with respect to occluding the complexity of Marx’s dialectical understanding of the human-nature interaction.

In his production-of-nature thesis, Smith was concerned to address the limitations of social constructivism in human geography without reverting to positivism. He was interested in countering what he considered a neo-Kantian focus on the discursive construction of “nature”; the nature idealism and “environmental romanticism” of those who emphasized and reacted against the domination of nature (Schmidt 1971 and the Frankfurt School); and the view of any red-green coalition of anticapitalist struggle, on account of the fact that capital has entirely subsumed nature in the production (such as restoration and biotechnology) and appropriation (via, for example, rent, financialization, and taxation) of surplus value. Smith proceeds from capital’s conversion of nature into “an accumulation strategy” (Smith 2006). As Napoletano, Foster, et al. argue, “These three thrusts were built on a critique of what Smith (2008) viewed as a contradictory dualism in bourgeois ideology of nature, conceived as both universal (encompassing everything that exists) and simultaneously as external to society, neither of which he considered incorrect but together offering a contradictory image of reality” (2019).

Smith refers to capitalism’s “real subsumption of nature all the way down.” For Marx, this statement would have been a critical comment directing us in favor of establishing the proper relation between social and natural metabolisms. In the hands of social monists, however, it becomes a general epistemological and methodological statement, rationalizing the monism of the capital system and denying the irreducibility of the social metabolism and the natural metabolism as they are brought into relation:

Marx conceived the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour in simultaneously historical and analytical terms, and the same twinning of historical and analytical intent applies to the conceptual framework necessary to understand the current production of nature. With the formal subsumption of nature, capital accumulation is facilitated predominantly by a continual expansion in the conversion of extracted material into objects of production. (Smith 2006, 28)

Such a view denies the autonomy of nature in a way that Marx did not. Marx did not belabor the point, but he did acknowledge the existence of a nature that always lies outside of human praxis. He rejected philosophical speculation about the ontological status and truth of this nature as scholastic as talk of God. But he did recognize the irreducibility of a nature outside of human society and history. It is this acknowledgement that goes missing in the arguments of the social monists, with the result that what to Marx were critical comments directed against the capitalist subsumption of the realm of use value (labor and nature) become general statements in favor of the social production of nature: “Much as the real subsumption of labour strips the labourer of individuality, the real subsumption of nature, through its capitalization and financialization, strips nature of its specificity” (Smith 2006, 29).

This, to Marx, would have been a critical comment against capital, with a view to revalorizing labor and nature against their enclosure and commodification. Writing that “Nature is nothing if not social,” Smith argues that this refers to “the production of nature, all the way down.”

The explosion of ecological commodification and capitalization has significantly deepened the production of nature. It became a mantra of 1990s constructionism that “nature is discursive all the way down,” but the dramatic transformation of “socionature” today signals, if anything, that it is the regulation and production of nature that threatens to penetrate ‘all the way down. (Smith 2006, 25)

The Marxist credentials of Smith’s production-of-nature thesis are questionable in being based on a highly selective reading of Marx’s conception of production (Napoletano et al. 2019). Smith consistently conceives production in terms of humanity changing the form of “received” nature through interacting with it, primarily through social labor (Smith 2006, 2008). While this seems consistent with Marx’s view that human labor, like nature, only proceeds by changing the “form” of existing material (Marx 1976), this interchange is quite distinct from notions of the actual production of nature. Marx thus characterizes the labor process as the site of the “metabolism between [the human] himself and nature” (283), with nature an active participant in the process (Saito 2017; Napoletano et al. 2018). That notion effectively precludes Smith’s notion of the “production of first nature from within and as a part of second nature” (Smith 2008, 83), since, beneath any human labor added, production always contains a “substratum” of material “furnished by nature without human intervention” (Marx 1976, 133). That means that while human beings can continuously transform first nature, even beyond initial recognition, they cannot produce in the way that Smith would have it. As Napoletano et al. argue,

Smith’s (1999) arguments for a more expansive conception of production compound this inconsistency between the production of nature as form or essence, rendering the thesis more difficult to reconcile with Marx’s approach. The identity that Marx posited between production and consumption in the Grundrisse that Smith invoked to justify his own approach is only one aspect of a complex, dialectical argument on identity-in-opposition that encompasses production, distribution, exchange, and consumption as nonidentical moments in a differentiated totality in which production predominates but without excluding the other three moments. (Napoletano et al. 2019)

Smith makes an unwarranted leap from Henri Lefebvre’s production of space thesis (1991) to argue for the production of nature. Marx placed the emphasis squarely on the human transformation of nature through social labor expressed in historically and socially specific forms of mediation. There is a need to distinguish this transformation of nature from the production of nature. Understanding this distinction is central to establishing the dialectical nature of Marx’s critique as a critical realism-materialism that transcends both idealism and a passive environmental materialism (something that can take the form of the culturalism and naturalism I am concerned with criticizing). While Marx fully recognized the drive on capital’s part to subsume nature entirely within the value form, he considered the natural form to be far more resistant to such subsumption than the trademark technological optimism that the bourgeoisie could countenance (something that advances in biotechnology have done nothing to change, despite exaggerated claims and fantasies) (Burkett 1999). Marx’s understanding of the limits to capital’s drive to subsume nature was developed as a result of his incorporating natural scientific studies into his analysis, yielding an awareness that the endless expansion of production impelled by the accumulative dynamic would continuously, and maybe ultimately, be checked by biophysical processes and natural factors that shape and constitute use values, thus giving rise to the ecological as well as social contradictions of capital (Saito 2017; Ekers and Prudham 2018). Avoiding a naïve bourgeois optimism with respect to technological and industrial advance automatically delivering progress, Marx characterized capitalist economic development as internally contradictory:

The productivity of labour is also tied up with natural conditions, which are often less favourable as productivity rises—as far as that depends on social conditions. We thus have a contrary movement in these different spheres: progress here, re­gression there. We need only consider the influence of the seasons, for example, on which the greater part of raw materials depend for their quantity, as well as the exhaustion of forests, coal and iron mines, and so on. (Marx 1981, 369)

As Harvey argues, Marx’s concept of universality in production postulates “the [human] metabolic relation to nature” as an “eternal necessity” that cannot be suspended by positing a subject-object identity between society and nature, although conscious common control over the social metabolism can render the relation less antagonistic (Harvey 2012). Napoletano et al. rightly charge that this complexity in Marx’s ecological discussion, including the metabolic rift conception itself, “is either lacking or severely obscured in Smith’s production-of-nature thesis” (Napoletano et al. 2019).

The same deficiency is apparent, too, in the work of Castree, for whom any reference to a nature independent of humanity produces an ontological society-nature binarism (Castree 2000, 2002, 2015). Castree charges that metabolic rift theory expresses an ideology of nature’s “non-identity with humanity and its relative autonomy” within a “dualistic mindset” that recapitulates “the bourgeois and green views of nature it otherwise opposes: namely, an ontological, theoretical and normative separation of the social and natural realms” (Castree 2000, 14, 21). That view results in the loss of the dialectics of nature again, which serves to undermine appreciation and development of the ecological dimensions of Marx as a metabolic thinker (Critchley 2018a).

That Smith (2008) and Castree (2000) continue to qualify their views so as to deny that the production-of-nature thesis implies that the material world as such is the creation of human labor, and that society could gain control over all of nature, suggests in the very least a recognition of the relative autonomy of nature with respect to the social metabolism. That recognition totally undercuts the objections to metabolic rift theory as dualistic. As Napoletano et al. argue:

But if at least part of nature is not produced by humans, or at best partially integrated into capital circuits, and outside human control, leading to all sorts of unforeseen human consequences, how exactly can reference to various natural processes as relatively autonomous or partially external to society—particularly when humans are recognized as a unique part of nature—be legitimately dismissed as dualistic or obfuscatory? If humans are part of nature, how can nature as a whole not be partly external, as well as partly internal, to human society? (Napoletano et al. 2019)

Smith is enough of a Marxist to be concerned to clarify the point of his argument: “The production of nature thesis makes no pretence to the control of nature.” This statement implicitly acknowledges the irreducibility of nature, bringing the argument back into relation with Marx, underscoring the critical concerns of metabolic rift theory:

Just as capitalists never entirely control the production process, its results, or the global capitalism it generates, so capitalist society does not entirely control nature. Global warming and genetically modified organisms are certainly socially produced but they are by no means entirely controlled. Nor should future societies entertain any fantasy of controlling nature.

By the same token, it should also be emphasized that the production of nature is in no way synonymous with a social constructionist vision of nature. (Smith 2006, 25)

Smith, then, takes pains to distinguish his view from a thoroughgoing social constructionism. His production of nature thesis is not, he insists, a social constructivism in which nature as an independent force disappears entirely. The distinction may seem a fine one, and so it is worth quoting Smith’s argument at length. Reading Smith’s words here it becomes clear that the emphasis needs to be placed on labor/production as the mediating term between humanity and nature, as against assertions of the social construction of nature. To this extent, Smith’s argument is consistent with Marx and can be read alongside the case for establishing the true harmonious relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature:

While the “production of nature” thesis certainly stresses the veins of social agency that runs through nature, it is not in any way assimilable to, or to be confused with, the constructionist paradigm that has become fashionable since the 1980s. Unsettled by the political implications of a focus on social production, but presumably responding to many of the same kinds of social shifts, some theorists have adopted a social constructionism anchored in the privileging of discourse. This creates its own kind of nature-washing in which the power of nature is discursively washed away or at least washed to the margins. This could hardly have been clearer than in the 1995 Social Text fiasco in which a scientist hoaxed that cultural politics journal with an entirely invented “constructionist” reading of contemporary physics. Whatever our necessary critiques of scientific conceptions of the world—and young scientists are often much more astute at this than those parrying from a distance—a discursive constructionism does not lead far. There is of course much debate on these issues, and the question of how to conceptualize nature-society relations is not and will not easily be solved in theory. I remain convinced that the crucial question is less how to recombine our understandings of nature and society, a project best geared to attempts to repair a rapacious capitalism, but rather the opposite: How could such a unified, if internally differentiated field, of nature-society relations, processes, and events come to be conceived in the first place as such a stark duality? This project requires reading the history of myriad practical productions of nature, over the last few centuries, through the evolution of western conceptions of nature. For the moment, a notion of the production of nature, which puts transformative human labour in its broadest sense at the center of the equation, works passably well, sympathetic I think with Donna Haraway’s notion of the co-production of social and natural processes and relations. Nature-washing, by contrast, re-consigns responsibility to nature. (Smith 2008, 246)

I would highlight Smith’s argument that “the crucial question is less how to recombine our understandings of nature and society, a project best geared to attempts to repair a rapacious capitalism, but rather the opposite: How could such a unified, if internally differentiated field, of nature-society relations, processes, and events come to be conceived in the first place as such a stark duality?” This view is consistent with the establishment of the “unified science” that Marx sought, eschewing philosophical speculation over the ontological status of “Nature” (and “God,” “Reason,” and “Humanity” for the same reasons), in favor of a focus on the practical, productive relation of real individuals in their material life-processes to nature (Marx EW EPM 1975, 356). Such a view rejects both “nature-idolatry” and “nature worship” (Marx in the Grundrisse), naturalism, whether in the name of natural science or spirituality, (Marx and Engels CW, vol. 4, 1975, 150), and capital idolatry and capital worship (culturalism and constructivism, the idea that reality is a social creation).

Smith thus places the focus on the myriad practical productions of nature, claiming that the notion of the production of nature, with transformative human labor at its heart, “works passably well, sympathetic I think with Donna Haraway’s notion of the co-production of social and natural processes and relations.” I think, in light of above criticisms, we can make the much stronger claim that Marx’s humanity-labor/production-nature works very well indeed and undergirds the idea of coproduction within the metabolic interaction between social and natural metabolisms. I agree entirely with Smith’s view that “Nature-washing, by contrast, re-consigns responsibility to nature.” Such “Nature-washing” is the nature idolatry and nature worship that Marx explicitly rejected. At this juncture, however, I am concerned to steer the notion of social production away from the dangers of capital idolatry and worship, away from rationalizing capital’s subsumption of labor and nature within its realm of exchange value. What we are really talking about, then, as Smith himself says, is the “very real subsumption of daily life to capital.”

What is new today is not that this horizontal integration of nature into capital has ceased, even if in some arenas it is significantly circumscribed as many raw materials become scarcer, harder to locate, and more expensive to extract. Rather, partly in response to these increasing constraints, a new frontier in the production of nature has rapidly opened up, namely a vertical integration of nature into capital. This involves not just the production of nature “all the way down,” but its simultaneous financialization “all the way up.” Capital is no longer content simply to plunder an available nature but rather increasingly moves to produce an inherently social nature as the basis of new sectors of production and accumulation. Nature is increasingly if selectively replicated as its own marketplace. (Smith 2006, 33)

While Smith is concerned about distinguishing his view from social constructivism, there is nevertheless a real danger that his concern with the social agency that runs through nature and its production does draw attention away from nature as an independent entity in its own right. The danger is apparent in the way that Smith argues that we should reject natural science’s idolatry of the “so-called laws of nature” and eschew the “left apocalypticism” and “fetishism of nature” indulged in by sections of the environmental movement (Smith 2008, 45–47, 247; Smith 2006, 23–29). Smith would counter that his target here is idolatry and fetishism, something on which I am in firm agreement. We should be careful, however, not to mistake what science explains with respect to the laws of nature with nature and its operation as such. Scientists do not indulge in idolatry in this sense. A natural science that engages in the idolatry of anything has ceased to be science. But there is a deeper point with respect to the notion of nature as an empty signifier, something which cannot serve as an ontological foundation om which to base politics, ethics, and social practice. So, we should emphasize that the specific target here is fetishism with respect to nature and its laws, and the way that a certain strain of environmentalism occludes human practice, production and agency to effectively fetishize “nature.” We should be alive, therefore, to the way that certain environmentalists naturalize their own social and historical agency, claiming to speak for nature with their own voices, as a non-negotiable truth and unanswerable overriding authority.

Smith’s remarks here are in keeping with the form of Marx’s critical comments on “nature-idolatry” and “nature worship” (Marx Gr 1973, 410-411). We need, however, to be alert to the danger that such comments could come to be taken further, occluding nature completely, and thereby depriving natural science of its object of study and entire reason to be. Not only do we lose natural science as a result, we lose reality as an intelligible and meaningful entity as such. We also lose sight of Marx’s pioneering contributions to ecology, as expressed in metabolic rift theory, with consequences that are debilitating not merely in theoretical terms but also political ones.

Marx’s status as a pioneer in ecological materialism and his identification of the ecological contradictions of capital are lost from view as a result. The claim that is still frequently heard that “Marx has nothing to say on ecology” is the product not merely of ignorance but of ideological obfuscation. This involves more than the tendency to reduce issues arising from social forms to technical questions—it is a failure to establish the right relation between economic categories and the social relations of production. Marx consistently excoriated those who made the error of turning socially specific economic categories into eternal form, thus naturalizing and dehistoricizing what ought to be historicized. Marx was therefore concerned with checking against what he considered the trademark bourgeois error of inversion of true relations and flight to abstraction (see, for instance, his criticism of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy Chapter 2.1: “The Metaphysics of Political Economy [The Method]”). In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx is adamant that “a socialist programme, however, cannot allow such bourgeois formulations to silence the conditions which give them the only meaning they possess” (Marx FI 1974, 341-2).

Marx was here writing in response to the claim made in the Gotha Programme of The German Workers’ Party that “labour is the source of all wealth and culture” (Marx FI 1974). Marx rejects that view firmly, highlighting the debilitating political consequences that follow in the trail of such bourgeois theoretical formulations. “Labour is not the source of all wealth,” Marx insists, proceeding to argue that “nature is just as much the source of use-values (and surely these are what make up material wealth!) as labour.” “Labour,” he continues, “is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.” Marx is concerned with identifying the conditions obfuscated by bourgeois theoretical formulations and inversions such as this, locating the source of abstraction in the self-possessing figure on which the liberal ontology rests:

Man’s labour only becomes a source of use-values, and hence also of wealth, if his relation to nature, the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour, is one of ownership from the start, and if he treats it as belonging to him. There is every good reason for the bourgeoisie to ascribe supernatural creative power to labour, for when a man has no property other than his labour power it is precisely labour’s dependence on nature that forces him, in all social and cultural conditions, to be the slave of other men who have taken the ob­jective conditions of labour into their own possession. He needs their permission to work, and hence their permission to live. (Marx FI 1974, 341–42)

The result of inversion and abstraction, then, is to obscure the nature of the social relations generating conditions of dependence, removing the distinction between the contributions made by human labor and nonhuman nature to production, and thereby occluding the political practice required to remedy the situation. Such “bourgeois formulations” are a theoretical inversion and abstraction that—in obscuring the precise ways in which the expropriation of both nature and unpaid socially reproductive labor in the household and the appropriation of unpaid labor undergird bourgeois society—come to “hobble” a political movement (Foster and Clark 2018). Marx proceeds to detail the damaging political consequences of such formulations (Marx CGP FI 1974, 342).

Marx’s emphatic statement that labor is not the source of all wealth, giving due recognition to labor, renders Smith’s production-of-nature thesis problematic, if not conceptually barren. Napoletano et al. acknowledge that Smith’s thesis “encourages a more detailed examination of the mechanisms and strategies that capital uses to bring environmental concerns into its accumulation processes at multiple points…that dovetail with work on metabolic rift, emphasizing the way in which capital continues to profit from environmental degradation even as public wealth and the conditions for human development are depleted” (Napoletano et al. 2019; Burkett 1999; Foster, Clark, and York 2010). Which is to say that the production-of-nature thesis is at best an invitation to deeper analysis with respect to the nature-society dialectic, and not the end. More precisely, the metabolic rift could be used to extend Smith’s critique of capital’s subsumption of nature by considering how newly capitalized nature:

1. exacerbates human alienation from nature by imposing further second-order mediators (private property, exchange, and so on; see the description of the metabolic rift later);
2. helps to grease the wheels of accumulation, such that the net effect is further deepening of the metabolic rift as well as an overexploitation of capitalized nature; and
3. reconciles the accumulation process to changed ecological conditions (and accelerates it) at the expense of the most politically marginalized population segments in the introduction of various socioecological fixes (Napoletano et al. 2019).

Clarification of the theoretical issues at stake here are of the utmost political significance. Although environmentalists committed to sustainability, even plain survival, are increasingly calling for an end to politics and business as usual, the break with “bourgeois formulations” necessary to effect a transition beyond prevailing social relations tends to be missing. Note, in this respect, the tendency of environmentalists to write of taking control of capital and reorienting it to social and ecological use, repeating the classic textbook definition of capital as a thing, as against Marx’s designation of capital as a relation. Such errors will indeed “hobble” (Marx’s word) a political movement by confining it within the very social relations its demands purportedly transcend. Within these confines, it should come as no surprise that environmental crisis could come to be apprehended as a business opportunity, giving us the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form instead of the required social transformation. The call for “system change, not climate change” should be an occasion for radical critique of an alienated system of production that systematically prioritizes the accumulative imperatives of capital over social and ecological health, exposing the material roots, contradictory dynamics, and class relations at the heart of the socioecological crisis (Harvey 1997, 2006, 2014).

Arguing that the labor and production process of society “mediates the metabolism between man and nature” (Marx 1976, 133), Marx makes a distinction between, on the one hand, “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) between man and Nature, the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence” and, on the other hand, the particular mediation through which this metabolic interaction takes on a socially and historically specific form (Colletti, introduction to Early Writings, by Marx, 1975, 27–28; Marx CI 1976, ch. 7, 291). In “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” Marx refers to the “reversal of the original relationship” through “the alienated mediation of human production with human production, the alienated species-activity of man. All the qualities proper to the generation of this activity are transferred to the mediator” (Marx 1974, 261). Marx is referring to the way in which production ceases to be governed by the direct satisfaction of human needs once the direct producers lose control over the production process and enter the system of wage labor. Instead, the social supply of labor comes to be expressed indirectly through the value form, with production geared to the pursuit of exchange value. This inversion is historically specific to capitalist relations of production and involves a qualitative shift to a structure of abstract value removed from the realm of use value or material production, with materiality considered a mere precondition for value and exchange (Marx 1976). Smith’s view that the alteration of nature involves unintentional byproducts of commodity production—such as climate change—underplays the extent to which environmental crises are necessarily generated by capital’s contradictory socioecological dynamics. As Napoletano et al. argue, the distinction once more pivots on the question of agency:

Here it is important to understand how and what structural features prevent bourgeois society from rationally and democratically regulating the metabolism between human beings and nature in such a way as to maintain the earth for the chain of future generations. To include in the production of nature all such “externalities”—from radionuclides to climate change—that capitalism leaves out of its value calculations further undermines the production-of-nature thesis as a radical critique of capital (Napoletano et al. 2019).

Smith’s production-of-nature thesis thus entails an explanatory monism which “far from resolving the problems of dualism, gives capitalism all the power in the society-nature relation and therefore erases nature altogether” (Castree 2002, 131). This monism is compounded by Moore’s assertion of the flat ontology of a more posthumanist approach, eliminating the analytical distinction between humans and their material environment central to Marx’s material-dialectical conception of nature and society (Napoletano et al. 2019). The result is to obfuscate the role of class, asymmetrical relations of class power, and other social structures of domination involved in the process of ecological degradation, making critical socioecological analysis well-nigh impossible (Malm 2018).

In contrast, metabolic rift analysis upholds the distinction between humans and the material environment in engaging in a socioecological critique focused on the antagonistic but conjoined coevolution of nature and society (Saito 2017; Napoletano et al. 2019).

Jason W. Moore and World Ecology

The extent to which the notion of social production could come to depart in substance from Marx’s argument is made clear in the way that world-ecology theorist Jason W. Moore develops the implications of Smith’s production-of-nature thesis to its logical conclusion. Moore thus proceeds to argue that capitalism appropriates and subsumes nature “all the way down, across, and through” (Moore 2015, 152). In this conception, nature ceases to exist independently of society, seeming to undermine the very point and purpose of natural science, undercutting its claims to objective knowledge. We should, here, bear in mind Marx’s call for a “unified science” on the basis of a materialist ontology, integrating natural-scientific and social-historical investigations: “The social reality of nature and human natural science or the natural science of man are identical expressions” (Marx EW EPM 1975, 356). This is a very different notion from the subsumption of one into the other and the erasure of nature—Marx recognizes the continued existence of nature independent of social production.

