American Slavery and Global Capitalism

Pictured: Weighing cotton in Virginia, circa 1905 (Detroit Publishing Co. via Library of Congress)

By Edward Liger Smith

Edward Baptiste’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism attempts to provide a material analysis of the development of Slavery in the United States leading up to the Civil War. In doing so he reveals the origin of capitalism, and Western Economic Supremacy, to be the Southern Slave Plantations, who provided Northern and English Capitalists with an endless supply of cheap cotton, picked by the hands of slaves. As Eric Foner of the New York Times said in his review of the text in 2014 “American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States” (Foner). Given the lack of analysis that has been done on the development of Capitalism in the United States, The Half Has Never Been Told, serves as an incredibly useful tool for American socialists who seek to understand the historical development of Western Capitalism, so that we may destroy it, and reconstruct a superior system.

Let us first quickly review Marx’s concept of Surplus Value, and his critique of Political Economy, in a manner that hopefully avoids putting the reader to sleep.

A common attack often levied at modern day economists, is that their field of study seems to have no place for historical analysis. To most Western Economists, capitalism’s laws are viewed as “natural.” The field has given very little thought to the historical development of capitalism, or the systems which predated it. In the 1800s, Karl Marx found this to be a major flaw in the works of Classical Economist David Ricardo. Marx argued in Capital Vol 1 “Ricardo never concerns himself with the origin of surplus-value. He treats it as an entity inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and in his eyes the latter is the natural form of social production” (Marx 651). Marx makes this critique of Ricardo, after he himself first laid out a lengthy history of the development of capitalism in Europe, which took place over hundreds of years. Marx’s analysis of production shows us that surplus value, or excess value beyond what society needs for survival, is not present in all modes of human production historically, nor is it exclusive to the capitalist mode of production. Marx draws our attention to the Egyptians, who’s advanced agricultural infrastructure allowed their society to produce what was needed to survive, while using their leftover time to construct giant pyramids in honor of the Egyptian monarchs. The pyramids themselves would be considered “surplus value”, however, they do NOT constitute the specifically capitalist form of surplus value. This is because the Pyramids were produced to show the power of monarchical rulers, and not to make money for a capitalist through their sale on a market. The domination of Private Property owners and giant global commodity markets would take years of development before coming about. Only after years of struggle between classes would capitalists finally wrench the means of production from the hands of monarchical rulers. These specific historical developments led to a change in how Surplus Value is produced. Now, rather than producing what is needed to maintain society, before using any extra time to construct surplus commodities for the monarchy, Surplus Value is produced through capitalists hiring workers, who then add value to a commodity, before selling that commodity on a market, at a price above it’s actual value. Under this capitalist mode of production, the creations of the working class, beyond what is needed for the survival of society, becomes the property of the capitalist class. This excess property appropriated by Capital is Surplus Value within a capitalist mode of production.

In his studies, Marx also found that the capitalist mode of production develops uniquely to every country and geographic location. In Capital, he often jumps around the world to look at the development of capitalism globally, but primarily narrows his analysis to the development of capitalist production in Europe. Here, Marx observed the rapid development of privately owned textile factories. An analysis of the productive output of these factories showed they had been producing commodities at an ever-increasing rate. This output of commodities was maintained and constantly increased by throwing young girls into the factories en masse. If girls died of overwork or succumbed to diseases contracted in the horrid factory conditions, capitalists looked to the newly created mass of unemployed workers to hire a replacement. Additionally, the machinery of production was constantly being improved. Factory owners were now competing with one another to sell the maximum number of products possible. The winners of this newly emergent capitalist competition were those who could produce the most while paying their workers the least. Capitalism becomes a race to produce surplus value, with no regard for the effects it has on the class of workers.

