Nature's Evil

In the chapter called ‘The Labour-Process’, Marx takes a new step. Labour creates a third thing which is neither labour nor matter. Seeking a metaphor which will help the reader understand this process, Marx turns to the idea of William Petty, the early English mercantilist. Labour is the father and the earth is the mother of use-value, quotes Marx from Petty. How to define the process of their intercourse without reverting to ‘fetishism’? Looking for still another metaphor, Marx proposes one that transfers agency from the person to the raw material. The function of matter, for example cotton or coal, is to ‘absorb’ (aufsaugen ) human labour. ‘The raw material serves now merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of work.’ Yarn, for example, is ‘nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton.’ Labour consumes raw material, nature absorbs labour – this produces a kind of symmetry. In their application to matter and labour, metaphors of ingestion – to devour, absorb, feed on – appeal to Marx more than the idea of sexual intercourse which he found in Petty. It takes six hours of manual labour for a spinner to create 10 pounds of yarn: cotton thus absorbs these hours of work in order to become yarn. Then this yarn absorbs still more hours of work to turn into a coat. In the same way a load of coal absorbs a certain number of hours of a miner’s labour. In commerce, goods interact and multiply. This creates capital, which has a life of its own – it invests and devours, destroys and resurrects, and multiplies again. Marx’s final formula is startling in its splendour: ‘… incorporating living labour with … dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster who begins to “work” as if he has love in his body.’ *

The live monster, the capitalist Leviathan, sends us back to Hobbes. However, does the ruling monster have ‘love in his body’? Are we to understand Marx’s capital as a live but lonely monster that ‘works’ on himself, as if masturbating? Is this solitary but explosive action the secret of the ‘value big with value’? Marx put ‘work’ in quotation marks, and they add a bit of irony to the picture. * The grotesque image of the monster state pleasuring itself, and thus endlessly creating capital, helped Marx to move away from the sentimental ‘mother-nature, father-labour’ model of his predecessors. That model gave too big a role to natural matter, to dead substance and to the finite universe.

Two pumps

The enlightenment of the lower classes, their sweet refinement, gave that stimulus to mass consumption without which capitalism would have been limited to aristocrats exchanging luxury items (see chapters 4 and 8 ). This internal side of the process was crucial. We know a lot about mercantilism as a system of trade relations between empires and colonies; the question is, how did this high policy translate into relationships inside every village, smallholding and, ultimately, family?

The mercantile system led to a major resource crisis – the shift from grain to wool. Polanyi describes how the English state both initiated and tried to slow down this transformation. The poorest of the rural poor received food subsidies that allowed them to survive. Pioneered in 1795, the Speenhamland system was an early version of agricultural subsidy, with the difference that this relief was given to landless labourers. Local parishes distributed aid among the needy. The profit from overseas colonies was redistributed in favour of the English rural poor. This early recognition of the ‘right to live’ resulted in the formation of a class of paupers – people who were deprived of land and didn’t see any point in work. The brightest minds of the era wrote about them; Malthus and Burke were both against subsidy; Bentham suggested replacing it with panoptical workhouses. A market in land could have helped the paupers, but it didn’t yet exist: if the impoverished smallholder could have sold his land the landlords would not have needed to enclose it, and he would have had some money.