The serious implications of the social productivist or constructivist turn become clear once climate change comes to be considered as merely a power play of social interests, a story that different groups tell from their own perspectives. In this reading, the climate system is a social production whose reality or otherwise is fought over between different groups and interests in politics. To point out the reality of the crisis in the climate system, as revealed by natural science, is not to indulge in the sophistry of power-play. There is a real world and it can be known in some part by the methods of science. The contest between groups and interests in politics is real enough in itself, but it is, ultimately, about something more substantial than power and power relations; it is about reality. Hence the importance of reinstating the dialectics of nature so as to recover the connection with Marx’s materialist ontology. That reality, however, is a mediated one, underlining the need to set the social and natural metabolisms in true relation.

Smith opens a line of analysis which sees first nature (the nature which precedes society and stands outside it, which Marx referred to as the “universal metabolism of nature”) as coming to be totally absorbed by second nature (nature as transformed by “society,” which Marx called the “social metabolism”) (Smith 2008, 65–69). Rather than engage in the critique of capital for the totalitarian way that it subsumes all—both labor and nature (true wealth in the realm of use value)—under the systemic imperative of accumulation, there is instead a rationalization that occludes the role of capital. The critical edge of Marx’s analysis, exposing asymmetrical power relations and systemic drives, is thus blunted to present a general statement with respect to social monism. The result is an effective denial of the existence of nature as an ontological referent, as an independent reality in and of itself.

Smith would deny that this criticism applies to his work, hence his concern to distinguish the production-of-nature thesis from the idea of the social control of nature as such. But the charge certainly applies to Moore’s work, where nature is considered to exist only in relation to social construction, as “hybrids” or “bundles” within the capitalist world-ecology. Moore goes so far as to describe the nature that existed before human society as “pre-formed” in that it is not yet produced or “coproduced” by society: “Even when environments are in some abstract sense pre-formed (the distribution of the continents, for example) historical change works through the encounters of humans with those environments, a relation that is fundamentally co-productive” (Moore 2014, 15).

This is the view I aim to contest. I argue in favor of notions of coproduction and cocreation, the idea of a partnership between creative human agents and of the world as a ceaselessly creative universe (Critchley 2016). “Both humans and nature are active agents” (Merchant 1992 ch. 10). This view does not deny the independent significance of nature as a reality outside of human agency. For all his emphasis on creative human praxis, Marx argues for society and nature as irreducible in their metabolic relation. Against this, the view that affirms a social monism against an alleged Cartesian dualism in Marx effectively rationalizes capitalist alienation and metabolic disruption within an assertion of social construction, thereby denying the idea of a metabolic rift that identifies a contradiction between capital and ecology (Moore 2015, 4, 19–20, 78, 152). The evidence is clear that the notion of metabolic rift plays a key role in Marx’s critical analysis of the contradictory dynamics of the capital system and it is clear, too, that this rift constitutes the defining problem of the contemporary age (Foster 2000, 164; Foster 2015, 9). The problem that Marx addressed in a local sense has therefore gone global, threatening the conditions of human civilization as such (Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 7, 73–87). Establishing this point has been my main concern in this piece on the pertinence of Marx to ecology.

Marx argues that capitalist commodity production necessarily disturbs fundamental ecological processes. This view is rejected on account of being contrary to the social-monist perspective. To point to specific instances of ecological rift is, to social monists, to give expression to an apocalyptic vision. I can point to examples of rift in both the texts of Marx and in the real world, which most assuredly continues to exist as the world we all live in. Since the social-monist accusation of “left apocalypticism” is of the same species as the cries of “alarmism” made against climate campaigners, it is interesting to identify what it is that unites seemingly disparate political forces. The common thread lies in a commitment to modernization as the human-social transformation of nature. Not only is this a distortion of Marx, it also plays into the hands of green critics of Marxism by (mis)reading Marx’s emphasis on human development as a type of Prometheanism. This revelation indicates the extent to which we are in the company of an ideological project, employing ideology in Marx’s critical sense—ideas that accurately express an inverted world, serving to conceal, preserve, and rationalize existing asymmetrical power relations. The critical dimension of Marx’s argument has been erased. His emancipatoryconcern with the alienation of labor and of nature under the capital system has been replaced with a social determinism that eliminates the rift in the metabolic order so as to theorize a social monism that emphasizes the social production of reality and rationalizes the contradictory dynamics of capitalist development. Thus, Moore affirms a “monist and relational view” against the supposed dualism of nature and society that he identifies within the ecological Marxism of metabolic rift theorists. He sees the “bundling” of nature and society as signifying their unified existence (Moore 2014, 16; Moore 2015, 85).

The truth is that once Marx’s dialectical relation between the social and natural metabolism is lost, things that are connected in his critical understanding can come to appear as dualistic. There is a need to understand the role of abstraction in conceptual analysis and to comprehend Marx’s analysis dialectically. For example, the notion of the identity of opposites points to a contradiction that can only be transcended at another organizational level. Alfred North Whitehead expresses this point on contradiction perfectly in his process philosophy: “Throughout the Universe there reigns the union of opposites which is the ground of dualism” (Whitehead 1933, 245). Whitehead thus warned against the dangers of a misplaced concreteness when it came to conceptual abstraction. The failure to appreciate the dialectical quality of Marx’s conceptual framework, then, has resulted in a number of critics condemning metabolic rift analysis as a form of Cartesian dualism. This criticism is a result of the failure to understand the role of abstraction in conceptual analysis, the way in one “moment” within the totality is isolated from the overall dynamics (Levy 1932, 31–81; Levy 1938, 30–36; Ollman 1993, 24–27; Paolucci 2007, 118–23, 136–42; Lewontin and Levins 2007, 149–66). Such conceptual abstraction cannot but appear partial, mechanical, or reductionist when considered independently of the totality. The point of abstraction is to shed light on specific mediations so as to better understand the larger concrete totality within which they are set (Mészáros 1972, 61–91). Fail to understand concepts and contradictions dialectically in relation to reality, and the door to dualism swings wide open. It was not a mistake that Marx made (hence his critique of abstraction, philosophical speculation and scholasticism, see Critchley 2018a 2018b). For Marx, terms such as Nature, God, Reason, Man, and Humanity are meaningless in themselves, insofar as their ontological status is uncertain apart from the mediation of labor/production in the social-nature metabolic interaction.

There is a distinction to be made here between open and closed dialectics. Fredric Jameson puts it this way:

The notion of the dialectic, with a definite article—of dialectics as a philosophical system, or indeed as the only philosophical system—obviously commits you to the position that the dialectic is applicable to everything and anything.… Western Marxism…stakes out what may be called a Viconian position, in the spirit of the verum factum of the Scienza Nuova; we can only understand what we have made, and therefore we are only in a position to claim knowledge of history but not of Nature itself, which is the doing of God. (Jameson 2009, 3–7)

Materialist dialectics are said to be “open” in the sense that they hold that there is no domain closed to human apprehension and knowledge. There is no separate domain of nature and no domain of God, as in Giambattista Vico, no Kantian things-in-themselves. This sounds liberatory but, I would argue, is itself a form of closure in that it invites the enclosure of the world and everything in it by a totalizing Reason, subsuming nature under society and human beings themselves under their alien mediations.

I develop an ecological Marxism in terms of the dialectical unity Marx established between society and nature, pointing to what Marx called the “metabolic interaction” that proceeds between them, making it clear that the “social metabolism” of human society and productive activity operates within the “universal metabolism of nature.” Marx seeks a unified or harmonious coexistence between both metabolisms, but this is not the “singular metabolism” theorized by the likes of Moore—Marx recognizes that nature precedes human action and will continue to exist independently of human transformation. Marx considered indulging in philosophical speculation in this regard to be idle and thus focused on labor/production as the mediating term. Marx’s criticism of “nature-idolatry” and “nature worship” does not constitute a denial on his part of a nature that is independent of creative human praxis, nor does it involve an assertion that nature only exists as a result of reality-changing and -constituting human social praxis; rather, it is an attempt to focus on the practical reappropriation and humanization (or disalienation) of human social powers in mediating the metabolic interchange with nature. This view is very different from that of social monism. Whereas Marx criticized the way that capital subsumes the two sources of wealth, labor and nature, within its pursuit of exchange value, degrading both in the process, monists, to take the words of Moore, point to the way that “capitalism internalizes—however partially—the relations of the biosphere,” as the forces of capital construct and configure “the biosphere’s internalization of capitalism’s process.” The fact that Moore says “partially” here would seem to imply a recognition on his part that nature does indeed resist complete enclosure. The effect of his analysis, however, is to extinguish the independence of nature. As he states: “Capitalism internalizes the contradiction of nature as a whole, while the web of life internalizes capitalism’s contradictions” (Moore 2014, 12; Moore 2015, 28; Moore 2015c, 91).

In the monist conception, nature, in effect, comes to exist only as an internal moment or relation within the capital system. And once this is admitted, then it becomes entirely legitimate to claim that “nature” is anything that human beings through their praxis come to say it is—or, more to the point, specific human beings within specific social relations, asymmetrical relations of class power within which some have greater voices and more choices than others. Nature thus comes to be effectively and irrevocably enclosed within the alienated mediations of the capital system, which in turn encloses human agents within class relations, breaking up the human we and dividing it in accordance with social power and asymmetrical relations of power and resources. This position gives the victory to Weber and his notions of untranscendable complexity within the iron cage of capitalist modernity over Marx and his society of associated producers. In an alienated social world, there is no human we, meaning that the agency of some counts for a whole lot more than the agency of others. We remain within the world of capitalist appropriation and class division. Instead of Marx’s critique of alienation, there is a Weberian rationalization of social determinism in the context of asymmetrical relations of power, celebrating the very thing that Marx sought to identify and uproot.

Here we see the deleterious consequences of the culture-nature dualism that issues from the loss of Marx’s dialectical materialist ontology. Marx certainly rejected naturalism in the form of “nature-idolatry” and “nature worship,” but he would also certainly have rejected a culturalism, idealism, or constructivism that saw reality as nothing more than the creation of human praxis. Marx rejects such dualism as utterly false and instead defines a dialectical relationism and realism. Marx was concerned with avoiding abstraction, or “scholasticism,” with respect to claims about the ontological status of “Nature,” “Man,” and “God.” In the monist concern to identify and reject dualism, Marx’s metabolic conception and dialectical realism have come to be lost, with the world coming to be seen as composed of human and nonhuman “bundles.” Moore thus asserts that “all agency is a relational property of specific bundles of human and extra-human nature” (Moore 2015, 37). This constitutes a “web of life” not in the ecological sense in which that term is normally understood, but in purely social-cultural terms. For Moore, such bundles are “formed, stabilized, and periodically disrupted,” but discursively rather than in terms of a materialist social-natural ontology (Moore 2014, 12; Moore 2015, 85 179. Moore 2015, 46).

In Moore’s conception, the critical aspect of alienation in Marx has been lost and with it the emancipatory commitment to a defetishized world that forms the entire point of Marx’s critique. A world that is made up of no more than “bundled” forms gives evidence of a social monism that expresses a neutral monism that lacks a philosophical anthropology, bringing with it the normative dimension that is key to notions of socialist emancipation (See Maclean 2014). Whatever else it is, it is not the Marxism of Marx. It is a reversion to Weberian rationalization, rendering rational the very capitalist forms that Marx criticized as alienated.

To criticize the capital system as a dehumanization, as Marx does, is to have an idea of what a truly human society looks like. Similarly, to criticize capital for the degradation of nature is to have some idea of what a healthy functioning nature would look like. Lose the critical-emancipatory dimension and “humanity” and “nature” cease to exist as anything more than social productions. This begs the question of who or what, within capitalist relations, is doing the producing and why. Reality becomes no more than a sophist power struggle. Victory in the class struggle ceases to have the emancipatory purpose it had for Marx and merely concerns the triumph of one sectional interest over another. Again, this is merely the circulation of power without the referents that give it an end and purpose. Marx’s criticism is that the capital system is necessarily involved in the degradation of labor and nature is grounded in a normative philosophy that cannot be socially neutral in this way. The exchange of that normative dimension for neutral monism ends an emancipatory project and delivers us into the world of endless power struggles and plasticity, a world that removes us ever further away from our socioecological matrix. Boundaries are written out as mere obstructions to productivist power. This is most decidedly not Marx’s view.

Social Monism and Cartesian Dualism

The principal target for these leftist critics is a dualism whose source they claim to find in Marx himself. As Smith writes: “Given Marx’s own treatment of nature, it may not be unreasonable to see in his vision also a certain version of the conceptual dualism of nature.” Ironically, the reason for this criticism seems to be Marx’s dialectical interactionism and relationism, which affirmed the unity of society and nature but in a way that avoided reducing one to the other. I see this as a virtue in Marx’s metabolic conception. Erik Swyngedouw, however, criticizes Marx for this understanding: “The social and the natural may have been brought together and made historical and geographical by Marx, but he did so in ways that keep both as a priori separate domains” (Swyngedouw 1999, 446). This distinction, I have argued, is to Marx’s credit, because it enabled him to argue for unity and harmony within the social-natural metabolism, avoiding the reduction of one metabolic order to the other, while also avoiding “idolatry” and “worship” in all their forms, not just natural but also sociocultural with respect to human power. Marx affirmed a unity that recognized society and nature as irreducible; that is, he affirmed a materialist ontology that recognized the existence of a reality that is always something more than human social construction.

Against Marx’s supposed dualism of society and nature, Swyngedouw proposes a singular “socionature” that is every bit as all-encompassing as capital’s thirst to subsume all things in the realm of use value—labor and nature—to its accumulative imperatives. Such a monistic socionature is reductionist, proposing a totalitarian unity in a world enclosed within a totalizing rationalization. We are in the presence here of G. W. F. Hegel’s World Spirit, overcoming Kant’s things-in-themselves; we are in the presence of Reason turning into a repressive rationalization of all things under the agency of capital; we are in the Weberian world of an untranscendable rationalization of social forms. In the words of Castree, “nature becomes internal to capitalism in such a way that the very distinction implied by using these terms is eroded and undermined” (Castree 2000, 27–28; Castree 1995, 20; Castree 2001, 204–05; Castree in Perreault, Bridge, and McCarthy, eds., 2015). Capitalism is thus presented as having a total power over nature in that it “seems to swallow up the latter altogether” (Castree 2002, 131; Latour 2005, 58). The social monist perspective is evidence of a self-made human world that has come to curve in on itself. I would strongly distinguish Marx’s focus on labor/production and praxis from such a view. Social monist criticism of Marx on account of his supposed Cartesian dualism is an invitation to reinstate Marx’s dialectical realism as a metabolic relationism that recognizes the irreducibility of the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature as they are brought into harmonious interaction.

Comprehending the Totality: The Dialectical Quality of Marx’s Conceptual Framework

Marx explicitly criticizes monism as something identified with capital’s inversion of subject and object:

The fusion of the subject-object inversion with the problem of the concept of capital is the fundamental theme of Marx’s oeuvre, which…constitutes the red thread which unites all other problematics in the early writings with those of the later works. (Backhaus in Bonefeld at al. vol. I 1992, 68 [see also Ranciere in Rattansi ed. 1989,86])

In overcoming the inversion of subject and object, Marx establishes their true unity in relation. It is therefore important to emphasize that Marx’s conception of “the metabolism of nature and society” was dialectical rather than dualistic, emphasizing the way in which our knowledge of nature was generated through the productive interchange with nature from within the social metabolism. In the view of David Harvey (Deutscher Prize Lecture 2011), Marx’s “metabolic relation to nature” involves a notion of “universality” that denotes a boundary of reality, establishing the conditions of sustainable existence serving to connect the “different ‘moments’” of Marx’s critique of political economy together. As I have argued elsewhere, since Marx did not manage to integrate the key boundary issues of the global economy and the universal metabolism of nature into Capital, his ecological critique remained scattered and incomplete (Critchley 2018a). I have therefore made a point of buttressing Marx’s published statements in this regard with the comments he made in his notebooks, indicating how integration could have been effected in terms of his critical method. The integration of specific mediations at the level of concrete totality is entirely possible within Marx’s humanity-nature dialectic. And, as the copious notes that Marx made from his extensive reading of scientific literature show, such integration was precisely Marx’s intent (Harvey 2012, 12–14, 36).

At this point, one can only conclude that what is in Marx a critique of capital’s alienating and exploitative domination of nature (and labor) has become in the hands of monists and modernizers a celebration of a human-social power abstracted from specific social relations and mediations to create and transform reality as such. This is Marx’s praxis unbound, which is to say, not Marx at all. Whereas Marx affirmed a materialist ontology, in this understanding nature as an independent objective entity has ceased to exist. In this case, the mediation of labor/production, which formed Marx’s principal focus in bringing the social and natural metabolisms into harmonious relation, has lost its point and purpose, since there is nothing with which to mediate. And once nature is lost, how far can the eclipse of humanity be behind?

When Moore remarks that “green materialism” was “forged in an era when nature still did count for much,” the clear implication is that nature no longer counts for anything, for the very reason that it has ceased to be (Moore 2014b). Does humanity, by the same reasoning, count for much either? And if nature as an objective referent has been lost, then natural science has lost its point and purpose: natural science has lost its object of study, nature, which would no doubt come as news to natural scientists. Who speaks for nature when nature has ceased to exist? The view cuts the ground from under environmentalism too, in that it has ceased to have any definite referent in nature. Such a view renders environmentalism both a science and a political and social movement, problematic to say the least and redundant to say the most—a view expressed by Latour, who makes the nonexistence of nature as a referent a basic stipulation of his philosophy. We are in the world of power and its circulation, construction, interests, the sophist world of Thrasymachus in which justice is the interests of the strongest.

The loss of a materialist ontology comes at a cost of coherence and purpose in any critical and emancipatory project. The inanities of culturalism are most obviously apparent in the departure from natural science. Thus, Moore endorses geographer Bruce Braun’s criticism of Marxian ecological economist Elmar Altvater for his adherence to the second law of thermodynamics in his analysis (Moore 2014b; Braun 2006, 197–99; Angus and Murphy 2016). Moore does not just downplay reality and the science that seeks knowledge of it by referring to nature as operating within a social dynamic, but he actually goes against basic physics and science when he argues that “the ‘law of entropy’…operates within specific patterns of power and production. It is not determined by the biosphere in the abstract. From the standpoint of historical nature, entropy is reversible and cyclical—but subject to rising entropy within specific civilizational logics” (Moore 2015, 14). This is a radical statement in favor of the human power to not just modify nature but to change its workings entirely.

In trying to make sense of something that seems so absurd, I would highlight “in the abstract” and relate them to Marx’s argument in “Thesis II on Feuerbach,” in which he declares the question of the truth with respect to objective reality to be a “scholastic” question. Truth must be proven in practice, stated Marx. Stated in such shorthand, this view would indeed seem to deny the relevance of ontological questions, giving up the scientific search for the truth of objective reality (as well as moral truths with respect to God) in favor of a truth that is generated and proven from within a humanly objective reality, from within human power relations.

Does this mean that Marx, then, is a social monist after all? I would argue not. General statements, such as the ones made in the “Theses,” do not constitute an overall philosophy. A careful analysis of Marx’s conceptual framework, supported by textual evidence of the precise features of Marx’s critical analysis, indicate the existence of a social-natural materialist ontology, one that sees society and nature as irreducible while being involved in a metabolic interaction. Social monism lacks this critical framework, fails to see the care that Marx took in defining the mediated relation between “social metabolism” and the “universal metabolism of nature,” and so comes to swallow reality up into social practice.

Social monism is a culturalism that commits the same mistake made by those who advocate a primitivist, anticivilization naturalism, but in reverse. The result is an idolatry and worship of social and cultural forms on one side, opposed to a nature idolatry and worship on the other, a wholly uncritical culturalism fighting it out with an uncritical naturalism. This is the real dualism, one that Marx explicitly rejected. The absurdities soon become apparent. The social monist view is not merely dualistic, opposing culture to a (nonexistent) nature, it inverts true relations, thus making the laws of nature subject to the powers of society, which, it is claimed, is capable of reversing or recycling entropy, because discursive practice says so (Moore 2015, 14).

The criticism of “left apocalyptism” is interesting in this regard, because it seems to be part of a general repudiation of not merely environmentalism in politics, but of notions of the natural environment as such, denying the existence of nature as an independent entity in itself. With this comes also the devaluation of natural science, which holds that knowledge of nature is possible. From the uncertain status of natural science’s object of study, it follows that the findings of science are rendered of uncertain value. Those who think this way would, no doubt, point to the political failures of environmentalism in light of the crisis in the climate system and environmentalism’s inability to mount an effective challenge to ecological degradation. Naturalism as an alliance of science, facts, and nature worship has proven politically ineffective against the power of capital. The greatest inroads have been made at the level of green energy, technology, and business, but only at the expense of leaving social relations unchanged, rendering environmentalism a green hygiene movement powering an exploitative and rapacious economic system with clean energy. Something crucial has gone missing. However, if naturalism is in error, at least it errs on the right side in affirming the existence of a nature that is independent of social praxis. The social monists reject naturalism for something that seems much worse, something that not only leads to absurdity, an entirely made-up truth in denial of ontological nature, but which risks becoming an ideological rationalization of the exploitative capitalist relations implicated in the degradation and destruction of the world.

Taken to the logical conclusion, social monists must go so far as to exempt humanity, as the reality-creating power, from nature’s laws altogether, a step that is indeed taken by those who argue that “nature and its more recent derivatives like ‘environment’ or ‘sustainability,’ are ‘empty’ signifiers” (Swyngedouw 2010, 304). While “‘Nature’ (as a historical product) provides the foundation,” Swyngedouw argues, “social relations produce nature’s and society’s history” (Swyngedouw 1999, 446). While this view does at least acknowledge nature as a “foundation,” in keeping with Marx’s recognition that the “universal metabolism of nature” enfolds the “social metabolism,” it nevertheless refers to nature as the “historical product” of human activity, and hence as something that exists within the confines of human history. This effectively elides the crucial distinction. Swyngedouw, while professing fidelity to Marx’s view, proceeds to criticize Marx for placing too much emphasis on this natural foundation in seeing nature as a signifier. Again, this is a continuation of Western Marxism’s trajectory since its beginning in the denial of the dialectics of nature. Ultimately, it places the culturalists on the side of the forces driving planetary unravelling—a concept and problem they reject.