During the time of capitalism's original development, the textile capitalist’s most important raw material was cotton. Thankfully for these European capitalists, they would find an abundant source of cotton at ever affordable prices directly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Edward Baptiste’s The half has Never Been Told may as well be a contribution to Marxist theory for those of us living here in the US, the world’s capitalist stronghold. Upon its release, Baptiste’s book was lambasted by those who Marx would have referred to as ‘bourgeois economists.’ One article from The Economist was removed after the Publication received backlash over their critique that “Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the white’s villains” (The Economist). Perhaps economists in the United States have not yet been made aware that the capitalist mode of production they claim to study so closely developed slowly out of a system of chattel slavery, which specifically targeted those with black skin. However, someone should make these folks aware that throughout the 19th-century, capitalists in the Northern United States, Europe, and anywhere else the capitalist mode of production had taken hold, were profiting greatly from cotton picked by black slaves in the southern United States. Despite what our modern-day economists would have you believe, black people were in fact victimized by white owners of capital. These white landowners did all they could to commodify the black body in order to create for themselves an endless source of labour power. This labour could theoretically provide capital with an endless source of surplus value, so long as that labor could be combined with land, which of course was quickly being acquired through the genocide and forced removal of native populations.

Painstakingly conducted research from Baptiste and others reveals Southern Slavery to be its own specific mode of production. So, while Southern Slavery had unique elements which made it distinguishable from Capitalism, they also shared many of the same features. Therefore, the class of Southern slave owners did not have the same motivations as the previously mentioned ruling class of Egypt, who also produced goods under relations of slavery. Instead, plantation owners in the south were subjected to the same market forces as their capitalist counterparts in Europe. Slave owners produced incredible amounts of surplus value through selling their cotton on a world market which provided endless demand for their commodity. Unlike Egyptian enslavers, the surplus value of southern plantation owners did not come in the form of giant stone creations, or sculptures to the gods. The surplus value appropriated by enslavers instead came in the form of money. Much of which was then reinvested in expanding production through purchasing more slaves, plantations, and land. This money used to make more money is what Marx labeled as ‘Capital.’

The endeavors of these Southern enslaver capitalists were heavily financed by banks in Europe and the Northern United States. These financial institutions simultaneously bank rolled massive campaigns of forced removal or genocide of Native peoples, aimed at divorcing them from the land and allowing market-based production to expand. The Native people’s own unique Mode of production had to be destroyed in order to make room for the production of capitalist’s surplus value. The enslavers of the United States essentially functioned as capitalists, subject to the same market forces as the factory owners who Marx studied in Europe. However, plantation owners held a unique economic power that would come to be enforced by the state. This power was the legal ‘right’ not just to commodify human labour power, but the source of that labour power. Human Beings. Through the legal commodification of human beings with black skin, Southern Enslavers used the labor of black bodies to produce obscene quantities of cotton. The sale of these commodities on the Global Market allowed plantation owners to accumulate massive hoards of wealth, and continue their expansion by endlessly investing capital. The brutality of these enslavers was either ignored or justified by capitalists around the globe who saw the South as an endless source of cheap cotton.

Black slaves existed under relations of slavery, while also being subjected to market forces that are usually associated with capitalism. These specific economic conditions incentivized white plantation owners to subject those who toiled in their fields to some of the most horrific crimes in human history. Similar to European capitalists who were consistently working children to death in order to maximize output, Southern slave owners sought any methods possible to increase the quantity of cotton they could produce. Because slave owners had legally enforced ownership of the physical bodies in their labor force, torture became the primary method used to force slaves into increasing the speed of cotton production. Baptiste draws on an analogy from former Politician, and fierce ideological advocate of slavery Henry Clay, who describes a “whipping machine” used to torture enslaved people and make them work faster. Baptiste explains it is unlikely the whipping machine was a real device that existed in the Southern United States.  He instead argues that the machine is a metaphor for the use of torture which was the primary technology used by enslavers to increase their production of cotton. While technological innovations such as the cotton gin allowed for an increase in the amount of cotton which could be separated and worked into commodities, far less technology was developed to aid in the process of actually picking the cotton. Therefore, in order for slave owning capitalists to increase the speed of cotton picking on their plantations, the use of torture was systematized and ramped up to an unimaginable degree. Torture was to the slave owner, what developments in machine production were to the factory owner: a tactic for continually increasing the Rate of Exploitation, or the quantity of commodities produced by a given number of workers, in order to produce an increased number of goods for sale on a market, which brings the capitalist his surplus value.

