Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 20th July 2018 13:56:24
Book Review: “A History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”
Authors: Raj Patel And Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso 2018
Pages: 312
Price: £16.99
Consider the humble ant. Its ‘brain’ contains 40,000 times fewer neurons than our own, it lacks language and can’t reason, its repertoire of possible actions is finite and small – and yet it builds nests of great complexity, complete with highways spanning great distances and farms in which fungus is cultivated or aphids milked for food. Ethologists learned that these abilities result from the playing out of very simple ‘rules’, such as ‘move in the direction where the smell of formic acid is strongest’, rather than individual or collective calculation. Or perhaps consider those single-celled cyanobacteria which 2.45 billion years ago transformed the whole planet by replacing its carbon dioxide atmosphere with one rich in oxygen, thus permitting the evolution of the rest of plant and animal life.
What if Homo sapiens turned out to be more like these creatures than we like to believe? What if our own world isn’t the result of any philosophy, ideology, or political program but simply us playing out a simple rule called ‘maximise profit’? That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Patel and Moore’s “A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things”. The intrinsic dynamic of capitalism, seeking ever greater profit, generates complex cycles of cheapening of some fundamental resources of the planet.
Patel and Moore call these resources Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives. You can increase profits by reducing wages, which means food has to become cheaper for workers to surviive: cheap energy is required to make the fertilisers to grow this cheaper food.The family maintains and reproduces workers for free (in the absence of wages for housework). Playing out the profit rule causes periodic crises, which have always been solved up until now by geographic expansion and colonisation, but eventually we’ve run out of planet. Disposal of wastes is undervalued by economists – treated as an unpriced ‘externality’ – so we now face environmental crises over global warming, plastic pollution and more.
The authors arrived here by combining the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein with the ‘ecological rift’ theory of the early Marx (as revived in recent times by John Bellamy Foster) to analyse capitalist ecology as a whole, closed system in which all resources are finite, not free, and all wastes have to go somewhere. Their analysis weaves together tightly several strands of Left activism that are at present separate, including labour rights and inequality, feminism, modern slavery, post-colonialism, and environmentalism. The distinctive ecological perspective which renders this interweaving possible is the book’s most important aspect, as these separate strands often clash in political practice: feminism versus male labour rights, immigration versus native labour rights etc. etc.
Inhabiting this novel viewpoint forces Patel and Moore to define their Seven Cheap Things in very particular ways – not entirely divorced from everyday usage but more abstract and far deeper. Tthey call them ‘real abstractions’, after Alberto Toscano. As with the ant, so with the human, everything that is produced – food, clothing, homes and workplaces, transport, communications, computers – must be co-produced with the rest of nature. When looking at a farm one can clearly see a connection between labour and soil, but when looking at a software developer there’s no such obvious link, which tempts us to think a distinction between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes, as though they were independent of one another.
The authors refuse and refute this distinction. They define ‘cheapness’ as “a set of strategies to manage the relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises”, where ‘web of life’ refers to those myriad complex cycles of co-production. Cheapness means more than just low cost though: it’s a strategy for mobilising work – human, animal, botanical, geological work – for as little compensation as possible. Capitalism, as Marx saw, transmutes all the invisible relations of humans to nature into production and consumption at the lowest possible price, in a process whereby money flows through nature. Islands of cash exchange exist within oceans of potentially cheap natural resources like minerals, plants and labour, and these islands are bounded by frontiers through which capitalism continually expands in order to resolve its periodic crises.
Patel and Moore begin their historical analysis from the year 1419 when Portugese sailors first sighted the (literal) island that they called Madeira. When they first landed it was entirely covered with trees, but within 40 years half had been cut down for shipbuilding and land to grow wheat for export to Portugal. The rest were cut down later for space to grow sugar and fuel to refine it in the world’s first factories. The small native population were enslaved, then reinforced by more slaves from North Africa. The authors claim this process set in train a great change of mindset, from earlier Christian notions of Providence to a total split between Nature and Society and a relentless pursuit of profit in exploiting the former. This change affected, and indeed still mostly affects, a newly emerging class of capitalists rather than the whole population: “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change, but most of us are in steerage”.
This Nature/Society split sanctioned not just the pursuit of profit but the creation of all the Seven Cheap Things. Illiterate indigenous peoples, being uncivilised, were relegated to the category of Nature, which sanctioned enslaving them. Women, who did not fight, sail or rule but cared for babies, could equally be relegated to Nature rather than Society. The colonial idea spread rapidly throughout Europe, and soon the discovery of the Americas found sources of cheap gold and silver (ie. cheap money) and later cheap guano to act as fertiliser for cheap food, the better to feed cheap factory workers driven from the land into cities. Marriage and the family ensured that these workers were maintained and reproduced, in effect for free, by unpaid wives: “Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care... To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to ask for an end to capitalism”.