In making these critical comments, I am concerned with avoiding the dualism of culture and nature, criticizing both sides on that divide while identifying the insights they bring to the debate. The awkward truth is that the social monists have identified a flaw in environmentalism, explaining its ineffectiveness as politics. Naturalists can identify the errors of the culturalists and culturalists can identify the errors of the naturalists: the key task is to locate the errors of both in the loss of a dialectical materialist realism and to restate the virtues of that realism within a metabolic understanding of the relation between society and nature.

Marx’s idea of metabolism expresses a sophisticated dialectical realism-relationism that enables a critical focus on the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” (Marx 1981, 949). Moore expresses this in terms of a “singular metabolism of power” (Moore 2014, 11; Moore 2015, 83). On the basis of this understanding, Marx shows the problem to be one of disruption in the metabolic interaction between society and nature, a disruption originating in the alienated ecological value form. In contrast to this, Moore argues that the problem is not “metabolic rift, but metabolic shift.” In this view, metabolism is merely “a way to discern shifts (provisional and specific unifications) not rifts (cumulative separation)” (Moore 2015, 83–84; for a better view of rifts and shifts, see Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 73–87). As a result, the possibility of a critique, based on Marx’s critical conception of alienated mediation in the EPM (Marx EW 1975, 261), that falls between the social metabolism of humanity and nature under capitalist relations comes to be lost. With the discarding of the critical focus that Marx placed on the alienation of labor and nature, the whole notion of capital’s necessarydevelopment and its deleterious social and ecological consequences disappears from view (Smith 2008, 81). The consequences are serious in that the entire emancipatory commitment driving Marx’s critique is lost and Marxism as a result becomes an ideological project, a form of apologetics for capitalist development.

Moore cautions against the “fetishization of natural limits” (Moore 2015, 80). It is at this point that the distancing from natural science in order to restate social agency and politics risks degeneration into an explicit capitalist apologetics. Moore thus argues: “The reality is not one of humanity ‘overwhelming the great forces of nature.’ Instead, he declares that capitalism has a seemingly infinite capacity for ‘overcoming seemingly insuperable ‘natural limits.’” With this happy conclusion, ideas of the absolute limits and ecological contradictions of capital come to be discarded to the effect that there are no boundaries, planetary or otherwise, for capital to transgress, no constraints on the constant expansion of capital and, implicitly, no cause for ecological concern. And with that, the whole socioecological critique of capital loses its force. The accumulative dynamic of capital is unbounded, free to overcome any barriers to expansion that lie in its way, with no need to recognize limits to its growth imperatives, natural or social. Capital has thus, at this ideological level, realized its ultimate fantasy of autonomizing itself from the realm of use value, degrading and destroying labor and nature at will, with consequences that will prove fatal for human civilization (Moore 2014c, 308; Moore 2014a, 14).

Moore explicitly rejects the concept of the Anthropocene with respect to the idea of an anthropogenic rift in the Earth system. Far from there being a metabolic rift as a result of the ecological contradictions of the capital system, as Marx argues, Moore presents capitalism as a world-ecology that is “unfold[ing] in the web of life,” involved in continuous innovation that ensures scarcity is overcome whenever and wherever it arises (Moore 2014a, 16–17). Far from seeing the capital system’s transgression of natural limits as a problem or contradiction to be afraid of, Moore actually celebrates capitalism’s ability to transcend all such limits. Indeed, in criticizing the green perspective as apocalyptic, he goes so far as to suggest that the collapse of civilization would not be “something to be feared” in any case, pointing to the fall of Rome as opening the way to a golden age. Such a view is blasé, (willfully) ignorant of the amount of suffering that followed in the wake of Rome’s collapse, and blithely unaware of the dislocation and destruction, affecting billions of people across the planet as well as the very existence of countless other species (and maybe even the human species), that would result from transgressing planetary boundaries. (For the clear evidence concerning the reality of the Anthropocene, see Ian Angus 2016.)

Moore’s use of the term web of life is instructive. This is a common phrase among ecologists, as in the title of Fritjof Capra’s 1996 The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Moore’s use of the term, however, is very different. Rather than being ecological, it is employed as a metaphor for the subsumption of the ecological under capitalism. Capra’s unifying vision of synthesis and relationism is replaced in Moore’s perspective by a view of society and nature as subsumed under capital as a singular metabolism composed of a collection of bundled, entwined relationships. At this point, the position comes to display clear affinities with the old “green capitalism” and the new “ecological modernization,” as expressed in the idea that it is possible to achieve “sustainability” by internalizing nature within the capital system, bringing everything under the logic of capital and its accumulative imperatives—thus taking the world to the market (Hawken, Lovins, Lovins, 2010; Mol and Jänicke 2009).

Moore thus praises the “ecomodernist” Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger for their “powerful critique” with respect to environmental problems. The ecomodernizers advocate capitalist markets, high technology (including nuclear and geoengineering), and accelerated economic growth as solutions to environmental problems, not the cause (within specific social forms and relations) of these problems in the first place. Rejecting as dualistic the concepts of the metabolic rift, the ecological footprint, and the Anthropocene, Moore claims that the mistake of the green critique is to focus on “what capitalism does to nature” instead of on “how nature works for capitalism.” It should come as no surprise, then, to read Moore concluding that rising to the environmental challenge we face involves “Putting Nature to Work” (Moore 2015c, 69; Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene [2016a, 111]; Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility [2007]).

I put the full titles here to give some sense of what the failure of environmentalism to develop a genuinely political and ethical position with respect to constituting public community entails.

The Social Monism of Capital

What makes this conflation of critique and rationalization such a hazardous enterprise for Marxism is the evidence that the development of the corporate form within the capital system is “erasing” liberal society at its roots, while taking control of public business in all its forms, political, social, and natural. The loss of nature as referent proceeds hand in hand with its corporate capture. The institution of private property is being replaced not by the communal social form as envisaged by Marx but the corporate form (McDermott 1991, 13–14; Critchley 1995a, 1995b). There is a danger, then, of a social monism that, in the name of Marx and Marxism, becomes complicit in capital’s totalization of society through corporate capture. In which case, social monism is not a coherent response to the process of environmental (and social) disruption, but an integral part of it.

In Moore, therefore, an uncritical social monism replaces Marx’s complex dialectical relationism based on a realist or materialist ontology with what is called a “dialectical bundling” in which reality is reconfigured as a series of socially constructed “assemblages” of things and processes. (Moore 2015, 13, 37, 76, 78.) In arguing that Marx viewed capitalism as unifying nature, Moore misinterprets Marx: “Rather than ford the Cartesian divide, metabolism approaches have reinforced it. Marx’s ‘interdependent process of social metabolism’ became ‘the metabolism of nature and society.’ Metabolism as ‘rift’ became [for ecological Marxists] a metaphor of separation, premised on material flows between nature and society” (Moore 2015, 76; Moore 2014a, 13, 18). This is a selective quotation that entirely distorts Marx’s meaning and the meaning of metabolic theory. In referring to the relation of capitalist development to ecology, Marx wrote of “the irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” which is a very different notion indeed. Moore claims that Foster’s term metabolism of nature and society is a distortion of Marx. I think it is clear from what I argued throughout Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration that Foster’s term is entirely consistent with Marx’s reference to “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth” (Marx C1 1976, 637; Marx C3 1981, 949) and that Foster’s work is a legitimate, insightful, and sophisticated development of the ecological materialism that exists in Marx (Critchley 2018a).

The same cannot be said of the social monism that Moore and others argue. Arguing that the capital system subsumes all things into it, Moore takes the ecological idea of the web of life and has it refer to the all-encompassing order of capital. This is a cultural-intellectual appropriation entirely in keeping with capital’s appropriation of labor and nature. And with reality thereby reduced to a collection of bundles (that is, commodities), the very notion of an Earth system disappears from view. In place of Marx’s critique of the capital system, we have the confirmation of the triumph of exchange value over use value and an expression of the delusion that the only reality is the social one constituted within the logic of capital.

In contrast, Marx’s materialist (social and natural) ontology makes possible the dialectical critique of alienation in the metabolic interpenetration, interchange, and mediation of nature-society relations. Even at the level of abstraction, society and its forms are not considered autonomous from natural cycles and processes. Such autonomization is impossible in Marx’s terms. The power of capital is secondary and derivative, meaning that capital can never autonomize itself from labor and nature; labor and nature, however, can autonomize themselves from capital and exist independently of the capital relation (Bonefeld in Bonefeld et al. I 1992, 103; Mészáros 2000, 606–7, 718–20, 725, 728–29, 733–34; Mészáros 1970, 21–22; Clarke 1991, 118). For Marx, then, there is an interrelation and interaction between society and nature, with neither side being subsumed into the other without fundamental damage occurring in the metabolism of society-nature. Both society and nature are legitimate subjects in their own right and in their metabolic relation and interaction. Marx affirms the fundamental irreducibility of society and nature, and therefore the possibility of one being subsumed by the other does not arise, except by way of capital’s alienated system of metabolic control seeking systemically to absorb nature into itself. Marx’s critical dimension as a result of his concept of alienation holds that neither society nor nature can or should be subsumed for a healthy and functioning social-natural metabolic order. His idea of a society-nature metabolism emphasizes totality and mediation, integrating society and nature at all levels while recognizing the heterogeneous character of reality. Such is the materialist and realist nature of Marx’s social-natural ontology, affirming the true material relations of reality (Lukács 1980, 119–24; Needham 1943, 13–20, 233–72).

With this conclusion, I shall draw my argument to a close, emphasizing Marx’s critical relevance to the environmental crisis in which we are embroiled.

Marx’s dialectical realism and relationism enables a complex, dynamic analysis that shows how human productive activities can be reintegrated within the larger biophysical world. While critical realist Roy Bhaskar acknowledges that Marxism has in the past shared “the manipulative, instrumentalist orientation to nature and place integral to the development of nineteenth-century capitalism,” he considers this a “relatively minor difficulty” compared to the lack of time before us in resolving the ecological crisis that is on us: “In the long run the answer may be socialism, but in the immediate-short run the question is survival, non-extinction.” Bhaskar rightly insists that there is “no way of bypassing historical mediations in any resolution of this profound and pressing ecopolitical problem,” noting that its very difficulty and urgency could provide the rudiments of a possible solution. This is a point I would stress in terms of the missing mediations in environmentalism as politics. Bhaskar speculates that the scale of the problem we face, in the form of a heightened sense of time and in the possibility it conveys of global displacement, “could so concentrate sensibility on our common planetary locale and our species’ interest in its survival as to avoid an early terminus for it.”

Bhaskar thus combines Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation:

What we need in order to feel at home in the world is not the infantile fantasy that it was made for us, but the mature post-Darwinian recognition of the ecological asymmetry: that it is more true to say that we were made for it, and that we survive as a species only insofar as second nature respects the over-riding constraints imposed upon it by first nature. From this nature, although it is always historically mediated, we can never, nor will we ever, escape. (Bhaskar 2009, 150)

Why, in the interests of a genuinely socioecological standpoint, would we even want to escape? I take a nonalienated metabolic order to indicate a humanity that has settled in its true place in the order of things. In which case, the emergence of a global ecological crisis may, in the long run, prove to be what Bhaskar states is (cautiously) to be (and in a slightly different context) an “indispensable ratchet in the self-transformative process of the human species in the direction of a more fully human, and at least longer, and perhaps more emancipated being” (Bhaskar 2009, 150).

We can argue over God and Nature ’til kingdom come. I would argue strongly that we need to get past any science versus religion so-called debate here and bring the worlds of fact and value back into relation. I think Bhaskar’s words beg deeper questions as to what being in place and being at home are all about, which assuredly involve a spiritual dimension and transcendent norms, truths, and values that go beyond conventionalism, certainly, and beyond a science which sees the world as objectively valueless, purposeless and meaningless. But in addressing such questions, we risk losing the focus that Bhaskar rightly seeks to bring to this question of survival, in the first instance, and flourishing, in the second. I hope I have given the “self-transformative” dimension that Bhaskar emphasizes the centrality it is due, placing it at the heart of the triadic relation that Marx establishes between humanity-labor/production-nature (Critchley 2018a). In terms of focus, I hope my argument has sufficiently emphasized the crucial need to bring environmentalism to the question of specific mediations with respect to resolving the ecological and social crisis. If my views on natural science, nature worship, and romanticism seem abrasive, I can only say that they are motivated by the heightened sense of time that looming ecological catastrophe is pressing on us. We simply have to overcome splits between scientism, culturalism, and naturalism to develop that “unified science” of which Marx wrote. And this at means bridging the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason while establishing the social metabolism and universal metabolism of nature in true relation. This is a question of uprooting the alienated forms of mediation in the capital system with appropriate forms of social mediation. As Bhaskar emphasizes, there is “no way of bypassing historical mediations in any resolution of this profound and pressing ecopolitical problem.” The tragedy is that, in detaching ecology as a naturalism (and scientism) from the field of practical reason (politics, ethics, and economics), we have failed to see this as an ecopolitical problem and hence have bypassed the necessary social mediations. This has left environmentalism without sufficient practical purchase, detached from effective “self-transformative process,” unable to transform reality and bridge the gap between humanity and nature—without a mediating term. We need an integral, socialized, and politicized environmentalism.

Those who still do not see why mediation matters or still cannot see what mediation means in that humanity-labor/production-nature relation need to consider these words from scientist Ken Caldeira, a man who has spent a lifetime addressing the problem of climate change:

“How do we address the climate problem, when 99.999% of the people in the world have other more immediate problems to address?

For many, the climate problem seems like a luxury problem for those who don’t have to worry about jobs, debt, corruption, violence, health care, etc.”

Mediation is key. What looks like a lack of response on the part of people is not indifference, it is incapacity. The real indifference comes from the capitalist value form and the split between use value and exchange value.

I have argued that, for Marx, there is an ecological critique running alongside the socioeconomic critique; the relation between the social and the natural metabolic order is established (Critchley 2018a). I offer the argument here as the answer to Caldeira’s question.

Conclusion

Napoletano et al. posit that the “dualistic counterpoising of monism to dualism that has constrained the ecological contributions of left- and Marxian-influenced thinkers within geography,” arguing for the integration of dialectical and systems theories into critical ecological thought without resorting to hybridization (Napoletano et al. 2019; Keller and Golley 2000). The authors argue for the pertinence of metabolic rift analysis to political ecology, indicating a potential that goes beyond the need to bridge disciplinary divides. They thus conclude that engagement with metabolic rift theory can serve to bring together and politicize the work of researchers within and across various disciplinary boundaries around shared concerns regarding the prospects of human society in the Anthropocene and sustainable alternatives to an ecomodernization that succumbs to a neoliberal environmentalism and a nature romanticism that fetishizes nature (Clark and York 2005; Castree 2017).

Thus, metabolic rift scholarship has become politically charged as part of a project of radical activism within and through the academy aimed at the identification and advocacy of progressive, socially just alternatives to the status quo (Blomley 2008). The metabolic conception exhibits a dialectical unity of theory and practice that cultivates strong organic links to red-green politics and activism beyond the strict confines of the academy (such as Wittman 2009; Klein 2015; Malm 2018; Wallis 2018), ensuring that environmental research and scholarship serves to overcome the disjuncture between academic theorization and social praxis, thereby challenging rather than reinforcing the hegemony of existing power structures (Peet 1977).

By bringing the critical weight of Marx’s dynamic materialist dialectic to bear on contemporary crises, the accent in metabolic theory comes to be placed firmly on the socio-ecological contradictions of the capital system, rather than on symptoms and surface-level manifestations to be addressed with incremental and technical solutions based on technocratic, neoliberal, and managerial assumptions. In transcending both Cartesian dualism and social monism, metabolic rift analysis offers a path to a genuine political ecology as distinct from an ecology of fear based on the “millenarian and apocalyptic proclamation that ecocide is imminent” (Harvey 1997, 194). That is not to downplay the serious and growing threats to civilization as a result of ecological degradation, but to locate these threats in the contradictory dynamics of the capital system so as to enable critical and practical engagement with the increasing struggles beyond the workplace to protect and enhance the socioecological conditions for a joint human and planetary flourishing (Harvey 2001; Burkett 2009; Napoletano et al. 2019).

Marx is a pioneer social ecologist in that his society-nature dialectical realism predates Ernst Haeckel’s ecology. Marx’s examination of the interchange between social and natural metabolisms is inherently ecological. For Marx and Engels, “man is inconceivable apart from his evolution in nature and his collective labours upon nature by means of his tools. Man’s dialectical relationship with nature, in which man transforms it and is therefore transformed, is the very essence of his own nature.… Nature is definable as the materials and forces of the environment that create men and are in turn created by man” (Parsons 1977, xi). Further, Marx and Engels “had a definite (though not fully detailed) ecological position. As both working people and nature are exploited by class rule, so they will be freed by liberation from class rule” (Parsons 1977, xii). It must be added that both society and nature—the worker and the soil as Marx puts it—are dominated, exploited, and degraded by capital’s alienated system of production. But there is a need to be clear with respect to the distinction between capitalism and the capital system (Mészáros 2000). Liberation from class rule must proceed further than the institution of private property to uproot capital rule and its basis in alienated labor at the more profound level of social relations of production and their transformation.

The ecological dimension of Marx’s thought is expressed in his writings on the metabolic interdependence between human society and nature and the way in which this relation is mediated in the sphere of labor/production. In this productive interchange, nature is transformed by labor as a mutual transformation. It is, to use Bhaskar’s term, a self-transformative process, and one that Marx sought to put on a nonalienated basis as a condition of healthy development (a true, organic growth as against capital’s cancerous systemic growth). Marx expresses this ecological view consistently, in his writing on the society-nature metabolic relationship that existed before the rise of capitalism, on the alienation of labor and nature under the rise of the commodity form under the capital system, and in the healthy, harmonious relationship that is projected to exist under future communist society.

The alternative to the social and ecological pathology which is becoming all-pervasive in the socioinstitutional and economic fabric of modern capitalist society is to be found in the development of an appropriate, harmonious relationship between humanity, their productive powers, and nature. The specific social character of the mediating term of labor/production is key in this respect. Viewing human beings as a part of nature, the essence of human mastery through technique and organization is not measured by the capacity to dominate nature but lies in “the mastery of the relationship between nature and humanity.” In other words, in the replacement of alienated mediation by a system of social self-mediation. Whereas domination is accompanied by the degradation and destruction of nature, the purpose of Marx’s mastery is to “do justice to the subtle interplay of internal and external nature” (Leiss 1974, 198). Whereas domination generates overscale, imbalance, and unreason, a true mastery is characterized by harmony in the metabolic interaction between all life-enhancing, life-affirming forces on earth. The restitution of social power and the disalienation of mediation renders human productive activity socially and ecologically benign and beneficent in contrast to the destructive consequences of alien power and control.

Marx’s critique of alien power, and of the technology of unreason implicated in its external control, is positively oriented toward the social ecology of a harmonious social metabolic order. The realization of such an order would represent the constitution of a genuine public life, in the sense of creating the overarching framework and infrastructure that brings human self-actualization in the social metabolism within the universal metabolism of nature. This would be to create a form of social self-mediation that brings power under human control and comprehension. Through this mediation, human beings would come to exercise common conscious control over their social existence for the first time in history. They would realize a public life that has dissolved Weber’s “untranscendable complexity” into units of mediation that are scaled to human dimensions and proportions. The alien mediation of institutional structures, forms, and practices within the capital relation are thus replaced with a social self-mediation.

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Source:

Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation

Lazarus Begging for Crumbs from Dives’s Table (Heinrich Aldegrever, 1552)

Bue Rübner Hansen

October 31, 2015

The black lumpen proletariat, unlike Marx’s working class, had absolutely no stake in industrial America. They existed at the bottom level of society in America, outside the capitalist system that was the basis for the oppression of black people. They were the millions of black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied ghetto dwellers, welfare mothers, and street hustlers. At their lowest level, at the core, they were the gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes, the drug users and dealers, the common thieves and murderers (- Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power).

1. Introduction

Today, few uphold the old belief that wage labor will gradually expand to cover the majority of the world’s population. Once, this was the condition of the historical belief that capitalism would create the conditions under which wage labor could be organized as a global power to match capital. Instead another teleology has appeared, claiming that capitalist development entails working class disorganization. Rather than a narrative of progress, this is a narrative of decline, of precarity, informalization, and immiseration.

Marx once predicted that a revolution would become organizationally possible through “the ever expanding union of the workers,” and materially urgent due to the deepening of proletarian misery: “A radical revolution can only be the revolution of radical needs.” ¹ In the twentieth century, this combination of misery and organization was rare, due to the concessions given to organized labor in the Global North, concessions which were to a large extent made possible by the exploitation, misery, and violent suppression of colonial populations. Today, we see instead a tendency towards the disorganization of northern labor, which is to a large extent due to competition from low-paid and less organized workers in the Global South. It thus appears that the two elements of Marx’s theory are mutually exclusive, but in a different way than believed by many during the mid-19th Century, when the idea of full employment and unionization was seen as a possibility. Instead, Marx’s own strong arguments for the impossibility of full employment have been re-actualized through a re-reading of Marx’s theory of “generalized law of capitalist accumulation” and the capitalist tendency to produce surplus-populations. ²

The foremost luminaries of this reactualization have been the proponents of communization theory, among whom the collective Endnotes is perhaps the most influential voice in the Anglo-Saxon world. Referring to Endnotes, Fredric Jameson, for example, has recently offered the provocative suggestion that Capital is a book about unemployment rather than about exploitation. ³ The writings of communization theorists on surplus population are of interest both because they provide an explanatory framework for understanding the empirically observable phenomena of the informalization of labor and the development of immiseration and slums, analyzed by writers such as Jan Breman and Mike Davis, and because it is one of the most sophisticated among the (in any case few) contemporary Marxist attempts to think the conditions of revolutionary communist practice today.

This text takes its diagnostic starting point in these new theoretical developments, with an aim to think through the challenge they pose in terms of the question of class formation and organization. It proposes that the central task of class composition is to respond to the problem of the contingency of proletarian reproduction, which all proletarians have in common, but deal with in many different ways. This means that class composition must start from the recognition that the modes of proletarians’ struggle are extremely diverse: from the limit condition of peasants fighting against becoming proletarianized to the classical figure of the wage-laborer on strike, lies a whole range of struggles to which feminist and anti-colonial writers are more attuned than most Marxists. Once we recognize this constitutive heterogeneity of the exploited and expropriated populations of the world, we recognize that any general theory of “the proletariat” as a revolutionary agent will have to start from the self-organization and composition of differences and particularly of different strategies of life and survival.