There are many ways in which capitalists can increase their rate of exploitation. The specific function of the whipping machine was to increase what Marx called the ‘intensity of labour,’ i.e., an increase in the expenditure of labour and quantity of commodities created by the workers within a given time period. For example, a slave owner hitting a field worker with a whip until the worker picks double the cotton. This would be an increase in the intensity of labour. There are many ways for capitalists to increase the rate of exploitation without increasing intensity of labour. Two common techniques used by non-slave owning capitalists at the time were increasing the productivity of their machinery and increasing the length of the working day. As was discussed previously, very few technological innovations were created in the realm of cotton harvesting during the time of Southern Slavery. Additionally, the Slave Owners already had free reign to work their labour as long as they pleased, and an extension of the working day would serve them no purpose. Slave owning capitalists had a choice to either give up their pursuit of surplus value or use torture on a mass scale to increase the speed at which their workers produced. Of course, the capitalists chose torture, and the market rewarded those capitalists who refined their torture techniques the furthest. Market competition compelled most all Southern capitalists to adopt torture as an incentive of production or be pushed out of business by those who did. The innovation of the market at work!

Slavery would only die in the United States after a long and protracted struggle between opposing classes culminating in the Civil War. Baptiste details this struggle in his book and in the process refutes the utopian historical myth that the labor of slaves was simply less efficient than wage-laborers, which is what led to the implementation of capitalism. Baptiste instead shows how Northern Capitalists came into a political conflict with the Southern Enslavers. Northerners began challenging the southern capitalist’s unique ‘right’ to own human beings. By the Civil War plantation owners had long been expanding into Mexico while continuing to steal land from Native Americans. Now running low on conquerable land, the enslavers sought to expand their control to various US colonies, or even extend slavery into the Northern US. This brought Southern Slave Capital into a direct conflict with Northern Capital.

By 1860 The North had developed a diversified industrial economy, albeit with the help of cotton picked by slaves. The South on the other hand had seen moderate industrial development, but mostly served as a giant cotton colony for the rest of the world’s capitalists. This limited diversification in the cotton dependent Southern economy and left them slightly less prepared for war. This, among other factors, allowed the Union to win the Civil War replacing slave relations with capitalist ones. Additionally, the Slaves and many workers who hated the Southern Plantation Oligarchy would take up arms and join the Union Army. We see in the civil war the intensification of struggles between classes, which reached its climax in armed conflict between the warring classes.  Whether he’s done so intentionally or not, Edward Baptiste’s history of slavery has provided great evidence for Karl Marx’s theory that struggles between classes are what drive history through various modes of production.

For those of us living in the United States who wish to wage a struggle against our current mode of production, the history of Southern slavery is necessary to understand. Marx conducted his historical analysis of the development of Capitalism in England with the explicit goal of helping workers to understand their current situation and how to change it. Similarly to Marx, American socialists have the imperative to understand the historical development of our own capitalist mode of production. A history that shows without question that the propertied class in this country has consistently used race as a tool for maximizing their own surplus value. The commodification of a specific race being the ultimate form of this. Today, capital seeks to sow racial divisions among the diverse mass of working people. This is done to distract the labourers of society from the forces of markets, our relations of production, and designed to maximize our exploitation for the enrichment of a small number of people who do not work, the capitalists. The union army destroyed the uniquely evil mutation of capitalist production that was southern slavery. Let us continue this struggle today by attacking capitalist production at its roots, and take power from the class who exploits us, and the markets which throw our lives into anarchy.

Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a co-founder and editor of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. He is currently a graduate student, assistant, and wrestling coach at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Bibliography

The Economist. “Our withdrawn review "Blood Cotton."” The Economist, 5 September 2014, https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2014/09/05/our-withdrawn-review-blood-cotton. Accessed 29 06 2021.