Each of the Seven Cheap Things receives a chapter to itself, which traces its changing relation to the others through history, using concrete examples. The levels of recursive influence involved may tax one’s power of visualisation, which suggests the book might reward a second reading (regrettably their Systems approach denies us solace from that old Marxist trick of merely intoning the magic word ‘dialectical’).
Occasionally their ‘real abstract’ view of a thing may feel over simplified – for example marriage among the aristocracy was always more about merging dynastic land-holdings than about the care or reproduction of labour – but that’s intentional, to abstract away from obscuring details. To risk a medical metaphor one might say that while Marx described the skeleton and musculature of capitalism, Patel and Moore expose its circulatory system and main organs, but it remains for many others to put flesh and skin onto its numerous limbs (think Vitruvian Man or the goddess Kali). The authors took a brave and wise decision to decant much of the detailed support for their arguments into copious references: the main book is only 212 pages long, with four to six references on most pages so that end-notes, bibliography and index fill another 100.
The book’s tone is radical but forensic – like a doctor describing a malignancy – and neither sentimental or moralising. The authors understand that capitalist states always in the end perpetrate forms of violence, whether on nature, on animals, or on human lives, during the resolution of their crises. Their chapter on Cheap Lives flaunts an excruciating list of the scientific racist taxonomy used to label possessed peoples under the Spanish sistema de castas in South America: negro, sambo, mestizo, mulato and worse.
In their concluding chapter Patel and Moore align themselves with various indigenous struggles provoked by resource theft or pollution like Standing Rock and Pan y Rosas; with Black Lives Matter; with Occupy and other recent grassroots campaigns. If frontiers are the motors of capitalism, then climate change marks the end of room for further expansion. They propose an agenda of resistance based on recognition (of the problems), reparation (not of money alone), redistribution (of land, energy and food), reimagination (of alternative futures), and recreation (liberation from drudgery by technology). It’s a distinctly anarchistic and anti-state stance, but rather tame given what went before, a flaw that might be fatal were it not shared by most similar commentaries, from Paul Mason's Post Capitalism to Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End. The very vagueness tells us something about the daunting size of the task.
It struck me though how well their emphasis on ecology complements Jeffrey Sachs’ The Age Of Sustainable Development (about the UN’s Millenium Goals) which demands global coordination of state and non-state actors to combat simultaneously world poverty and the climate crisis. It also fits rather neatly with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a critique of global finance. Read all three books and you may glimpse the outlines of a new vocabulary for social democrats, one that could prove more palatable to young people than the hermetic Marxist jargon still wielded by too many on the Left. An important book then, which deserves wide discussion.
Book Review: “A History Of The World In Seven Cheap Things”
Authors: Raj Patel And Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso 2018
Pages: 312
Price: £16.99
Consider the humble ant. Its ‘brain’ contains 40,000 times fewer neurons than our own, it lacks language and can’t reason, its repertoire of possible actions is finite and small – and yet it builds nests of great complexity, complete with highways spanning great distances and farms in which fungus is cultivated or aphids milked for food. Ethologists learned that these abilities result from the playing out of very simple ‘rules’, such as ‘move in the direction where the smell of formic acid is strongest’, rather than individual or collective calculation. Or perhaps consider those single-celled cyanobacteria which 2.45 billion years ago transformed the whole planet by replacing its carbon dioxide atmosphere with one rich in oxygen, thus permitting the evolution of the rest of plant and animal life.
Patel and Moore call these resources Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives. You can increase profits by reducing wages, which means food has to become cheaper for workers to surviive: cheap energy is required to make the fertilisers to grow this cheaper food.The family maintains and reproduces workers for free (in the absence of wages for housework). Playing out the profit rule causes periodic crises, which have always been solved up until now by geographic expansion and colonisation, but eventually we’ve run out of planet. Disposal of wastes is undervalued by economists – treated as an unpriced ‘externality’ – so we now face environmental crises over global warming, plastic pollution and more.
The authors arrived here by combining the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein with the ‘ecological rift’ theory of the early Marx (as revived in recent times by John Bellamy Foster) to analyse capitalist ecology as a whole, closed system in which all resources are finite, not free, and all wastes have to go somewhere. Their analysis weaves together tightly several strands of Left activism that are at present separate, including labour rights and inequality, feminism, modern slavery, post-colonialism, and environmentalism. The distinctive ecological perspective which renders this interweaving possible is the book’s most important aspect, as these separate strands often clash in political practice: feminism versus male labour rights, immigration versus native labour rights etc. etc.
Inhabiting this novel viewpoint forces Patel and Moore to define their Seven Cheap Things in very particular ways – not entirely divorced from everyday usage but more abstract and far deeper. Tthey call them ‘real abstractions’, after Alberto Toscano. As with the ant, so with the human, everything that is produced – food, clothing, homes and workplaces, transport, communications, computers – must be co-produced with the rest of nature. When looking at a farm one can clearly see a connection between labour and soil, but when looking at a software developer there’s no such obvious link, which tempts us to think a distinction between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes, as though they were independent of one another.