In order to elaborate such a theory, I turn to the Marx of the 18^th Brumaire, a text not interested in the elaboration of the abstract historical dialectic of communist revolution, but in developing and deploying a method of analysis of concrete struggles. This text has rightly been lauded by many as a model materialist analysis of the conjuncture – of the crisis, the relations of class forces, the historical temporality of events, the dynamics of political representation and violence, etc. Marx’s richly textured meditation on the play of contingency and necessity in the French revolution of 1848 and its aftermath is an important corrective to the all too common Marxist attempt to limit political analysis to what can be derived from the critique of political economy or to the question of the prospects of revolution. What follows is the attempt to relate the widely observed conception of political contingency and class formation in the 18^th Brumaire with the question of the contingency of proletarian reproduction. Starting from the latter allows me to read the Brumaire not merely as an analysis of the actions of constituted classes, but to draw from it a theory of class formation and class differentiation.

While the problem of proletarian reproduction has been raised with renewed urgency by the crisis and the growth of surplus populations, it has a wider significance. As observed by Michael Denning, the proletariat is not defined by exploitation and labor, but by its real or virtual poverty. The key insight of this text is that any practice of proletarian class formation and organization – the condition sine qua non of communist strategy – must start not only with this virtual poverty, but with the real strategies of life and survival through which proletarians live this problem.

2. The Necessity of Surplus Population Under Capitalism

Marx always gave a dual definition of the proletariat: in terms of the problem of the contingency of their reproduction, their existence as “virtual paupers,” and in terms of their exploitation as workers. ⁴ In other words, the proletariat is defined by its separation from the means of reproduction, and its compulsion to reproduce itself by reproducing capital. The reproduction of the proletariat (the value of its labor-power) is kept in line with the reproduction of capital through the “normal” working of the law of value: if wages rise too high, capital will hire less workers, thus creating a reserve army exerting a downward pressure on wages. ⁵ The point here is that as long as the employed and unemployed do not combine, wages will always fall back in line with the requirements of capital accumulation.

Marx pointed out that state violence is generally unleashed should such a combination force the law of value temporarily out of function. However, there are two other crucial limitations of workers organization, which are both based on the long-term secular tendencies of capital. First, the production and accentuation of differences within the proletariat along gendered and racialized lines, which leads to competition between and within national workforces; and secondly, the production of surplus populations.

As Marx notes with regards to the national and religious conflicts between the English and the Irish, this antagonism is the secret of the working class’s impotence in England, despite the level of organization of its English part. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this. ⁶ This is not merely a strategy of divide and rule, however, but an effect of capital’s chase for absolute surplus value, which – as soon as it has extended the existing workday as much as possible – brings it to incorporate the labor-forces of areas where the reproductive cost of labor is lower, and where necessary labor is thus less relative to surplus-labor time. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes:

Surplus time is the excess of the working day above that part of it which we call necessary labor time; it exists secondly as the multiplication of simultaneous working days, i.e. of the laboring population. … It is a law of capital … to create surplus labor, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labor in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the laboring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population – population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. … It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labor (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labor, towards infinity. ⁷

Second, Marx discovers that the chase for relative surplus value itself replaces workers with machinery, leading to an internal secular tendency towards the growth of surplus populations. ⁸ Thus, by enrolling new populations as workers and by expelling existing workers in favor of machinery, capital produces ever larger working classes alongside ever greater surplus populations, which makes the challenges of suspending the law of value through organization ever greater. We see here two tendencies of capitalism: whether in crisis or in periods of growth, existing lines of production will shed labor. Despite periodic crises, capital will accumulate ever more capital, and employ ever more proletarians. This gives us “the general law of capitalist accumulation”:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labor-power at its disposal. … But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here. ⁹

If we try to break this down we have three effects of this law: the expansion of the mass of employed (“active”) proletarians, of the number of unemployed (“reserve”) proletarians, and of the mass of unemployable (“consolidated”) proletarians. ¹⁰ The effect of the latter two categories is to press down wages, i.e. the monetary part of the reproduction of the working population. Indeed, capital constantly produces a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to the fulfillment its drive for valorization. ¹¹ The expanded reproduction of capital is thus both the expanded reproduction of the employed and unemployed populations, positing an ever greater relative surplus, a “disposable reserve army” bred by the capitalist mode of production. ¹² “Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands.’” ¹³

In recent decades such surplus populations have mostly been produced by automation manufactured in the Global North, whereas the surplus populations of the Global South overwhelmingly remain victims of the combined push of population growth and industrial agriculture in rural areas (subdivision of land, capitalist competition and expropriation). The northward migration from the former colonies introduces an already racialized population into an indigenous workforce rendered insecure by off-shoring, automation and informalization, with some longing for the heyday of Northern labor during the time of open white supremacy and the national social state.

In this increasing immiseration of the proletariat it is possible to find both a deepening contradiction between capital and labor – and thus an increased hope of a revolutionary clash rather than an integrationist class compromise – and an increasing competition between workers and between workers and the unemployed, and thus a decreased hope for solidarity and collective action. We discover this ambivalence in the writings of the communizationist journal and writing collective Endnotes. In their second issue, Endnotes developed a structural analysis, which claimed that the reproductive cycles of capital and labor were becoming increasingly decoupled, leading to a “secular crisis” of “the reproduction of the capital-labor relation itself” and an objective pressure on the proletariat to abolish capital. ¹⁴ The inability of capital to satisfy the demands of the workers was thus a condition of possibility of communism. However, in their third issue this condition of possibility appeared as a condition of impossibility: “an increasingly universal situation of labor-dependence has not led to a homogenisation of interests. On the contrary, proletarians are internally stratified” and their collective interests have often been captured by markers of race, nation, gender, etc. ¹⁵ These remarks allow, as we will see, no more than a hope grounded in a theory of the secular deepening of the antagonism between capital and labor, and the exhaustion of all possibilities of mediating it. In what follows we will see that Endnotes’s meditations on the necessities of capitalist development and the abstract possibility of communization leaves us without a materialist method of class formation.

3. Reproductive Crisis and Revolutionary Hopes

Endnotes’s theory of revolution is based on the tendency towards antagonistic reproduction given by the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. They posit a deepening crisis of the reproduction of the class relation itself, whereby the reproduction of capital and of the proletariat will enter into a deepening antagonism:

With its own reproduction at stake, the proletariat cannot but struggle, and it is this reproduction itself that becomes the content of its struggles. As the wage form loses its centrality in mediating social reproduction, capitalist production itself appears increasingly superfluous to the proletariat: it is that which makes us proletarians, and then abandons us here. In such circumstances the horizon appears as one of communization; of directly taking measures to halt the movement of the value form and reproduce ourselves without capital. ¹⁶

The tendency here described can only be seen as pointing in the direction of revolution or communization, if we claim that capitalism has reached some absolute limit to expansion, some exhaustion  of the capitalist teleology itself. Otherwise, capital will have room to maneuver and give concessions, and we would thus be dealing either with a contingent limit, which poses nothing but a window of revolutionary opportunity, or more fluid fields of struggles. Staking everything on one global totalizing process of subsumption and abjection, communization theory describes a process that is heading for its limit. This theory tends to reduce the question of revolution to its structural condition: general squeeze on living conditions. But because the processes of capitalist accumulation entails both the increasing competition and atomization of workers, Endnotes can only conceive of struggle as the spontaneous coming together of the separated, principally in riots and insurrections. But in this duality of objective tendency and subjective irruption, it is easily overlooked that riots are conditioned by everyday resistances that work against the naturalization of oppression and explore the limitations of other less antagonistic forms of redress. It is equally easy to forget the role of whispers, rumors, and camaraderie that precede a riot, setting the tone of its affective atmosphere of anger and contagious mutual trust. To understand all this is necessary to understand the connection between the structural “conditions of possibility of riots” and the riot itself. Perhaps it is the belief in the imminent exhaustion of the global process of capitalist accumulation that makes it possible to neglect such considerations.

Albert O. Hirschman once observed that when Marx and Engels in the late 1840s – most influentially in the Manifesto – thought that capitalism was reaching its final limit, they failed to recognize the capacity of imperialism to displace capitalism’s contradictions and postpone its crisis. ¹⁷ More problematically, Marx’s prioritization of the thesis that revolution would come about through the globalization and exhaustion of capitalist development, lead him to briefly lend colonialism support as a driver of the process that would make the proletariat a global reality, and thus communism a global possibility. ¹⁸ This implication is premised on an abstract formal dialectical reversal, which completely effaces how the effects of the global division of labor are divisive and disciplining, and hence the necessary difficult task of developing cross-border solidarity. Similarly, according to Hirschman, V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg only really recognized this power of imperialism when they could say it had run its course, i.e. when the recognition did not contradict the idea that revolution is objectively imminent. Hirschman’s provocation raises the following question: does the orientation of the revolutionary desire of Marxists – insofar as it is sustained by the theory of capital’s real teleology running its course – orient them away from the problem that there might still be venues for capitalist expansion as well as other modifying circumstances to the general law? ¹⁹ And furthermore, does capital not have the capacity to re-subsume areas and populations it has previously spat out as if they were new to it – once they have been sufficiently devalued?  The problem with the thesis of exhaustion is that in order to give hope it needs to suggest a uniform deepening of the proletarian antagonism with capital. This allows theory to avoid the question of strategy and organization, and allows it to “solve” the problem of the proletarian condition through a simple dialectical schematic à la “the expropriators are expropriated.” While we might agree that that is indeed the formal concept of communist revolution, it says nothing whatsoever about the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.

In his critique of communization theory Alberto Toscano relates its “almost total neglect of the question of strategy” to “the collapse or attenuation” of collective bodies capable of projecting a strategy. ²⁰ As a theory of communist revolution, communization is a theory of the insufficiency of all real practices, yet curiously a theory of hope. This is the case, because it is speculatively derived from the observation that capitalist development entails a deepening contradiction between the reproduction of the working class and the reproduction of capital. Under such conditions, labor must abolish capital or suffer its own slow death as surplus population. This is a theory of the “conditions of possibility of communism,” in Endnotes’s Kantian formulation. Because Endnotes focus on the “moving contradiction” between capitalist and working class reproduction, they tend to pose the question of composition from the classical point of view of uniting “the” proletariat in order to produce a historical subject adequate to abolish capital, often defining the proletariat in excessively formalistic ways, as fully atomized and mutually competitive and mistrustful, whereby the problem of their coordination becomes so radicalized that even struggle can only be thought as an event of spontaneity rather than a process based on the coming together and increased connectivity of already existing networks of solidarity and trust. ²¹

As with Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, deepening misery becomes the occasion for a conditional belief in progress, a kind of perverse faith that history will progress by its bad side – or perhaps the thesis is merely that if it progresses by its bad side, it will do so in a more communist way this time, unmediated by trade unions and parties, and free of the laborist productivism of former epochs. But freeing themselves of the weight of the past in this way, we also find ourselves in a vacuum, pinning our hopes on the absence of the positive tendency on which Marx and Engels hung their hats, namely the growing organization and productive power of the proletariat, the vehicle through which immiseration spelled the possibility of mass action rather than the barbarism of the war of all proletarians against all.

In addressing this tension, Endnotes do not provide any operational concepts and tactics that might enable the composition or abolition of these differences, except “struggle itself,” which spontaneously will abolish the double-bind in which workers find themselves: “they can act collectively if they trust one another, but they can trust one another — in the face of massive risks to themselves and others — only if that trust has already been realized in collective action.” Instead of participating in the collective development and sharing of tactics and tools of struggle, Endnotes admit the speculative character of their theory, which they consider a “therapy against despair,” the answer (revolution) to which the proletarians have not yet formalized the question. In short, communization is an answer whose only question is abstract, it responds not to the concrete problem of class formation, but to the abstract problem of fending off the despair of the theorists of revolution.

However, the debate that is of interest here is not one between forms of hope, and the possibility of revolution discovered in good or bad general historical tendencies. Neither from surplus population to communization, nor from the multitude to commonwealth, as it were. It is easy to understand that a theoretical indication of hope is necessary to keep practical reason from falling into cynicism, melancholia, or opportunism. ²² But such narratives risk leaving us stuck in the Kantian problematic of orientation in thinking, according to which the rational subject will only commit itself to practical, moral action if it has hope that its action will succeed in furthering morality materially or spiritually – and in which only the kind of action that addresses the tendencies that give hope, can itself be seen as carrying a historical promise, that is a promise of more than short term gains and eventual defeat. For Kant, the practical necessity of optimism ultimately becomes an argument for the practical necessity of the idea of God, for Endnotes it becomes an argument for the continuous meditation on revolution, that is, on an answer to which proletarians have not formulated the question. Even if the concept of communization, unlike Kant’s God, is founded on a systematic materialist and dialectical understanding of the laws of movement of capital, such a theory does not, as we have seen, provide us with a strategic, practical orientation of class formation and strategies of reproduction, nor with a concept of state violence.

Even if Marx’s systematic analysis of the tendency towards the production of surplus population is empirically confirmed, as suggested by Endnotes and Aaron Benanav – Marx is still adamant that it has many modifying circumstances from which he abstracts in Capital. ²³ However, while Marx is right to exclude them from his exposition for methodological reasons, we cannot draw any political lessons from a law without considering its countervailing tendencies that not only work against the tendency, but even suspend it. Some of these are internal, like the periodic devaluation of labor to the point that labor renders highly mechanized production uncompetive, which would lower the organic composition of capital. Another, and more significant moderator is declining birthrates, which Marx does not take into consideration as he methodologically takes demographic growth a variable dependent solely on wage levels. Thus, because of deindustrialization, declining birth rates due to women’s struggles for reproductive health and refusal of child bearing, violent state suppression of birthrates, etc. – it is possible that the tendency towards surplus population is periodically reversed. Further, the available pool of labor has historically been diminished by war, epidemics, famine and the slow death of poverty, declining public health standards and deadly policing of poor neighborhoods and borders.

What is interesting and challenging about the re-actualization of the theory of surplus populations today is that, unlike the immiseration thesis of the Communist Manifesto, it is not predicated on a thesis of the gradual embourgeoisement of the world, or on the homogenization of the proletariat. The reality of surplus-populations poses instead the issue of a generalized crisis of reproduction, and the multitude of survival strategies that arise from it, including modes of wealth appropriation far short of revolution proper, women’s struggles, and various forms of state and para-state violence. ²⁴ Reversing the relation between theory and practice, it poses a very non-Kantian question: what does it mean to orient revolutionary practice from the standpoint of the problem of the proletarian condition and the manifold ways to live it?

4. The Common Problem of Reproduction

We have seen how the proletarian condition is best understood as one of separation from the means of reproduction. This is the condition of capital organizing proletarians as wage laborers. New separations are constantly produced by capital’s expansive drive for absolute surplus value, a tendency through which ever new populations are included in the workforce – women and agricultural producers primarily. ²⁵ Furthermore, we have seen how the drive for relative surplus value tendentially spits out more workers, rendering them superfluous to capitalist production. In the course of long periods of mass-unemployment, and as an effect of the secular decline in employment we see a growth of the consolidated surplus-population, i.e. a population unfit, unable, unwilling to work, because of poor health, age; or – which Marx only mentions – because it has adopted another mode of reproduction.

Primitive accumulation, violently destroyed and destroys previous modes of reproduction. In Feudal Europe as in the Global South today and in colonial times, primitive accumulation ruptures customary bonds of authority, as well as the peasants’ organic tie to the land, and leaves individuals atomised and bereft of the means and relations necessary to survive and actualise their potentials. Marx’s retrospective analysis of primitive accumulation in Capital focuses on how this process lead to the creation of a mass of proletarians, who had to combine with capital as workers in order to survive. However, we also see in his narrative the outline of a different set of histories of struggles against the enclosures, food riots, and of the criminalized, and thus subversive strategies of survival and reproduction. The impotentiality of individuals had and has to be enforced by private and public violence, their propensity to combine autonomously or within and against their workplaces made the process of the integration of the proletariat into work-life a protracted process. ²⁶

In tandem with the repression of other modes of survival, money develops into a general condition for participation in society: if you don’t have it you are compelled to obtain it, be it by working, stealing, selling yourself or by marrying someone who has money. In other words, proletarians have to reproduce themselves through exchange. However, this gives us nothing but the abstract social form through which labor is reproduced; indeed the ways in which labor takes this form are innumerable. Behind the common problem of the proletarians (dispossession of means of re/production) and their common ‘solution’ (money) lies a manifold of heterogeneous modes of life through which the proletarian condition can and must be lived. Thus, as Silvia Federici shows,

primitive accumulation … was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. ²⁷

What is also implied here is that as the reproduction of the proletariat became mediated through the wage, it did not abolish proletarian self-reproduction; the wage has very rarely been high enough for workers to obtain all the means of their reproduction (food ready for consumption, sex, cleaning, health care) directly on the market. ²⁸ Instead, the wage became a form through which the unpaid reproductive work of women, but also of children and other dependents, was mediated through the mostly male wage, producing what Mariarosa Dalla Costa calls the patriarchy of the wage. ²⁹ Whereas Marx’s analysis focuses first on the accumulation of “men,” and then on their production and reproduction of capital through their exploitation, authors such as Federici, Fortunati, Dalla Costa and James provide a theory of the condition of possibility of Marx’s analysis: the production and reproduction of labor power itself. ³⁰ To understand the history of how struggles over reproduction started to wane, it is therefore not enough to analyze the integration of proletarians in wage-labor and the criminalization of alternative reproductive practices. We must understand with Federici how one effect of this war on women, whose most violent episode was the witch-hunts, was that the proletariat was split. ³¹ This effect of this war was not just the primitive accumulation and disciplining of women’s bodies by capital, state and church, but also the subordination of proletarian women to proletarian men. For these men the struggle for reproduction was often – and once alternative routes were exhausted mostly – a struggle to find women who could reproduce them. To the macro-violence of the clergy and the state, a micro-violence of the everyday was added, often drawing on the discursive resources and images produced by the former. Economic compulsion and extra-economic violence are inseparable but yet distinguishable under capitalism.

The destruction of the different forms of reproductive self-organization of the proletarians did not entail a destruction of proletarian reproduction as such, but the creation of the modern nuclear family, within which unpaid reproductive work took care of the reproductive needs of children and wage workers, so the workers could remain free-floating mutually competitive productive bodies. Hence we can understand the modern family as an essential survival-unit in a condition of insecurity, but we have to understand how the stability of this nuclear family model is inextricably linked to the stability of the male wage.

Thus, if we read together Marx’s chapters on primitive accumulation with his analysis of the general tendencies of capitalist accumulation, we must conclude that struggles over reproduction are becoming an increasingly important issue, not merely in the form of struggles over the wage and working day, but as defenses of welfare (the social wage), and struggles to appropriate the means of reproduction or against their expropriation. If the proletariat is, as Endnotes and Benanav write, “rather a working class in transition, a working class tending to become a class excluded from work,” we must note that it is also a class increasingly in need of alternative ways to secure its own reproduction. Before this becomes a matter of revolutionary struggle it is a matter of everyday solutions and resistances to the problem of proletarian reproduction.

5. Proletarian Differentiation

Marx conceptualizes the problem of the proletarian condition in two ways: in terms of its exploitation and in terms of its expropriation. If the former relates to the (waged) working class, the latter refers to anybody separated from the means of re/production, a pauper virtual or actual. Marx recognized that the proletariat also attempts to survive outside the capital-relation, as lumpenproletariat, rural or urban. This class lives as an excluded insider to “the silent compulsion of economic relations,” faced not with exploitation but with the “direct extra-economic force which is still… used, but only in exceptional cases.” ³² Marx had first introduced the lumpenproletariat in a discussion of Max Stirner’s romantic vision of non-productive and work-refusing ragamuffins and lazzaroni. After 1848, the problem of the lumpenproletariat becomes a problem of the failed revolution, of the proletarians who sold themselves to the reactionaries. This approach, which stresses the difference between the working class and the lumpen, and contains certain moments of moralization from the perspective of the work ethic and law and order, has since been at the mainstream of Marxism, with the most notable exceptions in Frantz Fanon and the Black Panther Party.

Marx’s focus on the contrast between the productivity of the proletariat and the “parasitism” of the lumpenproletariat mirrors capitalist value-production criteria, instead of asking the question of the common condition of the two, and the often blurred borderline between them. To theorize the proletariat as differentiated into workers and lumpenproletarians entails not prioritizing the problem of exploitation over domination or vice versa, but rather seeing these as different ways in which proletarians live their condition: at the extremes some suffer only domination or exploitation directly, but mostly, proletarians are faced with some mix of both. And through the mediation of competition of jobs and state handouts, etc., all proletarians are always indirectly submitted to both, but in an uneven way in which some are relatively privileged over others.

Thus, wage labor is one of many ways in which proletarians try to solve the problem of separation. If the proletarian is a virtual pauper, then in the proletarian condition (to take this word in the sense of the “human condition,” but historicized and negative) the proletariat is stratified into different strategies of dealing with this problem:

In Marx’s analysis the proletariat analysis is not limited to the actively working industrial proletariat, which was so central to trade union, socialist and communist strategy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the proletariat consists, as Engels claimed in 1888, of “the class of modern wage laborers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live,” we must note that this does not imply that they find willing buyers. ³³ The proletariat thus consists both of the employed and the unemployed. If the proletariat and lumpenproletariat are not agglomerations of concrete individuals, but modes of life that individuals slip in and out of according to the need and availability of work or other strategies of survival, the distinctions begin to blur. Yet it is clear that frequent conflicts might arise between these populations, both for moral reasons (e.g. the protestant work ethic) and the negative impact of crime on the everyday lives of working people. ³⁴ What distinguishes the lumpenproletariat from the unemployed is its mode of life, its everyday strategies of hustling, theft, and sex work, a subjectivity or conduct that tends to make it unemployable, whereas the unemployed law-abidingly look for work. Similarly, there are conflicts between the unemployed and the employed, most obviously the downward pressure on wages and conditions exerted by the former, or struggles for job-security by the latter. These groups therefore cannot share the same strategies for dealing with their class condition: the workers reject the “parasitism and crime” of the lumpen. The unemployed compete with each other and press the wages of the employed. Many employed workers struggle against the inclusion in the labor market of new groups of (women, lumpen, migrants, blacks) in order to maintain their position. Finally, those reproducing the labor force – mainly women – are under pressure from the labor force itself, to reproduce it. This is what it means that different parts of the proletariat live the proletarian condition differently. Now it becomes clearer what is at stake in the problem of class formation.