Foner, Eric. A Brutal Process. New York Times, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html. Accessed 02 07 2021.

Marx, Karl. Capital Volume I. Penguin Classics, 1976. 3 vols.

COVID-19, Marxism, and the Metabolic Rift

By Sagar Sanyal

Originally published at Red Flag.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from a purely natural occurrence. Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) that exist in populations of birds and various mammals such as pigs, horses, cows and humans, are nothing new. But the circulation of these viruses between species, and the frequency of viruses spreading from animals to humans, has increased in recent decades, and changes in the relationship between human society and nature have been the main driver of this.

The origin of COVID-19 and the vector for its spread to humans are still under investigation by scientists. The closest variant of the virus has been identified in bats, and it’s possible it was transmitted to humans through wild meat or bush meat markets, perhaps via pangolins. Whatever the exact origin and vector, however, the jump from animals to humans fits a familiar pattern, one long understood by epidemiologists.

The destruction of nature by capitalist industry plays a big part. As forests and other areas untouched by human development are destroyed, wild species like bats are forced out to forage for food in urban centers. Those wild species carry diseases that previously remained confined to forests and only rarely infected humans – never enough to cause an epidemic. But now this migrating wildlife comes into more frequent contact with large human populations. Sneezes and droppings from wild animals spread the virus to other animals that humans handle more often – like pigs, chickens or, as with the MERS outbreak in the Middle East a decade ago, camels.

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is among the writers who for years have warned of the increasing likelihood of such epidemics. On COVID-19 specifically, Wallace and his collaborators emphasize how the wild meat sector fits into the broader context of industrial food production. “How did the exotic food sector arrive”, he asks, “at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? The animals were not being sold off the back of a truck or in an alleyway”.

Increasingly, according to Wallace, wild food is being integrated into the mainstream of the capitalist food market. “The overlapping economic geography”, he writes, “extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands”.

Right wing news outlets more interested in racist scapegoating than in facts made a big deal of the wild meat issue, as if the world would have been spared the virus if only Chinese consumers had stuck to eating chicken or pork. But that is a false narrative. Since the 1990s, several deadly strains of bird flu and swine flu have developed and spread from industrial farms of chickens or pigs, including in North America and Europe, as well as in China.  

It has long been understood why these places breed disease. The animals are crowded into feedlots under conditions that run down their immune systems. The genetic monoculture of these populations takes away the natural diversity that reduces the prevalence of diseases. As farmers try to minimize time from birth to slaughter, this has the perverse consequence of acting as a natural selection pressure for pathogens that can survive more robust immune systems. All these things mean diseases can spread very fast within industrial herds and flocks. The cost cutting imperative means that work conditions (like protective equipment) are so poor that farm laborers are highly vulnerable to catching viruses from these animals.

The danger to humanity from such practices was reinforced in June, when scientists discovered a number of new strains of swine flu with pandemic potential circulating among pigs on farms in China. Although the strains, collectively referred to as G4 viruses, don’t appear currently to be able to spread between humans, around 10 percent of blood samples taken from farm laborers showed evidence of prior infection. All it would take is a small mutation and one or other of these viruses could start jumping from human to human and spread rapidly through the broader population, just as has occurred with SARS-CoV-2.

Marx and Engels’ groundbreaking work on the relationship between human society and nature in the context of the emergence of capitalism as a global system in the 19th century can help us understand the destructive dynamics underlying these developments. Central to their work in this area was the idea of the “metabolic rift”. All living things have a metabolic relation with their ecological surroundings, taking in certain things and putting out waste. When it comes to humans, Marx and Engels noted that our metabolism with the rest of nature is not due to our biology alone, but also to the kind of society we’ve built. To understand human metabolism with nature, we thus need social science in addition to natural science.