The authors refuse and refute this distinction. They define ‘cheapness’ as “a set of strategies to manage the relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism’s crises”, where ‘web of life’ refers to those myriad complex cycles of co-production. Cheapness means more than just low cost though: it’s a strategy for mobilising work – human, animal, botanical, geological work – for as little compensation as possible. Capitalism, as Marx saw, transmutes all the invisible relations of humans to nature into production and consumption at the lowest possible price, in a process whereby money flows through nature. Islands of cash exchange exist within oceans of potentially cheap natural resources like minerals, plants and labour, and these islands are bounded by frontiers through which capitalism continually expands in order to resolve its periodic crises.
Patel and Moore begin their historical analysis from the year 1419 when Portugese sailors first sighted the (literal) island that they called Madeira. When they first landed it was entirely covered with trees, but within 40 years half had been cut down for shipbuilding and land to grow wheat for export to Portugal. The rest were cut down later for space to grow sugar and fuel to refine it in the world’s first factories. The small native population were enslaved, then reinforced by more slaves from North Africa. The authors claim this process set in train a great change of mindset, from earlier Christian notions of Providence to a total split between Nature and Society and a relentless pursuit of profit in exploiting the former. This change affected, and indeed still mostly affects, a newly emerging class of capitalists rather than the whole population: “We may all be in the same boat when it comes to climate change, but most of us are in steerage”.
This Nature/Society split sanctioned not just the pursuit of profit but the creation of all the Seven Cheap Things. Illiterate indigenous peoples, being uncivilised, were relegated to the category of Nature, which sanctioned enslaving them. Women, who did not fight, sail or rule but cared for babies, could equally be relegated to Nature rather than Society. The colonial idea spread rapidly throughout Europe, and soon the discovery of the Americas found sources of cheap gold and silver (ie. cheap money) and later cheap guano to act as fertiliser for cheap food, the better to feed cheap factory workers driven from the land into cities. Marriage and the family ensured that these workers were maintained and reproduced, in effect for free, by unpaid wives: “Worker exploitation is bound together with the appropriation of extrahuman nature and the unpaid work of care... To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to ask for an end to capitalism”.
Each of the Seven Cheap Things receives a chapter to itself, which traces its changing relation to the others through history, using concrete examples. The levels of recursive influence involved may tax one’s power of visualisation, which suggests the book might reward a second reading (regrettably their Systems approach denies us solace from that old Marxist trick of merely intoning the magic word ‘dialectical’).
Occasionally their ‘real abstract’ view of a thing may feel over simplified – for example marriage among the aristocracy was always more about merging dynastic land-holdings than about the care or reproduction of labour – but that’s intentional, to abstract away from obscuring details. To risk a medical metaphor one might say that while Marx described the skeleton and musculature of capitalism, Patel and Moore expose its circulatory system and main organs, but it remains for many others to put flesh and skin onto its numerous limbs (think Vitruvian Man or the goddess Kali). The authors took a brave and wise decision to decant much of the detailed support for their arguments into copious references: the main book is only 212 pages long, with four to six references on most pages so that end-notes, bibliography and index fill another 100.
The book’s tone is radical but forensic – like a doctor describing a malignancy – and neither sentimental or moralising. The authors understand that capitalist states always in the end perpetrate forms of violence, whether on nature, on animals, or on human lives, during the resolution of their crises. Their chapter on Cheap Lives flaunts an excruciating list of the scientific racist taxonomy used to label possessed peoples under the Spanish sistema de castas in South America: negro, sambo, mestizo, mulato and worse.
In their concluding chapter Patel and Moore align themselves with various indigenous struggles provoked by resource theft or pollution like Standing Rock and Pan y Rosas; with Black Lives Matter; with Occupy and other recent grassroots campaigns. If frontiers are the motors of capitalism, then climate change marks the end of room for further expansion. They propose an agenda of resistance based on recognition (of the problems), reparation (not of money alone), redistribution (of land, energy and food), reimagination (of alternative futures), and recreation (liberation from drudgery by technology). It’s a distinctly anarchistic and anti-state stance, but rather tame given what went before, a flaw that might be fatal were it not shared by most similar commentaries, from Paul Mason's Post Capitalism to Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End. The very vagueness tells us something about the daunting size of the task.
It struck me though how well their emphasis on ecology complements Jeffrey Sachs’ The Age Of Sustainable Development (about the UN’s Millenium Goals) which demands global coordination of state and non-state actors to combat simultaneously world poverty and the climate crisis. It also fits rather neatly with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years as a critique of global finance. Read all three books and you may glimpse the outlines of a new vocabulary for social democrats, one that could prove more palatable to young people than the hermetic Marxist jargon still wielded by too many on the Left. An important book then, which deserves wide discussion.
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