Matthew R. Berry
09/01/2020
Critical Geography
Professor Simpson
Short Response Week One
1) After reading the three papers, I focused on what to me was the most personal and allowed me to understand the most, which was the Patel reading. To the best of my ability I will attempt to summarize the argument: The author is arguing that the 21st Century will be one of radical change, and to dream big. The author brings multiple arguments from historical contexts to show that, in a way, “the center cannot hold”, with how business is run at the moment. Anthropocentric climate change will act in a way as how the Black Death was in the 1300s, a final catalyst to eliminate the mode of production, which at the time was feudalism. The author identifies seven “cheap things”: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives, and discusses how each of those aspects, hugely important in their own rights, have, through capitalism, become commodified to the cheapest possible end, and that this is unsustainable for a multitude of reasons, which the author identifies in each of the subsections.
2) The author certainly had many connections to the Marx reading; the author identified many issues that continue to this day that could easily be correlated to the same issues that Marx was talking about in the mid 19th Century in Germany. The author also references Marx multiple times throughout the readings, especially in the “money” subsection of the passage. The author explains how the modern capitalistic society soley relies on the continual consumption and utilization of money, and that Marx would argue that “capital only happens with the live transformation of money into commodities and back again.” These issues are laid out in, albeit more dense terminologies, in the Marx’ reading.
3) “But since capitalism grows through it’s frontiers, the domestic and international deployments of force through nature to secure money, work, care, food, and fuel are accompanied by ideologies of race and state and nation, together with the appropriations and devaluations that these deployments involve. Cheap lives are made through the apparatus of the modern social order. They’re absolutely necessary to capitalism’s ecology.” (37-38)
I very much found this to be relevant to todays world and the current events we are experiencing. We see this throughout the inequalities laid bare in the United States by the COVID-19 pandemic, where so, so many individuals are barely scraping by and in desperate need of assistance once a cog is thrown in the grind of the capitalistic machine. At the same time, you see the ruling individuals, consistently deny assistance to those individuals who need help through the lens that these many individuals are simply fodder for the capitalistic machine and thus should be thrown back in the meat grinder, pandemic precautions be damned, because their lives are not valued, as they are cheap.
4) What can we do now to help bring about these radical changes that are necessary?
What Marx has said is pretty prescient, is there anything he got incorrect about the trajectory of things?
Is radical change even possible in our hyper-polarized country?
Am I cheap to somebody else?
To pick at your terminology a little bit, I think Patel and Moore would use a term like "Capitalocentric" instead of "Anthropocentric" climate change to emphasize that the destructive production humans engage in is the result of ideology and not intrinsic to human nature.
ReplyDeleteI'm on board with your identification of our global pandemic as a major challenge to "business as usual." It seems to be a pretty clear parallel to the influence the Black Death had on fuedalism. That's not to say that its not an opportunity for capitalist gain, but it does pose a huge challenge to "business as usual" hegemonic forces, as people around the world have to consider this immediate threat to themselves and to others around them.
On your last question, I would hazard that we (assuming a vague shared class) are all cheapened by forces of capitalism. If in no other way, than as consumers of the products of capitalism, as we're sold objects and ideas that profit someone else more than they benefit us. In a similar vein, social media seems to employ "cheap attention" to sell our time, and energy, and values to advertisers.
Well put Matt. I like Patel and Moore's term of a State Shift which they steal from Earth Systems but work to apply to Cultural Systems: a conceptual shift between Nature and Society. They want us to see the way capital is not just an economic system but a way of organizing relations between humans and the rest of nature. And yes, we should have in mind Marx three categories of Materialist analysis here. Capitalism needs to produce cheap lives as much as it needs to produce cheap Big Macs.
ReplyDeleteGreat questions in the end and this is where we always want to be thinking toward. What can we do with Marx and Gramsci and everyone we read right now? Patel and Moore propose the idea of a "world ecology" and so they are looking to contribute to culture as the terrain of struggle, and they aim to provide language to a coming community of a new organic intellectual. Certainly we need to take part in immediate social struggles, but they add that what is need is a way of thinking how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history. And to do that Patel and Moore write "we cannot end with the same abstractions that capitalism has made of nature, society, and economy. We must find the language and politics for new civilizations, find ways of living through the state shift capitalism’s ecology has wrought." What language or cultural practices begin to create a "world-eye" vision in which all of today's social movements are connected rather than individualized and fragmented? Space (ie material, the body, the mode of production) is one way to make that connection, says Marx.