The metabolic rift has both historical and theoretical aspects. On the historical side is the displacement of peasants and peasant farming methods from the countryside, and their corralling into towns to create the modern working class. Workers, unlike the peasantry, had no means of livelihood of their own, and therefore had to move around to find waged work, crowding into the cities where that work was concentrated. One consequence of this was that, instead of being reabsorbed back into the local environment, human waste now collected in vast pools in the cities.

This process was the main driver of the soil fertility crisis that struck Europe in the late 19th century. By displacing the peasantry, and forcing more and more people into the cities, capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”.

What about the theoretical aspect? The rift isn’t just about the natural effects they observed, but also their social cause. It is a rift in social relations: the forcible conversion of a peasantry into the modern working class.

Peasants farmed a plot of land to which they had customary right over generations. They controlled their own labor process, and this meant there was a feedback mechanism between their labor and its effects on the land. If they depleted the soil and thus threatened their livelihood, they could adjust their methods of work accordingly. Peasant farmers had, over many generations, developed practices to maintain soil fertility through crop rotation, cycling between crops and pasture to ensure manuring, and returning human excrement to the fields. Peasant methods of labor were the main factor in the metabolism between feudal society and the rest of nature. Feudal lords would leave peasants to farm as they wished, then take a portion of the produce.

By contrast, the capitalist mode of production involves the capitalist dictating the labor process, and then just hiring laborers to do what they are told. As capitalist farmers emerged, they realized more money was to be made by cutting out the aspects of peasant farming practices that had no immediate pay-off (even though they maintained soil fertility) and focusing just on the highest earning aspects.

Around the same time the first factories were bmetabloismeing established in towns, and the emerging capitalist class and the state that served them realized that wages could be forced down if large masses of former peasants were concentrated in a handful of industrial areas rather than scattered across a large number of small population centers. During the 18th and 19th centuries, vast numbers of peasants were driven from the land by a combination of brute force and legal changes (such as the Enclosure Acts). Out of this uprooted peasantry, the modern working class was born.

A new dynamic began to shape social metabolism with nature. Unlike the peasants who worked the land directly, capitalist farmers and the new captains of industry were far removed from the destructive consequences of their activities. So long as they had workers prepared to exchange their labor for a wage (and the desperate poverty in which most people lived ensured that there was no shortage), they could turn a profit, even if their actions were detrimental to the natural world on which their business ultimately depended. If they destroyed the land, they could use the profits they had made to buy more land elsewhere. More often, however, the destructive consequences of their activities were simply externalized – the poisoning of the air and water in factory districts, which had a major impact on the lives of workers in this period, provides a clear example.

From this point on, what was produced in society and through which methods was determined by the profit motive and competition among rival capitalists and nation-states. The impact of production on the natural world became, at best, an afterthought. A new dynamic was driving society’s metabolism with nature – one that would create environmental disasters on an ever widening scale.

Scientists who study the origins of diseases have been telling us for decades that we will continue to have outbreaks of novel viruses that hop from other animals to humans because of how we farm animals and how we destroy wilderness. This advice is ignored, just as the advice of climate scientists is ignored, because acting on it would require breaking from the profit-driven logic of capitalism.

Where it’s a choice between booking short-term profits and taking a hit to profit to address potentially destructive consequences in the longer term, capitalists will always put profit first. They, after all, can escape the consequences of their actions. They spend their days in air conditioned offices, unlike the farm laborers who spend their days surrounded by hundreds of pigs riddled with swine flu. In a pandemic, capitalists can hide away in their country mansions and, in the event that they fall ill, can pay for the very best of medical care.

For workers it’s a different story. We’re the ones on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, not through our own free choice, but through economic necessity. For the vast majority of workers around the world, stopping work isn’t an option. We must work to survive, even if in doing so we are actually putting our lives at risk. This suits the capitalists very nicely. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the world economy was already struggling. The ruling class, whether in Australia, the US or any other country, is desperate to limit the economic damage from the crisis, even if that means many more people will die.

