Re: <nettime> Return to feudalism

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 09/19/2017 01:05 PM, franz schaefer wrote:
> so if labour is no longer a relevant measure of value - as it is no longer
> needed, then indeed the only thing that is relevant for the value is the
> soil. marx most of the time neglects this as soil, back his days was
> abundant. the value of things harvested of nature was mostly determined by
> the labour it took to havest it and not su much by the value of the soil.

All your points are totally well-taken, but still it's possible to get 
more precise about it:

- When discussing the plantation economy and the colonial exploitation 
of the kinds of wealth that are now called "natural resources," like 
precious metals and so on, Marx tended to use the term "primitive 
accumulation," meaning the stuff was ripped off by force, including the 
force of enslavement, rather than being produced by free labor. A few 
years ago David Harvey began translating primitive accumulation into 
"accumulation by dispossession," both in order to accentuate the "ripped 
off by force" aspect, and to stress that this kind of accumulation has 
hardly disappeared, it is still ongoing. Now we talk about the 
"extractive economy" to indicate both this violence and its products, 
especially coal, oil, gas, rare earths and so on.

- When describing soil properly speaking, and the relationship between 
the hungry laboring city and the crops that grow from the fertility of 
the soil in the countryside, Marx used the term "metabolic relation," 
which is rather different from primitive accumulation. In Marx's day the 
city/country relation was a huge issue, because soil fertility tended to 
decline while population tended to rise. The young Marx was deeply 
involved in peasant revolts (that's how he got kicked out of Germany), 
so he explored all the questions of soil fertility and throughout his 
life he continued to recognize both the agency of the natural world, and 
the way that agency evolved in the metabolic relation between city and 
country, or if you prefer, between humanity and nature.  In the year 
2000 John Bellamy Foster transformed the contemporary understanding of 
Marx in a book called Marx's Ecology where he recovered this aspect of 
Marx's thought, which was basically ignored due to the incredible 
transformations brought by industry - notably the invention of synthetic 
nitrogen, which overcame the declining soil fertility that had obsessed 
nineteenth-century demographers.

Of course we have a new obsession in the twenty-first century: climate 
change. The products of the extractive economy produce CO2 and so does 
industrial ag, in a big way. Plenty of violence and ripoffs attend both 
processes. But now it looks as though the environmental consequences are 
about to dwarf those concerning wealth and redistribution. The metabolic 
relation between industrial society and the biogeochemical cycles of the 
earth is what any good Marxist should be thinking about and intervening 
in right now, imho.

best, Brian
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