6. Class Formation Through Struggle

Marx distinguished between the forms that subsume classes (the value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form, etc.), and the active process of class-formation in struggle. ³⁵ This distinction recurs in Operaismo’s notion of class composition, which has both a passive and an active form: the composition of the class as workers, and the active effort of composing the elements of the class, autonomously. “The political class composition… is determined by how the ‘objective’ conditions of exploitation are appropriated ‘subjectively’ by the class and directed against those very conditions.” ³⁶ It is here useful to recover a passage from The German Ideology describing active and passive class formation:

The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labor and can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor itself. ³⁷

Individuals are formed as a class, through their subsumption and limitation in the web of necessities of their social condition, but are forming a class through a common struggle. When there is no common struggle, those who could form a class fall back into internal competition or mutual indifference. In the absence of common struggles, the “objective class interests” become abstract slogans compared to the concrete reality of the interests of individual and families to compete with others for scarce resources. This should tell us why attempts to “raise proletarian consciousness” are generally met with derision. To say that people share a common problem to which there is a common solution is an abstract truth, which in itself will convince only very few to compose in common struggle; this requires trust in one another and in the tactics of struggle. A common problem is only a problem if a solution can be imagined; if not, it is simply a condition, a given if troubling fact, which might as well instill cynicism and opportunism. Struggles only emerge where people believe – rationally and affectively – that collective response to a problem is better than or complementary to the ways in which they deal with their condition in their everyday.

The last part of the quote indicates that the problem of the proletarian condition cannot be finally “solved,” but only dissolved, through “the abolition of private property and of labor itself.” Thus, the problem will persist and insists through all attempted solutions, be they individual or collective. This is one of the reasons for the investment of hope in political representatives who might solve the problem, religions that promise otherworldly salvation, and drugs that help you forget the whole mess. This also provides a justification for the projections of communist theory, in as much as it projects a solution that at least rests on the collective self-activity of the believers.

But is important that this communist horizon is not construed as a matter of overcoming and negating particular individual strategies of reproduction, in the sense of raising yourself to the level of universality of the class in the uniformity of its antagonism with capital. Rather, the practical task of class composition – which is necessary for posing the problem of the abolition of the proletarian condition concretely instead of remaining stuck in mutual competition and abstract hope – consists in developing collective strategies of life and survival which either combine, supplement or make superfluous individualized forms of reproduction.

If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favor of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favor of wages. ³⁸

Marx makes this argument, which is clearly orientated by the practice of the English workers, against Proudhon’s theoreticist rejection of workers’ combinations. Proudhon argues against workers’ combinations, for what will they achieve, even if they win wage rises: the capitalist class will push down wages to make up for lost profits, the cost of organizing will itself be higher than what is won, and at the end of the day the workers will still be workers, the masters still masters. While questioning the economic side of Proudhon’s argument, Marx’s focus on the experiences of the Bolton workers suggests that something more, and more important than wages, can be gained from combinations and struggle. ³⁹

However, the problem of the proletarian condition is much wider than any existing or even possible organization of wage labor. In the face of surplus population, trade unions will have their bargaining power undermined by the increasing competition from the un- or underemployed, and some will engage in a loosing battle to lower competition through enhancing the exclusion of some groups, on grounds of race, gender, or citizenship status. W.E.B. Du Bois pointed to this problem, when he wrote about the black working class in the United States:

Theoretically we are a part of the world proletariat in the sense that we are the mainly exploited class of cheap laborers; but practically we are not a part of the white proletariat and are not recognized by that proletariat to any great extent. We are the victims of their physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion and personal hatred; and when in self-defence we seek sheer subsistence we are howled down as “scabs.” ⁴⁰

The problem of proletarian separation can only be tackled in those nodal points where common solutions can be produced, and forms of competition – racialized, gendered, nationalistic, etc., can be undermined. This entails, quite significantly, facing the challenge of thinking the conditions of the composition of those that are not part of a workplace, which in Marx’s writing is quintessentially the problem of the peasants and lumpen-proletarians raised in the 18^th Brumaire.

7. The Material Conditions of Composition

Where the Communist Manifesto, written shortly before the 1848 Revolutions, was a meditation on the historical tendency towards immiseration, proletarian class power and revolution, Marx wrote The 18^th Brumaire in 1852 as a reflection of the failure of that revolution, particularly a failure that was due to the failure of the proletariat to compose with the lumpen and the peasants. ⁴¹ It is useful to return to this text today, when it is clear that the general tendency towards surplus population leaves us with a theory of the difficulty of revolution as much as of its urgency. In it Marx developed a materialist theory of class composition, as a corrective to the general, historicist projections of the Manifesto. The Brumaire is often read as a text in which the problem of class divisions – between proletarians and between the proletariat and its allies – is one of enlightening proletarians about their objective common interest and organizing them, of establishing alliances with the organizations of other classes, and of finding ways to politically represent the unorganized and “unenlightened” residues of the proletariat and other subaltern classes. Thus the question of strategy and force becomes reduced to the question of recomposing the political forces with a view to establishing new class alliances. However, if we look carefully at Marx’s reflections on classes in the text, we see that it is a profound reflection on the relation between classes as constituted categories of people, and the shifting and inherently practical and existential responses to the contingency of proletarian reproduction through which classes crystallize or melt away. Marx’s analysis of the chaos of the revolutionary crisis solely in terms of its political contingency is implicitly but indisputably shaped by presumptions about the question of reproductive contingency.

7.1. The peasantry

The 18th Brumaire conceptualizes the problem of separation in its most radical, most scattered and isolated forms: the small-holding peasants, a mass of semi-proletarians who are largely being undermined by the developing markets in food, taxes, and debts and the lumpenproletariat. Marx’s analysis of the counterrevolutionary section of the lumpenproletariat that was organized by Bonaparte, touches quite profoundly on the question of reproduction. He did not only offer them representation and partial protection, but a temporary solution to their condition of insecurity and poverty: pay, comradeship, and a mission. While the lumpenproletariat secured the dominance of Louis Bonaparte in the Parisian streets, it was the peasantry that elected him in December 1848. Marx asks what it is about peasant life that made them susceptible to electing a leader so alien to them. Unlike the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry does not easily produce or come into contact with more or less organic intellectuals. This gives us the basis of Marx’s often criticized statement that the small-holding peasants are

incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent [vertreten] themselves, they must be represented [vertreten]. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. ⁴²

But what is it in their mode of life that makes the peasants susceptible to this mode of representation, Vertretung? Here we must ask how Bonaparte became an answer to the peasantry’s need for orientation and representation. By understanding this need we understand how it might instead be satisfied by a movement of revolutionary composition. Marx’s inquiry into this problem starts not with the consciousness of the peasants, but with a description of the peasants’ specific mode of life, their problems and the possible solutions:

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’ bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. … Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient… and thus [the peasantry] acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a Department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. ⁴³

Thus the everyday and the mode of (re)production of the peasants separates them from one another, making it hard to constitute any political collectivities. And unlike the isolated urban proletarians who live in close proximity and attend the same workplaces, peasant families live stationary lives with few neighbors. ⁴⁴ Where a discourse that starts from the need of science and ideology would ask: how can the peasants be represented, and how can they be enlightened about the conditions under which they live, an inquiry starting with the way the peasants are living their condition comes up with different results:

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. ⁴⁵

The peasantry lives this common problem, but the very character of the problem itself, as well as the peasants’ limited means of communication and its localized mode of life, means that while it is formed as a class, it cannot form a class. This shows the strictly relational and self-relating character of Marx’s concept of class; the peasants share certain problems (market fluctuations of the prices of their produce, competition, their enslavement to capital through debt), but the ways these are formulated and dealt with are local. ⁴⁶ While this might create or maintain strong bonds of local communities and moral economies, the peasant population as a whole is a mere mass. It does not find the collectivity in which these problems could be articulated as common interests, where the everyday struggles of each peasant family or village could become a common struggle.

The isolation of the small-holding peasants meant that they were lost for the revolution: instead they were united by Bonaparte, a man in whose fame and power these individual peasants found a protector. Their trust in him as their representative was based on the historical memory of their alliance with the old Napoleon. A mass, whether heterogeneous and connected by locale (like the lumpen) or relatively uniform and separated (like the peasantry), is most easily united under a master or master-signifier. However, the isolation also points to the fact that a movement which develops the technical means and organizational forms through which peasants can communicate and link up is one that will abolish the need for a representative and enable the peasantry to represent itself. And indeed most of the successful revolutions and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century – in China most paradigmatically – were to a large extent successful due to the central involvement of peasant, party due to a communist re-appreciation of the peasantry, and due in part to the increased capacity of transportation and communication and thus coordination due to telegraphs, telephones, railways, cars, etc.

While changes in the means of communication and transportation were not a relevant variable in describing a revolutionary and counter revolutionary period of four years, he did consider the becoming revolutionary of the peasantry. Thus, he invested his hopes in the revolutionary organization of the small-holding peasantry on its worsening condition, pointing to the possibility that a change in the character of the peasants’ problem would lead them to seek its representative in the proletariat. In short, Marx did not suggest that the peasants could not be revolutionary:

The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. ⁴⁷

Marx defines revolutionaries as those who aim to abolish the old order, rather than improve their position within it, who opt for a different future rather than a repetition of the past in the present. Further, he notes that the ranks of the revolutionary peasants are likely to swell with the growth of the rural lumpenproletariat, “the five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself” or move back and forth between town and countryside with “their rags and their children,” reminding us of Jan Breman’s contemporary analyzes of the circulation and migration of landless and land-poor labor in South and Southeast Asia. ⁴⁸ As the small-holding peasant class is drawn further into the bourgeois order, the conservative consolidation will become an option for still fewer peasants; in other words, the strategies and modes of living the peasant condition will change as this condition changes. Now, Marx writes (in what was certainly also a strategic intervention in a process of class composition), the interests of the peasants are close to those of the urban proletariat, in which they will find a “natural ally and leader” – while many young lumpen peasants will be lost to the army. ⁴⁹ The terrain of struggle and political class composition also changes – the majority of the peasants no longer find their interests aligned with the bourgeoisie, as under Napoleon, but as turning against it. Thus, while Bonaparte would like to appear as the “patriarchal benefactor of all classes … he cannot give to one class without taking from another,” severely constricting his capacity to unite different classes under his representation. ⁵⁰

Curiously, the proletarian leadership of the peasantry advocated by Marx seems to install it in position of representation of the isolated peasantry, similar to that of the modern Prince Bonaparte, on the one hand, or a certain automatism of them joining the proletariat in the city – instead of the lumpen. It would thus seem that our reading brings us to the very traditional interpretation that Marx – according to the iron logic of his own argument – could only be champion of the industrial proletariat. However, Marx is not hostile to peasants per se, nor does he, as we have seen, present the peasants as necessarily counter-revolutionary. The arguments around their subordination to proletarian leadership mainly relate to the development of the means of communication and combination, i.e. the means of relating and composing in struggle, and of representing themselves. As we see in the case of the petty bourgeoisie, it is the character of their mode of life, its problems and solutions, which keeps them conformist: as their problem is changing, then so will their political orientation. In The Civil War in France, written in 1871, Marx asks: “how could it [the peasants’ earlier loyalty to Bonaparte] have withstood the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry?” The reactionary rural assembly of landowners, officials, rentiers and tradesmen…

knew that three months’ free communication of Communal Paris with the provinces would bring about a general rising of the peasants, and hence their anxiety to establish a police blockade around Paris, so as to stop the spread of the rinderpest. ⁵¹

In the 18th Brumaire Marx was hostile to the lumpenproletariat, skeptical of the peasantry’s revolutionary capacities, and hopeful about the urban proletariat. The whole issue here is to keep in mind that Marx’s reflections, while informed by a structural analysis, are first of all conjunctural. They are focused on the material conditions of combining or allying what is separate around common struggles, and on the invention and construction of new solutions to the problems of the times and of life. Technologies of communication (means of contagion, as it were) and the capacity to overcome or bypass the force of the state are decisive. But first of all, it is a question of aligning and shaping the interests of populations under the pressure of time. In his rebuttal of Bakunin’s critique that he wishes to make the proletariat the master of the peasants, Marx remarks that it is simply an issue of composing interests. With owner-peasants it is a matter of the proletariat doing for them at least what the bourgeoisie is able to, while proletarianized agricultural workers can organize with the proletarians immediately, in as much as there reproductive strategies can be composed. Finally, with respect to the rural workers, the goal is not a mere class alliance, but to effect a reorganization of their reproduction toward communal ownership, without antagonizing the peasants, i.e. without forcibly collectivizing them or removing their rights to the land. ⁵² We here see how Marx understands class composition as a matter of composing different struggles around reproduction, and not of feigning that this difference is simply an illusion hiding their common essence, identity, or problem.

7.2 Composing with the lumpen

To raise the problem of the class composition of the peasantry today and already in Marx’ times, is to discuss the struggles around the risk or actuality of landlessness or landpoverty and debt. Along with the question of surplus populations produced by mechanization (which also happens in industrial agriculture), this leads us towards the problem of the lumpenproletariat, as an extreme, informal condition and mode of survival and death.

Already in the Manifesto Marx and Engels had warned against this group:

The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. ⁵³

In the 18th Brumaire the lumpenprolateriat re-enters as a problematic figure for Marx’s schema of revolution: as a class the lumpen are irrefutably a product of bourgeois society and its dynamics, and a class of radical needs, yet one organized against the 1848 revolution in France.

The February Revolution had cast the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole power. Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat. Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after setting up a hundred different obstacles. There consequently remained but one way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other. ⁵⁴

Thus enter the lumpenproletariat in the narrative of the failure of the revolution, made historically relevant by the 24,000 young men recruited to the Mobile Guard to suppress the revolutionary proletariat. Marx’s scepticism with regards to the lumpenproletariat is a result of his awareness of how the political allegiances of a class are shaped by the ways in which this class reproduces itself. While this did not lead him to suggest that political recomposition can be achieved through recomposition of reproduction, we shall see that such a conclusions can and must be drawn from his writings on the lumpen.

In the 18th Brumaire it would seem that Marx lapses into the organicist idea of parasitism when, invoking the nation, he writes that the lumpen, like their chief Louis Bonaparte, “felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation.” ⁵⁵ However, Marx’s “nation” as a victim appears ironically, in relation to Louis Bonaparte’s own consistent self-representation as the savior of the nation. What Bonaparte and the lumpenproletariat have in common is their character as floating elements in the situation – if Bonaparte eventually becomes the figure uniting contradictory class interests it is precisely because of his apparent elevation above the classes. On the other hand, the lumpenproletariat was exploited exactly as an element that has no stable station or stake in society. For Bonaparte – as for the financial aristocracy – it takes abstractions and money to exploit an unstable situation. A significant example is the case of the young members of the Mobile Guard, who were captivated by their Bonapartist officers’ “rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic.” ⁵⁶ On top of this ideological seduction, it took monetary corruption (1 franc 50 centimes a day) to bring the malleable young lumpenproletarians into the Bonapartist ranks. ⁵⁷ The problem of the lumpenproletariat might not be that they are the paradoxical product of bourgeois society standing in the way of the world-historical revolution, but that their untimely up-rootedness is so contemporary in times where “everything solid melts into air,” that its organization in the revolution requires a wholly different mode of political composition.

It is clear that the counterrevolutionary character of this group of overwhelmingly young and male lumpenproletarians does not allow any general points to be made about the lumpenproletariat as such. Consider Marx’s numbers: 25,000 in the Mobile Guard compared to 4 million “recognised paupers, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes in France” – a large part of whom were women. ⁵⁸ Furthermore, even this particular section enrolled in the Mobile Guard, “capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption,” cannot be said to be counter-revolutionary per se. ⁵⁹ Indeed, while Marx does not suggest any tactics by which the lumpenproletarians can be won for the revolutionary cause, his description of how they became counter-revolutionaries, implies that other ideological articulations and other ways of satisfying their needs could bring them to another cause. Here we have radical needs that are not definable in terms of stable class interests, but as the wavering interests of a heterogeneous group which can compose with whomever can help satisfy their needs and desires, with whomever it can share a slogan, an idea and a meal (just like, we should add, the working-class itself before it is ideologically and organizationally homogenized by the workers movement). From this perspective of needs and the thirst for ideas and conviviality, the problem with the lumpenproletarians for the revolution is no longer that their modes of life are essentially counter-revolutionary, but that they, unlike the workers who are fed by capital, will not be satisfied by slogans, but only by cash pay and food (and a bit of moral license). There therefore is no structural reason why Marx’s strategic orientation couldn’t heed the urgency of Frantz Fanon’s call to organize the (mostly landless, rural) lumpenproletariat, whose alliances are never given in advance, but who will always take part in the conflict: “If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organized by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops.” ⁶⁰ And there is no structural reason – quite the contrary – that communisationists should not look to the practices of the Black Panthers, which started from the question of the armed and legal self-deference of a surplus population against the racist policing of its alternative forms of survival – its hustling and informal economies – and progressed to the implementation of survival programs that would drew tens of thousands to the struggle and powerful municipal election campaigns in Oakland, California. ⁶¹

The willingness of young lumpenproletarians to enlist in the Mobile Guard brings up the question not just of radical needs and their revolutionary potential, but the question of their practical organization around concrete solutions: the problem of all those that cannot or will not work is of an immediate everyday character. The needs of the lumpenproletarian are more immediate than those of the employed, and more non-conformist than those of the unemployed; in the absence of exploitation their modes of life are criminalized, their neighborhoods colonized, in the terms of the Black Panthers, by the police. ⁶² Thus the programmatic demand of an abolition of bourgeois property will be inefficient if it does not address the immediate needs of those that will otherwise sell themselves to the counter-revolution.

The history of the proletariat outside the wage-relation, of the proletarians rendered superfluous to capitalist production (if not necessarily indirectly purposeful as a reserve army) and the proletarians that always were superfluous, is a history of constant attempts to create other modes of reproduction, their victory, co-optation, or suppression. If proletarian self-reproduction against capital – i.e. a reproduction that opens for the self-abolition of the proletariat as proletariat – is to come on the agenda, it is not enough to state that such communization is an invariable revolutionary project of the proletariat (Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic) or a project only possible today, a deepening radical need (Théorie Communiste, Endnotes). ⁶³ To open the historical orientation of communization theory to the practical question of organization, it becomes unavoidable to relate it to ongoing practices of de-proletarianization. To go beyond this we need to see not only possibility and growing existential need, but potentialities which can be – or are striving to be – actualized. To do this is to open for the question of composition, emulation, organization, and contagion, between heterogeneous strategies of reproduction, as they exist or are needed to satisfy the practical situated needs of proletarians in relation to the many different ways they live this condition-problem.

While the reproduction of large sections of the Western European proletariat was mediated by the welfare state, what Balibar calls the “national-social state,” another range of struggles have taken hold, among migrants in Europe and proletarians in the “Global South.” ⁶⁴ Informal work and illegal activities, squatting and land occupations most significantly, but also what Asef Bayat calls quiet encroachments, a popular version of what Italian autonomists called auto-reduction in poor Levantine and North African neighborhoods and slums. ⁶⁵ Even where such activities are carried out on a small group or individual basis, attempts to crack down on those modes of reproduction have often resulted in mass popular resistance as Bayat points out; in short, we can speak of these as emergent moral economies of the proletariat. ⁶⁶ Similarly, the often “individualized” – if highly networked – ways in which migrants move often cohere into common struggles when they are met with a fence. Bayat shows that strategies of quiet encroachment, along with existing organizations of resistance such as workers unions, informal communities around mosques, and the football fan clubs, were all practical conditions for the capacity of the spontaneous uprising to pose the existence of Mubarak’s regime as a practical problem.

What matters are strategies that might build the proletarian capacity to resist and thus to project solutions to its misery, i.e. see it is a problem rather than a fate. Today, the tactics and strategies for dealing with, and abolishing the proletarian condition can thus only be reduced to the questions of the welfare state and trade unions through gross neglect. Furthermore, such strategies that have long been relevant where “development” was always a fiction, will become increasingly important a Europe that is provincializing itself and abolishing welfare rights in bundles. The forms of organization and class composition possible and necessary under conditions of surplus population and the squeeze on proletarian reproduction starts with “survival” programs. If not, the current violent and economic annihilation of the proletarian capacity to resist and combine will prevent any revolutionary crystallization.

8. Conclusion

Starting with the question of proletarian reproduction has several advantages: it immediately connects the macroanalysis of capital with the existential urgency of individual and collective strategies of life and survival. Further, it allows us to avoid positivistic sociologies of class based on the compartmentalization of a population, and economistic definitions of class in terms of economic functions within the division of labor. It allows us to think the structural and existential aspects of class formation together, and to understand how both composition and differentiation are responses to the same problem.

I have argued that the proletarian problem must be defined more broadly than by exploitation. The lumpen, the unemployed, unpaid reproductive workers, and the working class live the same problem-condition – the separation from the means of (re)production. Yet they live it differently, and these differences of daily practices, creates a differentiation of needs and desires, which is profoundly intertwined with processes of gendering, ableism and racialization, etc. The communizationist orientation to the conditions of possibility of communism poses the question of a solution adequate to the generality of this problem: the proletariat becomes the name for all those who ideally share an interest in abolishing this problem. From a spectatorial distance, this approach points out the limitations of existing struggles from the point of view of the capitalist totality, which provides it with a theory of what form such a revolution must necessarily take to be adequate. To intellectuals this is a theory of the logical form and possibility of revolution; to proletarians it is a theory of the inadequacy of their efforts. Merely pointing out the limitation of any one struggle by reference to the epochal radicality of a problem is a recipe for cynicism and indifference. It is not enough to be faced with a common problem; this yields nothing but an understanding of the proletarian condition as a misfortune. Unless there is the development of common tactics and strategies of dealing with concrete problems, the different mutually competing strategies for dealing with it will prevail. Any revolutionary practice must start with solutions that are situationally more convincing or desirable than existing ones. Instead of withdrawing to its own niche in the division of labor out of habit or for fear of violating the purity of struggles, theory, considered as a part of such movements, is the active effort to disseminate strategies of combination and struggle, and of elaborating commons and transversal points of connection between different struggles. Taking seriously the fact that resistances and networks of solidarity preexist irruptions of open struggle means to go beyond the faith in spontaneity. This entails an ethics of militant, embedded research, knowledge production, and popular pedagogy, which proceeds through practices of collectively mapping of the possibilities of composition, and reflections on how to connect and extend networks of trust and solidarity. ⁶⁷ It implies sharing tools of organizing and tactics of struggle, taking measure of the rumors and whispers, and engaging in small struggles in ways that can help them transform fear and mistrust into courage and solidarity.