If workers ran the world, it would be very different. It would make no sense for us to ignore the warnings of scientists about how industrial agriculture and environmental destruction are fueling the emergence of new diseases, for the simple reason that we’re the ones who will suffer when they appear. We don’t have a stake in the relentless scramble for short-term profit that defines capitalism today. We can organize production – both what we produce and how we produce – with human health and environmental sustainability in mind.

In the current pandemic, that might mean shutting down all but the most essential parts of the economy to slow the spread of the virus, while ensuring other workers are paid to stay home. In the longer term, it would mean reshaping animal agriculture to limit the potential for it to function as a petri dish for the emergence of deadly diseases.

This is how Marx envisaged the metabolic rift being healed. “Freedom in this field”, he wrote in volume 3 of Capital, “can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”.

Such freedom will never exist under a capitalist system in which the drive to profit rules. The first step in fixing the metabolic rift is to make our labor our own again. That means taking it back from the ruling class.

Engels on Nature and Humanity

(Pictured: A painting by English artist LS Lowry (1887 - 1976) entitled 'Going To Work')

By Michael Roberts

Republished from the author’s blog.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.

The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the use of human beings.  There are humans and there is nature – in contradiction.  This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels, who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science: scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and so was the relationship between man and nature.

This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism, which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”.  Later, followers of the French Marxist Althusser put the blame on Fred himself.  For them, everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’ and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.

Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus themselves.  Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to overcome any risks to the planet and nature.

That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.  They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of the planet.  Marx wrote that 

“the capitalist mode of production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and the intellectual life of the rural worker.” 

As Paul Burkett says: “it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections of communism.”

To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).

But Engels too must be saved from the same charge.  Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing.  While still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.

Just 18 years old, he writes: 

“the two towns of Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that, but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red. Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”

He goes on:

“First and foremost, factory work is largely responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. “

He connected the social degradation of working families with the degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the manufacturers.

“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone, out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their people.”

Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations, without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of factory production.

In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand. 

“To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” 

Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.

Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way.  And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature.

In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes: 

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains, the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were … thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)

Engels goes on: 

“in fact, with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body. …”

Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces.  

“But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”

The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it:

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.

As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’, as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.

Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish and will just destroy nature.  In his Outline, Engels described that argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.”  Humans can work in harmony with and as part of nature.  It requires greater knowledge of the consequences of human action.  Engels said in his Dialectics:

“But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote, social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”

But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.”  Science is not enough. “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.”  The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.

Marxism and Nature: The Metabolic Rift

By Rebecca Heyer

This article is intended to be the first in a series that will provide an introduction to some of the concepts that provide the foundation for ecosocialism, a movement that develops and applies socialist solutions to the challenges of climate change and the environment. All of these will be an attempt to introduce the reader to the subject matter.

Many readers find the original works that have helped define the movement to be difficult to follow. Academics such as John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus are highly respected, but use a language that many socialist organizers find somewhat inaccessible. I highly recommend their writing to anyone who wants to take the time and effort to read and understand them. I will not come close to their rigor and attention to detail here. I hope to inspire all people interested in building a socialist future to investigate further.

Marx's View of the Relationship between Humans and the Environment

Marx and Epicurean Philosophy

Karl Marx spent much of his life considering the relationship between the human race and the world they live in. He excelled in the study of philosophy, history and the natural sciences. Marx's world view was grounded in philosophy, particularly that of the ancient Greeks. The subject of his PhD thesis was a comparison of philosophy of two of the classic Greek scholars, Epicurus and Democritus. Both of them were materialists, in contrast to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who were idealists. Idealism had dominated western thought for centuries and provided a foundation for much of Christian theology. The Enlightenment marked a revival of the materialist school. Marx saw the relationship between humans and the environment in materialist terms and saw humans as part of the world they live in. Marx's world was not populated by ideal forms. It was made up of matter, time and space. It existed independently of any deity, and humans did not govern it or maintain it as agents of God. They interacted with their environment in a dialectical relationship, with all participants affecting all other participants.

