Saturday 3 November 2018

Blue Collar Beasts: review of 'A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things'

I read books, unlike you, you fool, and have just finished A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason Moore. In brief, it describes capitalism as an ecological model which draws on natural resources, including human work, and also shapes them. Different chapters describe the appropriation and control of territory, energy, labour, care, food, money and human lives, processes of cheapening which serve each other. For example, production of cheap energy allows the cultivation of cheap food which fuels cheap work &c.

Patel & Moore take a holistic view of the ecological and humanitarian devastation that fuels capitalism, and refuse to see its activities as outside nature. In support of this perspective the concept “work” is applied to nature - the Earth and animals in their capacity as providers - as well as to things humans do.

Inexorably obsessed with animals, animals on my mind, on my jumper, photos of dogs surrounding me, howling and panting softly under my breath, I was interested in the authors’ conception of animal “work”. The term’s used broadly to describe what capitalism’s instruments do to enable profit. I thought this was useful in detaching will from work - so much of the labour extracted by capitalists has been forced and without volition, or else the volition is a mask forged by necessity, which is why my cover letters always insist that I’m “passionate” about tedious occupations that fundamentally make me puke.

However I think the multiple meanings of the word meant several ideas were at risk of becoming clotted over the course of the book. At one point it gets etymological, the Latin root of travail being trepaliare, to torture (though conversely the root of the English work is werk, as in “to werk it in a sexy manner”). The authors discuss the werk of survival, which is not always fun; work done under conditions of exploitation; work being historically “integral to life” but also, under capitalism, an “organising principle” and means of control. Necessary or not, most of the work described is negative, but the authors gesture in one chapter to the potential of work to be uncoupled from drudgery. Creativity, the building of communities and cultures, is also work.

When this came up I felt there were more careful distinctions to be made between human work and the work of nature, particularly that of animals. It’s made clear in the book that the opposition of humans:nature or humans:animals is artificial, and also that this opposition is a “real abstraction” made actual by the assumptions we make and the way we live. It bears stating that animal work, above all that of livestock, has distinguishing factors. Humans are immiserated and destroyed in various ways, but they’re not farmed. For animals there’s no redemption of any work that serves human purposes, it can’t liberate them because it’s not for them. It’s not work that can be organised against by its subjects either. And while subjugated humans are made into “things” (“things” which have often been conceptualised as animals), livestock is literally made into inanimate matter, into food. The word “work” sometimes means things for people that it doesn’t mean for any other life form - after all, it’s a human word.

This isn’t to undermine the book’s argument, and definitely not to downplay atrocities visited on people, but the distinction is needed, because without recognising the difference between the way humans and animals are used, there’s a risk that referring to “animal work” is to make rhetorical use of their presence as an exploited resource, but then to turn aside at the “work’s” apotheosis. At that point the human:animal divide is a very real abstraction, easy to see in slaughterhouses, and in cellophane-wrapped or jarred or tinned components of creatures in the supermarket aisle.

The book once refers to “acts of chauvinism against human and animal life”, and gestures several times to the grotesqueness of the meat industry, especially the quantity of animals reared and destroyed. But it doesn’t pursue this idea of animals as real lives, and as victims - for the sake of its argument, they are still “things”. In that way, the authors perpetuate the human: nature distinction without questioning it. Granted it’s not an animal rights book, but it didn’t need to be - to acknowledge the differences between human work and nature’s work would only take a few words, and words are cheap.

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