The problem of the revolutionary organization of proletarian difference is one of inventing common solutions to the common problem of the proletariat, whether lumpen, employed or unemployed. But this must start with a recognition that the strategies of the struggle will differ significantly, according to the many ways the problem is lived and survived. Our task cannot be to search for the equation that will give us the result we want, but to explore the maximal possibilities of abolitions of separations here and now, between us and between us and our means of reproduction – be it through riots and affinity groups, mutual aid and autonomous zones or through taking municipal or state power. All this depends on situated assessments of the possibilities of composition, the state of the enemies and the relations of forces. ⁶⁸ If the struggle proceeds successfully, class-differences will be abolished both gradually and in leaps. Proletarians will be stuck less and less in the mode of life they had developed to deal with a problem of their separation, by abolishing this separation and thus their existence as proletarians. Struggles for de-separation are not merely courageous struggles for love, but also often entail fearful search for security. The affective atmosphere of communism cannot be given except through sensitivity to the micro- and nanopolitical dimensions of any movement. Further, if communism is to be thought again as a real movement we must accept that it cannot be a unitary process, but only the combination of manifold desires and needs of more or less separated proletarians, uniting for selfish reasons, but producing a telos in excess of their selfishness, a transindividual sublation of their individuality. Marx saw this clearly when he participated in the Parisian proletarians’ conviviality. He noted that the means to create communism is communism itself: that is, communism practiced produces itself as a need and an aim in itself. ⁶⁹ Communism is not an abstract Kantian “ideal” nor a plan, nor a universal and global horizon from which to judge all struggles or find hope. Communism, instead, is best described as a possible emergent telos in processes of combination, when they fold back on themselves and become self-reproducing, self-organized and capable of defending themselves. Such deseparation can only be effective when it involves the world of things and begins to abolish property as a form of separation. What is needed for this to happen is not the sustenance of hope, but practics of composition and experimentation with need, desire and possibility. Globality or universality are not terrains of collective action, but levels of theoretical abstraction. The questions of scaling up and universality will remain practically irrelevant until they are posed as concrete questions of the conditions of reproducing, combining and defending real movements.

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Forms of Unfree Labor: Primitive Accumulation, History or Prehistory of Capitalism?

Yann Moulier Boutang

February 1, 2018

The persistence of numerous and recurring exceptions to free wage-labor in the contemporary world leads us to ask about the status of these “exceptions”: are they anachronistic vestiges of a feudal past or “traditional societies,” or are they a mode of the “normal” functioning of a capitalism that is otherwise firmly a part of modernity? ¹ Can we speak of modern slavery? If we are dealing with unfree forms of labor, how can they subsist in a system where “free labor” is dominant? Is primitive accumulation the prehistory of capitalism and thus not part of its proper history, or is it indeed an integral part of “historical capitalism”? It will be noted in passing that in the latter case, it is not sufficient to revert to the word “slavery” without interrogating its status: is it a complete description with explanatory aims, a rigorously constructed metaphor, or a much vaguer approximation?

An initial solution consists in tracing the ensemble (or a part) of these forms back to the history of pre-capitalism: a convenient solution, as it brings in exogenous, extra-economic factors ranging from sociological indicators to the “agential preferences” so dear to the neoclassical economists, but above all force. It has the advantage of acknowledging heterogeneity, but is less satisfactory in terms of logic, leaving more free space of analysis and explanation.

A second response also falls under the category of a value judgement, in being another argument for the idea that the most brutal kinds of exploitation persist in all settings and all periods. With regards to exploitation, there is “nothing new under the sun.” On the other hand, if this solution provides the anthropologist with a certain moral comfort – thus invested in taking a critical distance from theories of human progress through forms of labor and the economy – it possesses a number of intrinsic difficulties. In order to be credible, the argument for the persistence of slavery should avoid the metaphorical use of the term “slave,” which would quickly devalue its scientific worth: slavery needs to be demonstrated, and to do this slavery must be analyzed in its coexistence with free labor, as we will see.

A theory of forms of unfree labor requires a theory of wage-labor. The exception must be understood through its distance from a norm, and as a result it proves necessary to produce a theory of how the two forms interact with each other, in both directions.

We propose to show two things: on the one hand, it shall be argued that so-called “primitive” accumulation of capital takes place in a continuous, or ongoing [continuée] manner; on the other hand, in order to accurately identify the contemporary role of forms of unfree labor, it is necessary to take the same approach as found in my previous work on the constitution of historical wage-labor. ² That is, to think today, at one and the same time, the complementary coexistence of forms of free labor and unfree labor. This means revisiting the history of historical capitalism, including its most contemporary form, in light of the rise of its “classical” tendency towards authoritarian forms of extractive activity. But this also means seeking out the reason for this permanent reintroduction of the worst forms of exploitation, beyond the emphasis – ultimately tautological – on the amorality or amoralism of capitalism. We cannot understand the ferociousness of plantation-based mercantile capitalism in the periphery without taking into account the no less extreme difficulties of the proletarianization and putting to work of the “poor” [les pauvres] in the center. This double movement is indeed valuable for a clear understanding of the emergence, the trajectory, and disappearance of forms of labor that are compatible or incompatible on the same institutional level or the same market.

Our point of departure will be the “scandal” of current forms of unfree labor, in order to move on to those forms of modern slavery and serfdom that are solidly anchored in the rise of capitalism. These “anomalies” raise both the question of “primitive accumulation” and that of the reciprocal and complementary character of systems of unfree and free wage-labor.

Forms of Unfree Dependent Labor: The Contemporary Scandal

Contemporary globalization appears to fundamentally be a relative (sometimes absolute) reduction in the number of workers and wage-earners [salariés] in the fullest sense of the term (in not recognizing self-employed or autonomous laborers as wage-earners, whom legal scholar Alain Supiot calls “para-subordinate workers”). ³ At the same time, we are witnessing in the Global South the incorporation of a considerable part of the active peasant population into wage-labor; Chinese and Indian peasantries make up the primary, but not exclusive, part of this movement of the total growth of the working population. Such a movement seems to follow the description of the birth of European industrial capitalism in Manchester: an intense rural exodus, a clustering of the population in the metropoles, an increasing reduction of the population active in the primary unwaged sector, accompanied by a very high rate of growth. In short, a Rostow-like take-off, marking the irreversible transition from a “traditional” society to a modern society (with the emergence of the individual consumer and “maximizer” dear to microeconomics). ⁴ When viewed from the air, São Paulo, the north zone of Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, the Pearl River Delta in the hinterland of Hong Kong, all illustrate this global “Manchesterization.” If we include the informal sector, which provides services that the public sector does not, then the massive African metropolises of Cairo, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Dakar enter into this descriptive framework.

This reassuring tableau of the evolution of human labor (reassuring since it ought to lead to development) needs to be tempered by several less uplifting facts, oft-neglected in polite indifference by international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The latter stress that the vertiginous rise in social inequality is due not only to a lack of jobs [emplois] in the macroeconomic sense of the term, but to the lack of jobs with the guarantees provided by the International Labour Organization (ILO), working in close cooperation on these issues with the United Nations (UN).

In the general principles contained in its founding charter (the 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia), the ILO goes a long way, since it states in Point I:

(a) labour is not a commodity; (b) freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress; (c) poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere; (d) the war against want requires to be carried on with unrelenting vigour within each nation, and by continuous and concerted international effort.

The ILO’s program was very broad and articulated through a Keynesian and Beveridgean conception of full employment. ⁵ More than a half-century later, in its “Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up,” the ILO insisted more modestly on four points:

(a) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; (b) the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour; (c) the effective abolition of child labour; and (d) the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

It is perhaps surprising that slavery in general or sex slavery (trafficking of women) in particular does not figure prominently among the ILO’s “recommendations.” In fact, after the abolition of slavery in Mauritania, slavery no longer had any legally sanctioned status, except in vestigial forms. On the other hand, the ILO considers the prohibition of slavery and human trafficking as falling under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (thus the traffic in persons is mainly for forced sexual activity). The lapidary (and paradoxical, if we think about its implications with regards to contemporary globalization) first article – “labour is not a commodity” – aims to address this question in a preliminary fashion. This precaution had to be explicitly formulated as much by the French Constitution of 1791 as by the great classical liberal economist John Stuart Mill a half-century later, as well as in the debates around “rental contracts,” a transitional form toward free labor in slave economies. ⁶

This no longer appears to be an issue when the relation of waged employment finds itself qualified by jurists as a relationship of subordination between a clearly defined employer and an employee. This relationship of subordination defines, in turn, a service, its limits, its conditions, its specific period of time, and the social rights that are applicable. Labor bargaining is established as a crime. The globalization of the labor market, which tends to reduce work to a commodity, and the rendering of stable, protected work precarious, naturally poses problems for international labor standards that are careful to avoid situations of forced labor. We touch upon here an inherent difficulty to the question of constraint. There is a real difference between juridical constraint, such as forced labor (colonial corvée labor in Africa, for example), and economic constraint, which pushes the proletarianized peasant, without juridical obligation, to work as a dependent wage-laborer in the plantation economy, as an expatriate “cadet” in Europe – a rather hypocritical difference. The only way to resolve the question is ultimately found in Beveridge’s conception of “full employment.” ⁷ For the inventor of the welfare state, the criterion for full employment is not setting the population to work through economic constraint (which brings back a type of labor very close to legally forced labor) but the fact that the jobs held are “quality” jobs. The quality of these jobs is verified if an unemployed person is willing to move in order to obtain one. For Beveridge, the best guarantee this labor is not forced and is attractive geographically is that it can become the object of a collective contract. The freedom to create unions and the right of association for workers are thus the conditions for unforced forms of employment.

The question of human trafficking in connection with the sex trade might also appear to be a significant oversight in the ILO’s programs. Although it is not possible to precisely analyze its extent, prostitution represents one of the principal sources of revenue for organized crime. While persons who make a living in the sex trade selling their own body have begun to claim, throughout the world, to be recognized as “workers” in one of the most important services worldwide (the tourist industry and services) and to benefit from the same rights as workers in other sectors of economic activity, international organizations have been very reluctant to take this step. There have been some developments, but they depend in large part on the demands that are being raised. International organizations have approached sexual tourism under the auspices of the sexual abuse of minors and violence against persons.

The question of force in the case of adult prostitution is on the other hand quite ambivalent. Certain national laws target pimping, that is, the real employers of prostitutes, as well as the organized crime which supports the traffic of this particular line of work; but it is often difficult to prove physical force. The principle of having “control over one’s own body,” although important for women’s liberation in matters of contraception, limits efforts towards legislative action, and can prove that the road to hell is “paved with good intentions.” And while casual prostitution, tied to poor living conditions or poverty and often in the aftermath of civil war, is an activity necessitated by the need to survive, it does not fall under “forced labor.”

It would thus take a trial, too easy in our understanding, to denounce the blindspots of international organizations on the issue of slavery in the strict sense of the term or on the issue of sexual slavery. Especially as concerns labor and health issues, these organizations can only act with the full consent of members states and provide recommendations, not rules that would apply directly in a supranational fashion. An extremely powerful consensus of public opinion, under the auspices of crimes against humanity, was required in order to apply coercive measures to states, through the creation – and not without resistance from United States – of an international penal tribunal capable of indicting the leaders of sovereign states. The legal restrictions against sex tourism were accepted by states because of the pressure exerted by NGOs.

As an alternative, it seems more pertinent to bring out other limits of the ILO’s definition of free labor that are exhibiting a growing importance today.

The first limit is conceptual and methodological. Although certain principles affirmed in the Declaration of Philadelphia (the right to a basic income, child welfare, and maternity protection: in short, “basic needs”) largely go beyond the sphere of dependent wage-labor, questions of domestic labor, sexual services, and childcare are not taken into account as constraining factors on activity. ⁸ However, this element is increasingly understood by feminist scholarship as being responsible for the persistence of employment discrimination, wage discrimination, and professional discrimination in the more developed countries. It is plausible to suppose that this also plays an important role in developing countries.

The second limit concerns the ILO’s almost exclusive focus on dependent wage-labor, which ends up leaving to the side forms of “autonomous, independent, or semi-dependent labor,” as much in the North as in the South. An important aspect of forced or confined labor in these forms involves – and in contradiction with the principles of the ILO – formally independent actors who exploit themselves, that is, they must give up the benefits which today come with wage-labor recognized as such. A significant proportion of live-in caregivers in agriculture, services, and micro-enterprises are managed by these “independents.” it should be borne in mind that the range of situations taken into account by defined ILO standards is far from complete.

That being said, by focusing only on aspects of unfree labor mentioned in the 1998 ILO declaration, the emphasis is restricted to the widespread persistence of forms of domestic servitude, sexual abuse, and the recruitment of minors in countries particularly devastated by civil wars and ethnic killings (particularly Sudan). Supposedly free labor to repay debts, which is very extensive throughout the Indian subcontinent (a good 50 million people), should be included. In the latter case, the person remains formally free: they sign contracts of employment for the amount of time necessary to pay back the debt, but find themselves to be subjected to essentially a corvée, in the Medieval and not metaphorical sense of the term, since this obligation to work for the creditor is a substitute penalty for the debtor having defaulted on payment – the penal offense would entail imprisonment, and thus the deprivation of liberty. The cancellation of debt during Indian decolonization in 1947, and subsequent recurring experiments, have served no purpose, as debt mechanisms are reinstalled. Authors including Charles Gibson and A.J. Bauer have argued, apropos of the enganche system (a form of labor in which one was “hooked” to a debt contractor), that individuals chose to enter these relations of subjection, since they offered social protection and security, or a social and cultural environment, which free market relations could not do to the same degree. ⁹

Germane to this directly forced labor is the issue of child labor; which, according to some estimates, affects 246 million children around the globe. ¹⁰ As for coercive [contraignant] contract labor not involving forms of personal slavery, because the individual and/or their dependents (infants, spouses) remained confined to less valued social tasks under the effect of an institutional or social discrimination (the burakumin in Japan, the Dalits in India, the Copts in Egypt) or work and residency regulations (foreign migrants in countries with migrant labor, as opposed to population migrations), it comprises a substantial percentage of the global workforce: it suffices to think about how the current prosperity in coastal China depends on a system of internal passports, which deprives access to social rights (social security, schooling, housing, retirement) for those in the rural villages (even if they are in the process of being totally undermined) who migrate to the cities unauthorized. ¹¹ As in the USSR of old, China has its “undocumented” [sans-papiers]. They number over 100 million, a considerable order of magnitude (recall that the active population of France is 23 million). It’s also impossible to ignore the work of migrants deemed to be in “irregular situations,” according to the terminology of the states where they reside, while the International Labour Office (the permanent secretariat of the ILO) classes contract work of foreign laborers as irregular because it overrides the principle of the right to work. ¹² Of the 140 million international migrants in the world, a good 50 million find themselves in situations of legal subordination on the labor market. Foreign workers in the United States who do not possess green cards or J-1 permits, and who participate in programs of temporary seasonal work, obviously should also be placed under this rubric.

Finally, if we account for the work of women who are compelled to do different types of work (independently of domestic labor) through traditional social structures (and of which the waged or paid portion only comprises a small part), we can estimate that around 500 million people in the world are working on behalf of others (dependent labor) but do not perform free wage-labor, abstracting from, or leaving to the side, the domestic labor of women.

It does not appear that situation will improve any time soon – a matter for concern. The so-called countries of immigrants (specifically Australia and the United States) are severely restricting or tightening their legislation, which have started to resemble the policies of European countries; while in Africa, Asia, Central and Latin America, all the way to the archipelagos in Oceania where there is a significant degree of permeability across borders, states are in the process of strengthening manifestations of “national” sovereignty and transposing them onto the labor market under the effects of foreign and civil wars. We might recall the brutal expulsions of immigrant workers from Libya and Nigeria. Recently, in Côte d’Ivoire, populations that have settled and been active in the country for several decades have come to be brutally regarded as foreigners or undesirables, and prohibited from both paid and independent activities. This element has added to the “classical” migratory pressure feeding real, bare-handed attempts to cross the many electric barriers across fortress Europe, whether they are on the official border or displaced even further to neighboring countries, or to candidates for entry into the European Union or some privileged partner. ¹³

De facto slavery, peonage, contract work in order to pay off a debt incurred to cross borders which are more and more costly to broach, work whose geographic, social, and professional mobility is hampered, bridled by many, broadly institutional, mechanisms which form a large part of state interventions – such is the full tableau of the global labor market, which does not resemble a linear absorption of a reserve or a rural workforce into canonical wage-labor [le salariat canonique]. ¹⁴ At this level, there is no difference between the “undocumented” across the entire world: the policies of several legal systems are semi-interchangeable in their mechanisms and applications from one side of the planet to the other.

In this sense, the dependent laborer’s struggle to win the basic liberty to freely sell their mere capacity to work to the highest bidder, as a wage-earner benefiting from the “normal” right to work without being subjected to the “special regime” reserved for foreigners, still has many days ahead of it. The freedom of residence is recognized in only a small number of countries that have generally been founded through European colonization, even if the Helsinki Accords (1977) paradoxically recognized the right to emigrate. Paradoxically, because the corresponding right to immigrate is the subject of one fraught international convention, the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and only provides for an obligation to take in or admit those who can prove they have been persecuted.

This dismal situation is not an accident of history, nor a recent incongruity. If we turn to the immediate past, or even further back, we are forced to make the same conclusion. The system of engagés and white indentured servants in the first European colonies in the New World, then the Asian coolies or “contract laborers in the Atlantic and Pacific economies, laborers in the ‘colonial corvée’ in Africa, these are the real, direct ancestors of the migrants under contract in Western Europe.” ¹⁵

But it is clearly the modern system of slavery and serfdom that constitutes the most complete example of unfree dependent labor.

The Scandal of Slavery and Modern Forms of Serfdom

Following the works of Eric Williams, Andre Gunder Frank, Eugene Genovese, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Immanuel Wallerstein, Sidney Mintz, and Jacob Gorender on the one hand, and those of Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman and Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, on the other, we now recognize the central role of the plantation economy in the rise of modern capitalism, which presupposes the birth of the absolutist modern state and mercantilist manufacturing in the 17th century just as much as the great English “factory” at the transition from the 18th to 19th centuries. ¹⁶ But what is less emphasized is the extraordinary persistence of slavery and serfdom within “liberal” capitalism all throughout the 19th century. ¹⁷ If we adopt the restrictive definition of capitalism, as only really emerging in the years between 1750–1780 (the Industrial Revolution and Parliamentary “enclosures”), then in the two and a half centuries of capitalism (1750–2000), we have to account for the 90 to 140 years of the persistence of slavery and serfdom as global and distinct legal systems in the central links of the world-economy. It was only abolished in 1836 for the United Kingdom and its empire, 1848 for France, but 1861 for Russia, 1865 for the United States, 1888 for Brazil and 1889 for Cuba, and 1907 for Zanzibar, one of the oldest sites of the Middle Eastern, then Portuguese, slave trade. For a survival of the pre-capitalist past (feudalism, or Oriental despotism, or traditional society according to the terminology), this is a very large remainder to explain. Whoever seeks to outline the dynamics of capitalism between 1917 and 1991 cannot abstract from communist socialism; mutatis mutandis, the enclave of slavery holds equal weight for liberal capitalism from 1780 to 1890.

The profits accumulated via the plantation economy prior to the Industrial Revolution and the formation of a wage-labor force [salariat] imprudently attached to it are no longer singular issues. Nor is the merchants’ and head planters’ training in the method of making “a large number of men work under one roof” – Marx’s definition of manufacture – through “brigades” enlisting women and children.

Coffee, sugar, indigo, tea, oil, minerals, mahogany, and ebony were produced throughout the liberal industrial age by unfree labor. We can factor in coolie labor, defined as a quasi-slavery, and which from 1820 to 1924 was used to start Californian agriculture, the extraction of gold, and maritime transport. However, migrant populations that were transformed into foreigners by the apartheid system, and found in the compounds of South Africa, have extracted gold and diamonds for half the planet.

To cap this demonstration, let us turn to the socialist world, presented as an alternative to liberal capitalism beginning in 1917. Its rapid industrialization features the exact same dual aspects: on the one hand, wage-earners benefiting from certain advantages (guaranteed employment, the indirect wage), and thus a form of wage-labor with its limitations or constraints partially ameliorated; and on the other hand, tens of millions of forced workers in labor camps, which were slow extermination camps but also real public works enterprises, mines.

These two sinister examples of the persistence of forms of unfree labor in the recent present and the multi-faceted past of capitalist modernity requires us to reexamine the question of primitive accumulation.

Primitive Accumulation Revisited

In the very short chapter devoted to the genesis of capitalist relations (“The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”) in the first volume of Capital, Marx writes:

But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation (the “previous accumulation” of Adam Smith) which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure. ¹⁸

Marx resolutely discards the false explanation of initial wealth, Quesnay’s avance primitive, which made it possible to modestly cloak its origins, or indeed to impute it to a series of plunders of all types (from the pillage of Aztec and Incan riches, to the genocide of indigenous people) that are external to capitalism. Capitalism’s functioning would thus not be contaminated by this ghastly factor, as an economy that claims to be neutral or unconcerned with what it calls the “formation of agential preference.”

Under capitalism proper, “the silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” Political violence provides, then, the initial drive without which the historical development of capitalism would never have been set in motion, but it becomes invisible (Marxists) or superfluous (neo-classical economists). Marx rejects the explanation that begins with money, because a pile of gold or cash only becomes capital when it confronts, as part of the means of production (that is, the condition of labor), labor stripped of the means of production, which becomes the condition of capital (with the potential for surplus-value). Otherwise, this money ends up as rent or income, but not capital. This is the class relation (of two antagonistic classes) that transforms money into capital.

