It was E.P. Thompson who stated, in The Making of the English Working Class, that:
When we encounter some sonorous
phrase such as “the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle” we must be
put on our guard. For behind this trade cycle there is a structure of
social relations, fostering some sorts of expropriation (rent, interest,
and profit) and outlawing others (theft, feudal dues), legitimising
some types of conflict (competition, armed warfare) and inhibiting
others (trade unionism, bread riots, popular political organisation)—a
structure which may appear, in the eyes of the future, to be both
barbarous and ephemeral.
We all, therefore, have to be on guard against the use of festishised
concepts, categories, or raw facts, which are often abstracted from
their alienated forms of appearance under the social relations of
capitalism. Yet, as Bertell Ollman indicates in his book Alienation,
the average social scientist starts with a conception of factors or
relations that are treated as logically independent of one another where
each relatum is taken as a self-subsistent entity existing
apart from the other. The latter philosophy of external relations treats
the world as constituted of things external to each other, remaining
independent, relatively isolated and static, meriting analysis only when
“bumping” into each other. The exogenous interaction of states, akin to
the analogy of billiard balls, independently operating within a system
of international anarchy would be the example par excellence from
neo-Realist international theory. Central to a dialectical method, in
contrast, is the philosophy of internal relations in which entities take
their meaning in and through their relationality with each other. The
full complexity of the inneraction of entities, then, can be assessed
only after their prior identity has been accepted as linked within a
relational viewpoint. As Ollman highlights, both issues of identity and
difference can then be established:
the identity of mode of production
and relations of production, private property and the division of
labour, production and consumption, base and superstructure, class and
state . . . constitutes the ontological basis for the investigation of
their actual differences.
Connections are therefore maintained and contained as aspects of each
part, as both ‘process’ and ‘relation’, forming together the whole in
which they exist. Various philosophical sources for treating internally
related aspects as part of the same whole may be established. Leon
Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development would be one
example. Another example would be Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the
integral state. Yet it is Karl Marx’s conception of capital that
establishes factors conventionally thought of as external as, instead,
treated as co-elements in a single structure or relational whole within a
materialist theory of history. What historical materialism manages to
capture is the ‘spiral form of development’ of concepts, as Engels put
in Dialectics of Nature, to establish the manifold ways in which entities are internally related as part of a dialectical method of inquiry.
A relational ontology therefore avoids positing entities in external
interaction, or succumbing to the pitfall of ontological exteriority, by
asserting instead a focus on the internal ties that bind exploitation
through value, labour, private property, class, capital, interest,
commodities, the state, nature, religion or ideology, to name just a few
possible points of departure. This is why Ollman asserts so adroitly a
powerful rereading of Vilfredo Pareto’s comment that ‘Marx’s words are
like bats. You can see in them both birds and mice’. In short, the
relational method of conceiving a world contained in each of its parts
is a hallmark of historical materialism. Putting us on guard against the
reified domains of trade cycles, states, or market relations and
shifting the focus from purely “technological” factors as the typical
refuge of economics and capitalist ideology to the internal relations of
political economy is therefore the enterprise of historical
materialism. The aim of my recently co-authored book with Andreas Bieler
entitled, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis,
is to have the philosophy of internal relations taken seriously as a
contribution to the critique of political economy. The philosophy of
internal relations is a revolt against the violence of abstraction—as
Derek Sayer puts it—through which concepts all too commonly become
fetishised, or treated as things, so that such material features come to
replace specific social relations. How does this philosophy of internal
relations pervade Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life?
Just as the dialectical method is treated as the differentia specifica of Karl Marx’s Capital
so that labour, value, and capital are understood in their inner
connection as an integrated totality with Nature, then so too do we find
in Moore’s world-ecology perspective a dialectical emphasis on the
relation between human and extra-human nature. A focus on the web of
life therefore reveals the inner connections of capitalism through Nature. This is crafted in Capitalism in the Web of Life as tracking the double internality of
capital’s internalisation of nature and nature’s internalisation of
capital. As an example, one could think of the ways in which capitalism
extends into the biosphere through the reproduction of cheap labour,
food, energy and raw materials in order to turn these ‘Four Cheaps’ into
the commodity system. Alternatively, there are limits to Nature meaning
that conditions such as climate change may act as a barrier to the
endless accumulation of capital. A dialectical method avoids the
distinction of Nature versus Society, or viewing the environment as an
object based on its interaction with society as externally
related. Instead, the philosophy of internal relations guides us through
the inner ties of class, capital, Nature to address how frontiers of
appropriation are produced and reproduced in the web of life. For sure,
Moore accepts that ‘it has been easier to assert a dialectical method
than to practice to it’. Therefore one can retain a lingering qualm
about his constant invocation of human and extra-human natures as
interpenetrating and interdependent, rather than inner-related. Yet
Moore’s book is a hugely significant advancement of debates on the
violent abstraction of Nature and the philosophy of internal relations
approach, for three reasons:
- For the critique of the “dirty dualism” of bourgeois thought
based on the Nature/Society binary that assumes these concepts as
separate, external and universal. One is reminded here of Neil Smith’s Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space
and the critique of the ideology of Nature and the frontier as
external: a world that is hostile, that has to be dominated and
subjugated in terms of its feminine qualities—Mother Earth—as an object
of conquest and penetration. Yet Nature is socially produced, it is a
social product, at the hands of capitalist development. As Marx states
in Capital, Vol. 1:
Animals and plants, which we are
accustomed to consider as products of nature, are in their present form,
not only products of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a
gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s [sic]
superintendence, and by means of his labour . . . In the great majority
of cases, instruments of labour show even to the most superficial
observer, traces of the labour of past ages.
2. For the assertion of a world-ecology perspective that seeks to
establish humanity-in-nature developing through the web of life. A focus
here on commodity frontiers or frontiers of appropriation linked to the
rise and geographical expansion of capitalism is crucial in extending
the law of value over the appropriation of Cheap Nature. Moore, quoting Grundrisse, acknowledges that the ‘natural fertility of the soil can act like an increase of fixed capital’; and
3. For a focus on abstract social nature as the substance of
value whereby abstract social nature captures a family of processes
through which states and capitalists map, identify, quantify, measure
and code human and extra-human natures in the service of capital
accumulation. To cite Moore:
If the substance of abstract
social nature is the production of “real abstractions”—of time (linear),
space (flat), and Nature (external)—its historical expressions are
found in the family of processes through which capitalists and
state-machineries make human and extra-human natures legible to capital
accumulation. The historical conditions of Cheap Nature are found not
only in the capital-labour relation but also in the production of
knowledge-practices necessary to identify and to appropriate unpaid
work.
A focus on the practices
constituting abstract social nature that secure and channel the frontiers of
capitalism, whose substance is abstract social labour in extending zones of
commodification on a wider scale, is therefore a pivotal contribution made by Capitalism in the Web of Life.
Recognition of the geographically embedded rationalising,
simplifying, and mapping practices of abstract social nature,
constituting Cheap Nature as part of the commodity frontier movement of
capitalism, is therefore crucial in the attempt to overcome the
Nature-blindness of contemporary critiques of global capitalism.
Capitalism in the Web of Life is therefore a significant contribution to the analytical foundations of historical materialism through its critique of the violent abstraction of nature and its development of the philosophy of internal relations that is the hallmark of a materialist theory of history.
taken from here
Der Beitrag On the Violent Abstraction of Nature erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.