Labor as a Natural Process

Marx saw labor as a process that connected humans with their environment. In Volume I of Capital, Chapter Seven, Section One, he wrote:

" Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labor that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labor-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labor was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be."

Labor is a dialectical process where humans impact the environment, but at the same time the changes in the environment made by humans impact humans.

The Metabolic Rift and Fertilizer

Marx and the Soil

Marx recognized the fundamental role of the soil in the labor process. He viewed agriculture as the basis for an economy. He included the following in the section of Capital cited above.

" The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labor. All those things which labor merely separates from immediate connection with their environment, are subjects of labor spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labor has, so to say, been filtered through previous labor, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labor, but not every subject of labor is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labor."

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was marked by a change in the relationship between humans and the soil.

Capitalism in Europe began to develop in the fourteenth century with the rise of capitalist agriculture. Feudal Europe had few cities or towns and agriculture was distributed across a multitude of feudal estates. Most were largely self-sufficient and trade was not a significant factor. As the population grew cities and towns became more important. This led to the practice of tenant farming and the development of markets for agricultural products. In Chapter Twenty-Nine of Capital, Volume I, Marx writes:

" Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of outlawed proletarians, the bloody discipline that turned them into wage laborers, the disgraceful action of the State which employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor, the question remains: whence came the capitalists originally? For the expropriation of the agricultural population creates, directly, none but the greatest landed proprietors. As far, however, as concerns the genesis of the farmer, we can, so to say, put our hand on it, because it is a slow process evolving through many centuries. The serfs, as well as the free small proprietors, held land under very different tenures, and were therefore emancipated under very different economic conditions. In England the first form of the farmer is the bailiff, himself a serf. His position is similar to that of the old Roman villicus , only in a more limited sphere of action. During the second half of the 14th century he is replaced by a farmer, whom the landlord provided with seed, cattle and implements. His condition is not very different from that of the peasant. Only he exploits more wage labor. Soon he becomes a metayer, a half-farmer. He advances one part of the agricultural stock, the landlord the other. The two divide the total product in proportions determined by contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to give the place to the farmer proper, who makes his own capital breed by employing wage laborers, and pays a part of the surplus-product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as rent. So long, during the 15th century, as the independent peasant and the farm-laborer working for himself as well as for wages, enriched themselves by their own labor, the circumstances of the farmer, and his field of production, were equally mediocre. The agricultural revolution which commenced in the last third of the 15th century, and continued during almost the whole of the 16th (excepting, however, its last decade), enriched him just as speedily as it impoverished the mass of the agricultural people."

The Metabolic Rift

The development of capitalist agricultural alienated farmers, both from the soil, which was the source of their productivity, and their produce, which was the fruit of their labor. Marx did not call this alienation a "metabolic rift" but later writers have used this term to refer to the disruption of the relationship between humans and the environment described in Capital Volume I, Chapter 15, Section 10.

" Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town laborer and the intellectual life of the rural laborer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labor becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the laborer; the social combination and organization of labor-processes is turned into an organized mode of crushing out the workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural laborers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labor set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labor-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the laborer."

Soil Depletion and the Use of Fertilizer

Capitalists often attempt to address problems created by a metabolic rift through technical changes in production methods. Marx was familiar with the attempt to mitigate soil depletion through the use of fertilizer. He was fascinated by the work of organic chemist Justus von Liebig on the subject of nutrients needed by plants. In large part due to Liebig's discoveries, the use of fertilizer in both Europe and America exploded during the nineteenth century.

The best available fertilizer available at the time was guano, the accumulated droppings of sea birds. Islands on the west coast of South America had an abundant supply. Demand for guano from Peru soared during the mid nineteenth century and the major agricultural producers of the time fought to control these resources. This led to the Chincha Islands War of 1864-1866. Marx saw this conflict as an example of the way imperial powers enter into conflict for the control of natural resources.

