Emily Gettis
GEOG390: Professor Simpson
Reading Response 6
10.7.2020
Seven Cheap Things: Food, Energy, Lives + Conclusion
For the second half of Patel and Moore's history of the world, we see the continued assaults on our society and environment by the strategies to maximize profits and minimize care. While history and the social relationships or ideologies that evolved from the past are still a method to prove their points, Patel and Moore bring more attention to today's capitalist opponent, climate change. While capitalist strategies evaluate and produce through means of power and oppression by possessing frontiers (in rural vs. urban materialist landscapes), climate change will rearrange the stage that capitalist cheapening strategies function.
Throughout these chapters, what stands out the strongest to me is the relationship between groups who resist and how capitalist strategies respond (with Cheap Food as the most potent example, in my opinion). In this chapter, cheapening capitalist systems (for example, the Green Revolution) either minimize outcries or create phony acknowledgments. These deeds placate laborers and starving people whose urban stage rattles the strategy. While this relationship is highly manipulative and continuously undermines those who resist, this was where I began to see how insecure cheapening capitalist tactics can be. This book can be a bit disheartening; however, in the Cheap Food Chapter, we see a 'soft spot' where resistance can direct capitalism. While it can minimize particular works or technologies to veil the gravity of their exploitation and ensures society's economic somnambulism while organizing the outrageous into the normal, groups of resistance are a force that it must respond to.
Patel and Moore's method shows us how history transforms itself but also repetitive in its outcomes. By proving moments of resistance and those capabilities, there can be possibilities for reform if organized well enough. By unveiling and unraveling historical connections on capitalism's web, the authors rearrange and present history. I see this call in their strategy of organization for resistance in the conclusion of the book. As these authors are highly intentional with their words, the "5 Re's" readers are left with invoked feelings of resistance by reorganization to withstand capitalism as it confronts climate change. I'm also reminded of the hundreds of pages of repeats that history says we are inclined to, and how sensitivity to these "5 Re's" is vital.
Your comment on how insecure the cheapening tactics are set off a lightbulb in my head. The insane amount of control is, like we talked about during our COVID week, a facade to keep people down and believing that there is no other choice. Capitalism is based on these principles of moving forward by devastating people and land but it is a participatory system and that's its weakness.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you drew our attention to that section of Cheap Food. The author's are indeed not only looking to critique but to provide examples, concepts, and directions for conceptualizing action toward a different future. Which ones are most compelling to you. In what ways do the "5 Res" allow you to think of activities or practices that might be possible on a local, regional, or global scale?
ReplyDeleteFor the author's history is much more transformation than it is repetition. In fact, this book understands History as class struggle. In what ways can space be put into motion in this book, seen as an argument, and allow one to conceptualize Massey's "progressive sense of place" anew?