Yet the problem of the origins of capitalism still remains, and on two levels. First there is the problem of origins or, if one prefers, the odor of the money that must be there in order to become capital. In the encounter between the proletarian and the money-owner, where does the latter’s money come from? Of course, money does not have an odor or smell. The profits from the slave trade and the interests paid to the traders from Nantes, Bordeaux, Le Havre, or Liverpool by the almost-always indebted planters, as Eric Williams has shown, would constitute the starting capital, without which it would have been impossible to transform the English poor into the proletariat in the Midlands factories. With this, the surplus extracted from the sweat and blood of slaves, like the sugar they produced, is indispensable to proletarianization. ¹⁹ The origin of capitalism is as troubled as the foundation of dynasties in Shakespeare’s tragedies – a history full of violence and fury: “In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” ²⁰ Capitalism is not Robinson Crusoe on his island, miraculously receiving all the tools necessary for his “civilized” survival. A considerable amount of wealth is required to put the poor to work, whether it is the merchant’s money or, more likely, the money accumulated by the modern state in protecting its fleets from pirates in the Caribbean, which finances the garrisons. Hence the question that torments the origins of capitalism with the Industrial Revolution: was there not a mechanism for explaining initial wealth, merchant capitalism for example? In this case, we are already in capitalism, before having entered it. The other solution is to presuppose a form of production that is no longer feudal but not yet capitalism: simple commodity production. What is inconvenient about this last solution is that it would never accumulate a sufficient amount of money [écus] prior to capital.

Let’s leave this difficulty to the side for a moment. Any founding of city or regime depends on an initial violence, which the discourse of legitimacy seeks to hide. But when Marx looks to understand primitive accumulation, he searches for a “historically determined” reason for the intrinsic logic of the system. He then advances the following explanation: for the capitalist relation to be established, there must be violence, because the valorization of money and its transformation into capital functions all the better if the separation is deepened, and thus the proletariat appears in all its dimensions. And this logic is not Hegelian in the slightest; nothing engenders itself without pain.

Primitive accumulation is doubtless the accumulation of the proletariat. But we have only displaced the difficulty. For the primitive accumulation of the proletariat poses a further problem. In saying that this is not an easy process for capitalism, and that it must deploy the entire power of the state – for example, the English army chasing off the Irish tenants during the “enclosures,” leads us to a new difficulty: does proletarianization happen once and for all? In this case, after an initial dose of violence intended to proletarianize the landholding peasants and expel them, move them by force, capitalism would return to softer, more economic methods which hide this initial coup de force.

But let’s propose another hypothesis, at least as plausible as the first, presupposing that proletarianization must – just as capital must start from money which is not capital – start from reality. This reality covers the free poor in the center of the world-economy and the slaves or serfs in the periphery who are not part of the proletariat or working class; let’s put forth the hypothesis that this proletarianization, as a deprivation of liberty, must be reproduced on an expanded scale, then violence is no longer necessary once, but it is necessary to guarantee the maintain capitalism in a continuous fashion. And primitive accumulation becomes the continuous accumulation of the process of ongoing proletarianization. It is a matter of continuous creation, to use Descartes’s language.

The text of chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” seems to point in the same direction we are indicating:

The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as “primitive” because it forms the pre-history of capital, and of the mode of production corresponding to capital. ²¹

Marx certainly provides us with a model of this pacification of the capitalist relation, or more exactly, this reduction in forms of exogenous violence to the sole functioning of economic mechanisms, when he analyzes the passage from absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value. This pacification takes on a specific role under capitalism: it assures a regular supply of labor-power, whose savage and unlimited exploitation threatens reproduction. The general interest of capitalism, usually correctly interpreted by the state (including the liberal state), thus prevails over the interests of individual capitalists. But the consideration of this need to secure the reproduction of the working class comes at a cost: a slow but steady rise of the transfer costs in the wage-earner’s income. Can we say that the violence of primitive accumulation is blunted because of the mechanism of the globalization and socialization of exploitation? The problem or trouble for our purposes is that the passage from absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value is produced within the fully deployed capitalist relation. Capitalism is already entirely present, fully equipped – the proletariat too – since the passage to relative surplus-value works or operates in step with the working class’s struggle over the limiting the length of the working day.

If we stick to the tautological definition of the capitalist mode of production and surplus-value, which holds that only the presence of free wage-labor makes it possible to talk about the capitalist mode of production and surplus-value, we have a capitalist mode of production that is able to be recognized, isolated, and dated in space and time in the same way as Parmenides’s argument for the univocity of the One, but just as unusable and immobile as the latter. Historical primitive accumulation becomes the prehistory of capitalism. It is not part of its internal history. It is not part of the class struggle (this exclusion will have a significant impact on the way in which the workers’ movement in the core considered the struggles of the poor [pauvres] and modern slaves).

There is nothing to see in modern slavery and forms of serfdom beyond non-capitalist modes of production (feudalism, Oriental despotism, primitive communism). Capitalism indeed has origins, but its beginnings hold an air of mystery, like the Hegelian passage from quantity to quality, or some kind of anti-Hegelian and Althusserian overdetermination. This explanation of capitalism appears weak when it is a question of discovering the real mechanisms of the historical genesis of the system of capitalist production. New difficulties are generated when it is a question of explaining the coexistence of forms of unfree dependent labor all throughout the expansion of capitalism across the globe. And yet we still impute the force and stamina of slavery in the sugarcane fields of Cuba, the coffee plantations of Brazil, and the cotton fields of the United States between 1790 and 1860 to the remnants of feudalism and transformations of the world market (a very high demand resulting from industrial and wage transformations in the core of the system); but do we resort to the same explanation for debt slavery in contemporary agriculture in Peru or India? ²²

Dale Tomich, on the basis of his study of the transformations in slavery after 1791 (the Haitian Revolution) in Martinique and then Cuba, accurately poses the underlying theoretical problem. ²³ Starting from the important controversy pitting Robert Brenner against Immanuel Wallerstein, he focuses on the impasse orthodox Marxism encounters in its response to the question of the nature of slavery within accumulation, which only repeats the vicious cycle Marx sought to escape. ²⁴ He clearly takes Wallerstein’s side in his global and systematic approach, whose central argument seems to hold to the principle that, through the circulation of money and commodity flows, and through the world market, the core of the capitalist system comes to extract surplus-value, including forms of unfree dependent labor, without the prior establishment of the canonical wage relation. This is what we have tried to show, on our part, in our work on slavery and the genesis of wage-labor. The creation of the incredibly complex institutional form of the fixed-length labor contract and wage-labor is not a formal precondition for the extraction of surplus-value, but the historical product of a struggle by dependent labor to win its freedom, and thus a social invention. ²⁵

Nevertheless, Tomich correctly emphasizes that Wallerstein’s initial impulse can lead to an “economism” and a “structuralism” detrimental to a careful empirical analysis of the terrain. The conflictual dimension and the institutional outcome – always specific – of the configurations of the primitive accumulation of the working class are at risk of dissolving into a reductive and homogeneous perspective. Isn’t it necessary to pose as a guiding methodological principle for historical and economic research that what took place in the “enclave of slavery,” or more broadly in systems dependent upon particular or “anomalous” forms of labor, as well as their evolutions, is not independent of: (a) internal forces (what we can call the governance of a system of slavery); (b) the internal dynamism of the system of free labor which is coexistent either at the global level or in the same territory; (c) the interactive effects produced between the two systems?

We have tried to show, for example, that the progressive enslavement of black people in Virginia and other North American colonies between 1620 and 1690 is inseparable from the extreme penury of the workforce in the plantations due to the escape from and rupture with the contract labor of whites (indentured servants) and blacks; that the system of contracting the workforce from the metropoles resulted in a policy of differential treatment between two types of labor; that the flight of slaves who sought to regain their freedom, specifically by demographic breach [brèche démographique] (sexual relationships and interracial marriages), led to the establishment of segregation. This segregation developed into actual apartheid (in Haiti, in North America, in South Africa at different moments) when the proportion of the black enslaved population arriving from Africa became overwhelming. ²⁶

In the case of contemporary international labor migration – like slavery, like coolie labor – the most productive methodological hypothesis is not that which considers the different forms of dependent labor (free/unfree, semi-free or bridled) as directly substitutable, but which locates how they are complementary. ²⁷ More broadly, it’s obviously necessary to think, at one and the same time, the failure to fix and put to work a proletariat at the core of the world-economy – this problem thus takes the form of the question of the poor – and the dazzling growth of the plantation economy. Colonial slavery and serfdom in Western Europe does not constitute the primitive accumulation of the proletariat (which already exists) but the working class.

We shall try to illustrate this method of treating the juridical heterogeneity of dependent labor by returning now to Marx’s description of continuous and expanded accumulation of the proletariat.

Proletarianization and Dependent Labor: A Complex, Nonlinear Process

On close examination, this relation which transforms dependent labor into a condition of capital presupposes a triple separation (Trenung): 1) the separation of the individual or productive unit from the means of production. This feature is generally held as a characteristic of “proletarianization,” and conforms to the definition of the pauvre given by Jean-Pierre Camus, the bishop of Besançon, in his Traité de la pauvreté evangelique (1634): “He alone is truly poor who has no other means of living other than his labour or industry, whether mind or body.” ²⁸ Since the 17th century, to be poor is to have no other means of living other than intellectual or physical faculties. The definitional precision of this passage is admirable, as it also includes the proletariat under intellectual labor, and does not fall back into the opposition between mental and manual labor. But there is another separation that plays a determinant role in the proletarianization: the separation of the individual or unit of production (family, community) from the product, which largely governs access to the market. This access breaks down into the right to sell the product of one’s labor on the market; or indeed into the simple tolerance and finally outright ban on selling the product. The very notion of the product of labor depends on this possibility. When the individual or group is denied the right and practical possibility to access the market where it can sell their activity or the product of this activity, they see the margins of freedom reduced. Regimes of slavery, serfdom, peasant production, and combined wage-labor (with another activity) are attenuated when this right is obtained, whether de jure or de facto. This is not a matter of property rights over a good or service, but the right to trade freely. One of the most historically common methods of limiting the individual to sell his or herself as a mere dependent laborer (free or not) is to forbid them from engaging in any other forms of commerce. This is why every diminished regime of dependent labor includes the right to land, money-holding, and the freedom to trade. Simple commodity production is highly dependent upon it.

We now come to the third form of separation observable in proletarianization: the separation of the mental or physical activity from the person of which it is the bearer or support (Träger, says Marx). This is what allows wage-labor to appear to be the hiring of services or capacities, as not the purchase of a person as in slavery or servitude (the latter two being described in the Code du travail as illegal subcontracting [délit de marchandage]).

Each of these conditions is open to variation, however. The separation of the worker from the means of production might concern the earth, housing, tools, or machines. A squatter who makes de facto use of a dwelling, whether it be the “allotment slave” [l’esclave mansé] (with relative autonomy and could own small plots of land), the English cottager, the maroon in the Antilles, the favelado in the middle of the city, is not in the same condition of proletarianization as Jean-Pierre Camus’s pauvre in the 17th century, the homeless [le sans domicile fixe], or the wage-earning tenant. ²⁹

The separation from the market might be formal (the slave under the harshest regime of slavery who neither has the right to hold money, nor goods of any kind, nor products cultivated or produced by him). The slaves or peasants in socialist regimes who can cultivate their own land and/or sell and trade their product on a market are less constrained than those who cannot. The wage-earner in a highly developed capitalist economy will be in a very different situation according to whether the co-product of his activity (co-product because it most often involves a joint production with an extremely complex machinery; if he were alone, he would not produce anything directly sellable on a market or requires a go-between which can be in his hands, at his disposal, or rather in the hands of the employer. This question is quite tricky in the case of the putting out system, where the merchant is a position of strength vis-a-vis the manufacturer, not because he directly controls the labor process, but because he is in a monopsony position.

To add to the complexity, we can note that the third clause, that of the separation between labor-power and the person (only the first being the object of the purchase/sale transaction) is not the necessary and sufficient condition for the commodification of labor. Put otherwise: in order for there to be a labor market, it is not essential for the bearer of the activity to be free in both de jure and de facto terms. There exists a market of unfree, even semi-free labor (indentured servants, temporary slaves). The existence of such a market can be confirmed by empirical facts, on the one hand (commercial registers), and laws of functioning that even W. Stanley Jevons would not have disavowed, on the other: specifically, through the formation of the supply and demand of this particular commodity, in a separate fashion, through their confrontation, through the mechanism of price variation correlative to a variation of available quantities, and even of very sophisticated overall valuation mechanisms. We might even say that the labor market for slaves, indentured servants, in short, forms of unfree labor (workers under peonage, or workers tied to their employers through debt bondage) resembles more what economists and merchants have historically called a market than the very paradoxical market of free wage-labor. The existence of a free labor market does not necessarily imply that what is bought and sold there is free. ³⁰ This is a methodologically fundamental distinction when we examine the forms the labor market takes today. The fact that the latter present fluid and adjustive characteristics makes it difficult for us to infer from them a progressive tendency in workers’ freedom.

The specificity of the labor-power commodity, which Marx so brilliantly analyzed, is the indeterminate character of its later use-value once the initial exchange is concluded, because it is within the power of the laborer to vary its implementation via machinery. But this also applies to the slave, as well as all the forms of unfree dependent labor, once the master implements a labor process in which the dependent laborer comprises a part of the conditions of work.

Proletarianization, de-proletarianization, and re-proletarianization thus appear as the first, ongoing challenges in the class struggle. The juridical form of the money/labor transaction is not an empty form which would lay the framework for a wage-earner’s struggle over quantities and prices. The wage-earner’s struggle over prices and quantities is only one aspect of what is at stake. The market of rights and freedoms is doubtless more important in its consequences on the social costs of the functioning of capitalism. Robert Castel and Claudine Haroche have retraced the genesis of the movement of de-proletarianization and partial decommodification of the wage relation in the market order, when republican theorists of reform established the worker as possessing social rights in order to struggle against a proletarianization whose revolutionary and destabilizing effects they measured. ³¹

A fourth category should be added to the degrees of “radical” proletarianization: the dispossession of political, civil, and personal rights. We have set up the inventory of rights which are paths towards freedom in both slavery and other forms of historical serfdom. ³²

But does not the segmentation of the contemporary market display an equal complexity in the regulation of international migrants through different regimes of work cards, travel visas, and employment access?

Through a general grid that can serve as an inventory for the degrees of freedom of dependent labor, it is easy to see that this fourfold order of conditions, often reduced too quickly to the privation of the means of production, opens onto a number of significant conditions. The table below provides a good illustration of this by restricting the column of rights to only the personal freedom of the dependent laborer. ³³

Table: The Four Dimensions of Proletarianization

Category of Dependent Labor	Separation from the Means of Production	Separation of the Product from the Market	Separation of Labor-Power from the Person	Freedom of the Bearer [Träger] of Labor-Power
Unfree Simple Commodity Producer	No	No	No	No
Free Simple Commodity Producer	No	No	No	Yes
Full Serfdom	No	Yes	No	No
Attenuated Serfdom	No	Yes	No	Yes
Modern Slavery	No	Yes	Yes	No
Enfranchised, Squatter	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Attenuated Slavery	Yes	No	No	No
Squatter	Yes	No	No	Yes
Unfree Indebted Artisan	Yes	No	Yes	No
Free Indebted Artisan	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Unfree Wage-Earner	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Free Wage-Earner	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The last section of this table might suggest that free wage-labor is the culmination of a process of proletarianization carried through to its end. Stripped of all the instruments of labor, deprived of all direct access to market of producers except for that of their own labor-power, split between their capacity to work and status as a person free to sell themselves to the highest offer, the wage-earner would be capitalism’s final word. This conclusion would be mistaken. Those who make the argument for “limited proletarianization” [prolétarisation restreinte], in line with our empirical observations on the hybrid and impure situations of proletarianization, have inferred that capitalism retreats before the consequences of a generalized expansion of wage-labor [salarisation]. Proletarianization can never come to an end, and this trait would be an indicator of underdevelopment. For our part, we tend rather to follow Sidney Mintz’s approach to the “peasant breach” by understanding the ensemble of forms of dependent labor. ³⁴ The path towards freedom constantly runs counter to the logic of capitalist proletarianization and often charts a trajectory that deviates from the expected trajectory of a “pure” proletarianization. ³⁵ This contradictory proletarianization is largely consolidated, at the center of the capitalist world-economy, through the construction of a wage-earner who becomes the “owner” of social rights, while access to certain goods (housing, patrimony, human capital) limits the classical modes of managing wage-labor and the middle classes. The precarization of the labor market (especially the attacks on the canonical model of the indefinite employment contract) and the involvement of a significant percentage of households in a patrimonial governance of the financial assets of the economy reflect an attempt to combat this transformation. ³⁶

Along with dependent labor, forms of unfree labor are part of the overall economic picture of the ensemble of capitalist relations.

– Translated by Patrick King

This text was originally published as “Formes de travail non libre: “Accumulation primitive. préhistoire ou histoire continuée du capitalisme?” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 45, no. 179/180 (2005): 1069–1092.

Mengenal Kenikmatan Kopi Sumatera, Kopi Terbaik Dunia

Indonesia merupakan salah satu negara pengekspor kopi terbesar di dunia. Ada banyak sekali jenis kopi yang tumbuh di indonesia. Salah satunya adalah kopi yang berasal dari sumatera. Bagi peminat kopi, pasti tidak asing dengan nama kopi sumatera. Ini. untuk lebih jelasnya kita akan membahas semua tentang kopi asli sumatera.

Apa Itu Kopi Sumatera

Seperti namanya kopi ini berasal dari sumatera utara. Memiliki cita rasa yang komplek dan berat. Selain itu teksturnya lebih halus dibandingkan jenis kopi lain di dunia. Proses pengelolaannya bisa memakai cara semi washed atau dry processed. Untuk jenis kopi yang tumbuh di pesisir selatan sumatera, dikenal dengan nama kopi lintong. Untuk yang tumbuh di bagian barat. Dikenal dengan kopi gayo dan masih banyak jenis kopi yang berasal dari sumatera lainnya.

Sebagian kopi yang berkualitas di indonesia memang berasal dari sumatera. Kopinya memiliki kekhasan tersendiri. Bahkan di daerah lampung, satu tahun bisa menghasilkan lebih dari 1,5 ton kopi per hektarnya. Masih banyak kebun kopi di sumatera. Sehingga setiap tahunnya selalu dihasilkan kopi yang banyak.

Asal Mula Kopi Sumatera

Kopi sumatera tidak hanya dikenal oleh masyarakat indonesia saja. Bahkan ke popularan kopi ini sampai ke penikmat kopi di luar negeri. Bahkan di amerika serikat, kopi dari sumatera ini laris manis. Asal mula kopi sumatera ini sudah ditanam sejak zaman dulu. Dikembangkan oleh petani lokal, sehingga menghasilkan kopi yang berkualitas dengan tekstur yang enak. Ada kopi lampung, kopi sidakalang, kopi aceh, kopi gayo dan masih banyak lainnya.

Manfaat Kopi Sumatera

Ternyata konsumsi kopi juga memiliki banyak manfaat. Tak hanya untuk mengatasi rasa kantuk saja. Berikut ini manfaat kopi sumatera yang harus anda ketahui:

Bisa meningkatkan memori

Kafein yang ada di kopi ternyata bisa meningkatkan memory. Penyakit alzheimer dan dementia merupakan penyakit yang berhubungan dengan memory. Menurut sebuah penelitian, dengan konsumsi dua gelas kopi setiap harinya. Dapat membantu ingatan lebih lama. Sehingga bisa mencegah terkena penyakit alzaimer atau dementia.

Mencegah Kanker

Konsumsi kopi setiap harinya, ternyata bisa mencegah terkena penyakit kanker endrometrium. Hal ini dikarenakan kandungan didalam kopi bisa menjaga kandungan hormon estrogen dan insulin didalam tubuh. Selain itu kopi mengandung antioksidan yang sangat tinggi. Sehingga perkembangan sel kanker akan terhambat. Untuk pemilik maag, lebih baik batasi konsumsi kopi.

Mencegah Penuaan Dini

Tidak ingin cepat tua dan keriput, cobalah untuk konsumsi kopi sumatera secara rutin. Kopi mengandung antioksidan, sehingga bisa menghilangkan racun didalam tubuh dari radikal bebas. Ini akan membuat sel beregenerasi dengan baik. Akhirnya keriput hilang dan penuaan dini tidak terjadi. Kulit menjadi lebih bersih dan sehat.

Meningkatkan Metabolisme Tubuh

Jika anda ingin menurunkan berat badan dan membakar lemak, konsumsi kopi bisa membantu. Supaya pembakaran lemak efektif, anda harus meningkatkan sistem metabolisme terlebih dahulu. Olahraga termasuk cara untuk meningkatkan sistem metabolisme. Tetapi konsumsi kopi juga bisa membantu meningkatkan sistem metabolisme tubuh. Kandungan kafein didalam kopi ternyata bisa meningkatkan metabolisme, sehingga lemak cepat terbakar.

Jenis-Jenis Kopi Sumatera

Setelah mempelajari tentang apa itu, asal usul dan manfaat dari kopi asal sumatera ini. Kita akan membahas lebih jauh tentang jenis kopi sumatera yang banyak sekali. Berikut ini penjelasannya.

Kopi Sidakalang

Kopi sidakalang tumbuh di daerah sumatera utara. Memiliki rasa dan aroma yang khas. Daerah ini berada di pegunungan, membuat pohon kopi bisa tumbuh dengan subur. Lokasinya dekat dengan bukit barisan. Memiliki ketinggian sekitar 1300-145- mdpl. Kadar bitterness dari kopi sidakalang cukup instens dan tinggi. Sehingga agak pahit rasanya. Proses pengelolaan dengan cara giling basah.

Kopi Lintong

Namoura Lintong Arabika

Kopi lintong pertama kali masuk ke Sumatera pada tahun 1988, dibawah oleh kolonial belanda. Pertama kali ditanam di daerah bukit barisan yang dekat dengan danau toba. Selain itu juga ditanam di daerah kecamatan linting nihuta. Inilah alasan kenapa diberi nama kopi lintong. Memiliki aroma yang khas dan rasa yang kuat.

Tumbuhnya di daerah kabupaten humbang hasundutan. Lebih tepatnya berasa di kecamatan lintong nihuta dengan ketinggian 1400-1450 mdpl. Ada di danau toba dan kecamatan dolok sanggul dengan ketinggian 1450-1600 mdpl. Ciri-ciri dari kopi lintong antara lain memiliki rasa seperti dark chocolate, aciditynya rendah, bentuknya lebih tebal dan herbal. Proses pengelolaannya dengan cara giling basah.

Kopi Gayo

Namoura Gayo Arabika

Kopi gayo berasal dari dataran tinggi aceh sumatera. Wilayah ini terkenal sebagai kota penghasil kopi berkualitas, Sebagian besar jenis kopi yang diproduksi adalah jenis kopi arabika. Sudah banyak penghargaan yang didapatkan oleh kopi gayo. Ada sertifikat fair trade, indonesia specialty coffe dan masih banyak lainnya. Wilayah tumbuh kopi gayo di sekitar daerah takengon, aceh tengah, gayo lues, dan bener meriah. Ketinggiannya sekitar 1200-1700 mdpl. Untuk pecinta kopi, wajib mengunjungi daerah ini untuk menemukan kopi terbaik di indonesia.

