Nature's Evil

Following Smith, political economy began from individual exchanges and the division of labour, moved to local markets and extended to long-distance trade. Polanyi overturned that logic: ‘In the light of our present knowledge we should almost reverse the sequence of the argument: the true starting point is long-distance trade, a result of the geographical location of goods.’ 15 Exotic, addictive goods arrived from distant markets. New tastes developed, new habits and fashions, and, eventually, a love of novelty for its own sake. Global trade, the international division of labour and the law of comparative advantage had little in common with the specialisation that had impressed Smith in the pin workshop. They followed, rather, from the geographical distribution of resources and delivery routes.

A live monster

Writing his

Capital

in London, Karl Marx was financially supported by a Dutch relative who imported colonial commodities from overseas and by his German friend who owned a cotton mill in Manchester. The latter, Friedrich Engels, is better known, but the former, Lion Philips, was no less inspiring. A converted Jew, he did not own plantations but established a tobacco factory and coffee distribution in Holland. Processing gave better returns than extraction and accrued lower risks. Philips died a rich and happy man – Marx noted his ‘fine Voltairian irony’. 16 His grandson and heir established Philips, the largest manufacturer of light bulbs in the world, but a little share of that coffee and tobacco was also converted into the text of

Capital

.

Marx saw trade as something that people carry out but do not understand. Smith believed in its ‘invisible hand’; for Marx, trade was also full of queer secrets and mystical apparitions. ‘To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities … is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value.’ For his part, Marx thought that nature played no bigger role in the creation of value than in fixing the course of currency exchange. For those who disagreed, Marx wrote that people fetishise nature instead of understanding the role of labour.

Any item, for example a coat, combines two elements within it – matter and labour. Marx doesn’t deny the materiality of the coat but accepts it as a dull fact of life, which labour is able to overcome and transcend. Marx tried out and discarded several metaphors to clarify these relationships between natural material and human labour. Labour ‘uses’ or ‘devours’ raw material. Labour ‘comes to fruition’ in the commodity. Raw materials without labour are useless, and even the strongest are perishable: iron rusts, wood rots, cotton spoils. Only labour can save them: ‘living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep.’ Labour both devours raw matter and resurrects it into new life. ‘Bathed in the fire of labour …, made alive for the performance of their functions in the process’, things are transformed from raw material into valuable products. 17 In this context, Marx uses biological metaphors, such as metabolism, as frequently as religious ones, such as resurrection. 18