In "The German Ideology", Marx lays bare his criticism of his contemporary intellectual elite. In summary, he claims the Hegelians are far too conservative, and merely spout their ideals without any concrete action. Marx sought revolutionary class struggle, and the mild discontent of the intellectual class amounted to at best ineffective, and at worst complacent. Later on in the section, Marx discusses the relationship between capitalism and ongoing specialization. In indigenous societies, every member of the group is expected to be able to sew, skin animals, navigate the landscape, identify edible plants and berries, and construct tools and shelter. As society "progressed", it further removed itself from its, what Marx would consider, proto-communist roots. In order to maximize efficiency of human capital, each cog in the machine should only perform one or two specific tasks, ie cardiologists, tax accountants, truck drivers, and mechanics, are all more efficient workers if they are not bothered to learn any additional skills. Marx follows this vein: he is an economist, a politician, a writer, and a philosopher, and his works are influenced by all areas of the humanities.
To segue into Patel and Moore - A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. My initial reaction to this book was expecting a list of cheap items, such as a button, shoestring, fishing hooks, etc. What suprised me were these radical concepts being considered as cheap: food, lives, labor, and so on. Recounting the history of Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, was fascinating. To commence, this island was uninhabited by humans, and was first encountered by Portuguese explorers. The island was full of lumber, needed for ship building, barrel making, and a whole range of construction materials. The Portuguese essentially raided the island, destroying its unique environment. Once the island was stripped of its resources, the Atlantic slave trade was just starting to pick up steam. Portuguese colonists were able to enslave Africans, and use them for their labor in sugar plantations and sugar processing in what are referred to as "engenhos". The sugar was moved to European markets, exchanging them for goods to fund Portuguese colonial development in Brazil and Africa. This model was repeated in Brazil - having lived there I have been on a tour of a gold mine in Ouro Preto - male slaves had an average life expectancy of two years, arriving in Brazil and being worked to death. New slaves were plentiful and easy to come by. Female slaves, valued for their reproductive capabilities were treated somewhat better and had more normal life expectancy, many Portuguese took black wives as Portuguese women in the Americas were rare and few and far between. These wives gave the Portuguese free slaves, and were again, treated better than the African imports. It can be amazing to see how little life is valued, and what horrors humans will subject other humans into, all in the name of capital. These practices continue to this day. In the Congo, Civil Wars keep the country from uniting, but it sits on the largest deposit of rare earth metals and lithium deposits essential for producing smart phones and computers. Western investors have a vested interest in keeping conflict in the region as conflict = slave labor and cheap metals. We all are contributors to this, in the same way average Europeans bought Brazilian and Madeiran sugar
Excellent overview, Dylan, of the mode of production Marx targets as the structural way in which people, places, and objects can be connected and subsequently destroyed, cheapened, and reproduced. And your attention to how this particular process, once it depleted the resources on Madeira, looked to expand across the Atlantic to Brazil speaks to the way in which "extension" is also part of the structure. Capital, Marx notes, is necessarily a structure that must keep moving and keep expanding as it inevitably pushes any one location into crisis and contradiction. What happens when there is not new colony, no new location to exploit was a critical question for Marx, and it is the one we find ourselves encountering in the current era of global or multinational capital.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to consider the way contemporary consciousness is shaped by this current mode of production. One famous critical geographer summed this up by pointing out that today "it's easier to imagine the end of the world then it is to imagine the end of capital." It's an interesting idea, and invites us to consider in what ways is the inability to imagine a positive future a symptom of the current mode of production where there is no outside of capital?
Meanwhile, Patel and Moore are offering new tools: their keywords of "world ecology" and "reparation ecology" begin the work of creating a different kind of community on a global scale. But again, great work paying attention to the production process at work in creating environments, subjectivists, and products. This is exactly what we want to pay attention to and grapple with as me move forward with the readings.