As is often the case, this metabolic rift led to another, as the capitalist system attempted to correct the problem by using new technology. Guano was carried from Peru to agricultural centers in Europe and North America by clipper ships. About the same time as the Chincha Islands War, shipping technology changed from wind driven vessels to steam driven vessels powered by coal. The mining and shipping of coal created a new, even more serious metabolic rift. Fossil fuels such as coal represent energy that was captured long ago by plants and has been sitting underground for millions of years. Plants use energy from solar radiation to convert carbon dioxide into other carbon compounds. This energy is stored in fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. The stored energy is released when fossil fuels are burned, but at the same time carbon dioxide is also released. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which, when released into the atmosphere, causes environmental systems like the oceans to retain heat and become warmer. The current warming trend that is driving global climate change began in the mid-nineteenth century and can be in, at least in part, traced back to the chain of metabolic rifts that was initiated by capitalist agriculture.

The Metabolic Rift Today

Agriculture

The chain of metabolic rifts in agriculture has continued. By the end of the nineteenth century, deposits of nitrates such as guano were becoming depleted. Capitalist agricultural, now dependent on nitrate fertilizer, needed a new technology. In 1909 an artificial way of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, called the Haber Process, was discovered. The Haber Process is still the dominate way of producing nitrates, which are used in the production of munitions and explosives as well as fertilizer.

The Haber Process is energy intensive, uses natural gas as a source of hydrogen and consumes three to five percent of the world's production of natural gas. Capitalist agricultural is also heavily dependent on the use of powered equipment, such as tractors, trucks and harvesters, which are also fueled by petroleum products. Although agricultural consumption of petroleum is dwarfed by other economic sectors such as transportation, according to the US Energy Information Administration about half a trillion BTU of petroleum is consumed by agricultural production in this country alone.

Energy

No where is a metabolic rift more apparent than in the capitalist production of energy. Fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and petroleum represent solar radiation received by plants millions of years ago and captured through the process of photosynthesis which converts carbon dioxide and water into other hydrocarbons. Burning fossil fuels releases both energy and carbon dioxide. After almost two hundred years of burning fossil fuels, accelerated by capitalist agriculture and manufacturing processes, the portion of the atmosphere made up by carbon dioxide has gone from less than three hundred parts per million to over 400 parts per million. Changes of this magnitude typically take millions of years.

Manufactured Goods

In the same way that the globalization of agriculture creates metabolic rifts, the globalization of the production of manufactured commodities creates additional rifts. These may not be connected directly to the soil, but they still impact the connection between humans and environmental systems. In a globalized economy the sources of raw materials, the sites of manufacturing facilities and consumers are usually separated by large distances and national borders. The most obvious impact on environmental systems comes from the need to transport huge quantities of commodities and materials. Most of these are moved by cargo ships and most of these ships are powered by a petroleum product known as bunker fuel, the residual that is left after gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and other lighter distillates are extracted. Bunker fuel is relatively inexpensive, but burning it emits large amounts of carbon dioxide compared to the amount of energy produced. The transportation of goods and materials needed to support a globalized economy contributes heavily to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and thereby to global climate change.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given the reader some idea of the meaning of the term metabolic rift and its place in the Marxian critique of capitalism. Metabolic rift is a key concept within ecosocialism and the understanding of how capitalism is responsible for global climate change.

This article originally appeared on the Socialist Party USA's official publication, The Socialist .

Rebecca Heyer graduated from Rice University with a BA in economics in 1977. Based in Texas, she worked as a systems analyst and consultant for 23 years, specializing in the management of very large data sets. Starting in 2000, she became active in politics, holding a county office in the Green Party and lobbying the Texas Legislature. She relocated to northwest Florida in 2006 where she served on the City of Pensacola Environmental Advisory Board. After the 2016 election she left the Green Party and joined the Socialist Party USA as an at large member. She currently serves on the Ecosocialist Commission. At the age of 62, she still enjoys the punk scene and living on the Gulf Coast.

Sources

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth by John Bellamy Foster, Robert York and Brett Clark

The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies in General - Karl Marx's Doctoral Thesis

Capital, Volume I by Karl Marx