Ciri dari kopi sumatera ini memiliki rasa yang sangat kompleks. Semua rasa, aroma dan tekstur dari kopi gayo sangat sempurna. Tidak ada yang dominan satu sama lainnya. Sehingga memiliki rasa yang benar-benar enak. Bahkan after tasternya cukup panjang. Aromanya sangat enak, aciditynya seimbang dan bodynya juga sedang. Proses pengelolaannya dengan honey, washed process atau natural. Anda wajib untuk menikmati kopi paling enak di indonesia ini.

Kopi Tanah Karo

Kopi tanah karo sudah popular sejak tahun 1900an. Pada waktu itu tentara belanda, membawa kopi ini ke Eropa. Sehingga makin banyak orang yang suka dengan kopi tanah karo ini. Salah satu kopi sumatera ini memiliki rasa yang unik. Sebagian besar kopi yang ditanam di tanah karo jenis arabika. Lokasi penanamannya sekitar kabanjahe, berastagi dan lereng gunung sinabung. Ketinggian sekitar 1275 -1300 mdpl. Rasa kopi karo sedikit ada rasa jeruknya. Jadi seperti ada rasa asam-asam jeruk. Untuk proses pengolahannya dengan cara giling basah.

Kopi Minang Solok

Dulu kopi minang solok tidak begitu terkenal. Masih sedikit orang yang tahu. Tetapi 2 tahun yang lalu, kopi ini semakin popular dan menjadi pilihan kopi terbaik dari sumatera. Berasal dari daerah dataran tinggi solok. Tempat tumbuhnya dekat dengan gunung talang yang memiliki ketinggian 1200-1600 mdpl. Dibandingkan jenis kopi lainnya, kopi minang solok memiliki rasa yang lebih ringan. Rasanya seperti ada rasa buah-buahan. Rasanya hampir mirip dengan kopi afrika. Jika anda tidak suka kopi pahit, kopi minang solok bisa menjadi pilihan yang tepat. Proses pengelolaannya dengan cara honey, washed dan natural.

Kopi Bengkulu

Kopi bengkulu tentunya berasal dari bengkulu. Sebagian besar kopi yang ditanam disini adalah jenis kopi robusta. Di tanam sekitar gunung kaba yang memiliki ketinggian berkisar 800-1400 mdpl. Rasa dari kopi bengkulu bervariasi. Ada yang rasanya seperti buah-buahan, ada yang rasa kakao dan bahkan ada yang rasa rempah-rempah. Untuk proses pengolahannya dengan fully washed atau semi washed.

Kopi Kerinci

Daerah kerinci menghasilkan kopi robusta. Ada beberapa tempat yang menghasilkan kopi arabika. Bahkan pada tahun 2014, ada beberapa tempat yang mulai memproduksi kopi liberica. Banyak ditanam dilereng gubung kerinci. Dengan ketinggian 500-1500 mdpl. Daerah ini kandungan organiknya sangat tinggi. Sehingga bisa menghasilkan kopi yang berkualitas. Selain di lereng gunung kerinci, juga ditanam di daerah batu ampar, gunung tujuh, solok selatan dan sungai penuh. Rasanya seperti campuran antara gerbal dan cinnamon. Kaya dengan rempah-rempah. Proses pengolahan dengan full wash atau giling basah.

Kopi Lampung

Jenis kopi selanjutnya adalah kopi lampung. Jenis ini memang sangat terkenal. Bahkan banyak perusahaan produksi kopi yang memiliki perkebunan didaerah sini. Sebagian besar kopinya adalah kopi robusta. Tempat penanamannya ada di lampung tengah, lampung barat dan tanggamus. Memiliki rasa seperti coklat yang komplek dan tinggi. Proses pengolahannya masih natural atau cara tradisional.

Itulah beberapa jenis kopi sumatera yang bisa anda konsumsi. Setiap jenis memiliki rasa, aroma dan tekstur yang berbeda-beda. Jadi pilihlah varian kopi yang paling anda sukai.

Freedom and Slavery: the Birth of Capital

We are frequently told that capitalism equals ‘freedom’; that it is the organic product of ‘human nature’. But far from arising naturally, the birth of the ‘free’ market is built on violence, dispossession, and enslavement.

The more individuals are left to trade and enrich themselves, the more capitalism thrives and consequently, the more free and prosperous everyone in society becomes – this argument is simple, familiar, and completely false. In reality, capitalist freedom has always had a deeply contradictory nature from the very beginning.

What the birth of capital required was that the owners of money, land and industry should be confronted by a mass of ‘free’ workers, liberated from any property of their own and completely reliant on the market. This is the real foundation of the capitalist system, and its history is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire”, in the words of Karl Marx.

The Decline of Feudalism

It was amongst the crumbling ruins of feudal Europe that the foundations for a new social order were laid. But the first blows against the old order were struck neither by the merchants nor the money lenders, but by the poorest and most oppressed layer in feudal Europe: the serfs.

Medieval Europe was built on the unpaid labour of this class of semi-slaves, who were granted a small patch of land in return for which they were forced to work for free on the estates of the church and feudal nobility for several days a week. Added to this was ‘boon work’ or corvee, which required the serfs to perform specific tasks for the benefit of their lords. In England at the time of the Domesday Book (1086), it is estimated that as much as 70% of the population were classed as serfs. It is in the struggle of this oppressed class of peasants to free themselves from bondage that the pre-history of capitalism can be traced.

There is an old German saying, “Stadtluft macht frei”, which means “town air makes you free”. Its source is a customary law from the Middle Ages under which any escaped serfs who remained in a town for a year and a day would no longer be subject to the claims of their former lords and hence would become free. But this custom did not simply descend from heaven or come about by a gentlemen’s agreement between the rulers and their slaves. It was the product of years of bitter class struggle.

A serf was considered a part of the lord’s property, as if he and his family had grown out of the soil itself. He was consequently completely under the jurisdiction of his lord, meaning he had little opportunity to seek justice from anyone else. The king was himself just another landlord and the church was the biggest landlord of all.

The easiest and most effective defence against the lords’ exploitation was flight, and throughout the Medieval period a constant struggle thundered between serfs striving to escape the snatching grasp of the lords and their man hunters who roved the country in search of their lost property.

One result of this clash was many of the free towns of Europe. These ramshackle settlements, from such humble beginnings, would in some cases become powerful independent cities. Born out of feudalism and yet in opposition to it, the town dwellers, known in France as ‘bourgeois’, organised themselves into city councils and guilds, which served as local organs of power through which these collection of individuals, thrown together by common struggle, would be transformed into a class.

The growth of these towns and the rapid rise in population up to the Black Death contributed to a powerful upturn in trade, which began gradually to undermine the foundations of feudalism.

Engels remarks that “long before the ramparts of the baronial castles were breached by the new artillery, they had already been undermined by money” in his article, The Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie. As early as the Crusades, some lords were beginning to demand money rents from their subjects in place of labour services, so that they could access the various luxuries and exotic products this trade brought into view.

But the more the lords exacted money rents from their tenants, the more both parties became dependent on the towns. Previously, the feudal manor had been a self-sufficient unit, combining both handicrafts and agriculture. The growth of the towns brought with it more specialised products such as tools and cloth for the masses as well as silks for the nobility. From this growing division of labour sprang a new relationship between the rural peasants and the bourgeois in the towns-a relationship mediated through commodities.

The 14th century represents a point of no return in the struggle against serfdom, which was already in decline in most of Europe. Rather than strengthening the lords against the peasantry, the crisis caused by the Black Death-which reduced the population of Europe by at least a third-actually gave the peasants themselves a great deal of bargaining power. The response of the lords was to try to impose a legal maximum on the wages of labourers and to crush the peasantry with taxation, of which the Poll Tax was the most infamous example.

The result was the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 which, allied with the poorest layer of the London masses, took the form of a national uprising. Despite its brutal suppression this revolutionary movement succeed on two fronts: there was no further levying of the Poll Tax (until Thatcher’s ill-fated attempt to resurrect it), and serfdom in England was dead. In its place was an exhausted nobility, increasingly dependent on money rent, independent smallholding peasants and a growing bourgeoisie in the towns.

Engels remarks that in history the actions of the men and women who make history “ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended”. The struggle of the peasants and town dwellers had set the stage for a dramatic new act in world history, but no sooner had their freedom been won, so began a new wave of enslavement out of the fruits of their victory.

The World Market

The decline of feudalism gave a powerful spur to the production and exchange of commodities. The developing division of labour between the craft industry in the towns and rural agriculture created an expanding demand for goods of all kinds. And this demand was fed by an increasingly complex and powerful web of commercial routes across Europe and the Mediterranean.

First in Egypt then taken up by the Italian city-states, sophisticated legal instruments such as insurance contracts and trading companies were introduced to cover the risks associated with regular long-distance trade. And along with the growing power of the merchants came the rise of “that common whore of mankind”: money. The founding of merchant banks in the great trading cities of Italy, such as Venice, originally as a response to the needs of merchant ‘capital’ would then act back on this development, pushing it to greater heights.

By the 15th century the burgeoning commodity economy in Europe was straining against what appeared to be a natural limit. The production and exchange of greater and greater masses of commodities created a dire need for money as a means of circulation and payment. Further, producers of much sought-after luxuries in Asia would often only take payment in silver, having no need for European cloth.

The growing thirst for precious metals to feed the developing market could not be quenched by the relatively scanty produce of European mines. The result was the infamous ‘gold lust’ that drove European adventurers on a quest of global pillage we now call the ‘Age of Discovery’.

One particularly quaint myth associated with this period is that it came about as a result of some uniquely European spirit of enquiry and adventure. This would certainly come as a surprise to the Chinese and Arab explorers of the period. But Engels offers us the swiftest rebuttal of this romantic nonsense:

It was gold that the Portuguese sought on the African coast, in India and the whole Far East; gold was the magic word which lured the Spaniards over the ocean to America. (ibid.)

This fact was not lost on the native ‘savages’ who encountered our intrepid European adventurers, one of whom remarked of Cortes’ conquistadors in Mexico:

They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit up their hearts….They crave gold like hungry swine. (quoted in Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent)

Everywhere the Europeans landed they discovered new wealth to bring home to sell at an enormous profit. Like old Midas, whatever they touched turned to gold, with calamitous results for the native peoples they encountered. Marx remarks (in Capital,vol. 3) that, “Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands everywhere for a system of robbery, so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping slaves, and colonial conquest.” Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the period following the discovery of the New World.

On 3 August 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed out of the Spanish port of Palos. His goal was to reach Asia by sailing west over the Atlantic. Instead, on 12 October he stumbled upon the Bahamas and a people called, in their own language, the Lukku-Cairi. In his diary, Columbus wrote:

They go as naked as when their mothers bore them, and so do the women, although I did not see more than one girl. They are very well made, with very handsome bodies, and very good countenances.

Historians estimate there were 1 million Tainos (of which the Lukku-Cairi were part) in 1492. 56 years later there were only 500.

This became a model for the colonisation of the rest of the Americas. Wiped out by unfamiliar diseases (sometimes deliberately), sent to an early death in poisonous mines, almost 100 million human beings were sacrificed at the altar of Commerce. The price of their lives was the 100,000 metric tonnes of silver exported to Europe from Latin America between 1492 and 1800.

Then as now, defenders of this genocide pointed to the benefits of European freedom that were being forcibly administered to the natives. One such pious servant of God, Archbishop Liñán y Cisneros explained:

The truth is that they are hiding out to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas. (quoted in Galeano, ibid.)

But these European liberators didn’t just free the indigenous population of their lives and treasure; each site of human sacrifice became a fresh link in the chain of the growing world market, demanding an intensification of production by the most barbaric means. As the native population of the Caribbean dwindled, it was replaced by African slaves and sugar plantations first trialled by the Portuguese on Cape Verde.

Rather than developing production on a higher level, the original achievement of the world market was to extend and intensify the slavery of old on an ever expanding scale. By the end of the slave trade in 1853 between 12 and 15 million Africans had been transported, of whom as many as 2.4 million died on route.

This horrific slaughter was an integral part of the early development of capitalism. This was not lost on Marx, who emphasised (in Capital vol. 1):

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production.

And yet, this period confronts us in one respect as an immense contradiction. On the one hand we see a developing world market with the ever-expanding production and exchange of commodities; but on the other, the methods used to produce these commodities remain nothing more than the intensification of pre-existing forms of exploitation to an agonising pitch.

Capitalism without commodities or money is unimaginable, but these still do not equate to capitalist production. What is required is for labour-power, the ability of human beings to work, to itself become a commodity. This final, decisive, stage in the birth of the capitalist system took the form of an immense social revolution which began in England in the 16th century.

The Agrarian Revolution

In 1516, the famous Tudor lawyer and writer Thomas More observed:

Yea and certyn Abbottes, holy men no doubt…leave no ground for tillers, thei enclose al into pastures: they throw downe houses: they plucke downe townes and leave nothing standynge but only the church to be made a sheephowse… (quoted in Morton, A People’s History of England)

What he was describing was a revolution, waged by the rich against their own people.

The end of serfdom had dealt a heavy blow to the power of the lords, but they still retained ownership of great swathes of land. It was from this position that the old masters began their counter-offensive against the free peasants of England.

The expansion of trade in the 14th century had also created a growing demand for wool, of which England was a major exporter. In response to this demand, landlords began forcibly evicting their feudal tenants in order to convert entire villages into sheepwalks. The importance of this lucrative trade for the English nobility can even be seen today in the woolsack upon which the Lord Speaker still sits in the House of Lords.

The result of this barefaced robbery was on the dispossession of thousands of peasants, many of whom had no choice but to roam the land looking for work or charity. The problem had already become so widespread that in 1489 Henry VII passed the first of a series of Acts which sought to curtail the depopulation of the countryside.

The discovery of the Americas and the gigantic upswing in trade that came with it only added fuel to the fire. Throughout the Tudor period, agricultural production was shifted towards cash crops for the market, with a new breed of capitalist farmers employing landless paupers as labourers.

Even this new mode of production proved insufficient to soak up the flood of poverty, however. Eventually, the class of pauperised ‘vagabonds’ became so large that it caused Queen Elizabeth I to introduce a special “Poor Rate” as early as 1601 whilst at the same time providing for “unlicenced beggars” to be executed “without mercy” as felons.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the expropriation and displacement of the rural masses took on an official form through the passing of a series of Enclosure Acts in Parliament. This was catastrophic for the rural population – it had effectively driven the English peasantry to extinction by the 19th century – but it provided an enormous army of propertyless labourers for the growing industries in and around the towns. It was this process of legalised theft that gave birth to the capitalist ‘property rights’ so admired by modern defenders of capitalism.

The State

Another myth that surrounds the birth of capitalism is that it was achieved by the pioneering economic activity of enterprising individuals, in opposition to the dead hand of the state. This fairy tale is regularly dusted off whenever the modern state is forced to pass reforms by the pressure of the workers, but nothing could be further from the truth. At all points our future captains of industry and commerce depended on the most brutal state repression to protect their class interests.

Absolutism arose out of the contradictions of dying feudal society: a feudal monarchy resting alternately on landowners, bourgeois and peasantry. With one hand it placed checks on the expropriation of the peasantry but with another, usually acting in its own interests, actually hastened the development of capitalism.

The sale of lands expropriated from the Church after the Reformation at cut down prices, for example, was an enormous gift to the nascent capitalist farmers of the 16th century. Likewise, the establishment of colonial monopolies by all the absolutist monarchies of Western Europe, provided essential protection for the early development of manufacture.

However, precisely because of its transitional and contradictory nature, at a certain point this form of the state comes into a stark conflict with the interests of the bourgeoisie. Once the bourgeois had seized economic dominance, it must be able to rule in its own interests. And so the last vestige of the feudal political system became just another fetter on the great drive for accumulation which was taking root.

Beginning with the Dutch War of Independence a wave of revolutions swept Europe as the bourgeoisie took the road to political power. In its struggle against the old order, it united all that was healthy and progressive in society behind its call for ‘liberty’. Sweeping away the particularism of the past, the revolutionaries cleared the way for the development of a truly national market. In place of the arbitrary privileges of absolutism, they demanded the ‘rule of law’, which in practice has always meant the rule of the bourgeoisie.

But the great and tragic contradiction of all these movements lay in the fact that, as in the English Revolution, they ultimately delivered power not to the peasants and artisans who formed the ironsides of the revolutionary armies, but a new, even more powerful class of exploiters-something our modern lovers of liberty tend to forget.

Following the burial of absolutism the state came fully into the possession of the new landed aristocracy, ‘bankocracy’ and large manufacturers, either in the form of a republic or, more commonly a ‘constitutional’ (that is, tame) monarchy.

Anyone who doubts the significance of this for the development of capitalism need only look at the measures taken by the English Parliament after the so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688: Enclosures were transformed from a widespread abuse to a deliberate policy; the Bank of England was created along with the ‘National Debt’ – a debt to none other than capitalist speculators; further legislation to impose a ‘maximum wage’ was imposed, while combinations of workers to negotiate better pay and conditions were, of course, forbidden.

The concentrated power of the state was used “to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition,” Marx writes in Capital (vol. 1), adding,

Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

It might also be noted that in this Golden Age of Liberty and Enlightenment, not a single worker or poor peasant had either a vote or political representation in any form. In reality the rising capitalist landowners and manufacturers needed the power of the state to ‘regulate’ wages and lengthen the working day.

In fact, it is only when their own miniature tyranny in the workplace is secured that the capitalist class will tolerate any political freedoms on the part of the workers, and even then, these are to be limited so as not to infringe upon their sacred right to ‘private property’, that is, the fruit of centuries of theft.

The Birth of the Working Class

The development of society is in the last instance determined by the development of humanity’s productive forces. But on its own technology is incapable of changing society – it is itself socially determined. The ancient Greeks had discovered steam power long before bourgeois Europe. Even the German inventor, Anton Müller produced a loom capable of weaving several pieces of cloth at the same time as early as 1529. The result was not the industrial revolution but, on the contrary, the murder of the inventor by the local city council.

In England, the agrarian and political revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries laid the basis for the industrial revolution. Without the creation of a ‘surplus’ population of proletarians, the rising productivity of agriculture, and the gigantic boons granted to the capitalists by their conquest of political power, such an enormous social transformation would have been unthinkable.

The newly created proletariat was quickly put to work, usually under the whip of brutal repression, but one more obstacle to the unfettered freedom of capitalist exploitation remained: the guilds. By imposing strict rules and restrictions on the industry the guild system, which was itself a product of the struggle of the early bourgeoisie, became a suffocating fetter on the free development of the capitalist mode of production. In fact, the first manufacture of woolen cloth recorded in 16th century was shut down by the local guilds precisely because it threatened their monopoly.

The first cotton spinning mill was actually set up outside of any major town, in Royton, Lancashire, in order to avoid the resistance of what remained of the guilds in 1764. This quickly established a pattern for what would become the factory system. As one writer noted in 1773:

Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced into the towns to seek for employment; but then a larger surplus is obtained and thus capital is augmented. (J Arbuthnot, quoted in Marx, Capital, vol. 1)

Here lies the secret of capital: Not private enterprise but the sweated labour of others; not property rights but the absence of property for the many.

Eventually, the wage limitations which had been in place for centuries were finally repealed in 1813. They were now “an absurd anomaly” according to Marx, as the capitalists could freely dictate their workers’ wages and conditions as they pleased. The advance of capitalist production (helped by the mailed fist of the state) had finally developed “a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.”

As this newer, more ‘civilised’, form of exploitation took over more and more spheres of production, the British ruling class suddenly discovered that the slaves working its colonial plantations were human beings too. But when it finally abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, the British government paid out £20m to compensate not the slaves but the 3,000 families that had owned slaves for their loss of ‘property’. This figure represented in today’s terms around £16.5bn: an enormous gift to the slave-owners, which they promptly put to use in English factories, Irish farms and Indian plantations.

Slavery was not abolished because it was immoral; it was abolished because it was unprofitable. It would be foolish to persist in such an expensive and unproductive enterprise when a shrewd investor could squeeze a never-before-seen profit from the blood of the ‘free-born slaves’ of Britain and its colonies.

But the creation of the working class gave a double gift to the capitalists. Not only did it create their profits from the workers’ surplus labour; it also created the means by which those profits could be realised – the first ever truly mass consumer market.

The average peasant never tended to buy much food or clothing because he would grind his own corn and weave his own cloth. The dispossession of the peasantry meant that not only were they dependent on the capitalists for work and wages, they also had to spend those wages on basic necessities like food and clothing from none other than the same capitalists (looked at on a national scale).

Later, in the 19th century, the British state used tariffs to destroy the Indian home-spinning industry and flood the market with cloth, often spun from Indian cotton. The role of India as a colony thus shifted from solely being a source of loot (which it remained) to also being an enormous captive market. In this way, the Indian masses, like their British counterparts, paid twice for their exploitation by the British capitalists.

This played an important role both in the rise of British capitalism and the struggle for Indian independence. In 1921, the Indian National Congress adopted a flag containing a picture of a spinning wheel to symbolise the home industry destroyed by British-rigged competition. This spinning wheel still survives (in part) in the Indian flag today, although it was changed into a Buddhist chakra wheel.

The importance of mass consumption to capitalism can be seen today on an even grander scale. The effect of this in our culture is the rampant consumerism and debt which bears down on us as individuals like a force of nature. We must not only work; we must buy. In this sense, supply determines demand as much as demand determines supply.

A New Fight

Capital now emerged, fully formed and “dripping blood from every pore” (to use Marx’s expression). Ever since, the freedom of capital has continued to find its reflection and source in the unfreedom of human beings. But it has also laid the basis for a new and greater fight.

Just as the bourgeoisie, a class born of the struggle between the feudal lords and serfs, was eventually able to seize power, transform the state to its own ends and wield it to eliminate the old order, so too can the working class, itself created by capitalism’s infinite drive to exploit human labour-power.

Like the medieval serfs, the workers of today give up most of their lives for a parasitic class of property owners. But by taking the immense productive forces created by their own labour into the hands of society as a whole, the workers of the world can put an end to class oppression for good, and usher in a new era of genuine freedom for the whole of the human race.

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